Firestarter (1984)

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. 

Ghostbusters II (1989), The Seventh Sign (1988)

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. 

River's Edge (1986), Blue Velvet (1986)

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.