TerrorVision (1986)

TerrorVision (1986) is a surprise pick for the blog. I was home after yet another 12-hour day at the office, dead to the world and waiting for the pizza man, when I decided to see what Comcast's Xfinity On-Demand had in the realm of '80s fare. 

There was a surprising amount, and some of it will be covered soon, including a few well-known options. But I had never heard of TerrorVision and wanted something light, cheesy, stupid, and easy to watch while scarfing down righteous pizza delight along with beer and gin. 

To start, the film has a FANTASTIC theme soon that somehow combines a New Wave Elvira-type singer with B-52s camp and a weird melody sensibility out of maybe Devo or Gary Numan. CLICK HERE.  

Crazy, right? Not to mention the insane psychedelic white noise that drifts throughout.

The acting is, appropriately, absolutely horrible. They all act at the level of community theater rejects ("Sorry, Bill, you just didn't quite make the cut for Man #47 this year. Come back next June."), which leads me to believe that either (a) everyone was drunk on the set, (b) no one took it even 1% seriously and so they were all having a blast, (c) cocaine was left in giant piles on a table in the middle of the set, or (d) every single one of those. 

The movie's "plot," if you want to be nice and call it that, is simple. A doofus installing a satellite dish accidentally calls down murderous aliens from the outer spheres. The whole family is absolutely worshipful of television, which is how it should be (in the '80s or anytime). I love the absolutely insane and clearly ironic '80s culture touches - the neon magnificence of the daughter's faux-beehive, the yuppy blandness of the father and the Jazzercise housewife mother... etc. 

And then there are subtle David Lynch-esque touches here and there, like when the parents casually introduce themselves to the punk boyfriend of their daughter as swingers. Surreal, and somewhat disturbing, yet weirdly appropriate. Or when the grandfather says to his young grandson, "Remember what I told you about the 30 ROUND MAGAZINE, BOY!??!?!" Wow, you get chills. Semi-seriously. 

Not to mention the basic premise involves "training" the TV monster into a quasi-domestic "pet."

The whole movie is, in fact, a really surreal and sarcastic take on the Valley Girl culture and general '80s yuppy mentality. It's like a completely twisted neon-magnified vision of Family Ties... perhaps Family Ties meets Toxic Avenger. Which is meant as praise. 

Somewhere along the lines, someone with a brain was attached to this script. And the trail is easy to follow, since the movie was written AND directed by the same guy - Ted Nicolaou. Hats off you, Ted, wherever you are, because this movie is FUN. 

I looked up Mr. Nicolaou's IMDB resume and discovered.... I hadn't heard of a single movie of his except one, 1994's Dragonworld, although I can't remember for the life of me how I know it. I just do. 

So this is a rare never-seen-it-before '80s horror film that is actually watchable and rewatchable due to strong satirical impulse combined with very bright sets and costumes (fantastic use of color everywhere) combined with hilarious and probably deliberate overacting combined with solid and gooey gore effects. 

Gorky Park (1983), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Gorky Park (1983) is an adaption of a book by one of my favorite fiction writers - Martin Cruz Smith. He has a series of books about a detective in Moscow named Arkady Renko who is clever, ironic, quiet, persistent, and honest. In Soviet (and later post-Soviet) Russia, this is a decidedly less-than-optimal combination of traits. 

Here, Renko is played by William Hurt - an actor I generally like despite being rather humorless in most roles... and he is totally humorless here as well. Which is not really in the spirit of the character, but whatever, no movie is ever quite like a book. Still, Hurt is something of a liability here - his stoic/deadpan demeanor along with the incredibly bleak Soviet backdrop (everything is rusted, everything is crumbling, everything is broken) means that this movie is interesting but not entertaining. 

The casting also needs some serious help. Brian Dennehy as an American come over at the height of the cold war to help solve a murder... well, OK. He does pretty much scream "AMERICAN!!" just from his voice and persona. But Lee Marvin as the villain was maybe not the best choice. Menacing, yes. But a good match for this plot (involving smuggled sables!) ... no. 

But honestly, it's really Hurt's game to lose, and lose it he does. He affects a bizarre comes-and-goes British accent, and his persona is all over the map. But, sadly, never a single moment of humanity - just this bleak philosophical blank attitude toward the whole world. 

It's a real letdown, considering how good the book was. The true star of the movie is the Soviet atmosphere (it was filmed in Helsinki, I believe), which is incredibly dismal and snowy and run down. It "feels" like what I imagine Soviet Russia in the early '80s to look and sound like. That alone is worth something, and so the movie isn't a total wash. But it misses out in a big way. 

The movie was directed by Michael Apted, who you might know from Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, Thunderheart, Nell, The World is Not Enough, and recently the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. A real veteran. I ascribe whatever victories this movie accomplishes to him. 

IMDB reports it brought in just shy of $16 million... but no data on how much it cost to make. Safe to say it was less than that and it made money at the end of the day. 

Meanwhile, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) appears on the horizon. Famously a Madonna vehicle, also featuring Rosanna Arquette and Aiden Quinn and Laurie Metcalf, small roles for John Turturro and Giancarlo Esposito and my personal favorite Richard Edson in a brief cameo. Pretty decent cast for 1985, all in all.

Like Xanadu last week, this movie has a really great soundtrack. Full on '80s explosion right from the beginning. Incidental music by the great Thomas Newman (American Beauty, many others). 

So, the plot: Roberta (Arquette) is a bored housewife who sees a series of ads in the paper that are to and from  mysterious chick named Susan - including, you got it - "Desperately Seeking Susan." Curious and with nothing better to do, she heads into NYC and seeks out said Susan, just for kicks. Finding her, she gets in complicated amnesia-based hot water with the Mafia and goes on the run with Susan. Pretty typical '80s fare. 

The movie drips with style to spare - crazy wallpaper, zebra print luggage, leather hand wraps, the cool aforementioned jacket (has a giant glitzy Masonic pyramid on the back, designed by Santo Loquasto), wild neon arm bangles, crazy striped muscle shirts, you name it. The great soundtrack just emphasizes the thorough 80s-ness. It takes me back. 

This movie is really about Arquette's character, she is the lead in every way, but after Madonna's popularity apexed around the time of this film's release Arquette was actually nominated for the *supporting* BAFTA award. Crazy! Pauline Kael famously called Madonna an "indolent, trampy goddess," which I was delighted to see repeated on Wikipedia for the world to read. That is pretty accurate, actually - props to Kael. And her fellow reviewer Vincent Canby named it one of the 10 Best of the year. Does it deserve it?

Hard to say. This movie is really, at the heart of things, one long music video ode to popular culture with the thinnest veneer of plot brushed over it. But it's a fun music video, and moves quickly and gives you a pretty decent feel for mid-80s New York. Aiden Quinn (80s character name of "Dez") is good, the leads are acceptable, the cameos are fun, and it moves pretty quickly. So, I guess I would recommend it. Check it out, it's a mid-80s time capsule. 

Meanwhile, let's end with the original demo version of Madonna's "Into the Groove," only found in this movie:

Xanadu (1980)

Xanadu (1980) is really a holdover from the '70s, but since it was released in our beloved ninth decade of the twentieth century, we must discuss it. 

It's pretty well known at this point as a campy cult classic of somewhat insane neon-drunk proportions. The director is Robert Greenwald, a TV/documentary legend who didn't make many feature films. One odd one he did was 1997's Breaking Up, a direct-to-video movie featuring Russell Crowe and Selma Hayak (!!). The point being that Greenwald perhaps doesn't have a big screen sensibility so much as a TV sensibility. 

One nice thing you can say about Xanadu - it is damned colorful. Bold yellows, greens, blues, reds, purples, pinks - they're everywhere. 

One not-nice thing you can say about Xanadu - the dialog is freaking horrendous. When our main character Sonny Malone (no, really) encounters a man sitting on a rock at the beach playing a clarinet (no, really), the dialog contains such pithy gems like "Say mister, what are you doing up there???" and then the mystery man's eventual statement that "They sure don't make rocks like they used to!!" HUH!?!??!?! HUHHHH?!?!?!? Not to mention that the old clarinet man is GENE KELLY. How did this happen?

High octane this film is not. The movie is full of inexplicable and usually accidental moments, most of them unintentionally funny. I love the incredible fake scream Sonny gives when he crashes a borrowed moped off a pier, followed by a glowing orange woman zooming off into the sky. No, really. 

The plot is brain-dead fluff about the nine Olympic Muses (as in Ancient Greece) coming to vibrant neon roller-skating life from a bizarre mural in sunny California. The one that is Olivia Newton-John serves as Sonny's muse (he's an artist). Another dialog gem: "You. I ran into you earlier today. I never set eyes on you before today. Now I've seen you three times today. I don't believe it." Brilliant, Sonny. He doesn't need a muse, he needs an education. At age ~25, he must be the oldest kid in third grade. 

The highlight of the movie, of course, is the music. The soundtrack sold very well, and I actually own it on vinyl (got it free, it's a long story). It's divided up into songs by Olivia Newton-John (including the hit title track) and songs by ELO. It was a worldwide smash, number one in most countries and number four on the Billboard 200 chart. 

Interesting factoid: this is actually a remake of a 1947 movie called Down to Earth with Rita Hayworth and Larry Parks. 

Despite the poor dialog and meh acting, the movie made a very small profit - according to Wikipedia, it cost $20 mil to make and brought home $22 mil - depending on advertising costs, it probably just about broke even. 

Worth seeing? Not really. I would YouTube the songs from the soundtrack, especially the big hits "Xanadu" (provided above) and "Magic," and you'll get a pretty good feel for the tone without having to sit through the rest of the mess. 

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), Legend (1985)

A day late for Halloween (and a dollar short), I humbly present two belated offerings before moving temporarily away from the '80s horror scene: Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and Legend.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is famous for both totally shirking the Michael Myers storyline and going off in a totally different direction with all new characters, and also for not being nearly as bad as virtually every Michael Myers sequel that followed it.

No more Laurie Strode, no more Doctor Loomis, no more Michael in his Shatner mask. Hello pieces of stonehenge used by a half-baked Irish madman to turn half-baked children's Halloween masks into horrific explosions of bugs and snakes as a sacrifice to half-baked druidic gods. Wait, I thought the Irish hated snakes?!

The plot is quite stupid. Our main character is one of the worst doctors in movie history, as he seems to be the ONLY doctor on duty on the night shift in his small hospital, yet he has absolutely no problem leaving to have a tryst with a woman, and then to essentially become an investigator into this mask mumbo jumbo.

Nevertheless, stupid beyond belief does not preclude fun. And this movie is pretty fun. It's crazy watching lasers shoot out of the TV - the masks are activated by a specific TV commercial, seen here:

As many, many reviews have noted, the plot makes no sense because of time zones. Since the commercials come on during a predetermined horror film festival on TV, the minute the East Coast put two and two together, the Midwest and West Coast are saved. Poor planning!

Also, why do the masks only come in three varieties? There is Lumpy Pumpkin, Wizard of Oz Witch, and So-So Skull. I wouldn't have been caught dead in any of them as a kid, but the kids in this movie eat them up like so much Halloween candy. No one can get enough, as if it was a fad.

Plot aside, this was an attempt by John Carpenter to mix things up. He wanted, apparently, to release a Halloween movie every year with a different unrelated story. A noble idea, executed poorly here by writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace, but a noble idea nonetheless.

Despite their bafflement, audiences came to see Halloween III in droves - on a budget of $2.5 mil, it brought home $14 mil. Impressive!

The other '80s fare tonight is the reverse: made for $24 mil, but only brought in $14.4 mil - losing about the same as Halloween III made. It's also going to be a slightly different sort of review... Ridley Scott's strange fairy tale Legend (1985) came out after his masterpieces were done: The Duellists, Alien, Blade Runner. What a trifecta!! After that, he was hit or miss: Legend, Someone to Watch Over Me, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1492, White Squall, G. I. Jane, and then followed by the long slow slide into action movies starting with Gladiator.

Legend is a weird, weird movie. I'm not sure what it wants to be. I'm not sure IT knows what it wants to be. It is extremely serious, without a single intentional joke in the whole movie. It acts like it wants to be a lost Grimm tale, deadly serious and full of ominous foreboding and Big Deep Messages About Life. But ... it also comes across as silly and thin as tissue paper and is not very well acted (sorry, young Tom Cruise and young Mia Sara). Tom Cruise seems baffled the entire time and has a particularly constipated look on his face. Poor Mia Sara, who is so good in Ferris Bueller's Day Off the year after this, has nothing to do here but look vaguely distressed.

The only really compelling reason to watch this is Tim Curry in heavy makeup as a really crazy Satan. At least, I think he's Satan. He seems diametrically opposed to all good things, and if the shoe fits...  Curry really hams it up and is the only cast member who seems to realize what the hell is going on.

Legend is a really big misstep for Ridley Scott. After three really unusual movies in a row, all critically acclaimed and praised heaven to heaven, I'm sure the studios assumed anything he touched - no matter how weird - would come out OK. Sadly, he didn't have the Golden Touch after all. In fact, many/most of the film he made after Legend were pretty quickly forgotten and don't have much of anything to say.

One of my younger sister's best friends in high school was obsessed with Legend, so I've seen it a number of times. But the last time I saw it I was pumped to the gills and beyond on bloody marys and taco bell. And I've got to say... it was the best I've ever seen it!!

It's a movie ripe for a Rifftrax/MST3K treatment. Myself and three friends (and two young kids) just sat and made fun of the stink cheese that is Legend... and it was fun! So I recommend viewing this one in company and under aid of inebriation.

Fright Night (1985)

Again, folks, sorry for the long absence between posts. My job and living situation has settled down slightly, and I should be back in the saddle as soon as the Comcast people fix my broken DVR. Meanwhile, I still have access to the On Demand movies, and while browsing I found ...

1985's cult classic Fright Night!

The plot is a really traditional/overused one, that you've probably seen (too?) many times in horror films - innocent kid sees evil things happening next door, nobody believes him until it's too late, it's up to kid (and sometimes mentor or friends) to banish the evil forever. Think Salem's Lot, Phantasm, The People Under the Stairs, etc etc. 

Here, the cast is really note perfect for a cheesy pop-horror flick. Chris Sarandon is magnificent as the evil vampire next door. Amanda Bearse is note-perfect as the "girl next door" girlfriend of our main character Charley, who is more or less convincingly played by William Ragsdale (best known for a slew of TV roles, including Herman from the early '90s Fox sitcom Herman's Head). His friend Evil Ed we've seen before on this blog, as Hoax (the nerdy kid) in 976-EVIL. And the fantastic Roddy McDowell is Peter Vincent, a mash-up of Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. 

The movie goes by pretty quickly and it's a neat 100 minutes. There are a number of nice little touches throughout, like how the vampire is munching on apples - apparently Chris Sarandon  suggested to the director Tom Holland that "there was a little bit of fruit bat in him" ... weird, but OK. It adds atmosphere and is a nice quirky touch. 

Or Charley's awesome Mustang, which the vampire spitefully destroys - that's when you know he's REALLY evil. Or the way the vampire rises from his coffin stiff as a board, just like Nosferatu. Or the good "Vampire Face" makeup. Or the great '80s club scene where the vampire just TRASHES two innocent bouncers. Or the fantastic vampire death scene in the basement. 

That's a pretty good list, and I could keep going easily. The movie is one of those "sum of the parts is more than the whole" gigs where there are a fantastic number of little things that add up. 

It was a the highest grossing horror film in 1985! Who knew? It cost $9 million to make, and brought back just shy of $25 million in the US alone, not counting video or DVD or foreign gross. Pretty decent. It's a LOT of fun, and in this coming Halloween season is worth putting on with a bowl of popcorn and a group of friends. 

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.