Blade Runner: An Essay

This last Wednesday night I saw Blade Runner: The Final Cut - the supposedly "final" of seven versions of the movie (!); this is the one from 2007 that has the restoration of some moments that director Ridley Scott felt were important, and he supervised a total audio/video overhaul from the original source material. It's taken me two full days to really process the movie, which I haven't seen in a few years. Please pardon the length of the review! 

What makes someone a human being? That's the main question explored by Philip K. Dick in his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which Blade Runner derives from. The movie is quite different in many ways, and even the things it keeps from the book are often not really explained - I'll include notes here and there about the stuff that goes unsaid.  

The Thing (1982), Predator (1987), Short Circuit 2 (1988)

 

I saw Short Circuit 2 last Saturday with my Dank Movie Club. I am pretty sure I saw this as a kid in the theater with my dad, because I have a memory of him pulling me into the lobby during the scene where Johnny 5 gets the snot beaten out of him and appears to be bleeding to death (!). 

But other than that scene, this is a kid-friendly light-hearted romp featuring a lovable wiseass of a robot. Honestly, the puppetry and special effects for Johnny 5 are pretty amazing - most of the budget must have gone into that. Fisher Stevens reprises his role as Johnny 5's creator (but weirdly, they changed his character's last name, even though he is clearly supposed to be the same person as in Short Circuit), and now the wonderful Michael McKean is his slimy-but-heart-of-gold business partner/grifter/con man/big idea man. 

The best scene is where Johnny 5 is tricked by hoodlums into stealing car radios - which he is VERY good at - and he learns their gang chant: LOS LOCOS KICK YOUR ASS! LOS LOCOS KICK YOUR FACE! LOS LOCOS KICK YOUR BALLS INTO OUTER SPACE!! It's very charming, trust me. 

Directed by Kenneth Johnson (Six Million Dollar Man, V, Steel), it has a lot of heart. It was only a very very modest hit - made for $15 million, made $21 million - and studios declined to make a third movie. 

The Thing is my favorite horror movie. I prefer it by far to the original and much-lauded Howard Hawks-directed 1951 Sci Fi classic. A group of American scientists in Antarctica are preyed upon by an alien that can perfectly mimic anything that it consumes. Who can be trusted? The ultimate paranoid thriller meets the ultimate practical horror special effects - truly memorable and gruesome. 

Directed by John Carpenter, featuring Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilfred Brimley, T K Carter, and many others, it's a real masterpiece. I will keep it short here, because I'll eventually write a longer post about this movie. 

This is a Perfect Action Movie. One of the all-time greats, right up there with Die Hard and First Blood: directed by John McTiernan (who also, coincidentally, did Die Hard) and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Ventura, Sonny Landham, Bill Duke, Carl Weathers, and more, it's the story of an elite group of soldiers on a secret CIA-funded mission in a Central American jungle to recover a lost diplomat... at least, that's what they think. Soon, the hunters become the hunted. 

A huge, huge hit, it features great special effects, an iconic and memorable villain, and some of Arnold's best acting and emoting. A tremendous classic. Should be seen by all. The most unsung aspect: it has a tremendous music score, one of the best of the decade. 

Brainstorm (1983), Delta Force (1986), The Survivors (1983)

I saw this with my online Dank Movie Night crew on Saturday night, and it was surprisingly good! Directed by special effects expect Douglas Trumbull, this movie should have come out in 1981, but was delayed by star Natalie Wood's mysterious and untimely death. At first the studio thought about shelving it entirely, but since her role was 90% complete and - as always - money talks in Hollywood, they finished it using her sister Lana as a stand-in and released it in 1983. 

The plot is about a group of scientists - including an estranged married couple (Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood) - that is headed up by Louise Fletcher (!). Because of the high wattage here, what might have been a somewhat cheesy premise is raised to legitimate drama: the scientists are on the verge of a breakthrough in recording human thought and feeling onto a special variety of tape media, and allowing people to experience the sensations when it's played back.

But the military wants in (it IS the '80s), to train soldiers or otherwise misuse the tech. And one of the group uses the technology to record himself having sex, and then almost dies when he splices the orgasm into a constant loop and attempts to experience it. When project head Fletcher dies, she records her death experiences - and Walken becomes obsessed with experiencing them in full. 

The plot unfolds pretty logically from there, and has a rather upbeat ending, which I didn't expect. It was a satisfying sci-fi thriller - maybe not in the uppermost pantheon of 80s sci-fi, but definitely worth your attention if you're curious about anything you just read. Better than I thought it would be. 

I remember liking this as a kid... but when I just saw it 30-35 years later as an adult, I hated it. What a shame. This movie, made by Cannon Pictures, can't decide what it is or what it wants to do. Chuck Norris, ostensibly the star, and second-billed Lee Marvin are in this movie for FAR too short a time, and given too little to do or say. The movie wants to be a serious drama with bold action sequences. Instead, it's a tepid, weakly written, anemic excuse for Chuck Norris to mildly kick a very small amount of butt for too brief a spell. 

The movie spends way too long setting up the central Lebanese plane hijacking - I got so impatient as they tried to establish a full cabin full of passengers, all of which we are supposed to care for and about. I *didn't* care! If Chuck Norris is here, let him kick ass!! But they don't. The movie is VERY slow for something called Delta Force, even after Norris is finally unleashed. Poorly paced, poorly written... not a standout, I'm afraid. Avoid it unless you are a Norris or Cannon Films completionist. 

This one surprised me. Bearing a paltry 9% approval on RottenTomatoes, I enjoyed it quite a bit nonetheless. Peak zany Robin Williams and peak jowly cynic Walter Matthau pair together in a movie that has an actual message to deliver. 

Two recently unemployed men - unemployed because of their mutual carelessness, although neither will ever realize it - cross paths in a diner right when it is being robbed. They foil the robber, but unfortunately they see his face ... and he knows they have. So he hunts them down to shut them up. Sounds serious, right? It's not. 

Both Williams and Matthau don't really seem like they're acting at all. Williams is an insecure mess, sensitive, funny, out of control, a motormouth who becomes obsessed with survival and self-defense after the robbery. Matthau is a sour, ironic, cynical father who takes the world in stride and hardly knows how to process the antics of Williams. 

Although critics like Ebert thought this movie had an identity crisis and tried to have things both ways, I think it actually works in its favor. Part of the fun is seeing dour Matthau glower at Williams, and Williams mug it up for Matthau. And the robber is ... Jerry Reed! And he's fantastic, as a world-weary Southern-fried assassin, who really doesn't WANT to kill them, but hey, he has a living to make, and he can't have them telling the cops, can he? 

In true 1983 fashion, everyone ends this movie as friends (even the hitman!), and the real villain is revealed to be the soulless corporate exec who is preying off vulnerable men who fear for their masculinity - echoes of the opening scene, when exec Williams is fired by a trained parrot (a truly bizarre scene). The movie doesn't QUITE say what it wants in the perfect way... but it's still light fun. 

Porky's (1982), The Hunter (1980), The Burning (1981)

 

It's safe to say that Porky's (1982) was a big deal when it was released, on several levels. Made for a scant $4-5 million, explicitly as a tax shelter (everyone assumed it would fail and fail big) it grossed at least $200 million in its theater run, plus who knows how much more in rentals, cable runs, physical sales, etc. Almost all by itself, Porky's created the Explicit Teen Sex Comedy genre that flourished in the 1980s, and also provided a template for various low budget directors to try and follow.

Directed by Bob Clark - an American who frequently worked in Canada and who made the cult horror hit Black Christmas (1974), the surprisingly good Sherlock Holmes film Murder by Decree (1979) and - most well known of all - A Christmas Story (1983), which is still played in a 24-hour loop on Christmas Day by the TBS cable network. 

Clark based Porky's on his real-life experiences growing up with five close friends in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The nightclub Porky's is based on a real place called Porky's Hide Away in Oakland Park, Florida. I couldn't dig up their reaction to the movie, but it must have boosted their attendance significantly. 

The tone of the movie is apparent in the very first scene - In 1954, a teenage boy is reluctantly waking up, sporting an erection which he has to hide from his mother. Once he chases his mother away ("I pulled a little groin muscle" he says. "Well, be careful" she replies) he immediately measures his penis, and is disappointed. This character is "Pee Wee" ... Yikes. Well, you can tell who the intended audience here was, ha.

So why was this movie such a mega hit? Well, a couple things are working in its favor. The friends here all seem realistically immature and also like real friends - they joke around, they play pranks on each other, they hatch schemes, etc. There weren't a lot of other movies doing this in '81, and the ones that were, like Diner or American Graffiti, were big hits.

The second is that it is steeped in '50s nostalgia, which became a huge deal in the '80s - Back to the Future, Stand by Me, Dead Poets Society, Dirty Dancing, Diner; it was a MAJOR moment for 1950's nostalgia, and this was one of the first (following some late '70s classics like Grease that led the vanguard). 

I've long been fascinated with the 50s/80s interplay. Both had conservative militaristic Republican presidents who were concerned with maintaining the status quo in the face of the USSR. Both worried about nuclear annihilation. Both were less than a decade removed from a major war. Both saw the explosion of youth-oriented music styles. Etc etc etc. Porky's cashes in on that big time. 

Being something of a major cultural artifact there is a lot one could say about Porky's. It goes without saying that the movie is casually misogynistic, racist, etc etc. (perhaps another commonality with the 1950s, sadly). This movie has been rightfully trashed by feminists ever since its release; but I honestly don't think Clark has any ill intent here - he's not telling the audience "this is how it SHOULD be!" ... he's just relaying some memories and saying how they were: imperfect. At least, that's how the tone reads for me. 

Some notes on the cast:

• Kim Cattrall is here! She's the teacher who howls like a dog during sex (har har har... that scene is unfunny and WAY too long). I always assume her career started with Police Academy (1984), but after looking up her resume, I was surprised to see she started way way back in Rosebud (1975). She was a six year veteran by the time she made Porky's! 
• Dan Monahan is cheekily likable as Pee Wee - he was in a movie as Tom Sawyer the same year this was released, as well as Only When I Laugh, which I also reviewed here. Later he was in two Porky's sequels (that didn't do nearly as well), Up the Creek (1984, was surprisingly fun), and From the Hip (1987). 
• Alex Karras is the Sheriff! I knew him as a kid as the dad on the TV show Webster. My dad knew remembered him immediately as a Pro Bowl tackle with the Detroit Lions through the 1960s. He was in some well-regarded movies, including Blazing Saddles, Altman's M*A*S*H, and Victor Victoria (1982). 
• Chuck Mitchell plays the malevolent Porky. I know him best as the mean restauranteur in Better Off Dead (1985), where he owns a place called "Pig Burgers" - surely a Porky's reference. He appears sporadically throughout the 80s, including Frightmare (1983) and Ghost Chase (1987). 
• Nancy Parsons is great as the mean gym teacher Mrs. Balbricker. I vaguely remember her as Coach Annie in 1992's Ladybugs, where she is one of the other soccer coaches.
• Wyatt Knight is Tommy, best remembered as "the kid with a mole on his dick" who antagonizes Balbricker in the shower. He never did anything outside the Porky's films. 

Fun fact: Howard Stern owns the rights to Porky's and has been dying for years to make a remake. No idea what the status of that is. As much as I knock Porky's above - it's not as funny at age 42 as it was at 12 - it does have some moments with real heart, and you can tell Bob Clark really invested some of himself in this. 

This is a movie I had read about but really knew nothing about before finding it on Amazon Prime. It's the final movie of screen legend Steve McQueen, released only three months before he died in November of 1980. 

The story of a bounty hunter, it was directed by Buzz Kulik, a very busy director of mostly TV movies who also made a few feature films like 1969's Riot with Gene Hackman and Jim Brown (produced by William Castle!!), and 1973's Shamus with Burt Reynolds; but perhaps is best known for the famous 1971 TV movie Brian's Song.

This movie has a surprisingly good supporting cast, including: 

• Tracey Walter - He's in tons and tons of things; I know him best as Malak in Conan the Destroyer and Bob the Goon in Batman. He was in 9 films with Jack Nicholson. 
• Eli Wallach - Also in tons of things, perhaps most famously as Tuco in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, as well as Guido in The Misfits. 
• LaVar Burton - Before he was Geordi LeForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but after he was Kunta Kinte in 1977's landmark Roots. 
• Ben Johnson - A famous stuntman who worked his way into stardom in Westerns, including prominent roles in John Ford's 3 Godfathers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and other famous Westerns like Wagon Master, Rio Grande, Shane, Hang 'Em High, The Wild Bunch, The Last Picture Show... the list goes on and on. A legend. 
• Teddy Wilson - A veteran TV actor who I know best as Sweet Daddy Williams on Good Times, and as Phil Wheeler on Sanford and Son. 
• Nathaniel Taylor - A friend of Redd Foxx who played the immortal Rollo Lawson on Sanford and Son and the attempted spinoffs. He was also in the blaxpoitation film Willie Dynamite. 
• Richard Venture - Veteran "that guy" actor who was in Being There, Scent of a Woman, All the President's Men, and many others. 

What a line up!

The plot here is a series of episodes where "Papa" Thorson (McQueen) has to go to various places and capture bad guys. A funny running joke is that he's a bad driver (in actuality McQueen was a race car driver and performed many famous action sequences like the immortal chase in the movie Bullitt or the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape), which made me laugh more than once. 

The opening episode is where he captures Lavar Burton in a small-town bar in Illinois - it's kind of amazing how charismatic LaVar Burton is in his short moments in the film. His famous voice, which many grew up hearing on Reading Rainbow, is modulated perfectly for every moment. He appears every fifteen or twenty minutes or so as a recurring joke - he is constantly fiddling with McQueen's gadgets, trying to improve them; he lives with McQueen after McQueen decides he doesn't belong in jail. That said, Burton lights up the screen every time he's there, I was very impressed and wished he was in a lot more of the film as a full-time sidekick. 

Apparently Steve McQueen directed a lot of the scenes himself, not caring for how the official director was doing. It was during the filming of this movie that 49-year old McQueen and others noticed that he was becoming severely out of breath after the lightest exertions. 

The doctors then did the tests that revealed the mesothelioma that would kill him within a year. McQueen blamed the asbestos suits he wore as a race car driver, as well as asbestos-removal projects he was made to do in the Marines. This movie morbidly benefitted from all the news surrounding McQueen's illness: he traveled to Mexico for a 3-month series of quack treatments that only weakened him further. 

All in all, this could have been released in 1979 and felt more at home in that decade. There is little or nothing of the 1980s in this, and it vibrates with that raw individualist 70s energy throughout. It's fun at times, but it needed a firmer guiding hand on the rudder. It feels a little piecemeal, a little fuzzy, and it really only shines when McQueen gets to do fights or action sequences. A completely acceptable movie, but nothing outstanding. 

I can't believe I haven't done this one yet! 1981's The Burning is one of the better-regarded slasher films of the decade, perhaps because it's one of the first and isn't quite aware of the cliches yet. It's often regarded by horror fans as "the one with Jason Alexander." 

The Burning was directed by Tony Maylam, who also did 1979's Riddle of the Sands, and 1992's Split Second, as well as a couple TV movies in the 80s. Apparently he is best known for rock music documentaries from the 1970s, which is how he came to the attention of the producers... 

The Burning is one of the very first serious productions by the Weinstein Brothers - Bob and the infamous Harvey, under the company that would become Miramax Pictures (named for their parents, Miriam and Max); they were originally rock concert promoters before making their way to Hollywood as the producers of music movies. Slowly they entered mainstream pictures through movies like this one: Harvey wrote some of the story, and Bob developed it into a screenplay.  

The Burning was explicitly made to replicate the success of low-budget '70s horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. The Weinsteins remembered a camp legend from upstate New York, known as the "Cropsey" legend, and turned it into the idea for the movie. 

A little known fact: although released in May of 1981, this was technically in development before the much more famous (and vastly more successful) summer camp slasher Friday the 13th, which was released a year earlier in May of 1980. Apparently the initial stages of development on The Burning took a long time, and it was only after hiring director Maylam that things got back on the rails. 

At the time this was being made, no one realized that the slasher phenomena was here to last. As such, worried about missing out on the slasher trend, the Weinsteins attempted to rush this into production as fast as possible, but because of their inexperience the movie ended up over budget somewhere around $1.5 million... and in the theaters it only brought back about $700,000 in the US... but it did quite well in other countries, especially Japan (!). Go figure. Ultimately it basically broke even. 

Some casting notes: 

• Jason Alexander! This was his first movie, and he didn't make another for five more years (he's a clerk in Harrison Ford's favorite of his own movies, The Mosquito Coast). Growing up he wanted to be a stage magician, but was told at some point that his hand size or shape wasn't suited for legerdemain (he has returned to this post-Seinfeld). There is very little information about his early 80s career beyond "he did commercials." 
• Brian Matthews - a daytime soap opera regular in the 80s, he's now a conservative therapist in Texas who ran unsuccessfully for office in 2012. 
• Holly Hunter! She came to New York in the late 70s and roomed with Frances McDormand (!). After being stuck in a broken elevator with playwright Beth Henley, Henley asked her to star in her play Crimes of the Heart, and Hunter's career was launched. The Burning was the only movie she made in NYC before moving to Los Angeles. 
• Fisher Stevens! His first movie as well. Later known from popular roles including Ben from Short Circuit (1986) and "The Plague" in Hackers (1995), he was a student at New York University while living with his mother when he was cast in this. 
• Brian Backer - Yup, "Rat" Ratner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is in this. Unbelievably, the same year he made this movie he won the Tony Award for Best Performance in Woody Allen's The Floating Lightbulb. 
• Lou David - the 6'5" actor who plays the killer, Cropsey, was in a few interesting things. Most notable are perhaps 1985's The Last Dragon and the blaxploitation flick Come Back, Charleston Blue. 

So how is this, as a movie? It's pretty fun if you are into summer camp slashers, or early 80s horror movies in general. It features all the hallmarks of its genre - lots of nudity, teenagers horsing around while a killer lurks on the fringes, lots of poorly edited murders, cheap gore... but also some occasionally creative shots, and a few well-executed sections. Better than some, but not at the top. 

The main problem is that the villain, Cropsey, is very boring and has no personality whatsoever. He's just a thrusting pair of gardening shears that wanders the woods. Compared to the apex-level 80s slasher villains like Jason Voorhees (and his mom), Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface, hell, even the puppets from Puppet Master or Angela from Sleepaway Camp, Cropsey is just ... a dull, easy-to-forget nonentity. It's very disappointing. 

As a result the teens have to drive the film, which they mostly do, but it's lopsided as a result. The best slasher movies feature a certain give-and-take between the killer and the victims - not necessarily in dialog, but in terms of screen time and our emotional investment in them. We invest our hopes for survival in the victims; we invest our fear in the killer. Without both, a slasher can never be fully successful, and that's what happens here. 

It's fun, and it's kind of amazing to see Jason Alexander messing around with Fisher Stevens and Holly Hunter and crew, but it's solidly in the middle of the pack. 

I'm BACK!!! - Pieces (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), The Unseen (1980), The Changeling (1980)

I'm back!! 

After two years away from the blog, I'm going to resurrect it like a horrible comet-fueled zombie (how appropriate). I've been watching '80s movies all the time, so I have plenty of material to fill in. 

Tonight I'll start with a stinker, a classic, a blah, and a maybe: 1982's Pieces and 1986's Big Trouble in Little China, then The Unseen and The Changeling from 1980. 

You know you're in trouble when the tagline is "It's exactly what you think it is." That inspires no confidence at all. This is a pretty braindead Halloween knockoff about an insane kid who kills his mom in the opening scene (much as Michael Myers kills his sister)... because she yelled at him for putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked pinup. 

Then many years later a series of murders occur at a college, where someone is killing women and sawing them apart to make a perfect woman (shades of Jame Gumb in Silence of the Lambs, I guess) ... surprise, surprise, it's the grown-up murderer who is finally completing his "jigsaw" puzzle. 

This movie is not good. The acting is lifeless and flat, the script is DOA, the idea was done better just a handful of years before... I feel this was a classic "soulless cash grab horror clone," and it feels like a holdover from the late 70s instead of from 1982. 

It was filmed in Boston, and was financed out of Puerto Rico. 

Directed by the Spaniard Juan Piquer Simon, who also did 1983's The Pod People and 1988's Slugs... and a 1990 curiosity called Cthulhu Mansion, which I am legitimately curious about. Although his career began in the 1960s, you'd never know it watching this... there is no spark of creativity here whatsoever. However, in interviews he's expressed pride in the gore - apparently they used pig carcasses for the chainsaw murders. I was unconvinced and unimpressed. 

The college dean is the only halfway interesting character, played by "Replacement Star" Edmund Purdom, who was known early in his career for taking over roles rejected by Mario Lanza and Marlon Brando. He's in other 80s cult classics, like Ator The Fighting Eagle (1982), 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983), Who is Afraid of Dracula? (1985), etc. 

Critics have wondered for years now if this movie is an example of self-aware horror or not. Does this movie KNOW it's a cheap derivative slasher? Is it, essentially, a parody of itself? This remote possibility resonates with some horror fans and results in a surprisingly high 46% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

But I agree most with this review I found on the Wikipedia entry for the movie: "Kevin Thomas, film critic for the Los Angeles Times gave the film a negative review, writing, 'Pieces is a wretched, stupid little picture whose sole purpose is the exploitation of extreme violence against women,' and further criticized it for being poorly dubbed and lacking suspense." Check, check, check. 

Meanwhile, Big Trouble in Little China is as good as they say, and better. A true cult classic, I saw it on TV when I was very young - I would guess I saw it when I was 7 or 8 at my Dad's house, perhaps on cable TV. I've been a devoted fan ever since - like I have been with almost every John Carpenter film I've seen.

Our hero Jack Burton (Kurt Russell in his prime) is really an anti-hero - he does almost nothing of note during the entire running time of the film; instead his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun, who is magnificent) kicks most of the ass, possesses most of the knowledge, has the girl to save, etc. Burton is more a Western "outsider" type, like in Shane or The Searchers - he enters a foreign community, lends "aid," and then leaves again at the end. But as Carpenter has noted, Jack Burton is really a sidekick who believes he's the leading man - that comic tension fuels a lot of the film's best moments. 

The original screenplay actually WAS a Western, taking place in 1880! Jack Burton would have rode an actual horse instead of driving a big rig, but the movie would still center around Chinatown and the "weird" supernatural aspects. The original script was written by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, but the studio later determined the script was no good and unfilmable, and hired W. D. Richter (director of Buckaroo Bonzai!) to come in to doctor it. 

Richter took 10 weeks to basically rewrite the entire thing. According to Wikipedia, Goldman called him and asked him to lay off - hoping the studio would rehire him and Weinstein to step back in - but Richter explained it was too late. When 20th Century Fox attempted to remove Goldman and Weinstein entirely from the screenwriting credit, the whole affair ended up at the Writer's Guild, and Goldman/Weinstein had their names restored. Apparently Carpenter was dismayed by this, as the final shooting script was entirely him and Richter. 

Anyway, behind-the-scenes stuff aside, unlike in classical Westerns Jack Burton is massively tongue-in-cheek the entire ride. He's funny as hell, delivers one liners and quips effortlessly (the ONLY thing he does effortlessly!), and is very brave, always driving the story forward in his (a) quest to retrieve his truck - his REAL relationship, and (b) help his friend. 

It's a rollicking, kitschy good time. The villains are wild, coming straight out of Chinese mythology, and the special effects are fantastic - peak 80s practical effects. Of special note is the wonderful James Hong, who plays the ultimate bad guy Lo Pan - he cackles marvelously and his screechy voice borders between menacing, petulant, impatient, and exasperated constantly. He's one of those 80s villains who the audience isn't sure whether to take entirely seriously or not - he's a threat, but he's a goofy threat, and rather charismatic - he never dismisses the heroes without first bantering with them. 

The movie was not a hit on its first run... made for between $20-25 million, it only made back ~$10-11 million. But it became a huge cult hit on video and cable, and probably has broken even over the years in rentals, streaming, and physical sales. The film was initially released only a week or two before the massive James Cameron action hit Aliens - the 7th biggest movie of the year - which buried Big Trouble in a landslide of marketing and lead-up hype. 

Meanwhile, The Unseen (1980) ... was not much fun to watch. Directed by Danny Steinman, who is mainly known for Savage Streets (1984), the Linda Blair street violence flick that I already covered on the blog, The Unseen is a pretty cheap and braindead horror movie. The movie is mostly known for a strange, almost unrecognizable performance by Stephen Furst (a good actor who was in Animal House, The Dream Team, the TV show St. Elsewhere,  lots more - how did he agree to this??), the plot is thin as 100 year old sheets.

Three ladies on holiday are convinced by a local guy to stay at his mansion for cheap after their hotel reservations fall through. Two of the girls are killed, and the final one is about to be, when it's revealed that the "unseen" killer is actually the Leatherface-like developmentally challenged son of the mansion's owner. The whole movie reeks of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but not as raw or harrowing as that film, and without anything to recommend it. 

Casting notes: 

• The trio of ladies (two sisters and a friend) are played by Barbara Bach, Karen Lamm, and Lois Young. 
• Barbara Bach is of course known for being married to Ringo Starr, and being a Bond girl in The Spy Who Loved Me. 
• Karen Lamm is best known for being married to Dennis Wilson, and starring in lots of 70s TV movies. 
• I couldn't find anything about Lois Young, but IMDB reports she wasn't in anything from 1980 onward until Newsies (1992) as a nun (!)... and then nothing after that. I'm sure there's an interesting story. 
• The horrible father and mansion owner is played by ... Sydney Lassick!!! Yes, Cheswick from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest! He was in a lot of horror movies in the 80s, including Alligator (1980), and the perhaps underrated Lady in White (1988). 
• Finally, his wife is played by Lelia Goldoni (!) - known for some really famous, serious films, most notably Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) and Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974).

Finally, The Changeling (1980) ... a movie with very good atmosphere, and some interesting setup, a fantastic soundtrack, and good acting throughout, but which is sadly very dated. It's one of those 1980 movies that gives off late '70s vibes strongly, and feels every inch of 42 years old (don't remind me!).  

Made in Canada, it stars George C. Scott (!) as a classical composer in New York City who moves to Seattle after his wife and daughter are killed in a traffic accident. Yeesh. But, unfortunately for him, the house he rents in Seattle is extremely mega-haunted. 

The plot from there is a little convoluted, but involved the murderous, vengeful spirit of a crippled boy who was murdered by his father so the father could collect/control an inheritance. 

To cover up the crime the murderous father adopted a new kid and pretended he was the original. Many years later, the adopted kid - who had no idea of the whole scheme - has grown up to be a US Senator and has to come to grips with the fact that his childhood was a lie predicated on the greedy murder of a sick child... all while George C. Scott's classical composer lives in the haunted house and tries to find love again (!). It's a crazy ride. 

The movie is very highly regarded by horror fans, and is frequently on lists of Best Canadian Horror Films. Directed by Peter Medak, a Hungarian director who also made Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981), many episodes of Showtime's Fairy Tale Theater, The Men's Club (1986), and perhaps most famously The Ruling Class (1972). Most recently, at age 80 in 2018, he made a documentary about Peter Sellers - which I would be interested to watch.

Besides George C. Scott, the casting includes:

• Trish Van Devere, as Scott's new love interest, and who won a Genie award for this film. She was married to George C. Scott in real life, and it shows in the movie - they have very natural chemistry. 
• The fantastic Melvyn Douglas as the US Senator whose childhood was a lie. 
• Voldi Way as the ghost child. Here is his IMDB bio: "Voldi Way was born in a VW bus to his flower children parents, home educated until the age of about eleven, when he co-founded a software company in Santa Ana, California. He attended Orange Coast College until his early teens, when he decided he needed more exposure to people his own age, and enrolled himself at Costa Mesa High School, in tenth grade." Wow! I'd like to read that autobiography. It appears he became a stuntman in later years. 
• John Colicos as a detective hired to look into the situation by the Senator. He was in quite a few movies from 1950 onward, and his 80s output includes The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), the underrated Nowhere to Hide (1987), and Shadow Dancing (1988).

The movie was a success - it cost about $6 million to make, and brought back $12 million. I agree, ultimately, with Ebert's review:  "If it only took craftsmanship to make a haunted house movie, The Changeling would be a great one. It has all the technical requirements, beginning with the haunted house itself... [the film] does have some interesting ideas... But it doesn't have that sneaky sense of awful things about to happen. Scott makes the hero so rational, normal, and self-possessed that we never feel he's in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence."

At Close Range (1986)

This is a real gem for Penn and Walken and Masterson. Walken is a rural criminal mastermind (and is extremely vicious too), Penn is his coming-of-age son who dips his toes into crime, and Masterson is Penn's intelligent girlfriend. The supporting cast (including Crispin Glover!) is fantastic. This is an interesting movie. 

Ebert called this movie "bleak" and Walken's performance as "hateful," and that is right on the money. This movie is filled with have-nots who decide to take instead of live with nothing... and they barely improve their material lives anyway, while degrading the remainder. And Walken is a burning cauldron of anger and hatred, and generally acts his ass off - he really did well in the 80s. 

And of course Sean Penn was an acting god in the 80s, and it shows here too. But secretly my favorite character was Terry, the girlfriend, played by Mary Stuart Masterson. She radiates goodness in a way that completely counteracts the bleakness. 

I hadn't ever heard about this movie before I found it randomly on Amazon Prime, which is a shame - it deserves to be better known.  

Teen Wolf (1985), Teen Wolf Too (1987), Colors (1988)

I loved this one as a kid. How did it age? Pretty well. This is still fun fluff - a teen discovers he's a werewolf, and adolescent complications ensue. Makeup is pretty good here too, if funny. This movie was a huge success: cost 1.2 million to make, according to Wikipedia, and made 80 (!).

Michael J. Fox is full of charm the same year as Back to the Future, and the supporting cast is great too. Lots of fun scenes in this one, but also a lot of heart and moral lessons. Not quite as slight as it appears. I first saw this as a VHS rental, and then on TV years later... now on Amazon Prime. Worthwhile.

Michael J. Fox hated the first one so much, he refused to participate in the sequel - a very wise move. So the second one stars Jason Bateman in a very early role. It's basically a degraded clone of the first movie but in college instead of high school. The plot arc is exactly the same but worse in every way. Bateman is good enough, supporting cast is fine, but the whole exercise is threadbare at this point, and the whole thing feels a LOT less likable. Hard to recommend, especially when the first one is available.

Cop movie with a fabulous cast: Robert Duvall, Sean Penn, Maria Conchita Alonso, Trinidad Silva, Don Cheadle, Damon Wayans, the list goes on. Directed by Dennis Hopper, his first since Easy Rider! Cinematography by Haskell Wexler!

So, it has a pedigree... but is it any good? Yes - it's thoughtful, and philosophical about gangs and their purpose and place in urban communities. It has flaws... but mostly it's interesting. Veteran cop Duvall tries to train bullheaded rookie cop Penn, with many difficulties. Not bad.