Category: awesome 80s in april

Awesome ’80s in April: The Final Countdown (1980)

the final countown

I used to be really fascinated with time travel. I guess I still am, but I used to spend a lot of time pondering whether time travel could ever be real. One of the questions I raised was that if you could travel in time then wouldn’t you try to kill Hitler? Wouldn’t you find a way to stop the Holocaust from happening? But then maybe there is such a thing as fixed points in time. Certain events have to happen and you simply cannot stop them.

Or maybe time travel is real, but it isn’t invented for many thousands of years in the future. The Holocaust is one of the more terrible events of the last century, but for those removed from it by millenea it might just become a footnote in the history books.

Or something. I’m not smart enough to understand the complications of time travel. But I still enjoy a good time travel story. The Final Countdown is about an aircraft carrier from 1980 accidentally traveling back in time to 1941 just one day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The ship’s crew must then decide if they will try to stop it from happening.

That’s a pretty cool idea, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Kirk Douglas is the captain of the ship. Martin Sheen is a civilian observer on board to make suggestions on how to improve efficiency. Charles Durning plays a US Senator from 1941 who just happens to be taking a leisure cruise on his yacht along with his assistant – played by Katharine Ross – off the shores of Hawaii on that fateful day.

The Senator is important because in real life (or at least the film’s version of real life) because he was someone who had warned of the Japanese attacking Pearl Habor and was in a position to become Vice President before the attack. But he mysteriously disappeared on that day. If the ship can save him it would impact history in unknown ways. Destroying the Japanese fleet would impact history too, of course, but there is a question of when they should attack. If they hit the Japanese before they hit the US then that could be seen as a sign of aggression, an act of war. But if they don’t then American lives will be lost.

Again all of this is interesting, but the film never makes it exciting. It is too busy moving to the next scene to allow time for the characters to chew on the dilemmas.

One of the difficulties for a film like this is how to end it. If they change history then we, as an audience, know the film is a fraud. It feels fake somehow. All cinema is fake, but alternate histories feel even faker. But if the characters wind up not changing history, then what’s the point?

I don’t mind so much when the film is good. But I found The Final Countdown to be rather dull. It doesn’t help that they gained full cooperation from the US Military and in return the film is filled with a lot of footage of the ship’s crew going about their work. If you like to see planes take off and land on a carrier (and it is technically impressive) then this film is for you. If you want some real action or drama, then you might look eslewhere.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night Game (1989)

night game poster

Jaws (1975) is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is practically perfect in every way. It is a film I’ve seen dozens of times. It is a film that I put on when I’m sick and miserable. It cheers me up every time. I love Roy Scheider in that film and he’s only my third favorite character in that film.

Scheider was an interesting actor. He starred in many movies through the 1970s and 1980s and was by all accounts a big film star (he made lots of movies up until his death in 2008 but these two decades saw him as a big movie star). But I feel like outside of Jaws, and maybe The French Connection, he’s mostly been forgotten.

He’s about the only thing that makes Night Game interesting. He plays Mike Seaver a Texas cop who might just love the Astros more than his (much younger) girlfriend Roxy (Karen Young). Somebody is slicing and dicing hot blondes on the oceanfront and it is up to Seaver to figure out who.

Given the title and his fondness for the Astros you know the killer is going to have something to do with baseball. If you are a fan there is quite a bit of gameplay on-screen and parts of it are filmed in the Astrodome. If you aren’t, well there is still Scheider doing his darndest to make a limp script exciting.

I didn’t hate it, but it is definitely forgettable. I watched it this weekend and I had to brush up on the plot via Wikipedia to write this review. It feels like a made-for-TV movie but with more violence and naked parts.

Awesome ’80s in April: Yes, Madam! (1985)

yes madam

When I decided to watch a bunch of movies from the 1980s this month I was thinking about all of the stereotypical films from that decade that I knew of as a kid. I was thinking about dumb comedies, big action flicks, slashers, and low-budget B-movies. Lots of other movies were made in the 1980s, of course, but my plan was to stick to the kinds of movies that made me think of the ’80s. I wasn’t interested in foreign language films, or art-house movies.

I’ve mostly stuck to that, but the Criterion Channel is running a series of films starring Michelle Yeoh and I just “had” to watch at least one. Yes, Madam! is the film that made her a star in Hong Kong and is at least partially responsible for a slate of action films starring women that became popular at the time.

Yeoh stars as Senior Inspector Ng, a Hong Kong detective who teams up with Senior Inspector Morris (Cynthia Rothrock in her first big role) from London. They are after some secret microfilm stolen by some gangsters.

Well, actually it was accidentally stolen by a couple of bumbling crooks, but the gangsters want it so you get the cops and the gangsters chasing the dimwits, and the gangsters doing everything they can to keep the cops from getting it first.

It is very similar to a lot of American action movies made in the 1980s. The plot is pretty silly, and the acting is not always great, but the action is a lot of fun. American films tend to involve a lot of gunplay, but Hong Kong films eschew the bang bang for the kung pow. Both types of films usually involve some comedy, but American films tend to have a wise-cracking lead hero, and their Hong Kong counterparts are more slapstick, and more physical with the comedy.

So it is with Yes, Madam! Yeoh and Rothrock kick some serious ass. There are a lot of fight scenes and all of them are fun to watch. The comedy doesn’t fare as well, but I’ve never been a fan of slapstick silliness. It is big, goofy fun, and well worth the watching.

Awesome ’80s in April: The Bedroom Window (1987)

the bedroom window poster

After a work party, Terry (Steve Guttenberg) talks Sylvia (Isabelle Hubbert), his boss’ wife, into going back to his apartment and to bed with him. After the lovemaking, Terry goes to the bathroom. Sylvia hears a noise outside. She sees a man attacking a woman. She struggles with opening the window and the noise startles the man, and he runs away.

She thinks about calling the cops to tell them what she’s seen, but she fears this will lead to her husband finding out about the affair. The next day they learn a different woman was raped and murdered not far from the apartment, just 30 minutes after the attack Sylvia witnessed.

Still fearing retribution from the husband, but now believing the man Sylvia saw was likely the man who murdered the other woman, Terry decides to call the police and pretend he was the witness. Sylvia gives him the details of the attacker and at first, the conversation with the police goes well.

Naturally, there are complications.

In order to arrest the killer they need more information from Terry, but he can’t give that information because he really didn’t witness anything. More murders occur and Terry’s desire to tell the real truth increases, but Sylvia remains unwilling to come forward. Terry does some investigating on his own and meets Denise (Elizabeth McGovern) the girl who was attacked outside his apartment.

The Bedroom Window follows some standard Noir tropes but with interesting modifications. Steve Guttenberg is either a brilliant choice for the lead actor, or an awful one. I know him from the Police Academy movies and Three Men and a Baby. He has such a goofy, gentle presence it is difficult to believe he could seduce someone like Isabelle Hubbert. Though it is quite easy to believe he could be the typical noir patsy.

But that’s just it, Sylvia isn’t the typical femme fatale. She isn’t involved in the murders. She doesn’t set Terry up. She simply witnessed one assault. She does become a cold fish the more Terry tries to convince her to come forward as a witness, but before that, she seems like a lady in a loveless marriage looking for some fun.

Denise is an interesting monkey wrench in the proceedings as well. She becomes a secondary love interest to Terry, but she’s also deep into the mix of trying to figure out who the killer is. She seems more out of a detective story – the plucky kid who helps the detective – than a film noir. She’s also the only actor who even attempts a Baltimore accent which is kind of distracting.

Terry makes idiotic decision after idiotic decision which digs him deeper into trouble. The film never quite makes me believe he’s as dumb as his actions make him out to be which caused me to yell at the TV more than once.

Director Curtis Hanson, who would later make LA Confidential one of the all-time great neo-noirs, keeps things moving briskly and with great style. The Bedroom Window isn’t great, but it is well worth watching if you dig neo-noirs with a slice of erotic thrillers thrown in.

Awesome ’80s in April: Silver Bullet (1985)

silver bullet poster

For the last few years, I’ve been steadily (if perhaps a bit slowly) reading my way through Stephen King’s bibliography. I’m not even halfway through. Dude has written a lot of books. People have made a lot of movies based on those books. Most of them aren’t very good.

My working theory is that filmmakers focus on the monsters – the killer clowns, rabid dogs, vampires, and other assorted creatures of the night – and ignore the world-building, the characters, and all other non-horrifying story development. But while readers may come to King for the monsters, they stay for all that other stuff. At least I do. And so the movies wind up focusing on the wrong things that make King’s stories so interesting. That’s my theory anyway.

Based upon King’s Cycle of the Werewolf novella, Silver Bullet is (obviously) about a werewolf stalking a small town. Our hero is young Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) who is bound to a souped-up wheelchair (which is named, in its very Stephen King way, the Silver Bullet). He has a nagging sister, Jane (Megan Follows) who narrates the film as an adult (another Stephen King trope) and a goofy, alcoholic uncle (a wonderfully hilarious Gary Busey).

There is a lot of small-town life that fills this film. There are community gatherings, family parties, funerals, and lots of Marty showing off his ability to get around without the use of his legs (he climbs trees and into his second-story window). The uncle rigs up an even better souped-up wheelchair that whizzes down the road at 60 MPH.

And of course, there is a lot of mutilations by a werewolf. None of it is particularly well done, and it is all pretty silly. You could call it a bad movie, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but it is also quite entertaining. It is exactly what I want a 1980s adaptation of a Stephen King werewolf movie to be.

Awesome ’80s in April: Call Me (1985)

call me movie poster

I freaking love the Criterion Channel. I say that every time I resubscribe. I don’t know why I ever take a break from it. I try to keep the number of streaming services I subscribe to down to three each month. Generally speaking, the wife gets a service, the daughter gets a service and I get one. I love Criterion but sometimes I want to watch a show on HBO Max or some other service and so I’ll pause my Criterion subscription. I’m always so excited when I come back.

Seriously, why do I ever leave?

Beyond having an amazing selection of incredible movies, the Criterion Channel is one of the few subscription services that actually bother to curate their films. They group their films by themes, or actors/directors, or other ideas. They often have interesting people come on and talk about their films. They include extras like audio commentaries and old making-of documentaries. Etc., etc., etc., It is a brilliant streaming service.

This month they are doing a series on Erotic Thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s. I’m thinking very seriously about making that my movie theme for May, but for now I’m talking about Call Me, a film I’d never heard of until I resubscribed to Criterion Channel (one of the many other wonderful reasons to subscribe).

Anna (Patricia Charbonneau) is a young journalist for an indie newspaper in New York. She’s in a fairly lifeless relationship with her boyfriend. One night she gets an obscene phone call from what she thinks is her boyfriend. The dude tells her to show up at a local bar and to leave her panties behind. The boyfriend is a no-show, but there is a strange dude who starts to hit on her. Getting away from him she hides in the bathroom where she witnesses a cop kill a transwoman over some stolen cash.

The obscene calls keep coming. She soon realizes they aren’t coming from her boyfriend but some stranger. She likes what he says. She gets really into it. She’s pretty sure the caller is the weird guy who was hitting on her in the bar (Stephen McHattie). He happens to be connected to the murder but she doesn’t know that yet. A young Steve Buscemi is also connected to it. He plays a character called Switchblade which is pretty awesome.

It never quite finds a way to seamlessly combine the erotic parts of the film with the thriller. So you wind up with some scenes where these scary dudes are trying to locate Anna because they think she’s got the cash, and scenes where she’s doing the sexy talk with some random on the phone. Eventually, those things come together but for most of the film’s run time, it feels like two different movies.

I quite liked Patricia Charbonneau in this, I’ll be interested in catching some other things she’s done, although looking at her career on IMDB it appears to be spotty at best. I do really like films from the 1980s that were shot on location in New York. It is always cool to see the city during this time period.

Awesome ’80s in April: Dune (1984)

duen movie poster

I’ve had a copy of Dune, the Frank Herbert novel, on my bookshelves for years. I’ve never managed to read it. I’ve tried a couple of times but I can’t get past the first few paragraphs. It is so dense, so full of new words that I feel immediately lost and that it isn’t worth my time to dig in.

I’ve had a DVD copy of Dune, the movie directed by David Lynch on my shelves for years as well. Until recently I had never managed to watch it. I tried once, many months ago, but didn’t get past the first few minutes. It was so full of exposition and new ideas that I was almost immediately lost and it didn’t feel worth my time to try and dig in.

Last year I did watch Dune, the movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and quite liked it. I’m a big fan of his films in general, and he somehow made this dense world full of numerous people and clans and ideas seem understandable and manageable. So, I figured now was the time to give Lynch’s adaptation another shot.

It was a notoriously expensive bomb. Lynch’s original cut ran about four hours and the studio made him cut it down to just over two. Critics hated it, audiences mostly stayed away, and Lynch has since disavowed it and refuses to speak of it in interviews.

It continues to be reevaluated by new audiences, and the general consensus of it is an ambitious failure.

It was David Lych’s third film. His first was Eraserhead (1977), a really weird, surrealistic body horror flick that became a cult hit. Mel Brooks of all people loved it and hired Lynch to direct his next film, The Elephant Man. That was a much more straightforward film, and it became a big hit and an award-winner. This is how Lynch came to direct Dune, a big-budget sci-fi epic.

I love it. With caveats. The plot is near incomprehensible even with multiple characters explaining what they are doing and with our ability to hear their thoughts.

Most of it takes place on a desert planet, the only place where the people of this universe can get something called spice. Which is a mind-altering drug, it can extend a person’s life and it allows people to bend space so they can travel across the universe in seconds. Or something. There are various warring clans who all are fighting over this planet. But it all seems to be covert. Outwardly the Emperor of the Universe has given control of the planet to one family. Their son is named Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) and he’s apparently some kind of messiah figure.

Everyone has weird hairstyles, one guy can float, and Sting spends a lot of the time practicing fighting with his shirt off. There are cool electronic shields of some kind, people have to wear these weird nose pieces on the spice planet and, oh yea, the planet is full of giant sandworms.

There is so much going on in this film that it is impossible to explain and even more impossible to understand. But it looks really cool. And it is populated by loads of great actors including Patrick Stewart, Brad Dourif, Linda Hunt, José Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Max Von Sydow, and Sean Young.

The style and look of the film are completely Lynchian. So even while I wasn’t always sure as to what was happening on screen, I sure enjoyed watching it.

Awesome ’80s in April: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

mad max beyond thunderdome poster<

Memory is a strange thing. If you have asked me last year if I’d seen all of the Mad Max movies I would have told you that I had. I might have hesitated for a moment before I answered and admitted that I wasn’t real sure about Mad Max (1979), but I had almost certainly seen Mad Max 2 (1981) and had 100% watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I have real memories of watching that one several times on cable TV as a kid.

The thing is while watching Beyond Thunderdome I remembered absolutely nothing of what appeared on the screen, and the few memories I did have of the film didn’t actually happen. So, have I watched this movie before? Or did I just dream it? Or maybe I was so young my memories of it have been supplanted. Who knows? But after watching this and Mad Max 2 recently I definitely need to watch the first one and then I’ll probably hit up Fury Road before long as well.

Beyond Thunderdome takes place sometime after the events of Mad Max 2. Max (Mel Gibson) now rides in a camel-driven vehicle. It is stolen by an airborne bandit (who is played by Bruce Spence who played a pilot in the previous film, but is apparently a different character in this one). Max follows the thief to Bartertown, which is run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). She’s attempting to recreate a civilized society but it is a long, difficult process.

Bartertown is fueled by pig poop burned into methane in a series of underground caverns. This area is run by a resourceful dwarf called Master (Angelo Rossitto) who rides around on top of a giant called Blaster (Paul Larsson). Master Blaster had designs to run Bartertown himself. Aunty Entity fixes things so that Max has to take him down so Aunty can stay on top. This concludes in a battle inside the Thunderdome (a big, circular cage where our two opponents jump around on bungee cords and try to kill each other).

Things don’t go as planned and Max finds himself exiled from Bartertown. Soon enough he stumbles upon some kids who have formed their own Lost Boys-esque community. Wouldn’t you know it Max and these lost kids eventually have to go to Bartertown and battle it out with Aunty and her minions. It all concludes with a big action scene with our heroes on a train being followed by the villains in various autos.

The general consensus is that Beyond Thunderdome is a lesser film than Mad Max 2 and that the scenes with the kids are an out-of-left-field oddity that takes the film down a notch. I get that, but also I kind of dug it. It isn’t nearly as exciting as Mad Max 2, but it isn’t trying to be. I do love the world-building in these films and this one really attempts to dig a little into how the people would try to rebuild their society after absolute devastation.

At the time Tina Turner was a huge star. She’s fine but she definitely dates this film within a very specific time frame. I actually like the kids, too. More or less. They created a goofy language for them which is kind of fun and kind of annoying. But their story is interesting. They basically don’t understand what happened to the world and have invented a myth about a pilot returning (they are the survivors of a crashed plane) and saving everybody. I dig the idea of people building new myths in the aftermath of an apocalypse.

The final chase sequence is good, but it is hard not to feel a little let down after watching the much better sequence in Mad Max 2. It makes sense to me that Fury Road is essentially one long, epic chase sequence. I mean why not take the best parts of all these movies and turn that into your new film?

Awesome ’80s in April: Purple Rain (1984)

purple rain poster

In my review of Desperately Seeking Susan, I talked a little about how Madonna and Michael Jackson were the biggest stars of the 1980s. One could argue that Prince was up there, too. He had numerous hit songs and his style was very much a part of that decade.

I liked some of his songs, but if I’m behind honest, I wasn’t really that into him. I’ve never really ventured beyond his hits and it was decades after its release before I had even heard the song “Purple Rain” much less seen the movie.

I’ve learned to appreciate more of his music over the last few years and was happy to use the Awesome ’80s in April as an excuse to finally watch this film.

As a piece of cinema, as a narrative story, Purple Rain is not great. As a time capsule, as a snapshot of Prince in this particular stage of his career it is pretty fascinating. As a music video, it is freaking fantastic.

They say the story is more or less autobiographical with Prince pretty much playing himself. Here he’s called The Kid and he’s an up-and-coming musician in Minneapolis along with his band The Revolution. They have a regular gig at the First Avenue nightclub (an actual Prince haunt) but the headliners are Morris Day and The Time. The two groups have a less-than-friendly rivalry.

The Kid has a lot of talent, but his personal life is a mess. His father (Clarence Williams III) was a musician as well, but he never made it big and is now an alcoholic and abusive husband. Two of the women in The Revolution hand him the music to “Purple Rain” a song that they wrote, but he refuses to listen to it. He wants to be the star.

He starts a relationship with Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) but when her own musical career starts to take off the Kid suddenly makes those lyrics from “When Doves Cry” become reality (“Maybe I’m just too demanding/Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold”). He becomes jealous and abusive. He also plays a brutal rendition of “Darling Nikki” at the club while staring directly at her.

If this movie is autobiographical then Prince does not come off as a good guy. The weird thing is the film doesn’t really give him much of a redemption arc. He does come to realize that he’s becoming more like his father, but he doesn’t really apologize to Apollonia or the band. His only real action is to finally perform “Purple Rain” and even then he doesn’t acknowledge that it was written by his bandmates.

It is, however, a brilliant performance of that song and at that moment I can forgive him, too. All the songs and performances are terrific. They really are the reason to watch the film. And for that, it is well worth watching. Just don’t come expecting a great story or any real insight into Prince, the character, or the person.

Awesome ’80s in April: Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987)

slave girls beyond infinity poster

The 1980s brought unto us the Video Cassette Recorder, also known as the VCR, and the Video Home System, also known as the VHS tape. Well, technically, these things were available way before the 1980s, but that decade made them popular, and it was then most people experienced home video. And technically Betamax came before the VCR, but it lost the Video Format War and so most people only ever had a VCR.

They say it was the porn industry that won the war for the VCR but that’s another story for another time.

My family was early adapters of the home video industry. We actually had a Betamax for a little while but eventually switched to VCR and never looked back.

Once the VCR took off it exploded onto the scene. Almost everybody had one. Video stores seemed to spring up almost overnight. The big sellers (or renters I should say for it would be many years before you could really buy a movie – I still remember seeing a price sheet once and the cheapest tapes were over $100, clearly they were meant to be purchased by stores and rented out) had a lot of shelf space to fill and while the big blockbusters and new releases were the reason most folks came into the store, they needed to fill those shelves to give the customers at least some semblance of major choices. Loads of small studios and big dreamers (or big pockets and a good sense that the home video market was a boon) started churning out low-budget movies to help fill those shelves.

Naturally, if you didn’t have a budget to make your movie then you had even less to market it, so you needed some reason for folks to buy your films and rent them. Exploitation cinema was nothing new, people had been making exploitative films for nearly as long as film existed. But the 1980s saw an explosion in the market. Sex sells, of course, as do naked boobs, blood-soaked violence, and big action. If you can make your audience laugh on top of that, then all the better.

I love that stuff. I especially loved it in the 1980s and early 1990s when I was coming of age as they say. There used to be a late-night cable show called USA Up All Night. It was hosted by Gilbert Godfried on Saturday nights and Rhonda Shear on Fridays. Godfried was very funny but it was Shear who always got my attention. She played a bubbly, innuendo-laden, hot blonde type and this pubescent boy watched her every weekend. Both introduced a series of films and then did various skits during the commercial breaks. The films were the types of films I’ve been talking about. My love for bad cinema can be traced back to watching Up All Night.

This (finally) brings us to Slave Girls From Beyond. I don’t remember if that film aired on Up All Night, but it could have. I felt I would be remiss if I didn’t have at least one film of this nature in my Awesome ’80s in April feature and here we are.

Slave Girls From Beyond is basically a retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, but in space with scantily clad babes. Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal) are captured by some mutant-looking dudes. Clad in rabbit-skin bikinis they escape their prison and flee in a rocket ship. Before long a mysterious force causes them to crash land on a jungle planet and they soon find themselves in the fortress of a strange man named Zed (Dan Scribner). He seems to be the only sentient inhabitant of the planet, though he has two robot guards.

A couple of other folks also recently crash-landed on the planet. The dude (Carl Horner) warns the girls that there were more of them, but one by one they’ve all disappeared. Soon enough he disappears and, yeah, I mentioned this is based on The Most Dangerous Game, so soon enough the three girls find themselves being hunted by Zed.

Before that though there is some naked frolicking, lots of running about the castle in their underwear, and a bit of comedy. Later, they will run into some mutants, zombies, and a hunch-backed alien with a laser rifle for an arm.

It is all very ridiculous and silly and kind of fun. There is nobody, and I mean absolutely no one who thinks this is a good movie, not even the people who made it. I do appreciate that the two leads aren’t the typical dumb bimbos. They are both rather intelligent and one of them often rambles off a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo to indicate she knows what she’s doing. They are both quite able to get out of scrapes as well.

If you can get into silly, low-budget, girls in outer space flicks, then you might find this one to be enjoyable.