True Confessions (1981)

True Confessions (1981) is proof that Robert DeNiro was capable of phoning it in even during the height of his prime - maybe a foreshadowing of his current half-retirement. Currently, it seems like whatever film he's in, he wandered onto the set and maybe someone waved a script in his direction, once. And, sadly, this movie is no pinnacle for Robert Duvall, either. 

The plot is pretty banal - a group of priests are in league with the mob to get church projects developed for cheap, while the mob gets respectability and high culture ins, etc etc. Meanwhile up and coming priest Desmond (De Niro) has a brother Tom (Duvall) who is a hard-nosed homicide cop who is investigating the brutal murder of a young prostitute. 

But even though the movie looks great, and is shot with workmanlike style, it's boring. It's dry as mummy dust. It's like reading an 11-page newspaper article about construction corruption, when you don't care. De Niro is nothing special (!!!) and Duvall isn't any more interesting. Both actors seemed contractually obligated to be here. Definitely not a labor of love. 

It's actually difficult to watch this movie, it's so dry and boring. The plot has too few characters, the emotional breadth is too narrow, the acting feels so forced, the plot is uninteresting... I have no idea how this got made. 

It was directed by a man with the incredible name of Ulu Grosbard, who made two early movies with Dustin Hoffman, and also made Falling in Love with DeNiro, and later The Deep End of the Ocean with Michelle Pfeiffer. So he's no stranger to good actors; but boy does he waste them here.

My sister is going to kill me for saying so, but the script is flat. And was written by the otherwise amazing Joan Didion (along with her husband, based on his novel). But it's just TOO real - real in the mundane sense, where you honestly don't care. 

William F. Buckley panned this movie, rightly, and said that DeNiro is woefully miscast. This is true. He isn't convincing in this role, at all. Coming a year after Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, I can only assume this was a "palate cleansing" project, meant to clean away the remnants of such a vibrant, violent character. 

Yet critics liked it. It brought in $12mil, but I have no figures for how much it cost. Recommended only for DeNiro or Duvall completionists. It's the perfect counterpart to The Godfather Part II, where each of those actors turns in a masterwork. Here? Forgettable, and, more unpardonable, boringly so. 

Ghoulies (1985)

Ghoulies (1985) is cheap, cheap trash. Sub-community theater-level garbage. It makes Troll look like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It makes Puppetmaster look like Nosferatu. It has only one thing going for it - the ghoulies themselves, who are creative and have senses of humor and are generally gross in a fun way. 

Wait! What's this, you say? A year before this was another movie where humorous little green monsters are summoned and wreak terrible havoc? What's it called?

Oh yeah, Gremlins. Gremlins crushes this movie in every way. Although, if I'm being entirely fair to this movie, I read on Wikipedia that this movie was actually intended to come out in 1983 or so, meaning it is roughly contemporary with Gremlins. But enough comparisons, let's take this turd on its own merits, or lack thereof. 

It opens with one of the least fun, most poorly acted sequences I've ever seen, where a many-years-ago coven meeting goes awry when a sacrifice can't be performed. Yawn. Then there is an abrupt cut to the titles, which is made doubly jarring by jaunty, lively music totally at odds with the F-class acting we just saw. 

The remainder of the movie deals with the son of the coven leader, in the present day, as he tries to assume his father's powers and summons Le Ghoulies in the meantime. And the ghoulies ... boy are they a trip. They are clearly cheap plastic dolls covered in vaseline, but whoever is animating them is doing a great job, because they move in JUST such a way that they are funny and have personalities. Which can't be easy given their construction. 

I was five when it came out, and probably about eight when I saw it first, but it was a pretty popularly known movie among my set in the late '80s, early '90s. And honestly, half the charm is the poster/VHS cover, showing a ghoulie popping out of a toilet with the positively submental tagline "They'll get you in the end!" To an eight-year-old, though, that is solid genius of the highest order. The Moby Dick of taglines and concepts, if you will.

The movie has some truly bizarre sequences that seem like the belong in another movie completely - when the green-glowy-eyed sorcerer summons two little people to be his familiars/helpers/jesters/whatever they are. It's so strange, and seems like it should be in an F-grade Italian sword-and-sorcery film. 

Or the totally '80s Sunglasses At Night Dinner Party, where the ghoulies hide in the food for no apparent reason, and then becomes a truly stupid seance, maybe the worst committed to film. Or the breakdancing stoner who seems be simply having a seizure right in front of us. 

Oh! Mariska Hargitay is in this, her debut movie (!!), many many years before Law and Order: SVU.

But make no mistake: this was a highly successful film. Made for a million dollars, it became a huge cult classic on VHS, probably in the eight-to-ten market that I fell in, and ended up grossing like $35,000,000 (!). The director was Luca Percovici, who made a few '80s horror movies, including Frightmare, which I have fonder memories of. 

There were several sequels made, but only the first one, Ghoulies II, was released in the 1980's, so I don't have to suffer too much more. 

Running Scared (1986)

Sometimes comedians don't realize they are not good at a certain kind of comedy. That is the case with Running Scared (1986), where no one had the guts to tell Billy Crystal or Gregory Hines that they make terrible, unfunny cops. 

Billy Crystal is a funny guy, normally. But as we saw in Memories of Me, he can also be an awful, unfunny mess. Now Memories of Me was a drama, more or less, but Running Scared is SUPPOSED to be a comedy - just look at that awful DVD cover art! - and he totally bungles it. 

My theory is that the '80s were so rife with movies where cops acted fast and loose - 48 Hours, To Live and Die in LA, Year of the Dragon, Manhunter, Robocop, Lethal Weapon, Sea of Love, Stakeout, Cop, and above all Beverly Hills Cop - that Billy Crystal thought he could get away with this. He was very very wrong. The divide that separates Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop and Billy Crystal in Running Scared is unbridgeable. 

So the movie itself... which is no good... is about two cops, Ray and Danny (Hines and Crystal), who try and take down Julio, the local crime... guy... thing... boss. They bust "Snake" (Joe Pantoliano) and try to turn him against Julio, but it goes haywire and only their craaaaaaaaaaaazy antics get them through. Ugh. Then they are shipped off to Key West on a forced vacation by their boss (Dan Hedaya), where they decide to retire and open a bar. Yawn. When they return to Chicago they hear Julio is loose, and decide to do One Last Bust before retiring. Also, they have to train their replacements. 

Honestly, the plot is paper thin ... thin as carbon paper, which is appropriate because this plot is copied off of better cop movies over the years. Rogue cops ... retirement dreams ... one last big bust ... evil gang kingpin ... yadda yadda yawn. There is nothing new here, and the childish comedy antics don't infuse any new blood at all into the tired script. 

So who is responsible for this mess? The director was Peter Hyams, who also made Capricorn One, Outland (which I like), The Star Chamber, 2010 (!), Timecop (uh oh), Sudden Death (uhhh ohhhh), The Relic (uhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhhhhh), and finally A Sound of Thunder, a movie I saw in the theater and really wish I hadn't. 

So his career experienced a notable decline, and I place the beginning right at the doorstep of Running Scared, aka no one's favorite cop movie, ever anywhere. The movie was written by Gary DeVore, who also wrote Raw Deal and Traxx and not a lot else. I see the Raw Deal similarity - if you added terrible jokes to Raw Deal, it might resemble this movie. 

It grossed $38 million at the box office, but I have no idea what it cost to make. My guess is it broke even or made a small profit. I sincerely doubt it was a runaway hit, especially as NO ONE I knew in the '80s, man woman or child, talked about this movie. Not recommended.  

The Mighty Quinn (1989)

This is a movie I had never, ever heard of: The Mighty Quinn (1989). It's apparently a murder mystery featuring Denzel Washington fairy early in his career, just before his big breaks to stardom. 

Apparently the late Roger Ebert praised this movie to the high heavens and called it one of the best films of 1989. Well, I saw it, and it isn't. It's interesting, but not in the same league as Do the Right Thing, My Left Foot, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Say Anything, et al. Ebert's main points in the brief one paragraph synopsis I read were that (1) it was fun and (2) it was underlooked. Well, OK. Sure. I'm also fun and underlooked, and I'm not a best film of 1989 either. 

Nevertheless, it is better than it should be considering that almost no one has heard of it. Denzel is Xavier, a police chief of a town in Jamaica, and has a really, really good accent throughout. Seriously good. He could teach Jamaican accents. 

There is a murder of a very important, rich man on the island, and a lot of money is apparently missing. Denzel (for some reason I prefer calling him by his real name than his character) is tasked with finding his childhood friend Maubee, who is the last person seen in the vicinity - in fact, who Denzel stopped for speeding/reckless driving just moments after the murder, without realizing he was a suspect. Maubee goes to ground, Denzel searches for him, and meanwhile high political pressure begins to bear on him from above - where is the money? Why can't you find the money? Who has the money? Where is Maubee? WHO is Maubee? 

Whenever Denzel digs deep into the crime, he is chastised and threatened and cajoled, etc. The mystery deepens as the movie progresses, but I won't give anything away in case you should someday catch this on TV. But there are several clever things going on that all come together near the end. 

The movie is dripping in atmosphere - vibrant sun, interesting characters with seemingly full lives of their own (my favorite was Esther Rolle as a witch who laughs and laughs and laughs when she tricks Denzel into opening a wicker basket full of snakes). There is also a lot of music in the movie, much of it reggae, much of it very good, including a version of the title song (written by Bob Dylan). 

I liked this movie, although I didn't love it. The pacing was too elastic - it felt like the tension would suddenly appear for no reason and then vanish again. There were one or two subplots that, although they were interesting, distracted me from something that felt more important. The camera work was also awkward - although there were a couple interesting shots where a character would seemingly look at the camera, only for a reveal that they were looking at another character just off camera. A few surprises, but nothing shattering. 

It was directed by Carl Schenkel, who is German and who made nothing I have heard of before or since. The movie grossed $4.5 mil, which feels about right, and was probably good for the budget. 

Worth catching if you find it somewhere. 

Leviathan (1989)

I owned Leviathan (1989) on VHS back when I was a kid. I didn't yet know who Peter Weller, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, or any of the rest of the cast were ... but I knew I liked it. Also, I was nine years old and a fool. 

So let's be honest here - this is a pretty trashy aquatic horror film. For reference, see The Abyss; Death Ship; "The Raft" segment of Creepshow 2; Dead Calm; Jaws; and especially Deepstar Six, which was the same era and sucked even worse. Despite the ridiculous cast, who knows how they all got signed up for this, this movie really doesn't work on ANY level.

The movie begins deep underwater at a mining station, looking for "silver and other rare metals." Yeah, OK. You and everyone else. Then one of the workers, in a giant mech suit, starts hyperventilating wildly - to the point that a little red skull-and-bones light starts flashing on his control panel. That's NEVER good. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the team - mostly post-Robocop Peter Weller - try to get him back into the station while over-the-top dramatic music plays (featuring a xylophone!). So, tension from the word go. 

This movie wants, desperately, to be Alien. The scene where they are all eating around a table is cribbed directly from Alien. Even the character types are similar. Poor Daniel Stern is terribly wasted here. We have the sober leader, the loose cannon, the comedian, the paranoid-for-no-reason, the sexy girl, the doctor, the black guy, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

The effects in this movie are ... bad. I'm sorry, Stan Winston, effects master of so many movies. They are piss poor. The spider that pops out in a cheap surprise near the beginning is approximately 1/10000th the quality of the Alien face-hugger it is obviously copied from. Even as a little kid, I knew these effects were trash garbage. I could have made better with a stop-motion camera and lint from my shag carpet. 

The basic plot, if you can call it that, is that this team of sub-marine miners encounter a terrible monster while trapped under the sea. This is somehow totally different than encountering a terrible monster while trapped deep in space, if you're continuing the analogies to Alien. Which was also about miners, by the way. Except all the characters acted like real human beings with realistic emotions, and the monster was damned horrifying. 

This movie, sadly, is like making a copy of something that has already been xeroxed about ten times. Every element that worked in Alien doesn't work here. The characters are thin and aren't given good dialog to speak. The computer effects somehow look infinitely less futuristic than Alien's decade-earlier depiction. The monster is half-assed at best. The tension is uneven. The music is too omnipresent and too serious. And, worst of all, the actors are all misused. Alien took unknowns and made them amazing. This movie takes established good actors and trashes them. 

Leviathan was directed by George P. Cosmatos, whose '80s movies include Of Unknown Origin, Rambo First Blood Part II (YESSSSSS), Cobra (YESSSSSSSSSSSSS), and this dreck. Then he made Tombstone in 1993, which is probably underrated and has great acting and great dialog, so go figure. 

His movies, until Tombstone, have a definite commonality - an emphasis on cheap action with tons of shooting and explosions, dialog that seems generally uncomfortable with the English language (like Cobra's "You're the disease... I'm the cure" or however that awkward one-liner goes), paper thin character types, and big bombastic scores that push the emotion the film is unable to provide. 

The movie was written by David Webb Peebles, who wrote very good scripts for Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, and Unforgiven - the first and last being undisputed masterpieces. How on EARTH did he write this thing? Did someone massacre it after he was done? Did someone drop the script on the floor and pick up the pages in the wrong order? Did he go into a fugue state? Did someone impersonate him? Was he badly in debt to the Mob? What happened?!?!?!

 The film grossed $15,000,000 (how???), but I couldn't find any data on what it cost to make. Maybe it made money, maybe it broke even, maybe it lost. It's anyone's guess. Please avoid this. 

Valley Girl (1983)

Valley Girl (1983) is the first movie where Nick Cage is billed as Nick Cage and not Nick Coppola. It's also the first movie in the '80s directed by Martha Coolidge (City Girls, Joy of Sex, the fantastic Real Genius, and the underrated Plain Clothes). It also has a fantastic soundtrack, which I'll cover in a bit. 

The story is simple - our heroine Julie (Debbie Foreman, who is otherwise known to me from the horror movie Waxwork) is having what passes for an existential crisis in the San Fernando Valley - she is popular, her dick boyfriend Tommy (Michael Bowen, who's career has really picked up lately) is popular, her friends are popular, she looks great, wears the right clothes, talks, like, the right talk... but something is amiss.

Julie dumps Tommy, and ends up falling for bad boy Randy (Cage), who is most certainly not from the Valley. He's a punk, as is his friend Fred (Cameron Dye) and extremely uncool among the upper-middle class circle Julie runs with. Fred's opening line on the "date" with Julie and her friend Stacey is extremely memorable: "Hi, I'm Fred. I like tacos, '71 cabernet, and my favorite color is magenta." ZING. 

As you might imagine, there are many Romeo/Juliet like struggles with love between forbidden sects of society - Julie's friends HATE Randy and love Tommy the superjerk... Randy is romantic, in his way, and smart, and keeps trying. Eventually he gets traction... but how will that play out? 

Let's make an aside for the soundtrack. If you like early '80s New Wave / New Pop / Pop Wave / Wave New / Synth Wave / Wave Wave / whatever you want to call it, you are doing just fine here. Let's examine this murderer's row of great synth pop: 

• Johnny, Are You Queer? by the Josie Cotton
• Girls Like Me by Bonnie Hayes
• A Million Miles Away by The Plimsouls
• Eyes of a Stranger by the Payolas
• I Melt With You by Modern English
• Who Can It Be Now? by Men at Work
• Love My Way by the Psychedelic Furs
• Jukebox by the Flirts

Awesome. I Melt With You is probably the best-known song these days, and closes out the movie... but my secret favorite is Love My Way. That's an all-nighter in my book. 

This movie was made on the serious cheapside. To the tune of $350,000, which is crazy low. ESPECIALLY when you consider it became an instant hit and made something like $17,000,000. That is highly impressive, and helped launch Nicholas Cage into more '80s movies like Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. etc. 

I also really like the subplot with Skip and Suzie's mom, especially when Beth (the mom) drops all kinds of reference to The Graduate ("plastics") and Skip, dumb as a stone, stares back at her vacantly and uncomprehending. 

This movie looks, sounds, and probably smells thoroughly '80s. Everything is bright - bright purple and pink jackets ... bright yellow pants ... bright red punk hair ... bright pink lipstick. And the dialog is, of course, famous. Everything plays off the success of the Frank/Moon Unit Zappa song of the year before. Like, totally, whoa, whoa, like ... yeah, totally. Maybe most famous is Randy's mocking rejoinder to Julie late in the movie: "Well fuck you, for sure, like, totally." 

This is definitely a pure '80s artifact, in that the culture is one of the characters in the film rather than just a backdrop. Recommended. 

Back to School (1986)

If you couldn't figure it out from my review of Easy Money (1983), I love Rodney Dangerfield. I have no idea why, exactly, but I know that like my love of the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello it was formed at a very early age. And today's review is a movie - Back to School (1986) - that I think is probably his best known and most beloved, and therefore a real treat to get to. 

Everyone has strange moments of synergy in their lives where they discover, for whatever reason, that everyone in the room has the same birthday, or everyone is related to a former president, or everyone's favorite drink is pink gin. In my case, I was once at a party in my sophomore year college apartment where everyone had some life-changing story affixed to Back to School. How it came up I have no memory. 

One guy said it had brought his parents back to together after a fight (?!), another girl said it had made her quit the diving team (!!), a third guy simply said it was the greatest movie ever made and then promptly passed out on our couch, a hero and legend until the end of days. 

I have no similar story -  I just really like the movie. I first caught it on TV, probably Fox 5/45 back in the late '80s or early '90s. The opening is great - a black and white vignette featuring Wayne from The Wonder Years bringing his Old World father a failing report card. The father yells at him, You've Got To Go To College!!! and Wayne sneers and generally declines. We cut to the present day...

The credits then run, with a great montage of vintage photos, including baby pictures, of Rodney Dangerfield. He runs a men's clothing store called Big and Fat, and has a son he misses a lot and wishes he saw more of. But hey, when you're a big time corporate exec, it's tough to find time for your kids...

...unless you're our hero Thornton Melon (Dangerfield, of course) and you make your own rules. I could easily go through this movie scene by scene, but that might/would get boring (for you) really quickly. So I'll hit a few major plot points and then some topics. After getting a divorce from his horrendous young wife ("Adam and Evil" says Rodney after catching her with another man), Dangerfield orders his amazing chauffeur (played masterfully by the incomparable Burt Young) to go to the university where his son studies. One part of the family crumbles, better reinforce the rest. 

His son, sadly, is a wimp. And a dweeb. His best friend and roommate, amazingly, is Robert Downey Jr. with wild dyed hair. And this son (played by Keith Gordon) can't hack it and is about to drop out - a major blow to proud parent Dangerfield who never attended school himself. Solution? GO TO COLLEGE WITH YOUR SON!!! Brilliant. 

But let's pause to discuss the cast here. It's a murderer's row - Ned Beatty is the dean, Sally Kellerman is the teacher/love interest, character actor Paxton Whitehead is Dr. Barbay, M. Emmet Walsh is Coach Turnbull, Adrienne Barbeau, Kurt Vonnegut as himself, and - by far my favorite - Sam Kinison is in this, at Dangerfield's real-life insistence, as Professor Terguson. Kinison is fantastic and very memorable as a teacher of contemporary American history.

In fact, my strongest memory of this film after the famous Triple Lindy dive is Kinison's reaction to a student's depiction of the end of Vietnam - it's vintage Kinison, screaming over-the-top comedy as he steadily melts down until he's yowling at full bore in his way. And then is marvelously defused by Dangerfield. 

Speaking of the Triple Lindy, another great point: Dangerfield's character was a trick diver as a young man and he gets back into it at school. Turns out Rodney Dangerfield himself was a trick diver in real life! Who knew? However, I am almost certainly the diving in the film is done by a body double. 

The movie was filmed both at University of Wisconsin, Madison and UCLA, and both look amazing. These are the kind of idealized college campuses that made me actually want to go to college as kid. Everything is green and landscaped and people are mulling around everywhere looking cool.

Remember how in the last Dangerfield movie I reviewed, Easy Money, he sang Funiculi Funicula? In this one he does a spirited version of Twist and Shout, which further reinforces my belief that he really wants to be a musician at heart. Or at least comes out of that vaudeville tradition where comedians were expected to have more than one talent to get by. 

Singing aside, his best performance is probably when he recites Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" for his oral exam. Surprisingly good. 

Also, Oingo Boingo does a great job playing "Dead Man's Party" at a wild party. 

I don't know how much it cost to make, but in combined theater and rental profits it grossed (according to IMDB) $150 million (!!). That is major in terms of 1986. This was a big success and probably led to Dangerfield making things like Lady Bugs and his unforgettably disturbing role in Natural Born Killers. 

I am a big fan of this movie. Excellent Friend Rob says this is both overrated and underrated, and that is spot on. It doesn't quite deserve the Pinnacle of All Dangerfield Comedies, nor does it deserve the Greatest Comedy of the '80s Award either ... but it's no humble fare, and is very funny in all the right ways. Dangerfield and whoever else wrote the story did a great job tailoring the role to his natural persona, so he is funny but vulnerable and realistic. He actually has soulful scenes, which is not what people think of when this movie gets thrown around. Everyone remembers the Triple Lindy, but nobody remembers the tender dinner scene where Dangerfield ruefully acknowledges his failed marriages. 

Heartily endorsed.