Category: Comedy

#947 Halloween 2018: Blood Hook (1986)

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If you’re like me and watched your fair share of slashers, you would agree that there’s a certain comedic element present in many of them even if they’re not marketed as comedies – especially the ones that show the imaginative ways how the killers do away with their victims. I’m tend to be very sceptical every time I’m presented with a slasher comedy, as they set out to parodize a movie genre that’s somewhat of a parody to begin with and a setup that rarely lends itself to any witty approaches.

In this sense Blood Hook is the worst of the worst. Otherwise your typical slasher, the comedy here is limited in the method of how the killer attacks his human prey: By throwing an oversized, hooked lure at them. Yes, it is just as funny on the screen as it sounds here.

As much as I sometimes loathe the copy paste slashers, some of them still earn a bit of my respect for having the backbone of not making a total, idiotic buffoonery out of their movie. For Blood Hook, not even that applies.

80s-o-meter: 58%

Total: 3%

#932 Trading Places (1983)

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While Eddie Murphy’s 80s comedies were mostly all successes, Dan Aykroid’s movies of the same era were much more a hit and miss. Luckily for Murphy, Trading Places is definitely much more of a hit.

The story here is about two old rich geezers making a wager that leads to Louis Winthorpe III and Billy Ray Valentine, two men out of the opposite ends of the social class spectrum having to exchange their lives. Directed by John Landis, the movie offers some clever moments, but could’ve used some trimming here and there to keep up the pace.

I can’t say Trading Places was such a riot I’d remembered it to be, but definitely offers some good laugh out moments, and the fans of either Murphy or Aykroid will be very much at home here.

80s-o-meter: 78%

Total: 79%

#931 Full Metal Jacket (1987)

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Directed with mastery by Stanley Kubrick Full Metal Jacket is a different kind of war movie consisting of individual segments all of which have been designed to stick. The barbershop opening scene, training bit, helicopter flight, tv interviews, getting pinned by the sniper all have became a part of pop culture imagery we now associate with Vietnam war.

As with any Vietnam War movie, the contemporary music plays a big part here as well, with tracks like The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black and The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird. The ending scene as the soldiers march through the flaming ruins at the end, and join together in singing the Mickey Mouse club march, reminding us of the chilling of the end of an innocence.

A perfect movie in its own right, Full Metal Jacket is a flawless exercise in dark humour and sheer madness that is war.

80s-o-meter: 68%

Total: 100%

#925 Red Heat (1988)

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Towards the end of the eighties the Hollywood movies started to reach out to gap the bridge torn between the two nations by the Cold War. Red Heat joins up two sides of the same coin kind of detectives from the rivalling nations together in a buddy cop movie that gets some extra mileage out of its nonconventional setup.

Ivan Danko, the CCCP detective played by Schwarzenegger draws a strong resemblance with Ivan Drago, a big framed antagonist from Rocky IV that famously muttered out only 9 lines of dialogue during the whole movie that he starred in. Both of the characters’ emotionless, powerful and almost non human qualities seem to meet very well the movie going publics’ expectations of the Russians – personally I’ve yet to meet anyone from behind the iron curtain even closely resembling either one.

At the top of his career in 1988 Schwarzenegger could very well pick the movies he wanted to be in, and in that light Red Heat is a somewhat weird choice since the wooden acting style is a step back from his earlier movies towards, on par what’s seen in 1984 Terminator. The character Schwarzenegger plays is also atypical for him as it has many comical sidekick qualities to it and keeps on making one bad decision after another throughout the movie, getting beaten up, shot and getting multiple people killed along the way.

Guess the Hollywood wasn’t ready to for an actual Russian hero just quite yet.

The fish out of water backstory provides a good base to this action comedy but if this wasn’t a Schwarzenegger movie, Red Heat would be average at best.

80s-o-meter: 92%

Total: 77%

#924 Cherry 2000 (1987)

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A white collar worker’s last of its line fembot – a Cherry 2000 – short circuits and ends up beyond repair. To find a replacement, he sets out to find a tracker to bring him one from the forbidden Zone 7, and soon unwillingly finds himself in the midst of an adventure.

Mixing various genres is always a huge gamble, but in Cherry 2000’s case the inventive forces behind it seemingly have a good time borrowing elements from sci-fi, cyberpunk, western and road movies and mixing them with elements of dystopian deserted world, 1950s and even some maniac campers. Unfortunately this lead to the movie ending hard to explain to the movie going masses and was deemed a straight to video instead of a theatrical release.

After its release the movie started gaining a cult following and has since inspired various movie and video game makers alike.

80s-o-meter: 88%

Total: 81%

#916 Grandview, U.S.A. (1984)

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Telling a story of a few individuals on the verge of a change in their lives in a small town, Grandview, U.S.A. is a successful little exercise in storytelling that feels a perfectly suitable for a TV, but doesn’t have that big screen charm to it.

The movie unravels its story, setting and many characters in a way that feels like a 90 minute pilot for a series. By taking its sweet time we get a good feel of the people and their aspirations, but makes for a slow paced movie where the viewer is never quite sure what storyline to follow and if more characters will still be introduced. I was afraid that the movie would run out of time tying its many loose ends together, but it does manage to conclude the main storyline in a satisfactory manner.

Being a forgotten movie for the general public, Grandview, U.S.A. boasts pretty impressive array of front line 80s actors including Jamie Lee Curtis, C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, John Cusack and Michael Winslow.

80s-o-meter: 90%

Total: 75%

#915 Cheech & Chong: Still Smokin (1983)

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Cheech & Chong, the comedy duo hit it big with their pot-head 1978 film debut Up in Smoke, and managed to release three more box office hits in the following years until hitting a brick wall with Still Smokin, a haphazardly tossed off sorry excuse for a movie that marked the downfall of the duet, followed by even bigger stinkers like The Corsican Brothers.

In Still Smokin the two travel over to Amsterdam for a film festival, where they start getting ready for a gala and shoot a number of small skits, from which the movie is then stitched together with. The last 25 minutes of the so called movie consists of a footage of their actual live stage act, which translates for the big screen even worse than the earlier skits.

There isn’t much good in this pile of leftovers, but just maybe a good lesson to be learned: Sometimes it’s just good to quit while you’re ahead.

80s-o-meter: 71%

Total: 7%

#914 Dudes (1987)

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A movie starring Jon Cryer and Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers fame) that most people me included have never even heard about? Color me interested!

Dudes follows up a three New York punk rockers that take a road trip with a VW Beetle from the east coast to get to the California, only to be ambushed by a gang of redneck thugs in Arizona. After the local police deny helping the two survivals, they then set out to find the gang themselves to revenge the death of their friend.

Dudes tries a little something of its own with freely mixing genres and presenting us some weird dream sequences and ghosts of the warriors passing by the prairie, but there’s something a little off throughout the movie and its screenplay. It all looks and sounds good, but other than that it just seems to wander around aimlessly for the most of its running time.

Cryer and Daniel Roebuck make for a likeable duo that I really see standing a chance of becoming a part of 80s pop culture catalogue had the script been better.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 60%

#910 Finders Keepers (1984)

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Remember The Whoopee Boys that I reviewed a while back? It took me awhile to even make the connection that Michael O’Keefe from that stinker of a movie is the same actor that plays the lead here, so much on another level is his performance in Finders Keepers. Here he manages to make for a perfect lovable scoundrel and even to pull off some genuinely funny physical comedy, both of which not easy feats at all.

Aiding him is Beverly D’Angelo from the National Lampoon’s Vacation fame and I really dug the weird chemistry between the two. Brian Dennehy makes for a terrific constantly outraged local mayor of a Nebraska two horse town and last but definitely not least David Wayne is just simply hilarious as the baffling, demented old conductor. Fans of Jim Carrey might be interested to check out the movie as he visits the set briefly as a local yokel in a performance only a shadow of the things to come.

Finders Keepers is one funny and entertaining comedy and a forgotten gem to add to your watch list.

80s-o-meter: 90%

Total: 87%

#909 Three Men and a Baby (1987)

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Let’s gather up three hot top list Hollywood male actors and make them go sickly sweet trying to cope with a baby in a clumsy fashion; this has been my presumption on Three Men and a Baby, and the very reason I’ve been steering away from it for the last 30 or so years.

But, I was wrong. What we have here is a terrific, smartly written and savvily directed comedy with a big heart and many laughs. After the woefully sluggish start depicting the swinging lifestyle of the three bachelors the movie really picks up as the baby arrives. Sure, there are some syrupy moments here, but Leonard Nimoy very smartly directs away from the most obvious clichés.

Three Men and a Baby was a huge box office hit and ended up the biggest grossing movie of 1987 – and not undeservedly so.

But I still do loathe the poster.

80s-o-meter: 91%

Total: 92%

#908 The Dirt Bike Kid (1985)

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Some of the family movies are awesome and in their own way the best that 80s has to offer; the movies like E.T., Princess Bride or Big are crafted with such a mastership that they enchant both the old and the young. These are the kind of movies that manage to revive that small kids inside of us and make us want to believe there might be a little bit of magic and adventure left in the world.

Then, there are movies like The Dirt Bike Kid. Designed by a committee of adults specifically for the kids with ideas lifted from other movies. Starring here can be seen Peter Billingsley, that kid from A Christmas Story that wanted a BB gun from santa. If you adored that movie, stay clear from this one as all that charm is absent here.

The Dirt Bike Kid is a prime example of a soulless creation that happens when you design something to monetise on a specific demography by trying to figure out the lowest common denominators.

80s-o-meter: 88%

Total: 17%

#905 A Fine Mess (1986)

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Kind of living up to its name, A Fine Mess is a mess alright; some mafia henchmen have drugged a race horse and when two deadbeats find out about it and win a ton of cash, the crooks go after them. Most of the rest of the movie consists of the goody henchmen chasing the men around in extended chase sequences, often sped up for a comedic effect.

Unlikely and inane plot twists follow each other as they purchase a piano from the auction by accident and then sell it to the mob boss. The writer and director Blake Edwards based the movie on an old Laurel & Hardy style, which does not translate well at all to the contemporary movie. Not in this particular experimentation at least.

There’s a slight positive undertone with the movie that keeps watchable, at least for awhile. But as the bad ingredients keep piling on, A Fine Mess becomes less on an entertainment and more a chore to watch.

80s-o-meter: 62%

Total: 32%

#904 Deathrow Gameshow (1987)

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Precisely the kind of a movie that the film critics pan for having no merits, Deathrow Gameshow follows a dystopic and amoral TV show that puts Deathrow convicts competing in various events in order to save their lives – not unlike something you would read from Judge Dredd comics.

If the concept seems familiar from The Running Man, another 1987 movie with the same kind of concept, here the emphasis is more on the comedic mishaps that the ruthless gameshow host faces as he drives his convertible from his hillside Malibu home to work to shoot another three episodes of the show.

Although the movie is such an obvious one trick pony, the movie makes for a surprisingly easy to watch experience. The humour is hit and miss, but when it hits, it surely finds its target. The end commercial spoof reel demonstrating various uses for the deceased bodies for example got a pretty decent chuckle out of me.

Being as crude and uneven as it is, Deathrow Gameshow cannot really be recommended to anyone. But I do applaud the nonconventional approach here to try to do something a bit off the beaten path. The world occasionally needs stupidity like this.

80s-o-meter: 86%

Total: 61%

#899 Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)

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With the exception of Saturday Night Live, sketch shows on the TV aren’t nearly as big in the states as they are in the old continent. As a some sort of oddity (and quite frankly luckily as a passing fad) sketch shows started to appear as full length feature films in the mid 70s.

Amazon Women on the Moon is a continuum to this fad, with five different directors including Joe Dante and John Landis at it. The movie derives its name from a recurring bits that follow a poorly made 50s style scifi movie of a expedition crew landing on the moon. These segments don’t offer any humoristic value beyond the intentionally bad quality and forced clumsiness, and you’re likely to get a much better mileage watching any similar 50s scifi movie done with grave seriousness. There are quite a lot of much funnier scifi films out there, believe me.

Being a full length feature film, the skits are long and tend to drag on for too long. The Blacks Without Soul bit with B.B. King got a good chuckle out of me, but fails to evolve beyond its initial idea and should’ve cut shorter. Carl Gottlieb’s Invisible Man spoof is the real gem here with Ed Begley Jr playing a deluded man convinced of having come up with a formula for invisibility, oblivious that people around him are just humouring him.

Amazon Women on the Moon is best viewed to catch a glimpse of the various 80s actors usually seen only in feature films testing their wings in short sketches.

80s-o-meter: 86%

Total: 60%

#897 The Video Dead (1987)

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Zombie movies are – and have for quite some time have been – a favourite of self-funded indie movie makers, who always seem to think there’s room for another poorly executed home made zombie slasher. Chances are there’s a team working on one in your home town ask we speak.

The Video Dead, released straight on tape, is one of these projects that time has forgotten. It does however stand up from the endless pit of similar zombie movies thanks to trying something a little bit of its own and introducing its concept of a possessed TV set spawning out the undead. The undead themselves like the rest of the movie are quite haphazardly made, but there’s also a certain good kind of Bad Taste vibe to all of it, especially in the forest scenes.

But, despite some chainsaw zombie action, there’s mediocrity written all over it. The splatter and the comedy elements are there, but if the movie had gone all the way with both like Evil Dead or the aforementioned Bad Taste, it might’ve had a chance of becoming a cult classic. As it is now, it’s just too tame and to make any kinds of waves.

80s-o-meter: 78%

Total: 57%

#895 The Whoopee Boys (1986)

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It’s worth taking a look on the poster on the right as it perfectly captures the essence of this movie, and no – it’s not good news. The Whoopee Boys is a comedy following two useless losers who after running into a rich heiress decide to get into the high society disguised as a gentleman and his servant.

Total void of funny is what best describes the movie. Much of the failure is due to Paul Rodriguez, the other half of the comedic duo who just goes for the low key comedy without any kind of idea or wittiness to it. His schtick throughout the movie consists of slapping women on their gluteus maximi and acting like a dick among the aristocratic crowd, making funny remarks about poodles humping legs and suggesting the owners stroke their pets’ genitals. I’ve never witnessed a comedian dying so many times on stage and I can only hope not to witness anything like this again.

The Whoopee Boys is an agonising experience to sit through, and I’d suggest anyone hoping to find a hidden eighties Dumb & Dumber gem here to keep on looking anywhere far away from this stink pile.

80s-o-meter: 89%

Total: 4%

#891 Tough Guys (1986)

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Tough Guys is an action comedy of a two yesteryear bank robbers getting released from a jail after serving their 30 year sentence.

After the interesting premise along with the main characters are introduced, the movie grinds to an absolute halt, presenting a stream of rather uninteresting events that only serve to rub in that modern day isn’t too kind for these old men. Watching the movie is a long and some times tedious waiting game for that inevitable heist in the end, but luckily the movie manages to redeem itself in the last 25 minutes of its running time.

Tough Guys is a relatively unknown movie that has gathered favourable reviews no doubt thanks to its veteran actors Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, and they manage to make the movie worth your while.

A word of warning though; replace them with some 30 years younger bulk actors and you really wouldn’t have that much of a movie going on here.

80s-o-meter: 64%

Total: 61%

#888 Hiding Out (1987)

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Hiding Out follows a Boston stock broker escaping to a small town and disguising himself as a teen punk to lead off the hired killers trying to bump him off. Instead of staying put in a safe house he then rolls himself into a high school in a baffling plot twist sure there only to make the movie more interesting. And yes; all sorts of unnecessary mishaps do start unraveling as a result.

Equally utilitarian is the approach with his cousin who’s there only to provide comedic whirl to the mix. Unfortunately these recurring mishaps – like the driving school bit – never actually drive the plot ahead, and thus feel plastered on.

If you can overlook its ridiculous premise, Hiding Out does offer an above average 80s drama comedy that’s still a good fun to spend 90 minutes with, despite its shortcomings.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 71%

#887 Hopscotch (1980)

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Hopscotch, for those unfamiliar with the activity, is that grid hopping game children play during the summer. Here the term refers to a wild-goose chase between CIA officials and a retired agent writing his whistle blower memoirs.

In terms of being a thriller – even if it’s a comedic one – the movie is pretty lame deal by today’s standards: The baddies are unduly goofy and mostly just end up tumbling against each other instead of ever posing an actual threat. Hopscotch visits various European locations to give it that international agent feeling; something I never really cared for in American movies.

Seeing Walter Matthau in action is always a treat, and I’ve really grown to admire his talent of effortlessly wearing whatever material is thrown his way. If anything here, it’s Matthau’s performance that remains the only reason why Hopscotch might be worth your time.

80s-o-meter: 56%

Total: 59%

#884 The Nude Bomb (1980)

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An exercise in unfunny, Nude Bomb follows the many mishaps of Agent 86 – Maxwell Smart – from the 1960s TV series Get Smart.

The humour consists either of catch phrases like ‘Would you believe it’ and ‘Missed it by that much’ that totally escape those not familiar with the series, or slapstick comedy of Maxwell tumbling around the room, breaking various objects along the way.

The Nude Bomb is devoid of laughter, and an endless stream of failed attempts for humour. Get Smart, Again!, a weak but still much more preferable sequel was released in 1989.

80s-o-meter: 38%

Total: 17%