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.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Evils of the Night (1985)

I’m fascinated by the careers of classic film stars late in their lives. Every now and again an aging star will land a wonderfully juicy film role, but mostly they found themselves in cheesy television shows as guest stars, or in low-budget horror films, slumming.

Julie Newmar, Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, John Carradine, and Tina Louise weren’t exactly the biggest stars of their day, but they made some good movies and starred in some enjoyable TV shows in their prime. They deserve better than this.

I watched Evils of the Night primarily based on that cast list and the basic plot description that involves vampire aliens kidnapping attractive young people for their blood.

I should have just gone to bed early.

I’m a fan of bad movies. I love the so-bad-its-good genre of cinema. This film doesn’t deserve to be called bad. It’s terrible.

The first twenty minutes find a bunch of sexy teens frolicking at a lake and sexing on the beach. Some dudes in ski masks (Neville Brand and Also Ray) snatch some of them and take them back to a hospital where Tina Louise, John Carradine, and Julie Newmar attempt to extract their blood, but not actually kill them.

It is never quite clear what they need the blood for, only that it has to come from healthy young people (but not too young) and that they can’t have any bruising (which is a problem for them because the guys is ski masks keep beating the kids up before they bring them in.) There is some business about the bosses screwing up by landing them in this small town where there aren’t enough healthy youngsters or intelligent minions to make their plan work. But nothing is really explained.

It is a weird mix of ’80s boner comedy and slasher horror with a bit of sci-fi alien story mixed in. But it feels completely thrown together with very little thought or effort put into it. For example during the numerous sex scenes, everybody keeps their shoes on and the guys never even unbutton their pants (the girls, including porn stars Crystal Breeze and Amber Lynn, naturally, get completely naked). The masked dudes wear masks to conceal their identities, but also overalls with their names on them. The spaceships come from clips stolen from the original Battlestar Galactica series (the poster includes a slightly modified Millenium Falcon).

One imagines they blew their entire budget on the stars and then just slapped something together fast and cheap hoping to recoup their money based on name recognition alone.

Please, do everyone a favor and don’t watch this film. It is bad enough that I had to.

Awesome ’80s in April: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1983)

2010 the year we make contact poster

2001: A Space Odyssey is arguably one of the greatest movies ever made. Certainly, it is one of the greatest science fiction films ever put on celluloid. It was made by the visionary auteur Stanley Kubrick. One of the many astounding things about the film is that it is almost entirely told through visual language. Great swaths of the movie contain no dialogue whatsoever. This is also one of the reasons the film is endlessly discussed – it never tells you what’s happening, it shows you.

A sequel was made in 1984. Directed by Peter Hyams 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a pale imitation of the original. As a sequel, it is not great. Where Kubrick’s film is mysterious, asking big questions and giving no answers, 2010 is all answers.

But if you can separate it from the original, and take it on by itself, it’s actually pretty good. Admittedly, that is a difficult task, as this film is basically an answer to the questions asked by the original. Its plot takes place right after 2001 ended and its characters spend their time hunting down what happened in that movie. But if you can get the original out of your mind and just let this one do what it’s doing, then I think you can find it enjoyable.

I said it begins right after the events of 2001, but really it begins 9 years after that movie (hence 2010 in the title.) At the end of the first film, the crew from the Discovery One spaceship which was on a mission to Jupiter are lost. The HAL-9000 computer, which controlled pretty much everything on board went a little crazy and killed most of the crew. Dave (Keir Dullea) the only survivor disappeared. As an audience, we know that he discovered a giant black monolith orbiting Jupiter and was sucked inside it. A long, psychedelic trip then turns him into a cosmic space baby. But in-film, the people of Earth have no idea what happened to him.

The Americans and the Russians are both planning missions to Jupiter to find out. There is a time rush as the Discovery One is slowly losing orbit and will soon crash. The Russians will have their ship ready faster than the Americans, but it is the Americans who have knowledge of the Discovery One and are the only ones who can reboot HAL. So, three Americans Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) who feels responsible for the entire Discovery One mishap, Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) who designed the Discovery One, and R. Chandra (Bob Babalan) who created the HAL-9000 computer, jump aboard the Russian ship.

All of this occurs during the height of the Cold War. During the mission relations between the two countries deteriorate with a Cuban Missile Crisis-type situation pulling them toward the brink of war.

The astronauts try to ignore the ongoing politics back home and instead concentrate on the mission. The film does explain what happened to HAL in 2001, but I won’t spoil that here. It explains further what the monolith is and what the aliens want, but again no spoilers. None of that is particularly thrilling or all that interesting. And if you want it to it can destroy all the mystery of 2001.

However, the design of everything is really quite good. I especially enjoyed the matte paintings and the various images of space, Jupiter and its moons and the placements of the ships within all of that. All of the space stuff is really interesting. I also enjoyed the relationships that develop between the various scientists (Helen Mirren plays one of the Russians and she’s always fun to watch, especially when attempting a Russian accent).

If this movie existed on its own, if 2001 had never been made I think 2010 would have been well-regarded. It might not be a classic, but It would definitely have a good following. I’d argue it should definitely be reconsidered, despite the Kubrick film always overshadowing it.

I wrote a different review of this film back in 2004. You can click here and read it if you like (spoiler alert, I hated it).

Awesome ’80s in April: Flash Gordon (1980)

flash gordon movie poster

After moving away for college and staying away for some twenty years, I moved back to my hometown a while back and started working in the family business with my father and brother. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with either of those things. Still aren’t if I’m being honest.

However, it has been really nice to get to know my brother better. We’ve always gotten along, but he’s four years older than me. He left home just about the time I was getting interested and by the time he moved back I was gone. So it has been wonderful forming a relationship with him as an adult.

We are both movie nerds so we spend a lot of our time talking about the various films we’ve recently watched. Since moving back he has told me many times of his undying love for Flash Gordon. This usually happens when a Queen song plays over the radio (and we tend to listen to the classic rock station so a Queen song often plays over the radio.) Queen, of course, wrote the soundtrack to the film.

Flash Gordon is one of those films that I was too young to have seen in the theaters, and have never really cared to catch at home. It bombed at the box office and the general consensus was that it was a stinker. That general consensus has stuck with me which is why I never bothered with it. But my brother’s love for it finally got me to track down a copy and I recently watched it.

I kind of loved it.

It is very silly and all kinds of cheesy, but intentionally so. His has more in common with the 1960s Batman television series than anything in the MCU. Of course, 1980 was a long way from the MCU or Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, or even Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. Christopher Reeve played Superman in 1978 but that was really the first big blockbuster superhero movie of the modern era.

At the time Comic Books were mostly kids’ stuff. Later in the 1980s, they would turn darker and grittier, but in 1980 they were still primarily for children. Flash Gordon was a newspaper comic strip that lent itself toward ridiculous situations, over-the-top villains, and general nonsense.

The movie follows in that same vein. It is bright and colorful, filled with outlandish sets, even more outlandish characters, and a plot that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than silly.

Sam J. Jones plays Flash Gordon, not a superhero but a football star. He boards his private jet and finds travel agent Dale Gordon (Melody Anderson) has snuck aboard. She’s pretty so he allows her to stay. Not long after they are in the air the plane is hit by a meteor and they crash land near mad scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov’s (Topol) laboratory.

He believes that the crazy weather they’ve been having (including massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and hurricanes) is part of an extra-terrestrial plot to destroy the Earth. He’s not wrong as it is Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow – and I really would like to hear the story of how they talked him into starring in this film) who has wreaked this havoc on the planet – he gets bored easily and likes to destroy planets just to see how they react.

Zarkov has a space jet at his disposal and the three humans take off hoping to save the day (well Zarkov hopes to save the day, he pretty much kidnaps the other two). They fly through a time warp, or a wormhole, or something or other and wind up on Ming’s planet.

There they meet some men with wings, a young Timothy Dalton in a mustache, a dude in a golden Destro-looking mask, Ming’s very attractive daughter (Ornella Muti), and an assortment of other oddballs. Flash beats off Ming’s men by basically playing football with a metal ball against them. He plays a deadly game of don’t-get-bit by a deadly scorpion thingy with Timothy Dalton. He flies some cool-looking ships, gets lost in a swamp, and has all sorts of adventures.

Again, the whole thing is ridiculously silly but a whole lot of fun. And yes, that score from Queen is pretty darn great.

Planet of the Vampires (1965)

planet of the vampires bluray

Mario Bava is one of the all-time great horror directors. He basically created the Giallo subgenre and was a master visualist. He also directed lots of other genres, including sword and sandals movies and science fiction. Planet of the Vampires is a bit of a genre blend including both sci-fi and horror. Kino Lorber recently released a nice copy of it on Blu-ray and I wrote a review which you can read here.