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.

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

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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.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)

harry potter and the sorcerers stone

This was originally written in September 2006.

Sometimes I suspect I am the only English speaker left who hasn’t read nor seen any of the Harry Potter series. A few years back I attended a midnight sale when one of the books first came out. I went for a good laugh with some friends who were completely hooked on the series.

The place was packed! Elbow to elbow they were all lined up to get the new book. It seemed very strange to me. I’ve attended my share of movie premiers which kind of makes sense, being the first to see a film and all, but they are only a few hours long. A book takes a couple of days to get through at least, and by the size of those Potter books I’d suspect a week or more of reading. Were these people then going to go home and read the book? Could they not have waited until tomorrow and made the purchase?

Scores of them were dressed up like Potter or, I guess other characters. It was like Halloween or a Star Trek convention. I went home mystified by the fandom.

In the years since most of my friends have become Potter fans and often chatter on about it. There are marketing goods, knock-offs, and even the odd religious book condemning Potter and his odious witchcraft. The little boy in the round glasses is everywhere.

I bought the books for my wife last Christmas, secretly thinking I’d read them too. Neither of us has cracked a page.

We borrowed the films from a friend a few months back but returned them having never seen a scene. At the time we thought we’d rather read the books before viewing the films. Last night while browsing Blockbuster we finally decided to rent the blasted thing and see what the fuss was all about.

I’ll start with all the problems I had with the film and there were a few.

I hated, detested, and loathed the large CG creatures. They looked fake, they moved like plastic dolls and they totally distracted me from what was going on in the story.

Perhaps the budget wasn’t up for it, or maybe the technical department wasn’t up for it, but to me, that’s a signal to go with the old-school puppet variety. Maybe it shows my age to say that, but my eyes can suspend their disbelief with a great puppet more than with decent CG any day of the week.

The rest of the special effects were dandy. I totally believed the flying on broomsticks, the floating keys, and the like, but the three-headed dog, the giant ogre, and other larger-than-life CG characters totally irritated me. Like Jar Jar Binks only less vocal.

There were several moments in the plot that felt brushed over. For instance, there was a harsh rule mandated on the first day of school that all students were to stay out of the woods. Yet when Harry and his pals get detention they are forced to not only go into the woods but are left alone in them. Sure enough, Harry is almost killed. Not very practical on the school’s part, I’d say. I suspect this is explained a little better in the book, but if a big item like this can’t be understood by those who haven’t read then the filmmakers haven’t done their job.

The directing was fair. A few choices seemed to lack any real vision. The ball game is filmed almost entirely in close-ups with only a few long shots showing the overall action. For a game that is only partially explained I would have enjoyed trying to figure out how to play. But with the close-ups, all I could tell was that a few characters were carrying a ball, or Harry was searching for the little one.

For all the problems I had with the film, it was very enjoyable to watch. The acting was good and the characters interesting. It is always difficult for the first film in a series because there is so much background work that you have to do, and they pulled that aspect off well. I’m sure that if I was a few years younger it would sit on a shelf alongside Goonies, Gremlins and Indiana Jones.

I’m definitely looking forward to the sequels and reading the books.