Today my sister introduced me to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989). I'd seen the previous two (Vacation and European Vacation), but never this one somehow.
Like all the Vacation movies, your appreciation really depends on how much you like Chevy Chase. I happen to not like him EXCEPT for these movies, so I'm in luck. But your mileage may differ - I know plenty of people who can't stand his well-meaning-but-oh-so-dumb persona.
Here he yet again plays the head of the Griswald clan, and yet again the kids are played by two new kids - Juliette Lewis (!) and Johnny Galecki (!!). And the wife is the lovely Beverly D'Angelo who is pretty fun here.
In this iteration of the formula, the Griswold family and in-laws (including a very funny Randy Quaid) assemble while various crazy antics play out: Griswald puts up a too-big tree in his living room. Griswald gets stuck in the attic. Griswald puts up an insane Christmas light display. Griswald (sort of) kidnaps his boss. Griswald Griswald Griswald.
I especially like how he inadvertently tortures his yuppie neighbors (Julie Louis-Dreyfus and Nicholas Guest).
This movie has a few very funny moments - his speech when he receives his "bonus" ... a few great facial expressions and reaction shots ... and a few total dud moments too (the entire opening I find almost unbearable).
It's difficult to really describe or review a gag movie like this, so I won't try too hard. It made good money back in 1989, costing $27 mil to make and bringing back $71. The script is another gem by John Hughes, and the director is veteran TV director Jeremiah Chechik, who is probably best known for Benny & Joon.
Nice piece of '80s trivia: the truck he races in the opening scene is Kurt Russell's work truck from Overboard (1987 and a particular favorite of your blogger, being the first movie my family saw on our VHS player).
And sad to say, the tremendous Lindsay Buckingham song "Holiday Road" is not featured anywhere in this movie. A real loss.
The Natural (1984) is in the running for the Best Baseball Novel of all time; the book, by Bernard Malamud, is significantly different than the movie in various ways which I won't get into here - or else this blog will double in size as every Stephen King movie etc. will need a book review attached as well. The movie, of course, was a major hit in the early 80s - it cost around $28 million to make and brought back $47 million - almost doubling its cost. It cycled constantly on Fox when I was a kid, and I can't tell you how many times I saw it. The movie opens with a kid playing casual baseball with his dad, and being told he "has a gift." Then the father dies, and a giant storm knocks down a tree. The son takes the wood and fashions ... WONDERBOY. The most famous baseball bat in cinema! Probably the only named one, too. As a kid playing baseball in the '80s, WONDERBOY (yes, it always must be spelled in all caps) was mythic in the extreme. I knew several kids who earned their woodburning badge in Boy Scouts carving some similar name into their own store-bought Louisville Sluggers. Don Mattingly edition bat? Hell, no. Those bats were "Slaughterbat" or "Home Runn" or just a bunch of lightning bolts and crosses and stuff. Sadly, as The Natural makes clear, if you name a bat something special it better be made from a damned supertree downed by superlightning in a superstorm right after someone superdies. Anything less and you just got a bat from Dick's Sporting Goods with some charring on it. Roy Hobbs, our hero, is played by Robert Redford in one of his more/less iconic roles. The movie proper begins when he is challenged to strike out The Whammer - a major league star modeled clearly after Babe Ruth - at a country fair. The Whammer is portrayed by Joe Don Baker, who is perfect for the role. Witness to the whole event is Robert Duvall, who is actually pretty poorly cast as sportswriter Max Mercy. Hobbs makes his way to the big leagues ... but not before he is shot and almost killed by Barbara Hersey, in an incident sadly modeled on the real life shooting of baseball player Eddie Waitkus by obsessed fan Ruth Ann Steinhagen in 1949. Once in the big leagues, he experiences some doldrums before finally earning his true fate as a megahero in the final moments. The ending of the book is ... significantly different, and much better. The movie is long, too long, at 137 minutes. Yet it's not because it throws everything into the pot - on the contrary, many scenes just drag on and on. Poorly directed is our conclusion here, by Barry Levinson. Levinson is very well known for Diner, Young Sherlock Holmes, Tin Men, Good Morning Vietnam, Rain Man, Avalon, Bugsy, Toys (!), Sleepers, Wag the Dog, and a few others. Needless to say, he is capable of making good movies ... but this one somehow just doesn't mesh well. It has its moments - Hobbs hits the hide right off the ball; Hobbs knocks out the scoreboard; Hobbs' tryout where every ball seems to go 600 feet; etc. But all in all, there is FAR too much slow motion footage of strikeouts or homeruns or strikes or swings etc. You can really tell that Redford doesn't know the first thing about baseball and they are desperately trying to cover this up with clever cuts which come across as sad and stupid. Most intriguing is that the story is pretty closely based on the legends of King Arthur, and specifically Sir Percival. The broken bat = broken sword, Pop Fisher = Fisher King, the team is called The Knights, etc etc etc. (thanks to IMDB for the aforementioned examples). But the movie plays this a little too heavily and in-your-face, and the movie doesn't need it. Instead, the movie does best when it has Big Moments. Hobbs impressing Pop to get on the team. Hobbs and any of his various famous home runs. Etc. I wonder if maybe the 137 minutes are due to so much damned slow motion to accentuate all the Big Sports Moments. Great tidbit - during the moments when they show Hobbs making the headlines, the copy beneath the headlines isn't about baseball but, instead, bass fishing, a religious service, and a New York Giant fan (thanks again to IMBC trivia). But despite my complaints, it's still regarded as a pretty good movie, and I guess it is, in a way. I was ruined after reading the book, which treats things much differently and more realistically. The film embiggens everything, but at great cost. I recommend The Natural, and it's one of the better non-comedy baseball movies out there, but it's no Eight Men Out (next to be reviewed) or Bull Durham (also coming soon).
From the production office of Aaron Spelling, circa 1983, comes ... Mr. Mom (1983)! This is one of a few gender role reversal movies from the 80s - 3 Men and a Baby (1987), Baby Boom (1987), Tootsie (1982, and the best of them), Victor/Victoria (1982), and probably Yentl (1983). In this one a fresh-faced Michael Keaton - in his first top-billed role - is furloughed as a car plant exec and forced to stay home and take care of the kids while his rising corporate exec wife - Teri Garr, who I always like in everything she does - goes off to the office and succeeds massively. The rest of the plot kind of writes itself - he struggles in the grocery store, she struggles with sexist coworkers, he struggles with crazy kids, she struggles with the glass ceiling, etc etc etc. Not much to really report here, not worth rehashing in any detail. Keaton is good, naturally funny and easygoing and really lives in the role. You totally believe he's just learning to do this "kid" thing. The movie was written by John Hughes - his second screenplay after National Lampoon's Class Reunion - and so it's filled with a lot of the usual John Hughesian hallmarks - families in turbulence, a cynical look at corporate America, the inevitable conflicts between work and home, parents and kids, husband and wife, etc. And, as usual, he finds a boatload of humor in it and brings it out sharply. The supporting cast is incredible - Martin Mull, Jeffrey Tambor, Ann Jillian, Christopher Lloyd, Fred Koehler, Edie McClurg, every corner of the movie is inhabited by some familiar face you know and, sometimes, love. One downside is the music. Not having seen this in many years, when the opening credits came on to a late-70s sit-com flutey little tune I was sorely disappointed. The music is - no offense to the composer - strictly TV quality. The movie was a huge, huge hit - according to Wikipedia it brought home $64,000,000 domestic, which was enough for studio execs to wisely say "That John Hughes... let's sign him, BUT QUICK." Which they did, to a three movie deal, and those three movies turned out to be Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science - three films in the upper upper pantheon of '80s film. The director is Stan Dragoti, who made only six pictures in twenty years, or roughly one every three years. Besides Mr. Mom, his other well known movie is The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), which is a great farce starring Michael Keaton's arch-nemesis Tom Hanks. Bill Simmons of Grantland.com has a great thesis that certain actors end up competing for the same roles, with the inevitable result that only one can succeed. He claims Keaton and Hanks were two that competed for the same positions until ultimately Hanks turned on the turbo and "won." However, the two movies Dragoti made last are the ones I knew best after this one - She's Out of Control (1989) and Necessary Roughness (1991). We'll get to the former in the course of this blog. I was surprised that Mr. Mom only gets a ~6/10 on IMDB. When I was a kid it was a movie pretty much everyone knew and liked and nobody would have said it was less than average. I would have guessed 7/10 at least. Very strange. Either way, if you haven't seen it it's worth a watch for the John Hughes script alone. There are hints of Home Alone and Uncle Buck and other later movies strewn throughout, which is a real joy for an '80s/'90s movie fan. Check it out.
TerrorVision (1986) is a surprise pick for the blog. I was home after yet another 12-hour day at the office, dead to the world and waiting for the pizza man, when I decided to see what Comcast's Xfinity On-Demand had in the realm of '80s fare. There was a surprising amount, and some of it will be covered soon, including a few well-known options. But I had never heard of TerrorVision and wanted something light, cheesy, stupid, and easy to watch while scarfing down righteous pizza delight along with beer and gin. To start, the film has a FANTASTIC theme soon that somehow combines a New Wave Elvira-type singer with B-52s camp and a weird melody sensibility out of maybe Devo or Gary Numan. CLICK HERE. Crazy, right? Not to mention the insane psychedelic white noise that drifts throughout. The acting is, appropriately, absolutely horrible. They all act at the level of community theater rejects ("Sorry, Bill, you just didn't quite make the cut for Man #47 this year. Come back next June."), which leads me to believe that either (a) everyone was drunk on the set, (b) no one took it even 1% seriously and so they were all having a blast, (c) cocaine was left in giant piles on a table in the middle of the set, or (d) every single one of those. The movie's "plot," if you want to be nice and call it that, is simple. A doofus installing a satellite dish accidentally calls down murderous aliens from the outer spheres. The whole family is absolutely worshipful of television, which is how it should be (in the '80s or anytime). I love the absolutely insane and clearly ironic '80s culture touches - the neon magnificence of the daughter's faux-beehive, the yuppy blandness of the father and the Jazzercise housewife mother... etc. And then there are subtle David Lynch-esque touches here and there, like when the parents casually introduce themselves to the punk boyfriend of their daughter as swingers. Surreal, and somewhat disturbing, yet weirdly appropriate. Or when the grandfather says to his young grandson, "Remember what I told you about the 30 ROUND MAGAZINE, BOY!??!?!" Wow, you get chills. Semi-seriously. Not to mention the basic premise involves "training" the TV monster into a quasi-domestic "pet." The whole movie is, in fact, a really surreal and sarcastic take on the Valley Girl culture and general '80s yuppy mentality. It's like a completely twisted neon-magnified vision of Family Ties... perhaps Family Ties meets Toxic Avenger. Which is meant as praise. Somewhere along the lines, someone with a brain was attached to this script. And the trail is easy to follow, since the movie was written AND directed by the same guy - Ted Nicolaou. Hats off you, Ted, wherever you are, because this movie is FUN. I looked up Mr. Nicolaou's IMDB resume and discovered.... I hadn't heard of a single movie of his except one, 1994's Dragonworld, although I can't remember for the life of me how I know it. I just do. So this is a rare never-seen-it-before '80s horror film that is actually watchable and rewatchable due to strong satirical impulse combined with very bright sets and costumes (fantastic use of color everywhere) combined with hilarious and probably deliberate overacting combined with solid and gooey gore effects.
Gorky Park (1983) is an adaption of a book by one of my favorite fiction writers - Martin Cruz Smith. He has a series of books about a detective in Moscow named Arkady Renko who is clever, ironic, quiet, persistent, and honest. In Soviet (and later post-Soviet) Russia, this is a decidedly less-than-optimal combination of traits.
Here, Renko is played by William Hurt - an actor I generally like despite being rather humorless in most roles... and he is totally humorless here as well. Which is not really in the spirit of the character, but whatever, no movie is ever quite like a book. Still, Hurt is something of a liability here - his stoic/deadpan demeanor along with the incredibly bleak Soviet backdrop (everything is rusted, everything is crumbling, everything is broken) means that this movie is interesting but not entertaining. The casting also needs some serious help. Brian Dennehy as an American come over at the height of the cold war to help solve a murder... well, OK. He does pretty much scream "AMERICAN!!" just from his voice and persona. But Lee Marvin as the villain was maybe not the best choice. Menacing, yes. But a good match for this plot (involving smuggled sables!) ... no. But honestly, it's really Hurt's game to lose, and lose it he does. He affects a bizarre comes-and-goes British accent, and his persona is all over the map. But, sadly, never a single moment of humanity - just this bleak philosophical blank attitude toward the whole world. It's a real letdown, considering how good the book was. The true star of the movie is the Soviet atmosphere (it was filmed in Helsinki, I believe), which is incredibly dismal and snowy and run down. It "feels" like what I imagine Soviet Russia in the early '80s to look and sound like. That alone is worth something, and so the movie isn't a total wash. But it misses out in a big way. The movie was directed by Michael Apted, who you might know from Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, Thunderheart, Nell, The World is Not Enough, and recently the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. A real veteran. I ascribe whatever victories this movie accomplishes to him. IMDB reports it brought in just shy of $16 million... but no data on how much it cost to make. Safe to say it was less than that and it made money at the end of the day. Meanwhile, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) appears on the horizon. Famously a Madonna vehicle, also featuring Rosanna Arquette and Aiden Quinn and Laurie Metcalf, small roles for John Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito and my personal favorite Richard Edson in a brief cameo. Pretty decent cast for 1985, all in all. Like Xanadu last week, this movie has a really great soundtrack. Full on '80s explosion right from the beginning. Incidental music by the great Thomas Newman (American Beauty, many others). So, the plot: Roberta (Arquette) is a bored housewife who sees a series of ads in the paper that are to and from mysterious chick named Susan - including, you got it - "Desperately Seeking Susan." Curious and with nothing better to do, she heads into NYC and seeks out said Susan, just for kicks. Finding her, she gets in complicated amnesia-based hot water with the Mafia and goes on the run with Susan. Pretty typical '80s fare. The movie drips with style to spare - crazy wallpaper, zebra print luggage, leather hand wraps, the cool aforementioned jacket (has a giant glitzy Masonic pyramid on the back, designed by Santo Loquasto), wild neon arm bangles, crazy striped muscle shirts, you name it. The great soundtrack just emphasizes the thorough 80s-ness. It takes me back. This movie is really about Arquette's character, she is the lead in every way, but after Madonna's popularity apexed around the time of this film's release Arquette was actually nominated for the *supporting* BAFTA award. Crazy! Pauline Kael famously called Madonna an "indolent, trampy goddess," which I was delighted to see repeated on Wikipedia for the world to read. That is pretty accurate, actually - props to Kael. And her fellow reviewer Vincent Canby named it one of the 10 Best of the year. Does it deserve it? Hard to say. This movie is really, at the heart of things, one long music video ode to popular culture with the thinnest veneer of plot brushed over it. But it's a fun music video, and moves quickly and gives you a pretty decent feel for mid-80s New York. Aiden Quinn (80s character name of "Dez") is good, the leads are acceptable, the cameos are fun, and it moves pretty quickly. So, I guess I would recommend it. Check it out, it's a mid-80s time capsule. Meanwhile, let's end with the original demo version of Madonna's "Into the Groove," only found in this movie:
Xanadu (1980) is really a holdover from the '70s, but since it was released in our beloved ninth decade of the twentieth century, we must discuss it. It's pretty well known at this point as a campy cult classic of somewhat insane neon-drunk proportions. The director is Robert Greenwald, a TV/documentary legend who didn't make many feature films. One odd one he did was 1997's Breaking Up, a direct-to-video movie featuring Russell Crowe and Selma Hayak (!!). The point being that Greenwald perhaps doesn't have a big screen sensibility so much as a TV sensibility. One nice thing you can say about Xanadu - it is damned colorful. Bold yellows, greens, blues, reds, purples, pinks - they're everywhere. One not-nice thing you can say about Xanadu - the dialog is freaking horrendous. When our main character Sonny Malone (no, really) encounters a man sitting on a rock at the beach playing a clarinet (no, really), the dialog contains such pithy gems like "Say mister, what are you doing up there???" and then the mystery man's eventual statement that "They sure don't make rocks like they used to!!" HUH!?!??!?! HUHHHH?!?!?!? Not to mention that the old clarinet man is GENE KELLY. How did this happen? High octane this film is not. The movie is full of inexplicable and usually accidental moments, most of them unintentionally funny. I love the incredible fake scream Sonny gives when he crashes a borrowed moped off a pier, followed by a glowing orange woman zooming off into the sky. No, really. The plot is brain-dead fluff about the nine Olympic Muses (as in Ancient Greece) coming to vibrant neon roller-skating life from a bizarre mural in sunny California. The one that is Olivia Newton-John serves as Sonny's muse (he's an artist). Another dialog gem: "You. I ran into you earlier today. I never set eyes on you before today. Now I've seen you three times today. I don't believe it." Brilliant, Sonny. He doesn't need a muse, he needs an education. At age ~25, he must be the oldest kid in third grade. The highlight of the movie, of course, is the music. The soundtrack sold very well, and I actually own it on vinyl (got it free, it's a long story). It's divided up into songs by Olivia Newton-John (including the hit title track) and songs by ELO. It was a worldwide smash, number one in most countries and number four on the Billboard 200 chart.
Interesting factoid: this is actually a remake of a 1947 movie called Down to Earth with Rita Hayworth and Larry Parks. Despite the poor dialog and meh acting, the movie made a very small profit - according to Wikipedia, it cost $20 mil to make and brought home $22 mil - depending on advertising costs, it probably just about broke even. Worth seeing? Not really. I would YouTube the songs from the soundtrack, especially the big hits "Xanadu" (provided above) and "Magic," and you'll get a pretty good feel for the tone without having to sit through the rest of the mess.
A day late for Halloween (and a dollar short), I humbly present two belated offerings before moving temporarily away from the '80s horror scene: Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and Legend.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is famous for both totally shirking the Michael Myers storyline and going off in a totally different direction with all new characters, and also for not being nearly as bad as virtually every Michael Myers sequel that followed it.
No more Laurie Strode, no more Doctor Loomis, no more Michael in his Shatner mask. Hello pieces of stonehenge used by a half-baked Irish madman to turn half-baked children's Halloween masks into horrific explosions of bugs and snakes as a sacrifice to half-baked druidic gods. Wait, I thought the Irish hated snakes?!
The plot is quite stupid. Our main character is one of the worst doctors in movie history, as he seems to be the ONLY doctor on duty on the night shift in his small hospital, yet he has absolutely no problem leaving to have a tryst with a woman, and then to essentially become an investigator into this mask mumbo jumbo.
Nevertheless, stupid beyond belief does not preclude fun. And this movie is pretty fun. It's crazy watching lasers shoot out of the TV - the masks are activated by a specific TV commercial, seen here:
As many, many reviews have noted, the plot makes no sense because of time zones. Since the commercials come on during a predetermined horror film festival on TV, the minute the East Coast put two and two together, the Midwest and West Coast are saved. Poor planning!
Also, why do the masks only come in three varieties? There is Lumpy Pumpkin, Wizard of Oz Witch, and So-So Skull. I wouldn't have been caught dead in any of them as a kid, but the kids in this movie eat them up like so much Halloween candy. No one can get enough, as if it was a fad.
Plot aside, this was an attempt by John Carpenter to mix things up. He wanted, apparently, to release a Halloween movie every year with a different unrelated story. A noble idea, executed poorly here by writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace, but a noble idea nonetheless.
Despite their bafflement, audiences came to see Halloween III in droves - on a budget of $2.5 mil, it brought home $14 mil. Impressive!
The other '80s fare tonight is the reverse: made for $24 mil, but only brought in $14.4 mil - losing about the same as Halloween III made. It's also going to be a slightly different sort of review... Ridley Scott's strange fairy tale Legend (1985) came out after his masterpieces were done: The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner. What a trifecta!! After that, he was hit or miss: Legend, Someone to Watch Over Me, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1492, White Squall, G. I. Jane, and then followed by the long slow slide into action movies starting with Gladiator.
Legend is a weird, weird movie. I'm not sure what it wants to be. I'm not sure IT knows what it wants to be. It is extremely serious, without a single intentional joke in the whole movie. It acts like it wants to be a lost Grimm tale, deadly serious and full of ominous foreboding and Big Deep Messages About Life. But ... it also comes across as silly and thin as tissue paper and is not very well acted (sorry, young Tom Cruise and young Mia Sara). Tom Cruise seems baffled the entire time and has a particularly constipated look on his face. Poor Mia Sara, who is so good in Ferris Bueller's Day Off the year after this, has nothing to do here but look vaguely distressed.
The only really compelling reason to watch this is Tim Curry in heavy makeup as a really crazy Satan. At least, I think he's Satan. He seems diametrically opposed to all good things, and if the shoe fits... Curry really hams it up and is the only cast member who seems to realize what the hell is going on.
Legend is a really big misstep for Ridley Scott. After three really unusual movies in a row, all critically acclaimed and praised heaven to heaven, I'm sure the studios assumed anything he touched - no matter how weird - would come out OK. Sadly, he didn't have the Golden Touch after all. In fact, many/most of the film he made after Legend were pretty quickly forgotten and don't have much of anything to say.
One of my younger sister's best friends in high school was obsessed with Legend, so I've seen it a number of times. But the last time I saw it I was pumped to the gills and beyond on bloody marys and taco bell. And I've got to say... it was the best I've ever seen it!!
It's a movie ripe for a Rifftrax/MST3K treatment. Myself and three friends (and two young kids) just sat and made fun of the stink cheese that is Legend... and it was fun! So I recommend viewing this one in company and under aid of inebriation.
Again, folks, sorry for the long absence between posts. My job and living situation has settled down slightly, and I should be back in the saddle as soon as the Comcast people fix my broken DVR. Meanwhile, I still have access to the On Demand movies, and while browsing I found ...
1985's cult classic Fright Night! The plot is a really traditional/overused one, that you've probably seen (too?) many times in horror films - innocent kid sees evil things happening next door, nobody believes him until it's too late, it's up to kid (and sometimes mentor or friends) to banish the evil forever. Think Salem's Lot, Phantasm, The People Under the Stairs, etc etc. Here, the cast is really note perfect for a cheesy pop-horror flick. Chris Sarandon is magnificent as the evil vampire next door. Amanda Bearse is note-perfect as the "girl next door" girlfriend of our main character Charley, who is more or less convincingly played by William Ragsdale (best known for a slew of TV roles, including Herman from the early '90s Fox sitcom Herman's Head). His friend Evil Ed we've seen before on this blog, as Hoax (the nerdy kid) in 976-EVIL. And the fantastic Roddy McDowell is Peter Vincent, a mash-up of Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. The movie goes by pretty quickly and it's a neat 100 minutes. There are a number of nice little touches throughout, like how the vampire is munching on apples - apparently Chris Sarandon suggested to the director Tom Holland that "there was a little bit of fruit bat in him" ... weird, but OK. It adds atmosphere and is a nice quirky touch. Or Charley's awesome Mustang, which the vampire spitefully destroys - that's when you know he's REALLY evil. Or the way the vampire rises from his coffin stiff as a board, just like Nosferatu. Or the good "Vampire Face" makeup. Or the great '80s club scene where the vampire just TRASHES two innocent bouncers. Or the fantastic vampire death scene in the basement. That's a pretty good list, and I could keep going easily. The movie is one of those "sum of the parts is more than the whole" gigs where there are a fantastic number of little things that add up. It was a the highest grossing horror film in 1985! Who knew? It cost $9 million to make, and brought back just shy of $25 million in the US alone, not counting video or DVD or foreign gross. Pretty decent. It's a LOT of fun, and in this coming Halloween season is worth putting on with a bowl of popcorn and a group of friends.
No, everyone, I'm not dead! Though some have wondered.
I'm moving, and my job is soaking up most of my time, which has crimped this blog output something nasty.
Tonight's offering is Firestarter (1984), which I remember mostly for Drew Barrymore. It turns out, watching it all these years later, that is mostly features adults - her mom is Heather Locklear, her dad is (very good) character actor David Keith, and the villains are Martin Sheen and especially George C. Scott, who is evil as hell in his role. Sheen is surprisingly down to earth. I like him more and more in these '80s movies. Here he is essentially playing a less creepy version of Candidate Stillson from The Dead Zone (1983). He's got the same frozen eyes and smile even as he says lines like "You and me, we're going to be pals."
The plot is based on the Stephen King book of the same name - a man and woman participate in some medical studies for money, and gain psychic powers. Then they have a daughter (Barrymore) in whom the powers are magnified several times. The mom can read thoughts and the dad can force people to do his will (an idea later seen in a couple X-Files episodes), but the daughter... well, the title kind of gives it away.
The daughter can start fires, and then some. She blows things sky high by the end of the movie - not mere fires, but CONFLAGRATIONS!! I always wanted to use that word in the real world.
So the Psy Ops department of the government wants to basically dissect and "dispose" of the young family because they are very dangerous with their new powers... but having to go through the dad and daughter turns out to be trickier than anticipated.
This movie was directed by Mark Lester, who went on quite a streak in the '80s. He directed Class of 1984 (1982), this movie, Commando (1985), and the great John Candy movie Armed and Dangerous (1986). Pretty solid run there.
Cute little Drew Barrymore, of course, came RIGHT form E.T. (1982) to this movie. If E.T. made her a star, this movie cemented it. Although, oddly, the movie only broke even - according to IMDB it cost $15 mil to make, and made back $15.1 mil. However, when I was a kid, this movie was on TV always. Every weekend, I feel like it was coming on.
The secret, unbilled star of the movie is North Carolina, which has never looked greener or more lush. Fantastic cinematography by Giuseppe Ruzzolini, whose work I perused on IMDB but I only recognized Teorema (1968). The whole movie is a Dino De Laurentiis production (see Blue Velvet) which means great music, great visual, somewhat bizarre and risky story.
The movie has issues - it goes on a little too long, and the tension is very uneven, but the dad is convincing and Barrymore is more than acceptable and even occasionally fun as the pyro-minded child who sets the world ablaze. Worth seeing.
I will eventually get to Ghostbusters (the 1984 original), but it really deserves its own post. Ghostbusters II (1989), sadly, does not. I expected to like this a lot more than I did. I saw it in the theaters as a nine-year-old, and had good memories of that experience. I remember being excited, thrilled, I laughed, and I almost immediately bought the horrible, horrible botch job of a game that came out for the original Nintendo. How disappointing, then, to see this pale imitation. While researching the movie for the blog, I read a quote from a dissatisfied Bill Murray that said "The movie was a lot of slime, but not much of us." How true, Bill. The movie is a lot of effects - some of them fantastic, others terrible - and very little ghost busting. The four ghostbusters themselves, in fact, pretty much phone in their rare appearances. The movie is much more interested with showcasing New York, paying attention to a surprisingly calm Sigourney Weaver (considering her infant is wildly imperiled for virtually the entire run of the movie, she is pretty laid back), and ogling the absolutely stupid and unscary new villain, Vigo Something or Other. He was so boring, voice by Max Von Sydow notwithstanding. A less scary villain would be hard to find. And the plot was nonsensical. Vigo was flooding New York with psychic goo that reacted to hatred, and in so doing gained power to once more take physical form as some kind of real-life Dracula? Huh?? HUH???? Who in hell wrote that? Oh. Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis wrote it. Sigh. This movie feels mostly like a serious of discarded ideas from the first one, swept together into a jigsaw puzzle of mostly unfunny jokes and set pieces. There are a few fantastic ones: The rich woman whose mink coat comes back to life and runs down the street; the Titanic docking and ghosts streaming out, with a gaping Cheech Marin saying "well, better late than never"; the judge facing the two brothers he sentenced to death. But many duds. The "climax" of the movie is toothless and boring, especially when compared against the first movie with the ingenious Stay Puft Marshmallow Man ploughing down Fifth Avenue. All in all, maybe a C-. It's not a BAD movie, but it ain't great either. Strictly for fans and little kids. Incidentally, there are a LOT of nods to the then-popular cartoon, which may account for why it was even green-lighted in the first place. You can easily imagine a phone call coming through, "Ackroyd! Ramis! Take all the cutting room floor garbage from the first movie and put something together, quick, this cartoon is really taking off!!!" Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectral spectrum, is the dreck that is The Seventh Sign (1988). It's awful. It features Demi Moore as a pregnant woman who discovers her child's birth will signal the apocalypse, and a listless underused Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss) as her husband. It's awful. Have I said that already?
The movie doesn't even deserve a lengthy run-down of the ways it sucks. Put briefly, it's too slow, it uses slow motion too much to make things "serious," the plot - simple as it is - is poorly explained. The actors don't seem to care. The film is shot poorly. It's too long. It's bland. More interesting are tangential factoids. For one, the director Carl Schultz is mostly known for directing the Young Indiana Jones series. For another, the thing I remember most about this movie is the cover to the VHS edition (a clock face with a beam of light coming from the number seven, as seen in the poster above) ... because for some reason EVERY video store in my town decided to prominently display this when I was about nine. It was total exposure. I actually saw the movie later, as a young teen, on TV ... and was so sorely disappointed, even then. I am actually pretty unimpressed by every "devil child" movie, except three. The Exorcist impressed me, Rosemary's Baby impressed me, and Let The Right One In impressed me. The rest are all dreck. Including this sad crap that gets shoved out onto the cable channels every so often, usually when yet another child-gets-possessed movie is released in theaters. It's too bad.
That's right everyone: it's Dennis Hopper Night here at the '80s movie blog! Specifically my favorite two films of his, which happen to be from the same year, 1986. A helluva year. But first, let me apologize for the delays between posts. I recently took a temporary job that has taken up my days and left me exhausted at nights. Really put a crimp on the blog. The first move I selected is one I saw in the theaters in my late 20s during an '80s revival festival and it really made a huge impact. Shook me, even. River's Edge is based on a true story of a group of teenagers in an impoverished corner of the Pacific Northwest. One of the teens, a real sociopath, kills a girl who is also a member of the group. The death has no impact on him at all, and he proceeds to tell the rest of his friends. Most of them are completely disaffected and have no discernable reaction at all. Only two - the ones played by Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye - are bothered by it to the point of telling people, doing something, doing anything. But the movie is really stolen by two other characters: first, Dennis Hopper, as Feck the town recluse, weed supplier, outcast, and professional nobody. Is there a better name for a town outcast than Feck??? He is simultaneously deeply bothered and self-impressed by a supposed murder he committed years ago, where he supposedly shot his girlfriend, but the facts are foggy and you're never quite sure his bragging is serious. He keeps a blowup doll around that purportedly resembles the girl he (maybe) killed, and talks to her all the time. He seems generally pathetic and agitated, but harmless. The scenes where he interacts with the teen killer, who is totally without conscience, are amazing to watch. But the movie really belongs to the leader of the group of friends, Layne, played by the incredible Crispin Glover. Most people know him as George McFly in Back to the Future (Michael J. Fox's dad), and he's been somewhat notorious in a number of other eccentric roles... but here he is completely electric. Layne is a speed freak who drives a souped-up dune buggy and talks in a wild spaced-out way that is spellbinding. Every vowel seems to go on for ages. He shifts moods like a chameleon, and is obsessed with doing right by his friends - even if it means covering up the murder of one of their group without a second thought. Layne in some ways is the center of the movie, as his actions drive most of the plot until Keanu can't live with the guilt anymore... and even then, you are holding your breath until Keanu has a showdown with Layne and finally tells it like it is. This movie is technically a cult classic, not having garnered much attention in the theaters when it was new, but then came on strong via video and word of mouth. I had heard about it before I ever went to see it at the midnight revival. In my opinion, it's a really underrated masterpiece. It's the most disturbing "teen" movie I've ever seen, but it's disturbing because it feels so real. I feel like I grew up with kids exactly like Layne, and knew adults like Feck who would ply kids with drugs for some momentary company. The whole movie feels like it could be any poor small town in American. Highly recommended. David Lynch's Blue Velvet, meanwhile, has enough notoriety to not need a lengthy introduction. I should say that I have a huge bias towards Blue Velvet - it's one of my five favorite movies (!). Let's start, instead, with the incredible opening theme, by Angelo Badalamenti:
Immortal. The horns, the strings, the weird lilting theme. It really sets a strange tone - a la the the later theme of Twin Peaks - for a movie named for a famous song. Although the song is in there, and after seeing how it's used you'll never think of it the same way again.
Bobby Vinton wouldn't be smiling like that if he watched Dennis Hopper's reaction to his song... OK, so the plot of Blue Velvet, in a nutshell. We open in Lumberton, North Carolina, which the famous intro shows us is All-America USA on the outside, and creeping black insects just under the surface. We see a man have a stroke, and the movie then follows his son Jeffrey who comes home to tend to the business and the family while the dad recovers. But Jeffrey quickly becomes bored, as any college age kid stuck in a small town might. One day he walks through a field behind some apartment buildings, and starts mindlessly chucking rocks across the grass. He reached down for another rock... and finds a severed human ear. And that's when this movie really takes off. Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLaughlin) and Sandy, the daughter of the local detective (wonderfully played by Laura Dern) decide to investigate this ear by themselves and get enmeshed in a dark, dark world - the seedy underbelly hinted at in the opening sequence. That's how we get to Dennis Hopper, here in his most iconic role as Frank Booth, a man of childlike desires and so emotionally stunted he can only express himself through song lyrics (the words of others) or through violence. He is perplexing, and entrancing, and he is frightening as hell. He is an alternate world father figure for Jeffrey (so violent and potent when Jeffrey's own father lies helpless in the hospital) whose interactions with the world are infantile and savage. You can't take your eyes off of him for a second. The plot unfolds, like all Lynch movies, with a sort of dream logic that makes emotional sense sometimes more than literal sense. Although, along with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet is fairly tightly scripted and doesn't sprawl out into strange terrain of dreams and alternate realities. There are also a lot of strange references to the Wizard of Oz - a main character is named Dorothy, a prominent villain wears a bright yellow suit and fairly closely resembles the Cowardly Lion. There is a great shot from the nose of Frank Booth's '68 Charger that shows the yellow lines in the middle of a road at 100 mph ... a sort of yellow brick road. I really can't say enough good things about this movie... but I DO note that it is not for the faint of heart. Not even a little. This is a very disturbing movie across the board, and will induce nightmares even in the well-prepared. There are many, many famous scenes I want to describe here but won't, both to avoid spoilers and to avoid losing sensitive readers. That said, highly recommended.
Now, I don't know if it's because I'm from a poorer, more rural part of Maryland, or if I have a kernel of kitsch deep in my cursed heart, but I love John Waters. Everything he does resonates with me on some level. That doesn't mean he's my all-time favorite or anything, but if he invited me to lunch I wouldn't say no. And I would probably dress nicely. With the words "Hey girls, whatchoo doin' over there? / Can't you see? I'm sprayin' my hair!" the 1988 kitsch masterpiece Hairspray opens with a bang. A period piece taking place in the '60s, the film revolves around the same dance show phenomena already discussed in the dud The In Crowd, the third movie ever reviewed on the blog. Except this film works in every. single. way. Divine (in his final appearance) appears as Edna, Baltimore mother in 1962 presiding over her dance-obsessed daughter Tracy Turnblad (played famously by the charismatic Ricki Lake, who can MOVE, let me tell you). Tracy and her best friend Penny Pingleton appear on the local dance show, the Buddy Deane Show, and tend to upstage the elitist whitebread dance aristocrats who dominate it. But 1962 was a heady year for civil rights, and Baltimore a troubled city. The movie deals, very frankly and openly, with interracial relations on several levels (interpersonal, local, national). Since this is John Waters here and not some boring documentarian, the movie deals with these issues with style and flavor to spare and never comes across as trying to lecture the viewer or anything. Most of this area of the plot involves a public protest because the aforementioned dance show only has one "Negro Day" per month. The unrest grows and grows into a serious protest, but manages to stay light hearted even as it shows really pissed off people. It's kind of the opposite of Do The Right Thing that way. The attention paid to dances of the early '60s is also a lot of fun. It's a world away from the "dancing" of today, that's for sure. It's wild, yet tightly choreographed, and seems a little bit improvisatory, but also has definite rules that I don't quite get. Luckily it's fun to watch, even for someone like me who doesn't dance or really even understand what makes a dancer good or bad. Maybe my favorite parts of the movie are the school sequences - especially when the teacher insists they say the pledge and the students do dance moves behind her back. Hahaha! That kind of thing definitely happened. And a lot of the scenarios are really funny, like when Ricki Lake gets put in the Special Education class for having feathered hair. There is MUCH I want to write here but would really spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't encountered this before. Like the ... see, even the most casual reference would ruin big surprises. So instead I'll mention that this movie has a GREAT soundtrack - much better than the similar The In Crowd despite the similar topics. John Waters doesn't just have a great eye for color and scene but also a great ear for music and dialog. Obviously this movie has a wide appeal, since it was remade into both a broadway show (2002) and ANOTHER movie (2007!). Additionally, it made #444 out of 500 best movies ever according to Empire magazine. Which is kind of wild and yet not out of the realm of possibility, I suppose. It "only" made $8 mil in the theaters when it was released, which was still four times the budget, but had a huge take on home video and became a pretty rapid cult classic. The number of people I have met who know this movie and can quote it always surprises me. It's good! I lament that the other candy-colored Waters classic from this era, Crybaby, was 1990 and not 1989. No fair!
Sorry for the delay in posts - it was a longggg week at work and I got home every day just zonked out of my mind. You wouldn't want to read what those posts would look like. It would be something demented and stream of consciousness like: "Slaughter High is is is a school of high slaughters hahaha school of school guy apple bomb WHERE THE STUDENT BODY IS GOING TO PIECES tagline taglineeeeeeeeeeeeee," the final burst of Es being where my face hit the keyboard and continued the word for me. Like I said, no good at all. So I waited and now I'm bringing the good stuff. Two horror films from the mid '80s, one atrocious and one firmly in the so-good-it's-bad category. Dolls (1987) is the crap here. Despite the fancy MGM dvd cover, and the Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) pedigree, it's no good to anybody. The plot is so tired: spooky house, two sets of strangers get trapped there on a stormy night, house has evil secret, one by one the strangers start dying until two of them team up, evil secret is revealed, our heroes escape. Yawn, right? I remember seeing this same plot in the Agatha Christie-derived And Then There Were None ... back in 1945! And how much do you want to bet that audience yawned and complained it was a rip-off of some movie from the 1910s? Here, the "twist" is that the house is owned by an elderly couple who makes dolls. Evil, evil, living dolls. SPOILER ALERT: The dolls are former visitors who have been transformed, via horrible special effects, into grotesque doll versions of themselves. It's similar to the 1979 horror travesty (sadly featuring Chuck Connors) Tourist Trap. Don't watch that. Don't watch this either. I had high hopes because it was by director Stuart Gordon, who directed the camp/kitsch masterpiece Re-Animator, an adaption of H. P. Lovecraft's classic short story Herbert West, Reanimator. I will delightedly cover that movie pretty soon - it's fun and crazy. But this one doesn't have that same campy charm. No, this movie has NO charm. The main characters are a little girl and a weird man-boy who is supposedly a child at heart, but looks a lot like an adult Sean Astin. They bond because they see the joy and life in the dolls; all the other houseguests are horrified or indifferent and thus slaughtered ruthlessly by little murderous cretinous dolls. If any of you readers are getting deja vu, it's probably because the '80s were chock full of "little evil creatures" movies, like Ghoulies, Gremlins, and, closest to this one, Puppet Master. Puppet Master actually came out two years later, but does everything right that this movie does wrong. Most importantly: the puppets/dolls. Here, they are all lightly scary, but instantly forgettable. In Puppet Master there is a small cadre of evil puppets you grow to know and almost kind of like. Plus, that famous Puppet Master theme music:
Creepiest carnival-style music you've ever heard. Dolls has nothing to compete with that nightmare fuel. So Dolls is a big loss, but what about Slaughter High (1986)? The same personality-less high-concept low-execution dreck? No! It's ... "good"! Well, it's terrible, but it descends so far down the terrible scale that it's great. Here is the general plot. There is a high school way out in the country. Is it a boarding school? A private school? Just the smallest public high school in the United States? Unknown, it's never explained. All we know is that is WAY WAY out in the country (takes like a day to drive to, later in the movie) and it only has about 20 students. One of these students is Marty, who is the quintessential eager nerd. He is happy to get along with everyone, if he can. But alas, the remainder of the student body seems to be jocks and jockettes who are in their early 30s (they must have failed A LOT) whose sole delight is crafting elaborate pranks to torture Marty. The entire (lengthy) first sequence of the movie is a very complex set up where Marty is promised sex with the most popular girl if he'll undress and meet her in the locker room. You might think you know where this is headed, but you'd be wrong. It's actually much, much worse. They not only embarrass poor Marty, then physically torture him as if he was a POW. They electrocute him, prod him with sharp things, waterboard him, it's unbelievable. And when the gym coach breaks it up, his cavalier attitude is stunning. "Eh, you kids, what did I tell you, now you're really, eh, meh, in trouble, blah." Yet Marty is still fairly chipper after this, incredibly. At least until the worst prank of all time goes awry right in his face:
Two more heavy hitters tonight. Two of the most popular, most enduring pop culture movies of the whole decade - Robocop (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). Robocop I wasn't expecting to like as much as I did. I first saw it when I was eight on a rental VHS, and like most eight year old boys I worshipped the fascistic ultraviolence where elite killing skills are valued far above such petty things like "law" and "order." That was a big, big deal in the '80s - action movie heroes tended to be fascist, hyperviolent killed who follow their own inner law and never the law of the rest of society. Think of all the movies like this:
Escape from New York
First Blood
First Blood, Part II
Rambo III
Commando
The Terminator
Predator
Cobra
Missing in Action
The Delta Force
etc etc etc
When I say "fascist," I mean it literally. According to Wikipedia, Fascism "views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation." Totally right. In Robocop, political violence is used to reunify a broken Detroit whose police are so beleaguered that they are considering going on strike (!). In fact one of the funny-yet-sad aspects of Robocop is how accurately it predicted modern Detroit. In 2043, Detroit is a run-down crime-ridden bankrupted hell hole where citizens (curiously white, even in the poorest neighborhoods... unsure why this is) are under siege by well armed criminals. Now it's 2013 and real-life Detroit isn't quite a hell hole, but it is bankrupt, the cops are out of money, the citizens face very high crime rates, and whole huge swaths of the city decaying to empty lots. Eerie how close Robocop got it. Future, thy name is Detroit. It's directed by Paul Verhoeven, and it shows. I've already reviewed his Flesh + Blood, and it feels like a warm up to Robocop. This movie embodies every single one of his themes in their simplest most primal abstraction. Identity reduction, seen also in Total Recall and Basic Instinct? Check. Explicit link between sex and violence, as in Basic Instinct and Starship Troops? Check. Strange pseudo-feminist ideas, a la Basic Instinct and Showgirls? Check. Main character who breaks the rules to get ultimate vengeance? Check. The movie looks and sounds amazing. It really holds up much better than I thought it might. The soundtrack, by Basil Poledouris, cleverly deals with the man-vs-machine theme by mixing orchestras with robotic synthesizers. Nice touch, and memorable. Meanwhile the cinematographer is longtime Verhoeven partner Jost Vacano. The film is full of interesting wide open spaces and big flat colors. Also interesting are all the ideas that spew forth about "What makes a man?" The visual look of the film (especially the headquarters) is like a daytime Blade Runner, and this motif follows suit. Is Robocop a man or a machine? He has memories, makes new experiences, but in the famous scene late in the film, he's just a face strapped to a metal frame. In fact, the whole movie is kind of the inverse of Blade Runner. In that movie, a human cop hunts down android criminals who threaten our idea of humanity. In Robocop, an android cop hunts down human criminals who threaten our idea of robotics with their de-individualized lawbots. All in all, a surprisingly good movie. But enough with all the highbrow theory. The bottom line is that Robocop is just a fun action classic. The cool scanline view from Robocop's POV; seeing Kurtwood Smith as the gun-running ultravillain; all the great fake commercials, especially the nuclear variant of Battleship; the great face-and-wires humanized Robocop from late in the movie; the great gun flip he takes from the fictional "T.J. Lazer" show; seeing Ronny Cox as the sleaziest corporate raider of possibly any '80s movie; so many great moments!! Very much worth watching. Made about $50 mil or thereabouts on a budget of $13 mil - not bad! A remake/reboot/whatever is due out next year (2014), but I can't report more than that. The same can't be said for When Harry Met Sally..., at least not the surprising part. It's entertaining through and through, and has been since its release. This review was sponsored by my friend Elena, the first person to post on this blog! When Harry Met Sally... (yes, the ellipsis is part of the title) ... (and that one is my own) there is so much joy in it! The hilarious and often touching interviews with the elderly couples. The endlessly quotable dialog. The realistic ups and downs. The cooperatively neurotic personality of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan). The famous scenes ("I'll have what she's having," "A WAGON wheel??," "When you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible," and so many more). I might go so far as to argue that even including The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, A Few Good Men, The Sure Thing, and This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally is the best movie Rob Reiner ever directed. Debatable, certainly. But I believe it. First: It may be the single most likeable role Billy Crystal ever had. I've seen most of his movies, and I'll be honest here - he's the same fast-talking neurotic character in every damned role. He's basically the Jewish version of Robin Williams - Mode 1 is fast-talking witty wise-ass, Mode 2 is quiet and depressed and morose. Billy Crystal is great in small doses - maybe most famously as Max in The Princess Bride. But here, since we have the cute and equally crazy Meg Ryan to compare him against, he is much more relatable. Second: Meg Ryan! She's at the peak of her stardom and her powers here. She's cute, a little quirky (her famous style of ordering food... her short temper ... "Sheldon") and the perfect foil for Harry. You care about both of them, yin to yang. When they experience rough times, you understand and hope they find a way to make it through. When they experience good times, you are right there with them. It's a real coup by Reiner to involve us so much in their lives. Third, the movie is also like many a Woody Allen film, a loving depiction of New York City. The restaurants; the apartments; the streets; the shops; the sounds; the crowds; it's like its own character. Finally, there is the great soundtrack. All classic jazz standards: It Had to Be You, But Not for Me, Autumn in New York, Where or When, and of course Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. Perfect! It's hand-in-glove with the rest of the movie. Just pitch perfect. All performed by Harry Connick Jr. and his trio (!).
I hardly even know what else to say about the movie. The bit parts are all expertly played. The great jokes. The wonderful conclusion at New Year's. The final "interview." A real gem.
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