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.

Outland (1981)

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It has been a lot of fun working through my life in movies. That sounds wrong. These movies actually have no connection with my life, my one rule is that I’ve never seen them. I should say I’m having fun watching movies from all the years I’ve been alive in chronological order. But that’s a mouthful, I really do need to find some snappy title for this feature that will easily describe what I’m doing.

The one rule is that each movie has to have never been seen by me before. But that’s not always easy to follow. I keep track of what I watch through Letterboxd, but it isn’t always accurate. Sometimes I forget to log a movie. And for movies, I watched before Letterboxd existed, before even IMDB existed, well those are hard to track. Who can remember all the films they watched when they were a kid? Sometimes I watch a movie I think I’ve seen before only to find absolutely none of it ringing any memory bells. Other times I start a movie that I think is new to me and realize that I have actually seen it before.

Outland is a film I thought I had never seen. But after I watched it the other day, I discovered that I had actually logged it on Letterboxd. But there wasn’t a single scene, a single image that was familiar to me. The logging was dated before Letterboxd existed which means I found it at some point, thought I had seen it, and guessed when that might have been. So, I really have no idea whether or not I had actually seen it before. Maybe I did and have forgotten the film altogether, or maybe I just thought I had and logged it.

Either way, I’m counting it for this silly little endeavor of mine.

Outland is a space western. It’s basically High Noon (1952) in space. Sean Connery plays Federal Marshal William O’Niel who has been assigned to a tiny mining outpost on Jupiter’s moon, IO. He quickly becomes concerned with the number of workers who seem to be going crazy and committing suicide. Everybody else, including the operations doctor, Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen) chalk it up to the poor living conditions on the station and the utter isolation. But O’Neil figures it is happening way too often for it to just be bouts or stir craziness.

Eventually, he discovers an illegal drug trade. A synthetic stimulant is being brought in and given to the workers to increase production. Use it enough and you eventually go psychotic. O’Neil tries to put a stop to it, but naturally, he comes up against the Company (who don’t officially approve of the use of the drug, but sure do like the boost in productivity).

There is a lot of Alien (1979) DNA in Outland, especially in the rugged, lived-in quality of the outpost, and the blue-collar nature of the people. Outland is rough and dirty, and the workers are tough and rowdy. They live in small spaces, their beds stacked one on top of the other with little privacy afforded to them. In contrast, O’Neil and the other high administrative positions live in comparatively fancy quarters with plenty of space and luxury. Also as in Alien, the real villain of the film is the faceless corporation, always putting profit above human lives.

It isn’t nearly as good as Alien. Director Peter Hyams doesn’t have nearly the skill or artistry of Ridley Scott. The script (also by Hyams) isn’t as tight either. But the world that he has created is really quite something, and Sean Connery gives one of his finer performances.

Awesome ’80s in April: The Presidio (1988)

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It is funny what you remember from your childhood. Until this week I’d never seen The Presidio, but I remember that my cousin Clifton has. I remember him telling me how awesome it was and that James Bond beat a guy up using just his thumb. That was enough to make me want to watch it, but I wasn’t even a teenager in 1988 and my mother was much more strict about what she let us watch than Aunt Sandi was for Clifton. When I was old enough to watch it I had already moved on to other movies. But I still remember wondering how a guy could beat another guy up with just a thumb.

That guy is Colonel Alan Caldwell (Sean Connery) the provost marshall of the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, California. He’s a hard-nosed guy who doesn’t take too kindly when Jay Austin (Mark Harmon), a police detective shows up at his door trying to solve two murders. One murder was committed on the base, but another, seemingly by the same criminal, was committed in the city. That means it is SFPD jurisdiction.

Turns out Austin used to be an Army man, stationed at the Presidio, under the command of Caldwell. They didn’t get along too well, but are forced to team up to solve these murders. This sets up our buddy cop film with one tough, old, by-the-books officer and a younger do whatever-it-takes to get the job done detective.

It is all pretty standard 1980s cop flick fare. Connery is great and the mystery is pretty good. The action is mostly average although I did enjoy one scene inside a warehouse full of giant water bottles that get shot up pretty good. Meg Ryan plays the love interest who is also Caldwell’s daughter. She’s basically a Meg Ryan type but not given much to do.

All in all a pretty good way to spend a Saturday afternoon at the movies.

Oh and that scene where Connery takes down a dude with his thumb? That’s worth the price of admission all on its own.

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I almost forgot to mention, there is a scene in which Mark Harmon’s character meets a woman with a bunch of Grateful Dead posters on her office wall. He needs something from her so they have a hilarious chat about the Dead and which shows they’ve seen. It ends with him promising to send her a Dylan bootleg.