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. 

Hairspray (1988)

Now, I don't know if it's because I'm from a poorer, more rural part of Maryland, or if I have a kernel of kitsch deep in my cursed heart, but I love John Waters. Everything he does resonates with me on some level. That doesn't mean he's my all-time favorite or anything, but if he invited me to lunch I wouldn't say no. And I would probably dress nicely. 

With the words "Hey girls, whatchoo doin' over there? / Can't you see? I'm sprayin' my hair!" the 1988 kitsch masterpiece Hairspray opens with a bang. A period piece taking place in the '60s, the film revolves around the same dance show phenomena already discussed in the dud The In Crowd, the third movie ever reviewed on the blog. Except this film works in every. single. way.

Divine (in his final appearance) appears as Edna, Baltimore mother in 1962 presiding over her dance-obsessed daughter Tracy Turnblad (played famously by the charismatic Ricki Lake, who can MOVE, let me tell you). Tracy and her best friend Penny Pingleton appear on the local dance show, the Buddy Deane Show, and tend to upstage the elitist whitebread dance aristocrats who dominate it. 

But 1962 was a heady year for civil rights, and Baltimore a troubled city. The movie deals, very frankly and openly, with interracial relations on several levels (interpersonal, local, national). Since this is John Waters here and not some boring documentarian, the movie deals with these issues with style and flavor to spare and never comes across as trying to lecture the viewer or anything. 

Most of this area of the plot involves a public protest because the aforementioned dance show only has one "Negro Day" per month. The unrest grows and grows into a serious protest, but manages to stay light hearted even as it shows really pissed off people. It's kind of the opposite of Do The Right Thing that way. 

The attention paid to dances of the early '60s is also a lot of fun. It's a world away from the "dancing" of today, that's for sure. It's wild, yet tightly choreographed, and seems a little bit improvisatory, but also has definite rules that I don't quite get. Luckily it's fun to watch, even for someone like me who doesn't dance or really even understand what makes a dancer good or bad. 

Maybe my favorite parts of the movie are the school sequences - especially when the teacher insists they say the pledge and the students do dance moves behind her back. Hahaha! That kind of thing definitely happened. And a lot of the scenarios are really funny, like when Ricki Lake gets put in the Special Education class for having feathered hair. 

There is MUCH I want to write here but would really spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't encountered this before. Like the ... see, even the most casual reference would ruin big surprises. So instead I'll mention that this movie has a GREAT soundtrack - much better than the similar The In Crowd despite the similar topics. John Waters doesn't just have a great eye for color and scene but also a great ear for music and dialog. 

Obviously this movie has a wide appeal, since it was remade into both a broadway show (2002) and ANOTHER movie (2007!). Additionally, it made #444 out of 500 best movies ever according to Empire magazine. Which is kind of wild and yet not out of the realm of possibility, I suppose. It "only" made $8 mil in the theaters when it was released, which was still four times the budget, but had a huge take on home video and became a pretty rapid cult classic. The number of people I have met who know this movie and can quote it always surprises me. It's good! I lament that the other candy-colored Waters classic from this era, Crybaby, was 1990 and not 1989. No fair!

Dolls (1987), Slaughter High (1986)

Sorry for the delay in posts - it was a longggg week at work and I got home every day just zonked out of my mind. You wouldn't want to read what those posts would look like. It would be something demented and stream of consciousness like:

 "Slaughter High is is is a school of high slaughters hahaha school of school guy apple bomb WHERE THE STUDENT BODY IS GOING TO PIECES tagline taglineeeeeeeeeeeeee," 

the final burst of Es being where my face hit the keyboard and continued the word for me. Like I said, no good at all. So I waited and now I'm bringing the good stuff. Two horror films from the mid '80s, one atrocious and one firmly in the so-good-it's-bad category.

Dolls (1987) is the crap here. Despite the fancy MGM dvd cover, and the Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) pedigree, it's no good to anybody. The plot is so tired: spooky house, two sets of strangers get trapped there on a stormy night, house has evil secret, one by one the strangers start dying until two of them team up, evil secret is revealed, our heroes escape. Yawn, right? I remember seeing this same plot in the Agatha Christie-derived And Then There Were None ... back in 1945! And how much do you want to bet that audience yawned and complained it was a rip-off of some movie from the 1910s? 

Here, the "twist" is that the house is owned by an elderly couple who makes dolls. Evil, evil, living dolls. SPOILER ALERT: The dolls are former visitors who have been transformed, via horrible special effects, into grotesque doll versions of themselves. It's similar to the 1979 horror travesty (sadly featuring Chuck Connors) Tourist Trap. Don't watch that. Don't watch this either. 

I had high hopes because it was by director Stuart Gordon, who directed the camp/kitsch masterpiece Re-Animator, an adaption of H. P. Lovecraft's classic short story Herbert West, Reanimator. I will delightedly cover that movie pretty soon - it's fun and crazy. But this one doesn't have that same campy charm. 

No, this movie has NO charm. The main characters are a little girl and a weird man-boy who is supposedly a child at heart, but looks a lot like an adult Sean Astin. They bond because they see the joy and life in the dolls; all the other houseguests are horrified or indifferent and thus slaughtered ruthlessly by little murderous cretinous dolls. 

If any of you readers are getting deja vu, it's probably because the '80s were chock full of "little evil creatures" movies, like Ghoulies, Gremlins, and, closest to this one, Puppet Master. Puppet Master actually came out two years later, but does everything right that this movie does wrong. Most importantly: the puppets/dolls. Here, they are all lightly scary, but instantly forgettable. In Puppet Master there is a small cadre of evil puppets you grow to know and almost kind of like. Plus, that famous Puppet Master theme music:

Creepiest carnival-style music you've ever heard. Dolls has nothing to compete with that nightmare fuel. 

So Dolls is a big loss, but what about Slaughter High (1986)? The same personality-less high-concept low-execution dreck? 

No! It's ... "good"! Well, it's terrible, but it descends so far down the terrible scale that it's great. Here is the general plot. There is a high school way out in the country. Is it a boarding school? A private school? Just the smallest public high school in the United States? Unknown, it's never explained. All we know is that is WAY WAY out in the country (takes like a day to drive to, later in the movie) and it only has about 20 students. 

One of these students is Marty, who is the quintessential eager nerd. He is happy to get along with everyone, if he can. But alas, the remainder of the student body seems to be jocks and jockettes who are in their early 30s (they must have failed A LOT) whose sole delight is crafting elaborate pranks to torture Marty. The entire (lengthy) first sequence of the movie is a very complex set up where Marty is promised sex with the most popular girl if he'll undress and meet her in the locker room.

You might think you know where this is headed, but you'd be wrong. It's actually much, much worse. They not only embarrass poor Marty, then physically torture him as if he was a POW. They electrocute him, prod him with sharp things, waterboard him, it's unbelievable. And when the gym coach breaks it up, his cavalier attitude is stunning. "Eh, you kids, what did I tell you, now you're really, eh, meh, in trouble, blah." 

Yet Marty is still fairly chipper after this, incredibly. At least until the worst prank of all time goes awry right in his face:

Robocop (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

Two more heavy hitters tonight. Two of the most popular, most enduring pop culture movies of the whole decade - Robocop (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). 

Robocop I wasn't expecting to like as much as I did. I first saw it when I was eight on a rental VHS, and like most eight year old boys I worshipped the fascistic ultraviolence where elite killing skills are valued far above such petty things like "law" and "order." 

That was a big, big deal in the '80s - action movie heroes tended to be fascist, hyperviolent killed who follow their own inner law and never the law of the rest of society. Think of all the movies like this:

• Escape from New York
• First Blood
• First Blood, Part II
• Rambo III
• Commando
• The Terminator
• Predator
• Cobra
• Missing in Action
• The Delta Force
• etc etc etc

When I say "fascist," I mean it literally. According to Wikipedia, Fascism "views political violence, war, and imperialism as a means to achieve national rejuvenation." Totally right. In Robocop, political violence is used to reunify a broken Detroit whose police are so beleaguered that they are considering going on strike (!).

In fact one of the funny-yet-sad aspects of Robocop is how accurately it predicted modern Detroit. In 2043, Detroit is a run-down crime-ridden bankrupted hell hole where citizens (curiously white, even in the poorest neighborhoods... unsure why this is) are under siege by well armed criminals. Now it's 2013 and real-life Detroit isn't quite a hell hole, but it is bankrupt, the cops are out of money, the citizens face very high crime rates, and whole huge swaths of the city decaying to empty lots. Eerie how close Robocop got it. Future, thy name is Detroit. 

It's directed by Paul Verhoeven, and it shows. I've already reviewed his Flesh + Blood, and it feels like a warm up to Robocop. This movie embodies every single one of his themes in their simplest most primal abstraction. Identity reduction, seen also in Total Recall and Basic Instinct? Check. Explicit link between sex and violence, as in Basic Instinct and Starship Troops? Check. Strange pseudo-feminist ideas, a la Basic Instinct and Showgirls? Check. Main character who breaks the rules to get ultimate vengeance? Check. 

The movie looks and sounds amazing. It really holds up much better than I thought it might. The soundtrack, by Basil Poledouris, cleverly deals with the man-vs-machine theme by mixing orchestras with robotic synthesizers. Nice touch, and memorable. Meanwhile the cinematographer is longtime Verhoeven partner Jost Vacano. The film is full of interesting wide open spaces and big flat colors.

Also interesting are all the ideas that spew forth about "What makes a man?" The visual look of the film (especially the headquarters) is like a daytime Blade Runner, and this motif follows suit. Is Robocop a man or a machine? He has memories, makes new experiences, but in the famous scene late in the film, he's just a face strapped to a metal frame. 

In fact, the whole movie is kind of the inverse of Blade Runner. In that movie, a human cop hunts down android criminals who threaten our idea of humanity. In Robocop, an android cop hunts down human criminals who threaten our idea of robotics with their de-individualized lawbots. All in all, a surprisingly good movie. 

But enough with all the highbrow theory. The bottom line is that Robocop is just a fun action classic. The cool scanline view from Robocop's POV; seeing Kurtwood Smith as the gun-running ultravillain; all the great fake commercials, especially the nuclear variant of Battleship; the great face-and-wires humanized Robocop from late in the movie; the great gun flip he takes from the fictional "T.J. Lazer" show; seeing Ronny Cox as the sleaziest corporate raider of possibly any '80s movie; so many great moments!! Very much worth watching. 

Made about $50 mil or thereabouts on a budget of $13 mil - not bad! A remake/reboot/whatever is due out next year (2014), but I can't report more than that. 

The same can't be said for When Harry Met Sally..., at least not the surprising part. It's entertaining through and through, and has been since its release. This review was sponsored by my friend Elena, the first person to post on this blog!

When Harry Met Sally... (yes, the ellipsis is part of the title) ... (and that one is my own) there is so much joy in it! The hilarious and often touching interviews with the elderly couples. The endlessly quotable dialog. The realistic ups and downs. The cooperatively neurotic personality of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan). The famous scenes ("I'll have what she's having," "A WAGON wheel??," "When you decide you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible," and so many more). 

I might go so far as to argue that even including The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, A Few Good Men, The Sure Thing, and This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally is the best movie Rob Reiner ever directed. Debatable, certainly. But I believe it. 

First: It may be the single most likeable role Billy Crystal ever had. I've seen most of his movies, and I'll be honest here - he's the same fast-talking neurotic character in every damned role. He's basically the Jewish version of Robin Williams - Mode 1 is fast-talking witty wise-ass, Mode 2 is quiet and depressed and morose. 

Billy Crystal is great in small doses - maybe most famously as Max in The Princess Bride. But here, since we have the cute and equally crazy Meg Ryan to compare him against, he is much more relatable. 

Second: Meg Ryan! She's at the peak of her stardom and her powers here. She's cute, a little quirky (her famous style of ordering food... her short temper ... "Sheldon") and the perfect foil for Harry. You care about both of them, yin to yang. When they experience rough times, you understand and hope they find a way to make it through. When they experience good times, you are right there with them. It's a real coup by Reiner to involve us so much in their lives. 

Third, the movie is also like many a Woody Allen film, a loving depiction of New York City. The restaurants; the apartments; the streets; the shops; the sounds; the crowds; it's like its own character. 

Finally, there is the great soundtrack. All classic jazz standards: It Had to Be You, But Not for Me, Autumn in New York, Where or When, and of course Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. Perfect! It's hand-in-glove with the rest of the movie. Just pitch perfect. All performed by Harry Connick Jr. and his trio (!). 


I hardly even know what else to say about the movie. The bit parts are all expertly played. The great jokes. The wonderful conclusion at New Year's. The final "interview." A real gem. 

Back to the Future and Back to the Future II (1985, 1989)

Although no one has formally commented on the blog yet, and please let nothing stop you from doing so, I do get emails from friends who say "Why are you watching such obscure trash? I have never heard of the last five movies you wrote about. Where the hell is [insert movie everyone knows]?"

The answer, of course, is this: That's what's on TV! I cull most of my picks from a handful of channels that play '80s movies with some regularity - most often, MGM and Encore with a sprinkling of other channels. I also tend to prioritize movies I may never see again - I'll always be able to find E.T., but when will Slaughter High come around again? 

That said, tonight I'm covering possibly the most beloved single film of the entire decade and its fairly well-liked sequel: Back to the Future and Back to the Future II, released in '85 and '89 respectively. I would cover the third installment (which I actually detest, and hated from the day I saw it as a kid in the theaters) except it snuck across the border into the No Man's Land of the '90s (even though it was filmed back-to-back with number two).

So, here we are. The first movie, of course, is a mega blockbuster (8th highest grossing in the decade) and is also completely saturated in the '80s - the look, the ideas, the actors, everything. For the uninitiated, here is the basic rundown. Our protagonist Marty McFly is played by Michael J. Fox, known best at the time the move was released from  his iconic role as Alex P. Keaton on the huge TV hit show Family Ties.

Now, I love Michael J. Fox. I like him as much in his duds (Light of Day; The Hard Way) as in his hits (Back to the Future series; Teen Wolf; Doc Hollywood). But I freely admit he largely plays the exact same personality in each movie. I'd estimate about 85% of every role is just his natural perky wise-ass personality with the squeaky voice and 15% is whatever character he's supposed to be. 

Luckily that is a good thing here. In this movie, director Robert Zemeckis (Romancing the Stone; Who Framed Roger Rabbit?; Forrest Gump; Cast Away) uses Fox to absolutely maximum potential. Just maxes him right out. It's like the role was written just for him. And it shows: the movie made $383 million in combined theater and rentals. 

Here's the plot: Marty McFly (which is just a great freaking name) lives in Hill Valley, California. His dad (the immortal Crispin Glover in his most famous role) is a wimp, his mom (the sexy Lea Thompson at her peak of fame) is a lush, and his dad's boss Biff (played by the fantastically hateable Thomas F. Wilson) is a horrific bully. Luckily, Marty has an escape: he is good friends with mad scientist Emmett "Doc" Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd in what is probably his most recognizable role. It's either this or Taxi, take your pick. 

Doc Brown meets with Marty in the parking lot of a mall to show him his newest invention: A TIME MACHINE. This is, of course, the most '80s touch of them all - time machines were a BIG topic back then. Movie from '80s featuring time travel include:

• Star Trek IV 
• The Philadelphia Experiment
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Trancers
• Flight of the Navigator 
• The Terminator
• Time Bandits
• Young Sherlock Holmes
• The Final Countdown
• Peggy Sue Got Married
• Somewhere in Time
• Cocoon (sort of)
• Howard the Duck (sort of)

and I'm sure more that I'm forgetting. Time After Time only missed by one year, being from '79. It's a helluva list.

I'm not sure why the time travel motif blew up so much in the '80s, but it sure did. And this movie is the undisputed king of them all; the time travel is the main conceit and is also hovering in the background waiting to emerge again and twist things once more when you least expect it. 

Getting back, Doc Brown has not only created a time machine, but he has immortalized it in one of the most '80s of all automotive icons: The DeLorean DMC-12. The car is INCREDIBLE. The gull wing doors, the unpainted stainless-steel finish, the wedge nose shape, everything about it screams 1980s. The only other car I might consider would be the Ferrari 308 GTSi that Tom Selleck rocks in Magnum P. I. 

OK, so the DeLorean has a time machine for a power plant ("1.21 Gigawatts!"). Unfortunately, to power the machine Doc Brown has stolen plutonium from terrorists ("Libyans!"). They hunt him to the parking lot and gun him down - Marty uses the car to escape and travel back to 1955 ("88 miles per hour!") and set things right. Unfortunately this actually creates several more problems - he meets his young mother, who falls for him (!) at the expense of his future father (!!), and he is trapped in 1955 until a young Doc Brown can figure out how to generate the 1.21 gigawatts needed to get back to 1985. 

As Marty attempts to set his parents back up, fix his time machine, ward off the horrendous bully Biff, and save future Doc from the terrorists, he discovers that as he alters the past, he alters the future. In an ingenious twist, as he changes events people in the photos he has from the present begin to fade out of the photograph - out of existence. Even he is eventually imperiled and begins to fade out. As a kid I found this mesmerizing and it adds a real sense of urgency and compulsion to the whole movie. There is always a clock ticking and Marty is under a lot of pressure to get everything done. 

The immortal theme, done by Alan Silvestri, is very exciting and memorable. The plot is clever and intermixes the '50s and '80s with great effect - kudos to writer/producer Bob Gale, who surprisingly did not write many other movies outside the Back to the Future universe. It's too bad; of course, with the success the franchise, he is probably rich beyond counting and doesn't need to write anything else. He's probably being carted around in a platinum hovercraft right this moment.

I don't want to write much more, or else I will spoil the movie entirely for anyone who hasn't seen this yet. Instead, I'll move on to the sequel, made four years later. I was nine when the second movie was released and remember vividly that it was released sometime in the autumn, and was almost as big a hit as the original, and that it spawned more talk among my friends than any other movie. Everyone was talking hoverboards and holograms and whatnot. 

The premise is that Doc comes back to 1985 from 2015 and says that Marty has to go to the future with him to save his future children. Marty does so, and successfully defeats Biff's grandson Griff. However, their departure is witnessed by Biff, who sees Marty again in 2015 as an old man, and which sets into motion a long chain of events that leads to Future Biff taking a sports almanac back to 1985, betting on various sports events and becoming the richest man in the world... much to the detriment of the McFly clan. 

The second movie is a lot more gimmicky than the first, and very honestly, is about 3/4 as good. The plot isn't as tight, the characters are more broad (and therefore less focused and interesting), and the whole thing feels less urgent - maybe because the idea isn't as new anymore. The neatest thing the second movie comes up with is its dystopian view of the Biff-centric future, which is really decayed and horrifying in that neon tech-noir '80s way. 

When I was growing up I had a number of friends who preferred the second movie to the first one - but I think this has to do with being older when it came out and the stronger memories it generated. I've never met anyone, and probably never will, who prefers the botch-job of the third movie, which takes place in the Wild West and has approximately one successful joke per hour. Approximately. 

So it's really the first two, and especially the first one, that shines. The first movie just gets everything right - the look, the gags, the characters, the actors, the music, the pacing, the works. It's perhaps semi-famous for the best screening of any movie in Hollywood - usually they preview a film and the audience hates something and the producers change something and so on. Not here - the audience blew up in a frenzy of adoration. 

I'm not sure what other bases to cover here. There was a mass production of merchandising tie-ins, very common, but I really only remember the atrocious Nintendo game. There was a cartoon, I think, and maybe another related TV version, but I remember neither very well. What I would be most interested in knowing is what later movies were directly influenced by the series - anyone know? Can think of any characters drawn straight from Doc Brown and Marty McFly? The fading polaroid effect? Etc.? Any input most welcome.