The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is one of the first "heavy hitters" here on the blog. By that I mean the movie was promoted heavily to mainstream America, and was successful. IMDB indicates it made a combined $100 mil in theater and video rentals. I don't know how much it cost to make, but I am sure it was a lot less than that.
It also has Big Time Big Name actors - Nicholson! Cher! Sarandon! Pfeiffer! And it shows - the movie is very highly polished. The general plot is that the Devil (played by Nicholson) comes to a small town and seduces three women who have small magical powers. His general plan seems to be to have them all give birth and thereby bring about the end of the world.
Each woman has a distinct personality, and watching Nicholson adopt a new persona to seduce each one is fairly fun. Nicholson really chews up the scenery, and he has a few great speeches, especially the one on Women in the church near the end.
It's also interesting to see Veronica Cartwright (who I know best from Alien) as the churchy woman in town who is punished for seeing through the devil's facade and calling out the witches. In Alien she is the first to panic, the first to collapse into extreme fear in the face of the unknown. Here she is the opposite - the stalwart Old Testament believer who refuses to accept the presence of evil in her community.
It's based on the book by John Updike, although it changes the plot somewhat. The book is known as a somewhat pro-feminist novel, but the movie is even more so. The women fall once each for Old Scratch, but absolutely get the better of him in the end.
The movie has a couple set pieces worth mentioning: the first is the tennis match, where the women each finally discover their powers when the game gets intense and they cause a tennis ball to start levitating. I found it kind of boring, but then I learned something interesting - the tennis ball was completely animated by Industrial Light and Magic! You would never, ever know. I figured the levitation effects were just normal fx, camera tricks, etc. It's impressive that CGI could accomplish that in 1987.
The other is the great scene where the bible thumper, enemy to the witches, finally meets her end - by endlessly vomiting cherry pits until her husband puts her out of her misery with a fire poker (!!). It's a surprisingly graphic and nasty scene, and feels very raw.
Meanwhile, Night of the Creeps (1986) is a movie I liked in a goofy kind of way despite being unpolished in every way. The plot is kind of a mash-up of several different genres:
Aliens, who look like men in giant misshapen E.T. suits, open the film by allowing a horrible experiment to escape their ship and come crashing to earth. The experiment is basically a group of gross leeches/slugs/leechslugs who jump in your mouth and live in your brain. Then once you die, they animate your body until they can find a new host.
So far, so good. But the catch is that the movie plays at being a teen slasher movie too. So it's a sci-fi/horror/teen slasher/detective movie. The detective part kicks in when the police start trying to figure out how to stop the sluggos.
The title comes from the best scene in the whole movie: the fraternity sorority prom night. A cop busts through the main door of the sorority house and barricades it shut. The girls complain - who are you? What in hell do you think you're doing?
The cop says: "I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that your dates are here. The bad news is that they are dead."
With those immortal lines begins a really fun sequence where the cop detective, our two nerd heroes, and a house full of fully decked out sorority girls all help fight off the leechies. It's very well managed and I really enjoyed it.
Sadly, the movie appears to have bombed horribly. IMBD reports it cost $5 mil to make and only brought back a tenth of that. It was directed by Fred Dekker, who also made the '80s classic The Monster Squad, famous for the line "Wolfman's got NARDS!" He apparently also made Robocop 3. I didn't even know they made a third one ... not a good sign.
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