I knew it all along.  These films were just too familiar.  Of course the Snakeman would have to make an appearance, alongside the other fashionable nightmare fuel of that age - nuclear apocalypse.  Absolutely uncanny, but again, I'm sure this was the lingua franca of the entire zeitgeist.  Another film that I adored, although it would date less generously and seem a lot more silly in a mere few years.  Dennis Quaid was always the acceptable discount Harrison Ford available, and Kate Capshaw was much better here than in Indiana Jones.  The big problem which would reveal itself with a bit more cinematic experience is in how cheesy and phony the dream sequences are portrayed.  I recognize it now as the laziest possible cliches for how to represent these psychological states.  Even as a kid, I think I would have appreciated something a little more surreal and spatially disturbing.  At the time, I didn't really have any frame of reference for how to do it better.





I remember that I was under the impression that this was a Dirty Harry movie, even shortly after first watching it on video.  That may not say much about my observational skills at the time.  But ignoring character names aside, I still enjoyed the film as an erotic thriller, quite risque and far more sexual than my parents had been led to believe, and even in retrospect, I enjoyed it much more than most of the actual Dirty Harry films, including the previous Sudden Impact which I also watched around this time, and seemed very tame by comparison.





At this point, Willy Wonka and Young Frankenstein were already in my go-to pantheon, so I had no problem with Gene Wilder entering into Dudley Moore's shoes by trying his hand (metaphors!) at this very 10-ish middle-age male sex comedy.  And being PG-13, it promised to have a little bit of nudity, although I think it was more suggested than revealed (a little side-breast, I believe).  Kelly LeBrock definitely piqued my interest as a swimwear model worthy muse, and with a witty breathy British coo.  But the fact is that, like 10, this is really a film that can only be appreciated with some romantic experience under one's belt, and the film is an enjoyable enough romp, but at the time, I could only appreciate the titillation.




Speaking of which, it probably speaks for itself that even in my adenoidally impaired state that I found this film to be completely unengaging.  I don't want to write off Tanya Roberts as an actress entirely based on this, but here, she is only superficially sexy and lacks whatever intended animal allure, and even immature Jinn could recognize hacky dialogue that would have embarrassed Fantasy Island writers.  Everything about it is cheap, which is the ultimate erotic killer.  (More on this next week.)
 

Here's a film that I credit entirely to my Starlog subscription, which ran a glowing review that intrigued me enough to pick up a VHS rental.  It's pretty low-budget, slightly funny, and really only sci-fi in concept than execution.  But I was happy to have these oppotunities to try something different.  And it was especially interesting that John Sayles had also written things like Pirhana, Alligator, Battle Beyond the Stars and The Howling.  Which each and all have very little resemblence here.




This was one of the first films I had taped on blank VHS from HBO, I think.  It's a solid detective drama, with lots of great actors I did not yet know (Denzel Washington, Howard Rollins, Robert Townsend), and the great Adolph Caesar playing the kind of nightmare drill sergeant that fits between Stripes' Warren Oates and Full Metal Jacket's R. Lee Ermey. 





This is a little more obscure, but it filmed around rural Kentucky where I grew up which is why it got some notice.  This isn't a bad film, probably standard Southern drama fare, for all I remember, but it was also Martha Plimpton's debut so that I could recognize her in next year's Goonies.
 

I remember the scene where Drew Barrymore gets real drunk on champagne.  Probably a very irresponsible film, and is of more interest now in context to Barrymore's biography, but still has so many important essentially 1984 elements here.





And like clockwork, here's perhaps the most contrived 1984 experience package.  An LA MTV Party melange of 80s faces and new wave pop rock.  Maybe sorta funny here and there, Eric Stoltz is very concerned.  It's like, "Guys?  What's it all about?"  Probably made a profit, what do I know?





All I remember is that Meg Tilly kicked all of the ass like the film itself didn't deserve her.
 

I didn't know much about the Talking Heads outside of a couple of weird videos like "Burning Down the House" and "Once in a Lifetime".  One of my dad's friends had recommended this and dubbed him a copy, so we watched the VHS probably sometime in spring-summer '85.  I enjoyed the organic flow of the material and staging, although it would be several years yet before I began collecting their records.




I was actually far more interested in this at the time, even though "No More Lonely Nights" wasn't a favorite McCartney track.  But I was interested enough in the Beatles and a few McCartney solo tunes (probably mostly culled from the Wings Over America LPs) to take a look.  But the press was bad.  Really really bad, in fact.  Bad enough that no one showed the thing anywhere near me.  Once I got a look of it on video, it began to dawn on me why.  The film is garbage, worse than even the expected "series of music videos strung together" would suggest.  Imean, I could sit and enjoy the entire Duran Duran VHS "video album" from around the same time with no qualms at all.  Broad Street was just a self-indulgent bore.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

For some reason I never saw Temple of Doom in the theater, which seems impossible..but I didn't. I had to wait to rent it on video, and I just remember hating it with a passion. Think I tried it again in highschool to the same results. And none of this makes sense either, because all the darkness and ugliness in that movie should have been right up my alley. Maybe it's because I got a promotional book for it when it was in theaters and it kind of spoiled all the good stuff.

That movie was awful. Even beyond the matter of what did or didn't suit my tastes, the movie just looked awful. When I tried to go back and watch it as an adult I was taken aback by how sloppy the iconic bridge scene looked. The alligator/crocodile cutaways looked like stock footage, conspicuously inserted. It was an unmistakable step down in quality from the guy who had Jaws and the snake–infested Well of Souls under his belt. Actually I don't know if the reptiles were supposed to be alligators or crocodiles because India has both, but I'll just call them alligators for brevity's sake. When characters fell from the bridge to their deaths, what we saw looked like alligators just rolling around in the water, tangled up in fragments of wardrobe and accompanied by overdubbed screams. The hokeyness was jarring enough to disengage my attention entirely and sever my suspension of disbelief. It was the first time I'd seen something from Spielberg that wasn't befitting of his previously–untarnished name. 

I thought the movie relied far too heavily on gross–outs like bugs in your hair and Hot Snake Surprise, which came across as unimaginative cheap shots of lazy writing. Granted, Raiders of the Lost Ark had already shown us Alfred Molina covered in tarantulas, and several scenes slithering with asps, but those were scares, I would argue, not the kind of targeted nauseations we were subjected to in Temple of Doom. The characters weren't deep–throating whole snakes by the mouthful.

Then of course there was the problem of Willie, Cate Capshaw's character, screeeeeemeeeeeennnnngggg through the whoooole goddammmmm moooooviiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

...EEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!


Temple of Doom definitely got over–hyped.
"Steven Spielberg! George Lucas! Filming the GREATEST MOTION PICTURE OF ALL TIME!" That's an actual quote from the Temple of Doom promo that was tacked onto the beginning of the Raiders VHS release. 

But I'd wager it wasn't entirely the spoiler–riddled ads that ruined the movie for you. I think Lucasfilm and Paramount had already seen to it. 

By the time this film hit home video, it had already if quietly achieved at least a cult status, and that poster is hard to argue with.  What the film gets right is that its best scares are the ones in anticipation of terror, such as the opening dream sequence, where the knowledge of scares to come creates the suffocating tension.  And even the eventual realization that the scares to come would, more often than not, be a lot more silly than scary, itself was a kind of catharsis, as if the audience along with our heroine was triumphant in calling the terror's bluff.  But as ludicrous as many of the actual scares were (that final faux-ending was unintentionally a great gut-buster), the film does establish a novel and endearing avatar of subliminal horror, even if much of that promise would be squandered into crass self-parody once Freddy became little more than a lame wise-cracking late night horror TV host.




This film forbodes the rest of the decade's jingoistic negation of the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era made by a bunch of bros who though the last 15 minutes were the best part of First Blood while ignoring all of the necessary build-up which puts this resentment into emotional context.  "Emotional context" is certainly not a phrase that was uttered on the set of Missing in Action, a gross and gauche retread of the much more involving Uncommon Valor from the previous year.  It follows in the macho renaissance of glamorized consequenceless violence and virile vanity.  The sequel - actually a prequel - set in vintage Vietnam, was intended to be released first, but this was rushed out to pre-empt Rambo six months later.  Missing in Action II was the superior film simply for being a straight-forward action film without its predecessor's offensive and far less honest attempts to rewrite history.




Yet another sex comedy where the intended audience surrogate is a sexually obsessed virgin of promising but discouraged talent.  The completely medicore and routine film is only bouyed by the charms of Jon Cryer, a knock-off Matthew Broderick who would really flower in Pretty in Pink a couple of years after, and the young and steamy Demi Moore, whose talent would also take a couple more years to fully mature.
 

I love the first NOES. Compared to the sequels, I appreciate how abstracted and nightmarish Freddy is in this one. And I think while most of these slashers tap into teenage anxieties to some extent, it feels a lot more resonant here, in part because of how good the performances are.

My big takeaway from Missing in Action were all the scenes where Chuck Norris sneaks up in plain view on VC who don’t bother to turn around. The second one is a lot better. Although M. Emmet Walsh is pretty fun. I’ll probably rewatch both at some point. Not the third though, that one is horrible even by the series’ standards.

Rock wrote:

I love the first NOES. Compared to the sequels, I appreciate how abstracted and nightmarish Freddy is in this one. And I think while most of these slashers tap into teenage anxieties to some extent, it feels a lot more resonant here, in part because of how good the performances are.

Also how restrained the suspense.

Rock wrote:

My big takeaway from Missing in Action were all the scenes where Chuck Norris sneaks up in plain view on VC who don’t bother to turn around.

It wouldn't have made any difference in Rambo, where the VC couldn't see well enough to shoot an elephant.