Starchaser: The Legend of Orin is an interesting animated movie that plays like a mix of barbarian movies and Star Wars. Orin is a slave in the crystal mines, who one day finds a magic laser sword that summons a vision of a long-dead previous owner, who guides him to escape his bonds. Orin meets many new people, most of whom want him dead, and goes on a grand adventure before finally confronting The Big Bad Guy.
I rather enjoyed this. The Han Solo lookalike and his talking spaceship (sigh) was well done. The love interest is suitably lovely. The bad guy is appropriately horrible. And the good guy is pretty clueless, but in an OK way. Worth checking out.
I had never heard of this movie, which was released in the US as "The Quest," but it came out only a year after Henry Thomas's Cloak and Dagger, a big favorite of mine as a kid, so it's nice to fill in a gap. Henry Thomas plays Cody, an American kid whose parents die and leave him in the care of an Australian ... junk man? I'm not sure WHAT his guardian does.
Very popular with his peers, Cody is constantly getting in trouble, much of which he engineers himself. His best friend is a girl, but there is never any sexual tension (even though they are supposed to be 14). Cody and his friends discover a weird pond that's not on any map, where the water boils for no reason, and a weird shape momentarily rises out of the murky water. What could it be?!
Cody is obsessed and eventually goes diving to solve the mystery - which he does. The answer is rather ingenious, and makes sense to an adult more than a child. I think I would have liked this movie more as a kid, but it is still pretty entertaining now that I'm halfway grown up. Worth checking out, one of the better kids movies of the mid-80s that I've come across.
I started out hating this and ended up loving it. The title, of course, refers to emeralds - this movie opens with emerald smugglers being gunned down brutally, and then unfolds along a different line: Ryan O'Neal meets playgirl Anne Archer, and they team up.
They eventually come up against emerald cartel owner Omar Sharif, and the movie pivots into a heist movie (with hot air balloons!). Then the movie pivots again into an action thriller. The first quarter of the film, where O'Neal and Archer have to establish their chemistry, doesn't work so well. It never seems realistic. But after that, the movie sort of moves things along by itself and the chemistry becomes more organic. A lot of fun! Fun fact: the producer thought it felt more like a TV movie. Ouch!
This was somewhat interesting: a new psychiatrist at a military psych hospital experiments with allowing his patients to live out their fantasies as a treatment. But then 2/3 of the way through a huge plot twist happens, one that I really didn't see coming, and which recontextualizes the entire film.
Ultimately, I wish the movie had stayed away from the heavier religious themes - they don't work. And I am pretty sure the movie THINKS it's a riot... it's not. It's rarely funny, and should have taken lessons from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But that's ok, the idea is fascinating, and it moves along at a pretty nice pace.
My one serious quibble: the biker bar scene near the end is insanely violent and nasty, in a rather unforgivable way. Whoever wrote the script (was it the novelist Blatty? the director Friedkin?) needs some gentle counseling. That scene belongs in a different movie. a
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