Kuukausi: maaliskuu 2019

#1056 The Hollywood Knights (1980)

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The Hollywood Knights follows a gang high school fraternity of the post–World War II baby boom generation during one long halloween night of 1965 as they go around playing nasty pranks to teachers, policemen and fellow students.

Considering that the pranks aren’t particularly funny, nor creative – pissing to a punch bowl is as high brow as it gets – they are showcased far too much in the movie. The real human interest story of the young couple played by Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer is bypassed with a few quick shots and does not get the attention it deserves. Same goes for the story of Jimmy, one of the Hollywood Knights, who’s enlisted and heading to Vietnam unbeknownst of the horrors that await there. Although this part of the movie is better handled, I would’ve liked to see more even more emphasis on this side of the story.

What makes this movie is not its plot, characters nor even its humour, but the way it successfully invites the viewer to be a part of this one wild night as one of the Hollywood Knights.

80s-o-meter: 55%

Total: 68%

#1055 Nobody’s Perfekt (1981)

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You remember those older, round backed, worn out VHS tape cases in a distant corner of a video rental store that nobody really checked through anymore? Nobody’s Perfekt is a typical movie you’d find stacked in a pile like this.

Three fellows suffering from minor mental defects wreck their car on a pot hole and take a revenge on the city hall, specifically the mayor. Their cunning plan includes stealing a cannon and hitching a ferry and they end up on the tail of a bunch of criminals doing a heist.

The movie is generally good natured, but mostly with witless gags with the punch lines visible miles away. A random customer checking out the video might’ve been somewhat content with the selection back in mid 80s, but unless you identify as one, it’s best to leave this one at the video rack.

80s-o-meter: 74%

Total: 19%

#1054 Micki & Maude (1984)

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A man in a severe baby fever impregnates his wife and lover at the same time in Micki & Maude, a period piece of a comedy done in the era when sexual revolution was just turning to baby boom.

As you’d imagine, most of the comedy here is derived from the close calls of the two brides almost bumping into each other, and ending up having a labour together which feels such a predictable move that it felt tired instantly the scene had started. Although, there is one recurring gag, involving a great sweatshirt that does pay off in the end providing one of the better belly laughs of the movie. Much of the carrying of the movie is done by the lead Dudley Moore, who manages to pull off the despicable role while remaining lovable and funny, and it’s easy to seem what a complete disaster the film could’ve been in more unexperienced hands.

Micki & Maude has the much too common problem of cooking up a drama much too big to be resolved in a satisfactory way, leaving the writer no options but to weasel out of the situation with a wishy-washy, lukewarm solution in the end.

80s-o-meter: 81%

Total: 62%

#1053 Volunteers (1985)

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Tom Hanks and John Candy star as Peace Corps volunteers send to a small Thai village to build a bridge in Volunteers, an adventurous, never-quite-funny comedic take on The Bridge on the River Kwai, something of an odd target for a parody.

It takes quite a while for the Volunteers to find its tone of voice; it’s only towards the last 30 minutes of the movie that it starts to be enjoyable. Before that the movie feels much disoriented and shoddy and the bad camerawork where most subjects seem out of focus and oddly framed. It seems that the movie can’t really make up what it’d want to be, exactly; even the elements of crazy comedy are tried out at one point when the characters start reading the subtitles superimposed to the screen, which seems bit of a faux pas.

If I was to judge Volunteers only by its end part, it would rate nearer the 80 point mark as it manages to press many feel good buttons in the last minutes. But as a whole the movie can’t really be recommended, even if you’re a fan of the comedy of Hanks or Candy.

80s-o-meter: 78%

Total: 61%

#1052 Hero at Large (1980)

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Hero at Large is an innocent little tale of a aspiring actor who tries to make the ends meet by posing as a super hero, until he one day stumbles upon a robbery that he stops. He then finds a new direction to his out of stepping in to help people while getting intimate with the lady next door.

It’s a movie that wouldn’t be made today – heck, it probably wouldn’t warrant even a single TV episode: Writing is sloppy and none of the event really make too much sense or follow logic. Other than the movie logic, that is.

Hero at Large is something of a relic of its time, but at least it’s a good hearted and benignant one, for all that it’s worth.

80s-o-meter: 74%

Total: 59%

#1051 Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986)

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Jumpin’ Jack Flash is probably the best known of the Whoopi Goldberg’s 80s comedies. And it is a pretty well-rounded, sure shot of a comedy – that’s just somehow even a bit too well-rounded and tame.

What I did find distracting watching the movie after a long while is how Goldberg is either forced or wilfully performing some kind of female Eddie Murphy schtick here. Gags like getting loud and foul-mouthed or making an embarrassing public scene are all too familiar from movies like Beverly Hills Cop or 48Hrs. I’ve always found Goldberg a good actor that succeeds better in the moments when she is not loud nor obnoxious.

All in all it’s a pretty wishy-washy ride. But also so good willed that it’s easy to forgive most of its shortcomings.

80s-o-meter: 89%

Total: 73%

#1049 Far from Home (1989)

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Father and daughter run out of gas and get stranded on a lone town in the middle of the desert in Far From Home, an interesting little thriller that saw a limited theatrical release upon its release.

What makes the movie interesting is not its setting nor the plot, but the good kind of movie-like quality of the small town and its trailer park that gets borderline abstract at times.

For a thriller the movie fails to deliver any kind of suspense and even when the killings take place, they seem more humorous than something that would have you on the edge of the seat. Matt Frewer and Drew Barrymore make for a solid and believable pair as the father and daughter, but the two young trailer park brothers both seem badly directed or complete miscasts for their roles.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 70%

#1048 The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)

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Western movies were quite a craze starting from the 30s all the way to the 60s, after which they fell out of style in the 70s. The Legend of the Lone Ranger was an attempt to bring back Lone Ranger – the masked wild west hero that made his original debut already in the 30s – to the Star Wars generation.

It did not go down well. But then again, it wasn’t a valiant effort to start with.

Cinematography wise the movie looks like it belongs way to the past and its clearly not positioned right for its target audience: The film is much too violent for the youngsters and much too childish and lame for the grown ups. It takes ages for the Lone Ranger to appear and while the movie picks up the pace towards the end, it’s just too little, too late.

80s-o-meter: 24%

Total: 31%

#1047 Gotcha! (1985)

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Like mentioned numerous times before, there was a hangup in the 80s to do movies based on Europe. Paris in particular was a popular location, due to its romantic and mysterious reputation to the US public, with many dreaming to travel there one day. Unfortunately the European locations rarely translated well to the American cinema and the endless number of films with out of the water US citizen involuntarily getting into all sorts of mishaps are often only tedious to sit through.

Gotcha! breaks this spell .. sort of. I don’t find the locations fascinating, but they do feel less distracting than usual. It’s an interesting little espionage story that manages to pull off something refreshingly different.

Young Anthony Edwards proves he can carry a full length feature film as the sole lead, most likely somewhat saving Gotcha from total oblivion.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 74%

#1046 Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983)

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Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is officially a sci-fi movie taking place on some distant planet, but don’t let a few latex masks and flying vehicles fool you: This is another one for the pile of the dystopian, post-apocalyptic desert action films.

The movie boasts somewhat better production values than its competition with modified cars, costumes and limited special effects, but the story itself is so uninteresting that I had a hard time keeping alert while watching the movie.

Unlike many other shoddy sci-fi titles of the era, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn does not really have any sort of cult following, probably due to not being shoddy enough to be any kind of guild pleasure. The film is also available as a shoddy 3D version, which does not really add to the experience at all.

80s-o-meter: 58%

Total: 22%

#1045 Cyborg (1989)

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Written in one weekend and shot with shoelace budget just to find some use for movie sets and costumes left over from cancelled movies, Cyborg is a prime example of how movies shouldn’t be made.

The movie is pretty much a mess, edited painstakingly to make it to the feature film length. The pacing is way off and the cyborg theme is not followed through at all. The few fight scenes with Jean-Claude Van Damme handing out roundhouse kicks are somewhat entertaining but go only so far to save the movie.

The lack of vision and enthusiasm shines through every crevice of the movie and Cyborg ends up a lifeless shell of a movie done solely with quick cash business goals in mind.

80s-o-meter: 81%

Total: 8%

#1044 The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper (1981)

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The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper retells the story of a hijacker who escaped with $200,000 after leaping from the back of a Boeing 727 on 1971 and became a something of a media pet at the time.

As you’d imagine the movie takes quite a few liberties from the original story to beef it up, but even so the movie doesn’t really keep up the interest that well. The selected genre is a scoundrel movie that was popular at the time, but what’s seen here can’t really hold up a candle to the genre classics like The Cannonball Run, even if the movie was based on some real life events.

The charm that the movie might’ve had at some point probably had to do with being already familiar with the story. For the 2019 viewer, that magic is unfortunately long gone.

80s-o-meter: 76%

Total: 38%

#1043 A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988)

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A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon portrays an insignificant little story taking place during the 60s for no apparent reason, and does a pretty bad job at conveying the said period.

Often dubbed by the worst movie of River Phoenix by his fans, River himself wqs reportedly embarrassed having to play the part. And really, there is very little to be loved here. We’re forced to watch through the mishaps of a womanising brat trying to pass as an adult while betraying his best friend, cheating on his girlfriend, reciting bad poetry while trying to borrow enough money from someone to get a one way ticket to Hawaii.

A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon is an unfortunate smut in the solid lineup of movies River had before his untimely death in 1993.

80s-o-meter: 51%

Total: 16%

#1042 Impulse (1984)

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I never read any information about the movies I’m about to watch, but I do check out the posters and VHS covers beforehand as I feel they’re an essential part of the overall experience. It’s a pretty good meter in managing the expectations for the quality of the movie: If the poster completely lacks any effort, chances are that the movie itself is a half-hearted effort as well. And then, once in a blue moon along comes a movie where the poster sets the mood completely wrong, but also manages to be off-putting and misleading at the same time.

If I had checked out the cover of the Impulse beforehand, I’d probably postpone watching it to the next decade. Fortunately I didn’t and instead of a soft porn movie suggested by the poster, I found a pretty nifty action thriller with a slight horror twist to it. Story wise there isn’t anything new here but the production values are good and the movie keeps the viewer successfully on the edge of the seat as the events soon spiral out of control.

As usual with the movies with such an enormous conflict, Impulse fails to wrap everything up in the most satisfactory way in the end, resorting to the 70s way of summarising the final events in writing which really feels like a faux pas in an otherwise solid movie.

80s-o-meter: 86%

Total: 79%

#1041 The Hunter (1980)

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I’ve had The Hunter movie laying around for a few years now and based on the cover image I always mistook it for a action film with a cop trailing a killer. What we got here instead is a loose biography of an aging bounty hunter Ralph ”Papa” Thorson who goes after (often petty) criminals who’ve skipped on their bail.

Yes, I’ve never heard about Thorson either. He wasn’t exactly a widely known character in his days, much less these days. If his life or person were anything interesting, The Hunter sadly fails to capture any of that. Steve McQueen is his charismatic self but fails to be nothing more than Steve McQueen and seems a far cry from the big framed, grizzly Thorson. We get the idea that he is a bad driver and that his young wife is expecting a baby that Thorson doesn’t really want to have, but other than that, all the really interesting bits about him – like his colourful working history – is left out of the movie.

The Hunter goes down in history primarily for being the last movie for Steve McQueen who sadly passed away with cancer after wrapping up the film. He was 50 years old at the time.

80s-o-meter: 71%

Total: 48%

#1040 Battle Creek Brawl aka The Big Brawl (1980)

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Jackie Chan appears in his first english speaking role in Battle Creek Brawl, a comedic martial arts movie with disappointing plot and an uninspired 1930s setting. Chan himself already shows some of the promise in the imaginatively humorous fighting choreographies that later become his trademark, but it’s those same more recent movies that make the moves seen here kind of basic.

What I did like was how the actual Texas brawl tournament was setup, with an imaginative array of fighters that reminded me in a good way of many classic fighting arcade games like Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Street Fighter series, both of which might have takes some cues from this movie.

Despite the few good fighting bits, as a movie Battle Creek Brawl is a pretty tired show that has a bit too much whiff from the past – both the 30s and late 70s – for me to really enjoy.

80s-o-meter: 32%

Total: 38%

#1039 Heat (1986)

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I never was a fan of Burt Reynolds’ smirky, above oneself comedy character seen in oh too many films, so I was surprised to seeing him in dramatic action roles where he is not only tolerable, but actually pretty good!

In Heat he plays a body guard longing of leaving Las Vegas behind him for good, but keeps on making some bad decisions that take him further back on his dreams. The movie feels almost as a prequel to Malone, released the following year and although the movie is bit of a mess plot wise, the movie is never taxing to watch.

Heat also features one of most hilarious kill moves ever, featuring a canister of gas and a light bulb, and is worth watching for that scene alone.

80s-o-meter: 84%

Total: 72%

#1038 Class (1983)

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A private school brainiac goes for a wild night out and hooks up with a woman of his dreams who woefully turns out to be his roommate’s mother in Class, probably the only decent early 80s comedy with the adult-youngster forbidden love theme (the other ones being My Tutor, Private Lessons and Blame it on Rio).

The movie works because it is first and foremost a decent comedy instead of cringeworthy voyeuristic peeping tom flick like its aforementioned competition. There’s some genuinely good chemistry between Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe and I can see the movie failing in many ways with other some less skilled leads.

The well built conflict that tears the friendship apart proves out to be too big for the screenwriters of the movie who weasel out of the situation in a disappointingly lukewarm fashion in the end.

80s-o-meter: 82%

Total: 79%