The Totally Awesome ’80s in April: All the Movies

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8 Million Ways to Die (1986)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (1983)
The Bedroom Window (1987)
The Big Red One (1980)
Black Moon Rising (1986)
Breathless (1983)
Call Me (1985)
Castle In the Sky (1986)
Child’s Play (1988)
Dead Calm (1989)
Death Spa (1988)
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Dolls (1987)
Dune (1984)
Entity (1982)
The Final Countdown (1980)
Firestarter (1984)
Flash Gordon (1980)
Flashdance (1983)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
Highlander (1986)
Initiation (1984)
Innerspace (1987)
The Killer (1989)
Mad Max (1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Maximum Overdrive (1986)
Monkeyshines (1988)

Night Game (1989)
Night of the Comet (1984)
Night of the Demons (1988)
Nighthawks (1981)
Presidio (1988)
Purple Rain (1984)
Rambo Trilogy (1982-1988)
A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)
Robocop (1987)
Silver Bullet (1985)
Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987)
Starman (1984)
Three Amigos (1986)
X-Ray (1981)
Yes, Madam! (1985)

Awesome ’80s in April: Black Moon Rising (1986)

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This theme always makes me think about what makes an ’80s movie so 1980s? There are lots of ways you could answer that from certain visual styles, to the excessive use of those lightning bolt effects. There are themes and motifs films from the 1980s reflected on regularly, and genres that elevated the box office (think slashers and action flicks).

You could turn on your TV right now and find a movie already in progress that you’ve never seen before and determine pretty quickly that it was made in the 1980s.

Certainly, if the film you put on was Black Moon Rising and you saw this car roll across the screen, you’d know you were watching an ’80s movie.

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And if there were any doubts after that, once you caught wind of Linda Hamilton’s hair, you would know with absolute certainty.

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The film itself is a great big pile of 1980s cheese. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sam Quint a thief turned FBI subcontractor hired to steal a computer disk containing damning information about some big Las Vegas corporation. He easily steals the disk, but when he’s chased down by some goons, he slips it behind the tag of that totally awesome car pictured above.

That car is a prototype made by some super-smart nerds, and it can travel up to 350 MPH and runs on water. Before Sam can get his disk back, a thief named Nina (Linda Hamilton) steals the car.

Actually, she steals a lot of cars. She’s part of a car-stealing ring that is so bold they show up at a fancy restaurant, lock all the doors then drive away with a couple of dozen cars at a time. The ring is run by Ed Ryland (Robert Vaughn), who is so bold that he’s building two massive high-rises to run his car-stealing operation out of.

Naturally, Sam has to break into the well-secured high rises and steal the car back. Naturally, he romances Nina in the process.

It is all very silly and rather dumb, but Tommy Lee Jones makes it worth the watching. He could elevate even the stupidest material. I’d watch him in anything. The car is pretty fun too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: Night of the Demons (1988)

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These days I meticulously log all the films I watch on Letterboxd. Before that I used to have a blog post where I listed out everything I watched. I also marked the films on IMDB as I watched them, and I often tried to remember everything I had ever seen and marked them as watched and rated them as best I could remember.

Often, after I’d watch a movie, I’d click on an actor and then scroll through all the films they’d ever been in, carefully marking the ones I’d seen as watched and rating them. It wasn’t a perfect system. I’m sure there are lots of films I never marked down – movies that I watched as a kid and have long since forgotten, etc. And there are probably some movies I marked as watched that maybe I hadn’t actually seen. Memories are weird like that.

As I get older, I find there are a lot of films I’ve marked as watched, but then when I sit down with them again I realize not a single scene is familiar. I have no idea if I actually did watch them and have just forgotten everything in the film, or if I somehow thought I had seen it but actually had not.

Night of the Demons is a film I would have sworn that I had seen before. I remember watching it. Okay, I remember watching some of it. Well, alright, I remember one particular scene in which one of the actresses got topless. What can I say? I would have been about 14 at the time, pubescent and horny.

But watching it tonight there wasn’t a single moment that seemed familiar. Most of the actresses do get topless, but none of them rang that memory bell. And it seems like I would have probably remembered multiple instances of sex and nudity and not just one scene. So maybe I watched one of the sequels. Or maybe it was something else and I somehow conflated it with this film. Possibly I remember the movie poster for this (which I definitely saw many times at the local video store) and watched something else and my memories of the film got mixed in with the cover art. Or maybe I just watched part of the movie and had to turn if off for some reason (possibly my mother caught the nudity and yelled at me for watching it).

None of this matters, of course. You’re probably wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about this. I’m just forever fascinated by how my brain processes all the movies I’ve seen.

The film itself is a silly bit of 1980s horror. Some dumb teenagers (all played by actors who are clearly well out of high school) go to a party in an abandoned funeral parlor and accidentally unleash a demon which, one-by-one, possesses them and does a bit of light murdering.

The film isn’t big on specifics. There are some vague murmurings about the place being haunted due to some crazy murder taking place there sometime in the past. They unleash the demon by doing a half-assed seance and looking into a mirror.

The kids are all paper thin in their development and they are almost all obnoxious. Especially Stooge (Hal Havins) who loudly complains all the time, calling all the girls, “Bitch.” 1980s horror icon Linea Quigley is probably the most interesting, but that might just be because I know her from other films.

But the special effects are good. I’m a sucker for practical horror effects and there are some good ones here. Quigley’s character has a scene where she rubs red lipstick over her chest in circles and then pushes it completely into her breast. Which has got to be the most low-budget 1980s horror special effect ever.

I have no idea if I watched this movie back when I was a kid. But I’ll definitely be watching it again. It is by no means a great movie, or even a good one. The plot is barely there, the characters are annoying, but it’s still quite entertaining in that dumb ’80s horror way.

The Awesome ’80s in May: Castle in the Sky (1986)

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I feel like I don’t talk enough about Studio Ghibli. As I say this I look back and see that I’ve written about four of their films and not a single movie from Pixar so maybe I’m not quite telling the truth. But I do love Ghibli and I watch their films over and over again, moreso than pretty much any studio.

Castle in the Sky was the very first film produced by Studio Ghibli and it was directed by one of its founders (and its most famous name) Hayao Miyazaki. It was not the first film directed by Miyazaki (he’d been in the industry by this point for over a decade, working in television and as an animator in movies – he’d also directed a few feature films) but it was still early days in terms of him having full control over what he wanted to make.

You can already see the themes and characterizations he’d carry with him throughout his career being formed. This is a film that is anti-war, pro-nature, with a strong female protagonist. It also does something really interesting with its antagonist. It begins making you think one group of pirates are the enemies, but soon enough they’ve become friends with our heroes. Miyazaki is famous for having sympathetic antagonists. Here he does find some true enemies, but that switch with the pirates is wonderful.

I actually wrote about the time I got to see this film on the big screen a few years ago for Cinema Sentries so I don’t feel I need to talk about it much more, but it is a wonderful film and I do recommend it highly.

The Awesome ’80s in April: ¡Three Amigos! (1986)

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I loved this movie as a kid. I quoted it endlessly.

“Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?”
“You dirt-eating piece of slime! You scum-sucking pig! You son of a motherless goat!”

Etc. Me and my friends often did the Three Amigos salute – crossing our arms and gyrating our hips. It was a great movie.

Or so I thought back then. At some point I bought it on DVD via one of those cheap snapcase boxes but I didn’t actually watch it until years later when me and my wife were living in France.

When we first moved to Strasbourg we sublet a tiny little apartment from a young university student. She was spending the year studying in England so she let us the place on the cheap. She only had a single bed so she removed it. We eventually bought a surprisingly comfortable futon but for the first couple of weeks we slept on an air mattress with a tiny hole in it.

We’d blow it up of an evening (using an exhausting to use manual pump) and by morning it would be completely flat. In the middle of the night it would be about half full and the weight of both our bodies kept up slightly above the hard floor. But if someone would get up to go to the bathroom the weight of the other would flatten it leaving the sleeping person confused and irritated.

We only had one chair in that flat, and it was uncomfortable so we spent much of those first two weeks sitting on the floor, backs against the wall. I had brought a couple of those old DVD/CD binders full of movies and we would watch them on our laptop.

One of the first movies we watched was Three Amigos, probably because I had all of those fond memories and we wanted something funny to alleviate our discomfort.

Unfortunately, my memories didn’t match what we were watching and our discomfort remained. It was not an enjoyable viewing. So much so that I haven’t watched it again until last week. And only then because our Internet was crapping out, not allowing us to stream anything and so I needed a DVD from the 1980s.

Sadly, I am unable to say that the unenjoyable viewing in France was not due to our uncomfortable setting. As an adult I just don’t enjoy this film.

It was written by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, and Randy Newman (his only screenwriting credit, he also wrote songs for the film) and it has that disjointed SNL movie feel, but also that early Steve Martin throw all the jokes at a wall and see what sticks feel.

Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Sheen play three silent movie stars who had a long run as the, you guessed it, The Three Amigos – gunfighters who protect the vulnerable. But their latest box office returns haven’t been great and the studio head sacks them when they demand higher salaries.

Meanwhile in some Mexican village a woman sees one of the Three Amigos films, thinks it is real, and sends a wire to them asking for help and offering a large sum of money. The message gets garbled in translation and our heroes believe she’s offering the cash for a performance.

You can see where this is going. The Amigos arrive put on a show and then the real bandits arrive. At first they decide to split, because they aren’t real heroes, but yada yada yada, they come back and save the day.

That’s a pretty good set up for a funny farce. And there are some good gags. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I didn’t laugh. But I didn’t find it hilarious.

A movie like this needs a specificity about it, it needs to lay down a solid foundation for the gags to work. There just isn’t much here for the film to work with. We don’t really know the Amigos other than they are actors. Chevy Chase hardly does anything at all. Short and Martin do some funny stuff, all within their wheelhouse, but it never feels more than them just mugging their way through a movie.

And I’m not sure what they are satirizing – silent movies? People who pretend to be heroes but really aren’t? Other than a few funny bits the movie falls flat for me.

I know lots of people love this movie. And I admit I’m weird when it comes to comedy. But after this viewing I’ll be selling my DVD and I hope to never watch it again.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: The Initiation (1984)

the initiation movie poster

The Initiation feels like two different slashers thrown together in a way that does disservice to them both. The first part is a bit of a cliche but it is fun to watch. The other part is also a cliche but it is not fun, a bit of a mess and a kind of a slog.

College girl Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is pledging a sorority and for Hell Night her and her fellow pledges have been tasked with breaking into her father’s enormous department store and stealing the security guard’s clothes.

She’s also been having this terrible recurring nightmare about a strange man being burned alive in her childhood home. Unrelated to her story (or is it? – it definitely is) a man with a burned face breaking out of an insane asylum and starts killing people.

She gets cozy with graduate assistant Peter (James Read) of the psychology department who specializes in dreams. This is the part that’s a slow. He’ll analyze her dream and investigate her past and realize the connection between the dreams and the murders. But as an audience we figure that stuff out pretty quickly so the whole mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t mysterious at all.

The fun part of the film is the group of girls going to the department store and being killed off one by one. The deaths aren’t all that inventive and I’m being generous with the word “fun” here, but it is more more enjoyable to watch than the psychology nonsense.

As a certified horror fan and slasher enthusiast this is very much in my wheelhouse. I love films where characters are trapped in an en closed, but large space and have to face off against something horrible. This certainly doesn’t do anything new with it, and half the plot is a bit of a chore, but there is enough there to satisfy your hard core horror nerds.

The Awesome ’80s In April: Innerspace (1987)

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Innerspace was the very first movie I ever saw in Letterboxd.

Quickly, for the few of you who may not know, letterbox is when they put those black bars on the tops and the bottom of the screen. They do that because movies are generally shot in a rectangular aspect ratio that fits the movie theater screen but does not fit the old square TV screens. To make it fit the square TV screen they had to cut off parts of the movie which is called Pan & Scan (pan is the cutting off of the sides, scanning is moving what you see within that cut image). Letterboxing added the black bars to make the image rectangular again thus allowing you to see everything the filmmakers wanted you to see.

I have a vivid memory of renting Innerspace and getting a little pre-movie title explaining what Letterboxing was. I did not understand it at all. I immediately noticed the black bars though. Me and mom complained about it heavily. But also, it did seem to make the movie look better somehow, more cinematic. Sometime later I watched The Empire Strikes Back in letterbox and I was hooked. I became a lifelong champion of the format. Nowadays pretty much everything is Letterboxd, even are TVs are formatted that way.

Anyway, when we plugged in Innerspace this past weekend that’s what I thought about.

Also, it is a pretty fun movie. It is some basic 1980s science fiction cheese but it has a good performance from Dennis Quaid and a hilarious one from Martin Short. And the special effects still hold up quite well.

Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton a great pilot whose also a bit of a hotshot and alcoholic. He volunteers for a special mission in which he’ll be shrunk down to the size of a pin head and injected into a rabbit. For science you understand.

Short plays Jack Putter a hypochondriac grocery store clerk. For *reasons* Tuck is injected into Putter’s body instead of the rabbit. Our heroes have to find a way of getting him out before his air runs out. Also, some bad guys want the machine Tuck uses to fly around inside Putter’s body.

The film is basically one long excuse to show off some cool effects of this little machine zooming around the inside of a body. Like I said they do hold up. I’m a sucker for classic practical effects. It also allows Short to show off his physical comedy. With the little ship zooming through is bloodstream and the like he has to make all kinds of animated reactions and he’s a master at that stuff.

The rest of the film is just silly 1980s action stuff and isn’t worth mentioning. Meg Ryan is always worth mentioning. She’s Tuck’s girlfriend but isn’t given much more to do than that.

I’ll always remember Innerspace for turning me onto the Letterbox format, but it is worth checking out all on its own.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Flashdance (1983)

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I suppose everyone of a certain age knows that scene in Flashdance. If you are of that age then you are already picturing it – Jennifer Beals on a stage in a skimpy outfit. She’s backlit so you can’t see her features but produces a lovely profile. She dances seductively as water pours down from above creating a splash dance if you will (and you probably shouldn’t).

It is an iconic moment, one that is embedded into my memory from my growing pubescent brain. Yet I’d never seen the movie until this past week. I was surprised to learn that scene comes very early in the film. There will be more dances, some of them more creative but none as sexy or iconic.

She plays Alexandra Owens a welder by day (which gives us plenty of actually very well lit scenes in which she sweats while sparks fly all around her) and a dancer by night.

She dances in a club inhabited by guys who wear trucker caps and drink Budweiser but who watch attentively as she does arthouse dances and never complain that she doesn’t bother to take her clothes off.

She likes dancing at the club but what she really wants to be is a ballet dancer. She has an elderly mentor who encourages her to apply at the prestigious dance academy but she’s intimidated by it as she’s a working class girl.

Her boss at the welding factory is twice her age and, again, her boss, takes a shine to her. At first she lets him know he’s twice her age and her boss and that’s definitely not appropriate, but naturally they wind up a thing anyway.

She’s also got a sister who is an ice skater, and a grumpy Dad. There is a lot going on in this film but none of it really adds up to anything. We never get to know any of the characters and there isn’t much in the way of development or tension or plot. Mostly it is an excuse for a lot of big dance numbers. To be fair those are quite enjoyable and they are set to some great 1980s pop music.

It was directed by Adrian Lynne who’d also direct 9 1/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction and produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (their first of many collaborations including Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and The Rock) and that completely tracks as it has that beautiful sheen but empty center.

If you can turn off your brain and enjoy some sugary candy then this is an enjoyable distraction. But if you are looking for something more I’d look elsewhere.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Addition: Dolls (1987)

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Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator (1985) and for that he will have my eternal gratitude. That film, along with Evil Dead II (1987) opened my eyes to gonzo horror that mixed crazy violence with comedy and gore, and my life was forever changed.

But while I absolutely adore Re-Animator I’ve never really taken to any of the other Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. Dolls, his third feature film as a director, did not change that.

Dolls is part of an unrelated series of films about childhood toys that come to life that for some reason were very popular in the late 1980s. The special effects work with the puppets here is a lot of fun, but it comes in very late in the film, and unfortunately the build-up is a bit of a slog.

An obnoxious married couple with a precocious young daughter get stuck in a thunderstorm. A couple of punk girls are hitch-hiking nearby and are picked up by a doofus salesman. They too are trapped by the storm. All of these disparate people make their way into a strange old mansion where they are greeted by a kindly old couple.

Most of the characters are highly unlikable. The punks are petty thieves, and well, punks. The married couple constantly complain and are ridiculously mean to the little girl. The old couple are pleasant enough but of course they are in control of the killers dolls. What’s left is the salesman who is dumb and goofy and the precocious girl.

Naturally, the killer dolls kill the annoying characters first leaving the salesman and the girl to survive the night. Presumably creating and working the puppets was expensive so most of the film they are completely off screen. They don’t really appear until nearly 45 minutes into this 77 minute film. Once they do appear things become a lot of fun, but that’s a long 45 minutes where nothing much interesting happens before then.

I’ll argue that it is worth watching for those dolls. My wife is a doll collector and while she leans heavily into the Barbie world and these are more of the porcelain variety I still got a kick out of watching how they brought them to life (and then found creative ways to destroy them). I’m a huge fan of practical effects and they are well done here.

I just wish their was a better script that moved around the effects.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Highlander (1986)

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More so than any of my other themes I find that I wind up talking about my experience with the movies during Awesome 80s in April rather than reviewing them. I grew up in the 1980s. I watched a lot of movies during that decade and continued to watch them on home video through the 1990s and beyond. More than any other decade I have watch movies from the 1980s.

I also remember hearing about a lot of the movies in the 1980s. I remember watching trailers growing up, or hearing about films from Siskel and Ebert, reading reviews in the local paper, etc. These things are implanted in my memory, even for movies I’ve never seen.

So when I watch the now, those memories linger. You’ll find that in these reviews I’ll spend a lot of time talking about watching them as a kid, or at least knowing about them in some way. Sometimes it will be just a memory of seeing the VHS cover a thousand times while browsing for something else to watch.

So it was with Highlander. I didn’t watch the film when it came out in 1986. I was too young. I didn’t watch it in high school or even college. But I was very aware of it. In this case I don’t remember watching trailers or hearing buzz about it as a kid. But later people talked about it being one of the great fantasy movies of all time.

When I finally did see it, probably twenty years ago or so, I was disappointed in it. I didn’t really like it and I didn’t understand why people loved it so.

Watching it again now I both understand the hype and my trepidation over it. It has a cool concept. Some great music. Some beautiful shots. A wonderfully ridiculous performance from Clancy Brown. But Christopher Lambert in the lead doesn’t work for me. The mythology isn’t fleshed out very well. And the staging of most of the action is just bad.

The Highlander is Connor MacLeod (Lambert) an immortal living a simple life as an antiques dealer in New York in 1985. Our film begins with him watching a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden. Bored, he leaves before the match is over only to be attacked by some rando in the parking garage. They fight with swords and MacLeod beheads the other dude.

Flashback to the Scottish Highlands in the 1500s and MacLeod is living a simple life as a farmer or whatever Scottish villagers were in the 1500s. His clan fights another clan. The Kurgan (Brown) is another immortal, but badass and evil. He’s fighting for the other clan. But really he just wants to kill MacLeod because when one immortal beheads the other he gains the dead guys powers or something.

Kurgan gives MacLeod a good stabbing but is unable to behead him. The thing is MacLeod at this time doesnt’ know he’s immortal. Nor do any of his clan. They have a funeral and everything. But then MacLeod wakes up, definitely not dead, and freaks everybody out.

He’s banished and eventually meets Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery) a good guy immortal who teaches McLeod in the immortal ways of living, fighting, and not dying.

There are a bunch of immortals on Earth and the only way to kill them is the beheading. Every once in a while these guys get a tingling and that means they gotta come together and try to kill each other. Someday there will be a great tingling and everybody will gather together and fight until the there is only one immortal standing. That guy will get all the power and become God or something. They very much like saying “There Can Be Only One” right before they try and kill each other. It is unclear why they need to kill each other. They don’t always as MacLeod and Ramírez become friends. And later MacLeod will hang out with another immortal and they definitely don’t try and kill each other. So maybe its just the evil guy who likes killing.

It is all kind of vague and nonsensical if you ask me. I don’t think the writers spent a lot of time working the details of the mythology out. There are sequels and a TV show so maybe it makes more sense later on.

The film moves back and forth between the 1980s where MacLeod has to fight the Kurgan again, but also makes a lady friend, and deals with the police over the decapitated dead guy from the garage, and the past where he gets all his training and stuff.

The film looks great. The Scottish scenery is stunningly beautiful and cinematographer Gerry Fisher gives the modern stuff a cool noirish feel with lots of shadows, backlighting, and fluid camera movement.

Christopher Lambert is stiff as MacLeod, never making me believe anything that happening to me. But Clancy Brown is clearly having a lot of fun while Sean Connery does his best Sean Connery. He’s playing an Egyptian who has been living as a Spaniard but he’s still got Connery’s very Scottish accent. I’ll take that over Lamber’s attempt at Scottish. In the modern scenes he’s doing something like German for some reason.

The fight scenes are poorly choreographed and terribly shot. It is hard to believe the same crew who creates such interesting images in all the other scenes managed to screw up the many fight scenes so badly. But here we are.

But that Queen soundtrack rocks.

So what we’re left with is an interesting mythology poorly told and some very pretty images. That’s enough to make me recommend it, but not enough to make me want to dive into the sequels.