Porky's (1982), The Hunter (1980), The Burning (1981)

 

It's safe to say that Porky's (1982) was a big deal when it was released, on several levels. Made for a scant $4-5 million, explicitly as a tax shelter (everyone assumed it would fail and fail big) it grossed at least $200 million in its theater run, plus who knows how much more in rentals, cable runs, physical sales, etc. Almost all by itself, Porky's created the Explicit Teen Sex Comedy genre that flourished in the 1980s, and also provided a template for various low budget directors to try and follow.

Directed by Bob Clark - an American who frequently worked in Canada and who made the cult horror hit Black Christmas (1974), the surprisingly good Sherlock Holmes film Murder by Decree (1979) and - most well known of all - A Christmas Story (1983), which is still played in a 24-hour loop on Christmas Day by the TBS cable network. 

Clark based Porky's on his real-life experiences growing up with five close friends in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The nightclub Porky's is based on a real place called Porky's Hide Away in Oakland Park, Florida. I couldn't dig up their reaction to the movie, but it must have boosted their attendance significantly. 

The tone of the movie is apparent in the very first scene - In 1954, a teenage boy is reluctantly waking up, sporting an erection which he has to hide from his mother. Once he chases his mother away ("I pulled a little groin muscle" he says. "Well, be careful" she replies) he immediately measures his penis, and is disappointed. This character is "Pee Wee" ... Yikes. Well, you can tell who the intended audience here was, ha.

So why was this movie such a mega hit? Well, a couple things are working in its favor. The friends here all seem realistically immature and also like real friends - they joke around, they play pranks on each other, they hatch schemes, etc. There weren't a lot of other movies doing this in '81, and the ones that were, like Diner or American Graffiti, were big hits.

The second is that it is steeped in '50s nostalgia, which became a huge deal in the '80s - Back to the Future, Stand by Me, Dead Poets Society, Dirty Dancing, Diner; it was a MAJOR moment for 1950's nostalgia, and this was one of the first (following some late '70s classics like Grease that led the vanguard). 

I've long been fascinated with the 50s/80s interplay. Both had conservative militaristic Republican presidents who were concerned with maintaining the status quo in the face of the USSR. Both worried about nuclear annihilation. Both were less than a decade removed from a major war. Both saw the explosion of youth-oriented music styles. Etc etc etc. Porky's cashes in on that big time. 

Being something of a major cultural artifact there is a lot one could say about Porky's. It goes without saying that the movie is casually misogynistic, racist, etc etc. (perhaps another commonality with the 1950s, sadly). This movie has been rightfully trashed by feminists ever since its release; but I honestly don't think Clark has any ill intent here - he's not telling the audience "this is how it SHOULD be!" ... he's just relaying some memories and saying how they were: imperfect. At least, that's how the tone reads for me. 

Some notes on the cast:

• Kim Cattrall is here! She's the teacher who howls like a dog during sex (har har har... that scene is unfunny and WAY too long). I always assume her career started with Police Academy (1984), but after looking up her resume, I was surprised to see she started way way back in Rosebud (1975). She was a six year veteran by the time she made Porky's! 
• Dan Monahan is cheekily likable as Pee Wee - he was in a movie as Tom Sawyer the same year this was released, as well as Only When I Laugh, which I also reviewed here. Later he was in two Porky's sequels (that didn't do nearly as well), Up the Creek (1984, was surprisingly fun), and From the Hip (1987). 
• Alex Karras is the Sheriff! I knew him as a kid as the dad on the TV show Webster. My dad knew remembered him immediately as a Pro Bowl tackle with the Detroit Lions through the 1960s. He was in some well-regarded movies, including Blazing Saddles, Altman's M*A*S*H, and Victor Victoria (1982). 
• Chuck Mitchell plays the malevolent Porky. I know him best as the mean restauranteur in Better Off Dead (1985), where he owns a place called "Pig Burgers" - surely a Porky's reference. He appears sporadically throughout the 80s, including Frightmare (1983) and Ghost Chase (1987). 
• Nancy Parsons is great as the mean gym teacher Mrs. Balbricker. I vaguely remember her as Coach Annie in 1992's Ladybugs, where she is one of the other soccer coaches.
• Wyatt Knight is Tommy, best remembered as "the kid with a mole on his dick" who antagonizes Balbricker in the shower. He never did anything outside the Porky's films. 

Fun fact: Howard Stern owns the rights to Porky's and has been dying for years to make a remake. No idea what the status of that is. As much as I knock Porky's above - it's not as funny at age 42 as it was at 12 - it does have some moments with real heart, and you can tell Bob Clark really invested some of himself in this. 

This is a movie I had read about but really knew nothing about before finding it on Amazon Prime. It's the final movie of screen legend Steve McQueen, released only three months before he died in November of 1980. 

The story of a bounty hunter, it was directed by Buzz Kulik, a very busy director of mostly TV movies who also made a few feature films like 1969's Riot with Gene Hackman and Jim Brown (produced by William Castle!!), and 1973's Shamus with Burt Reynolds; but perhaps is best known for the famous 1971 TV movie Brian's Song.

This movie has a surprisingly good supporting cast, including: 

• Tracey Walter - He's in tons and tons of things; I know him best as Malak in Conan the Destroyer and Bob the Goon in Batman. He was in 9 films with Jack Nicholson. 
• Eli Wallach - Also in tons of things, perhaps most famously as Tuco in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, as well as Guido in The Misfits. 
• LaVar Burton - Before he was Geordi LeForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but after he was Kunta Kinte in 1977's landmark Roots. 
• Ben Johnson - A famous stuntman who worked his way into stardom in Westerns, including prominent roles in John Ford's 3 Godfathers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and other famous Westerns like Wagon Master, Rio Grande, Shane, Hang 'Em High, The Wild Bunch, The Last Picture Show... the list goes on and on. A legend. 
• Teddy Wilson - A veteran TV actor who I know best as Sweet Daddy Williams on Good Times, and as Phil Wheeler on Sanford and Son. 
• Nathaniel Taylor - A friend of Redd Foxx who played the immortal Rollo Lawson on Sanford and Son and the attempted spinoffs. He was also in the blaxpoitation film Willie Dynamite. 
• Richard Venture - Veteran "that guy" actor who was in Being There, Scent of a Woman, All the President's Men, and many others. 

What a line up!

The plot here is a series of episodes where "Papa" Thorson (McQueen) has to go to various places and capture bad guys. A funny running joke is that he's a bad driver (in actuality McQueen was a race car driver and performed many famous action sequences like the immortal chase in the movie Bullitt or the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape), which made me laugh more than once. 

The opening episode is where he captures Lavar Burton in a small-town bar in Illinois - it's kind of amazing how charismatic LaVar Burton is in his short moments in the film. His famous voice, which many grew up hearing on Reading Rainbow, is modulated perfectly for every moment. He appears every fifteen or twenty minutes or so as a recurring joke - he is constantly fiddling with McQueen's gadgets, trying to improve them; he lives with McQueen after McQueen decides he doesn't belong in jail. That said, Burton lights up the screen every time he's there, I was very impressed and wished he was in a lot more of the film as a full-time sidekick. 

Apparently Steve McQueen directed a lot of the scenes himself, not caring for how the official director was doing. It was during the filming of this movie that 49-year old McQueen and others noticed that he was becoming severely out of breath after the lightest exertions. 

The doctors then did the tests that revealed the mesothelioma that would kill him within a year. McQueen blamed the asbestos suits he wore as a race car driver, as well as asbestos-removal projects he was made to do in the Marines. This movie morbidly benefitted from all the news surrounding McQueen's illness: he traveled to Mexico for a 3-month series of quack treatments that only weakened him further. 

All in all, this could have been released in 1979 and felt more at home in that decade. There is little or nothing of the 1980s in this, and it vibrates with that raw individualist 70s energy throughout. It's fun at times, but it needed a firmer guiding hand on the rudder. It feels a little piecemeal, a little fuzzy, and it really only shines when McQueen gets to do fights or action sequences. A completely acceptable movie, but nothing outstanding. 

I can't believe I haven't done this one yet! 1981's The Burning is one of the better-regarded slasher films of the decade, perhaps because it's one of the first and isn't quite aware of the cliches yet. It's often regarded by horror fans as "the one with Jason Alexander." 

The Burning was directed by Tony Maylam, who also did 1979's Riddle of the Sands, and 1992's Split Second, as well as a couple TV movies in the 80s. Apparently he is best known for rock music documentaries from the 1970s, which is how he came to the attention of the producers... 

The Burning is one of the very first serious productions by the Weinstein Brothers - Bob and the infamous Harvey, under the company that would become Miramax Pictures (named for their parents, Miriam and Max); they were originally rock concert promoters before making their way to Hollywood as the producers of music movies. Slowly they entered mainstream pictures through movies like this one: Harvey wrote some of the story, and Bob developed it into a screenplay.  

The Burning was explicitly made to replicate the success of low-budget '70s horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. The Weinsteins remembered a camp legend from upstate New York, known as the "Cropsey" legend, and turned it into the idea for the movie. 

A little known fact: although released in May of 1981, this was technically in development before the much more famous (and vastly more successful) summer camp slasher Friday the 13th, which was released a year earlier in May of 1980. Apparently the initial stages of development on The Burning took a long time, and it was only after hiring director Maylam that things got back on the rails. 

At the time this was being made, no one realized that the slasher phenomena was here to last. As such, worried about missing out on the slasher trend, the Weinsteins attempted to rush this into production as fast as possible, but because of their inexperience the movie ended up over budget somewhere around $1.5 million... and in the theaters it only brought back about $700,000 in the US... but it did quite well in other countries, especially Japan (!). Go figure. Ultimately it basically broke even. 

Some casting notes: 

• Jason Alexander! This was his first movie, and he didn't make another for five more years (he's a clerk in Harrison Ford's favorite of his own movies, The Mosquito Coast). Growing up he wanted to be a stage magician, but was told at some point that his hand size or shape wasn't suited for legerdemain (he has returned to this post-Seinfeld). There is very little information about his early 80s career beyond "he did commercials." 
• Brian Matthews - a daytime soap opera regular in the 80s, he's now a conservative therapist in Texas who ran unsuccessfully for office in 2012. 
• Holly Hunter! She came to New York in the late 70s and roomed with Frances McDormand (!). After being stuck in a broken elevator with playwright Beth Henley, Henley asked her to star in her play Crimes of the Heart, and Hunter's career was launched. The Burning was the only movie she made in NYC before moving to Los Angeles. 
• Fisher Stevens! His first movie as well. Later known from popular roles including Ben from Short Circuit (1986) and "The Plague" in Hackers (1995), he was a student at New York University while living with his mother when he was cast in this. 
• Brian Backer - Yup, "Rat" Ratner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is in this. Unbelievably, the same year he made this movie he won the Tony Award for Best Performance in Woody Allen's The Floating Lightbulb. 
• Lou David - the 6'5" actor who plays the killer, Cropsey, was in a few interesting things. Most notable are perhaps 1985's The Last Dragon and the blaxploitation flick Come Back, Charleston Blue. 

So how is this, as a movie? It's pretty fun if you are into summer camp slashers, or early 80s horror movies in general. It features all the hallmarks of its genre - lots of nudity, teenagers horsing around while a killer lurks on the fringes, lots of poorly edited murders, cheap gore... but also some occasionally creative shots, and a few well-executed sections. Better than some, but not at the top. 

The main problem is that the villain, Cropsey, is very boring and has no personality whatsoever. He's just a thrusting pair of gardening shears that wanders the woods. Compared to the apex-level 80s slasher villains like Jason Voorhees (and his mom), Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface, hell, even the puppets from Puppet Master or Angela from Sleepaway Camp, Cropsey is just ... a dull, easy-to-forget nonentity. It's very disappointing. 

As a result the teens have to drive the film, which they mostly do, but it's lopsided as a result. The best slasher movies feature a certain give-and-take between the killer and the victims - not necessarily in dialog, but in terms of screen time and our emotional investment in them. We invest our hopes for survival in the victims; we invest our fear in the killer. Without both, a slasher can never be fully successful, and that's what happens here. 

It's fun, and it's kind of amazing to see Jason Alexander messing around with Fisher Stevens and Holly Hunter and crew, but it's solidly in the middle of the pack.