Kuukausi: joulukuu 2022

#1717 Weekend Pass (1984)

Posted on by admin

I can add Weekend Pass to the list of movies that I misinterpreted due to its name and, theme and poster.

We’re led to expect a raunchy comedy where three horny sailors go paint the town red, with lots of gratuitous nudity thrown in, but even though Weekend Pass starts off as such movie, it finds a much more interesting tone by exposing the vulnerabilities and insecurities among the sailors, eventually turning into kind of sweet romance movie about them falling in love with three nice girls.

While this was a positive surprise, I doubt that this was the innovation that most of the audience at time was looking for, which may explain the low ratings the movie received.

80s-o-meter: 83%

Total: 78%

#1716 Buddies (1985)

Posted on by admin

I was delighted to find Buddies, the first movie about AIDS is a non-exploitative one. Directed by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., a director with a long history of gay movies, Buddies feels quite honest in its depiction of the events and characters, never robbing any of the characters their personal traits and sexuality.

The movie is muted in most of its expression as it follows the growing friendship and emerging romance and sexual interest between a young gay man volunteering to be a buddy for an AIDS patient abandoned by his friends and lovers in the final stages of the disease.

A sign of a good movie, Buddies is still thematically relevant, as well as an interesting look into the history of the mid-80s where humanitarian groups had to step in to help for the lack of wider support from the government, and a tribute to those who risked their own safety to help others.

80s-o-meter: 78%

Total: 81%

#1715 Distant Thunder (1988)

Posted on by admin

Most people know John Lithgow for starring in 3rd Rock from the Sun or Dexter, but every movie I’ve seen him in furthermore underlines how he is one of the greatest actors of his era, a versatile performer who has excelled in a wide range of roles and genres.

What makes Lithgow such a great actor is his ability to fully inhabit a character and bring it to life in a believable and nuanced way. He has a talent for finding the heart and humanity in even the most complex and flawed characters, and he has a natural charisma and charm that endears him to audiences.

This shows in Distant Thunder which would not be much of a movie without Lithgow’s stellar performance, as he is able to elevate both mediocre manuscript and a pack of mediocre actors to excellence with his portrayal of the many Vietnam veterans failing to rejoin civilian life, living a vagabond life as one of the mountain men in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Lithgow perfectly captures all the right nuances of socially awkward and traumatised veteran’s clumsy efforts to once again rejoin the society and reach out to his son.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 84%

#1714 Split Decisions (1988)

Posted on by admin

Split Decisions is a boxing movie straight out of a pen of a angsty teenager and its sense of drama feels like a high school musical sans the music.

The father, a boxing trainer, has two sons who are both boxers. He is proud of one and helps him prepare for the Olympics, but he frequently has conflicts with the other son, who is rebellious and hard to deal with. When the troublesome son is killed by a criminal organization after he refuses to lose a match, his brother seeks to avenge his death by challenging the boxer who was involved in the crime syndicate to a fight.

It’s a sports movie so you know how the story will end up, so while waiting for that the personas or their relationships in the movie should be super interesting to watch. Unfortunately all the characters are paper thin, almost caricature like without any interesting growth in them, replaced by drama that feels plain melodramatic and forced.

80s-o-meter: 82%

Total: 18%

#1713 Maria’s Lovers (1984)

Posted on by admin

Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1984 drama follows the story of Ivan, a Yugoslav-American soldier returning home to Pittsburgh traumatised after being held captive in a Japanese POW camp during WW2.

Despite being desperately in love with Maria (Nastassja Kinski) and overcoming his rivals in love, Ivan’s mental health struggles prevent him from fully embracing their relationship physically and mentally. As a result, Maria becomes attracted to a travelling musician casanova.

Maria’s Lovers is visually pleasing movie that has a promise of a great movie written all over it, but ultimately feels confused about what story does it want to tell. The movie is heavy on poetic symbolism that feels similarly intriguing at times, but woefully clumsy at others.

80s-o-meter: 2%

Total: 63%

#1712 Rappin’ (1985)

Posted on by admin

Upon the recent reviewing of Beat Street, I was expecting a cringeworthy musical with gangs rivalling in 80s rappity rap battles and being all melodramatic and their life being oh so hard. Turned out Beat Street was nothing like this, but quite a solid hiphop movie of the 80s, and Rappin’ is the cringy one to avoid.

Or, to fully embrace, if you can appreciate the pissy poor plot of Mario Van Peebles getting out of juvie, being rivalled by a gang leader straight out of Grease musical, battling the big corporation trying to take over their hood and being pushed of doing a rap record and winning a rap competition, because he is so naturally good in the art of rappity rap.

But, like everybody else he would prefer to just be grim, distant, poetic and to suffer – and make the audience suffer with him.

80s-o-meter: 90%

Total: 31%

#1711 Halloween 2022: Watchers (1988)

Posted on by admin

Finally wrapping up this year’s Halloween with Watchers that I’ve had in my peripheral vision for a few years now, being one of the last Corey Haim movies of the 80s I haven’t yet seen.

My expectation was a supernatural movie with certain Watchers lurking in shadows, but to my surprise the movie was about a boy running into a stray dog whom he then adopts, later discovering that it is in fact a runaway experiment from a genetic research lab with mental powers equal to a human, being followed by a dangerous creature from the same lab.

And meeeeh, I did like my first impression better than this quite far fetched scifi story the movie presented to me. The movie is based on a seemingly solid book by Dean Koontz, so my only guess is that something got lost in translation here. The movie is ok, but its core audience leaves me puzzled as the movie feels thematically geared more towards 12-year olds, yet boasts R-rating.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 68%

#1710 Halloween 2022: My Demon Lover (1987)

Posted on by admin

There’s little fun to be had with movies that introduce a concept doomed to fail, and then fail, but amazingly lot of entertainment when the opposite happens.

My Demon Lover is one of those cases where something I absolutely hated on paper – A street musician becoming a demon when sexually aroused and attacking women – surprises and finds an interesting tone of its own, ending up more of a romantic comedy, sprinkled with some dark, grim humour.

80s-o-meter: 90%

Total: 71%

#1709 Halloween 2022: The Immortalizer (1989)

Posted on by admin

For the last two years I’ve plowed through an endless list of uninspired slashers, and it was this year that I got to reap the results of that sacrifice and got to see some horror movies with more interesting concepts.

If you’ve enjoyed action comedy horror movies similar to Dead Heat, the chances are high for you to find something to enjoy here as well. The Immortalizer is wonderfully 80s straight-to-video horror movie of bunch of evil scientist types sending out their mutant creations to kidnap young, beautiful people to give old ultra rich people a chance to live in their bodies through brain transplant.

Sure, it’s trashy and highly stupid movie – but also highly entertaining one, and the poor poster does not really give it the justice it deserves.

80s-o-meter: 94%

Total: 83%

#1708 Halloween 2022: The Cellar (1988)

Posted on by admin

A nuclear family settles into a run-down house in the Texas desert, unaware that it is cursed by a Native American enchantment in the form of a terrifying, underground creature.

The Cellar’s theme centered on stereotypical, borderline racist Native American spirituality falls flat right from the start, and does not feel real nor plausible at all. The generic and forgettable underground monster, which could have easily been replaced with pretty much anything else like an alligator, fails to be scary or threatening.

It’s just so poor script and concept that even top-notch acting and effects couldn’t save this monster horror flick.

80s-o-meter: 83%

Total: 31%

#1707 Halloween 2022: Slaughter High aka April Fool’s Day aka The Last Laugh (1986)

Posted on by admin

Although the poster claims that Slaughter High is from the makers of Friday the 13th, they don’t share the same writers nor the director, so I’m not quite sold on that claim. Anyway, Slaughter High is a copy pastey slasher revenge movie where mistreated and disfigured nerd who was picked in high school gets back to his old school mates visiting the abandoned school in a class reunion, wearing an off-the-shelf old joker mask. Or is it him?

Well, yes it is. And there’s nothing very imaginative going on in the movie. The killer has gained superhuman powers and speed and will get anywhere in the school before others and can smell where they are without seeing them, while the ex students have become more stupid than ever, running around the school and getting separated from each others to be more easy targets.

Slaughter High isn’t a bad slasher and has proper production quality to it, but other than that it’s totally and utterly uninspired product.

80s-o-meter: 89%

Total: 37%

#1706 Halloween 2022: Redneck Zombies (1989)

Posted on by admin

I’ve drawn the line to any movie to end up in my watching list to be shot in film as towards the end of the 80s the amount of VCR recorders skyrocketed and so did the bad movies made by amateur teams, especially in the horror genre.

But, although shot on video Redneck Zombies came with high recommendations from Troma Entertainment so there must be something they saw in the movie, right?

Redneck Zombies is funny, extremely gory and almost anarchistic in the same way that Bad Taste is, and the video treatment only adds to the atmosphere. It’s also shot and cut as a movie shot on a film would’ve, with some actual directing work done by Special Effects coordinator Pericles Lewnes. It’s odd, extremely poor in taste and utterly stupid, but for the people looking exactly for those things Redneck Zombies will provide in abudance.

80s-o-meter: 72%

Total: 63%

#1705 Halloween 2022: The Strangeness (1985)

Posted on by admin

A low budget movie where a group of explorers in an abandoned gold mine get trapped in and haunted by a monster / entity.

This is one of those movie that can’t possible be rated very high because it’s not particularly good. But I appreciate the effort behind this shoelace budgeted movie and did enjoy many of the aspects here, how the clumsy stop motion monster was put together for example and how the movie manages to build a coherent feeling of wandering around in a endless mine when it was mostly shot in a small set build in a garage.

So The Strangeness definitely punches above its weight. But other than that it’s still quite shoddy, most of the scenes for example are lit so that it’s hard to see anything (and I was watching a proper copy of the movie). I will give the movie a few extra points though for having more stickyness than most of the copy pasted horror movies I’ve seen once again this year.

80s-o-meter: 42%

Total: 39%

#1704 Halloween 2022: Spellcaster (1988)

Posted on by admin

Spellcaster is a horror movie that came to be after the executed producer bought an Italian castle for making films. They then quickly cooked up a story about random bunch of people taking part of a TV programme about finding a cheque hit somewhere in the aforementioned castle.

The poster for the movie features the British musician / actor Adam Ant, but his fans will be disappointed to hear that his actual role in the film is limited to just a few quick shots.

Spellcaster was shot already in 1988, but got its official release as late as 1992. And truth to be told, not much would have been robbed from humanity if this one was totally shelled instead.

80s-o-meter: 84%

Total: 32%

#1703 Halloween 2022: The Demons of Ludlow (1983)

Posted on by admin

As per usual there hasn’t been a side of crappy horror movies this year either, and The Demons of Ludlow falls in there somewhere between bad and totally useless.

So there’s basically a haunted automatic piano and villagers getting attacked by people dressed in 19th century clothes apparently living inside the said piano – and it is all as lame as it sounds.

The Demons of Ludlow misses its mark pretty much on all ends, and does not even provide an intentional humour for those looking for giggles and laughs.

80s-o-meter: 1%

Total: 7%

#1702 Halloween 2022: The Hand (1981)

Posted on by admin

As for someone who has plowed through most of the mainstream 80s horror movies a long time ago, and then having to had to settle for finding gems in an endless sea of cheapo horror movies not worth the raw film they’re on, finding a proper horror movie like The Hand with a notable names behind it is a real threat.

Directed by Oliver Stone as his first movie in a decade that turned out a heck of an era for him, The Hand follows Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine), who after struggling with his personal life loses his hands and career as a cartoonist. He finds himself terrorized by blackouts and nightmarish visions of his torn off hand still living a life of its own.

The premise of the movie takes some believing and could have easily gone unintentionally humorous with the lesser talented team, but Stone and Caine completely sell the viewer the idea, keeping everyone in the audience wonderfully in suspense until the end credits roll.

80s-o-meter: 75%

Total: 90%