1980s Archives - Page 2 of 18 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 15, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stallone, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) + Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection – Blu-ray Discs

January 21, 20201980s, 1990s, 2011, 2020, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Eddie Murphy, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the “Beverly Hills Cop: 3 Movie Collection”

BEVERLY HILLS COP (1984)
**/****
2011 BD – Image B+ Sound C+ Extras A
2020 BD – Image A Sound C+ Extras A
starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher
screenplay by Daniel Petrie Jr.
directed by Martin Brest

by Walter Chaw I used to watch Beverly Hills Cop about once a week in regular rotation with other movies I bootlegged during those first delirious go-rounds with the VCR-connected-to-rented-VCR carousel. It was on an extended-play tape with two other movies (Desert Hearts was one of the others, Re-Animator the third; quite the triple-feature!); back then, quantity beat the ever-loving shit out of quality. (Bless Paramount, by the way, for always being too cheap to encode their VHS tapes with Macrovision.) For me, Beverly Hills Cop was, like its contemporary Ghost Busters, the ne plus ultra of comedy–my eleven-year-old self still a couple of years away from Monty Python–and the requisite throwaway scene in a strip club was enough to be the centrefold in this analog PLAYBOY that, huzzah, I didn’t have to hide between the mattress and bedspring. The picture had, truth be told, everything a pre-pubescent boy could want in terms of violence (but not freaky violence), sex (but not freaky sex), nobility (the easy-to-understand kind), and plotting (ditto). The hero was an African-American man I’d never seen on SNL (which was on too late for me to catch) and had likewise never seen in 48Hrs.. He was small and not particularly powerful, but he was lithe and had a quick wit and compelling improvisational skills, and he ably parlayed his minority status in a few scenes that aren’t the slightest bit threatening. Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley is, in fact, not entirely unlike cultural brother E.T.–the outsider hero with special abilities who, mission accomplished, can slink off to wherever it is he came from.

Polyester (1981) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 12, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, Stiv Bators
written and directed by John Waters

by Bryant Frazer For anyone who kept up with John Waters’s gleeful forays into poor taste during the 1970s, Polyester, released at the dawn of the Reagan era, must have seemed like a change-up. It was hardly a big-budget affair, but it felt posher than the earlier, low-budget features that earned him his (dis)reputation. Those movies were filmed on grungier 16mm in the belly of Waters’s Baltimore hometown, but Polyester was shot on 35mm and set in the suburbs. Famed actor-in-drag Divine was once again in front of the camera, but instead of the usual outsider role, he was playing squarely against type as neglected housewife Francine Fishpaw–and sharing star billing with 1950s/’60s heartthrob Tab Hunter. Waters introduces Francine by having his camera glide into the Fishpaws’ home and up the stairs (the director’s first-ever Steadicam shot) to find her dressed only in bra and girdle, bathed in a golden-hour glow, as Hunter croons lines from the title tune (lyrics by Debbie Harry): “You know about abundant women/Well, this girl only aims to please/Outside there’s a load of noisy neighbours/Upstairs there’s a Polyester squeeze.”

Red Heat (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 6, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Hungary, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross
screenplay by Harry Kleiner & Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Walter Hill

by Bryant Frazer The first, pre-credits scene of Red Heat takes place in a Russian banya, a steam bath where hulking, Vulcanian workers in grimy T-shirts labour to shovel wood and coal into massive stoves that keep the water hot and the room steamy. The camera follows a blue-eyed man as he steps into the room, assuming his POV as he surveys the tableau. A whole section of the space is dedicated to barely-clad muscled men pumping iron, and the camera lingers on them. It pans slowly across the room before finding a group of nymphs bathing au naturel, zooming in and reframing, finally deciding it's not interested in them. The blue-eyed man turns his head, catching sight of a figure across the room. It's Schwarzenegger, about one square foot of fabric shy of nudity, striding confidently past the bathing beauties before stepping up into a side chamber and disappearing again into the haze. The next shot catches Arnold in medium close-up, tilting lazily from his calves all the way up his chiselled torso, until it frames him in flattering low-angle portraiture. He is squinting, and he is scowling, and he has an Ivan Drago flat-top. This is peak Arnold. The reverse shot lands, almost hilariously, on a group of a half-dozen nude and nearly-nude bathers, all pink and vulnerable in their skin, gazing back at him, excited or terrified or maybe both. It's as if a god stands before them.

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 23, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It’s a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike’s side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret’s apparent fearlessness–when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully–Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn’t cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

Howard the Duck (1986) [Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 21, 20191980s, 2019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Hellraiser I II III: The Scarlet Box – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 2019****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2019, Arrow Video, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Thriller, UK

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (a.k.a. Hellraiser) (1987)
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Sean Chapman, Ashley Laurence
written and directed by Clive Barker

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Kenneth Cranham, Imogen Boorman
screenplay by Peter Atkins
directed by Tony Randel

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Terry Farrell, Doug Bradley, Paula Marshall, Ashley Laurence
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Pinhead (Doug Bradley) looks menacing, but he’s actually just a leather-daddy who seems reluctant, most of the time, to do what other people think is in his job description. There’s a scene at the end of the first Hellraiser, the only one written and directed by creator Clive Barker, where Pinhead and his good-time boys and girls (“Cenobites,” if you must, an appropriation of another term for “monk”) are about to tear heroic Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) apart when she asks for a chance to explain something. Pinhead patiently hears her out. In the sequel, as she’s running away, rather than hooking her in place with their literal hooks on chains, Pinhead and his Cenobites send the chain to block her way, instead. They’re terrible villains, Cenobites. They’re fun to look at–Hellraiser‘s creature design is, of course, legendary, with Pinhead occupying a privileged place on the Mt. Rushmore of horror bogeys–but more mildly-disapproving Greek Chorus than Iron Maiden. Reason in part, I think, for why they were disastrously made into stock slasher villains in the third film: part wise-cracking Freddy Krueger, part Jason Vorhees rampaging psychopaths. The failure of that metamorphosis and the ensuing wrestling with what role Cenobites should ultimately occupy comprise the minor ups and horrific downs of the seven films (and counting) to follow. Maybe it’s in the name. Maybe the idea never was for the Cenobites, these dour, British, monastic, S&M losers, to be avenging angels, but rather for them to be precisely what they are: these drippy scolds who appear at the exact moment you go searching for more outré porn on an unprotected browser. One of a couple of Pinhead’s catchphrases doubles as a carnival barker’s patter: “We have such sights to show you.” His buddies represent that banner of geeks and sideshow freaks. But they’re not going to force it on you. In the pantheon of bad guys, they’re maybe the only ones who not only need but would like your consent, if you don’t mind, please and thanks ever so.

Pet Sematary (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 17, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Horror, Stephen King, Thriller, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist
screenplay by Stephen King, based on his novel
directed by Mary Lambert

“Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless.”
-Jefe (Rubén Blades), The Counselor

by Bill Chambers A VICE UK review of the recent Happy Death Day 2U came in for a shellacking on social media because of a click-baity tweet suggesting it was the “first” slasher movie about grief, a claim that only demonstrated a lack of expertise while making a sacrificial lamb of Happy Death Day 2U (which scarcely benefited from the bad-faith attention). Neither the headline nor the subheader of the review itself is as boldly specious, but there in the body of the piece is this: “Christopher Landon’s latest, Happy Death Day 2U[,] might be the first slasher that actually centers on dealing with grief.” (The headline–“‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Is More About Grief Than Horror”–nevertheless bothers me, too, incidentally: grief is horror.) So often accused of cynicism because they’re formulated to maximize a body count, slashers are engineered to comment on the capricious nature of existence, and the best ones seize on this to acknowledge the toll of loss on the survivors (Black Christmas (1974), Rob Zombie’s Halloween II)–while even the most mediocre ones tend to have a killer motivated by a deep and incurable sorrow (see: The Toolbox Murders (1978), the first Friday the 13^th).

The Neverending Story (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

March 28, 20191980s, 2019, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Family, Fantasy, West Germany

The NeverEnding Story
**½/**** Image C+ Sound B
starring Noah Hathaway, Barret Oliver, Tami Stronach, Moses Gunn
screenplay by Wolfgang Petersen, Herman Weigel
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. About two-thirds of the way through Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story, the warrior/child Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) encounters a mirror that reveals a person’s true self, and he discovers his reflection is that of Bastian (Barret Oliver, once synonymous with ’80s genre fare as the child star of Cocoon, D.A.R.Y.L., and the original Frankenweenie), the reader of Atreyu’s story. It’s a fascinating, Oedipal (read: Lacanian) moment where the hero, enlisted to save his world from an inexorable plague called “The Nothing,” realizes that his quest has led to himself and, more particularly, this self’s ability to bestow a name upon his kingdom’s stricken mistress (Tami Stronach). Atreyu encounters the mirror after he’s survived a pair of gatekeepers who test his perception of himself. He makes it, but barely–suggesting, maybe, that he knows he has an author, but hasn’t quite put together that he and his world are a boundless “piece of the hopes and dreams of mankind.”

True Stories (1986) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 25, 2019****/****, 1980s, 2019, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Musical, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Jo Harvey Allen, Swoosie Kurtz
written by Stephen Tobolowsky & Beth Henley and David Byrne
directed by David Byrne

by Sydney Wegner For as long as I can remember, Talking Heads have been my favourite band. They provided the soundtrack to road trips and living-room dance parties; theirs were the cassettes in my first Walkman and my first car. Among the weird stuff my brother and I cycled through during our blessed hours in front of the TV was a VHS collection of their music videos, which we must have played a thousand times. And then there was True Stories, a special favourite, something we never got sick of. I grew up in Austin but lived about ten miles from the centre of town. Our house was on an acre of land surrounded by untamed woods; we spent our time riding bikes and climbing oak trees and rolling in mud. It felt like we grew up in a small rural town, and those first 12 years of my life formed my idea of Texas. Some of my favourite memories are from road trips to visit my grandparents in San Antonio and summers spent camping our way to New Mexico and Arizona, driving for hours through land where the only evidence of civilization was the road we were on. As an adult, when I visited Utah I thought the mountains might fall and crush me. In Washington, the trees formed a picturesque prison. Only in Texas can I breathe. It’s a place where the world feels so big and flat that I can almost sense myself hanging onto the edge of the earth. What enchanted me about True Stories so much as a child is, of course, its music and its humour, but also that it captured this openness in a way that felt comforting and beautiful, very much unlike the desolate wasteland Texas appears to be in so many other movies about the state. Sometimes I wonder if it confirmed the Texas I already knew, or helped shape it for me. It never seemed like a coincidence that True Stories was released the same year I was born.

Evil Dead 2 (1987) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] – DVD|4K ULTRA HD + BLU-RAY + DIGITAL

February 17, 2019****/****, 1980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Evil Dead II
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn
****/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley
screenplay by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw More a remake with yuks than a sequel, Sam Raimi’s astonishing Evil Dead II is a kitchen-sink splatter flick inspired by the drive-in spam-in-a-cabin tradition and leavened by an unhealthy fascination with The Three Stooges. Leading man and crash-test dummy Bruce Campbell (Bill Chambers referred to him once as “brick-jawed,” and I can’t improve on that, literally or figuratively) turns in a legend-making, career-defining performance, re-imagining his Shemp, Ash, as a man of stage-melodrama, white-hat resolve who comes of age upon discovering his knack for slaying the undead. The great unspoken peculiarity of siege classics like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is that there is somehow always discovered a hero who’s biologically hardwired for the task of staying alive in the face of great demonic hordes. The crux is that it’s unspoken no longer in Raimi’s “Dead” trilogy (the third instalment the out-and-out comedy Army of Darkness), which, by the end, becomes a rags-to-rags fable about a retail clerk repelling an army of Harryhausen skeletons laying siege to a medieval castle. In its way, this is as canny a satire of the consumer/clerk relationship as anything in Dawn of the Dead.

First Blood (1982); Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985); Rambo III 4K (1988) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

January 17, 20191980s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Revenge, Stallone

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

FIRST BLOOD
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
written by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

“Hate war, but love the American warrior.”
-Lt. Gen. Hal Moore

by Bill Chambers I suppose I said it all in my previous review, but that was some sixteen years ago, and my feelings on the original Rambo trilogy have changed somewhat since then. I attribute this to age (if not maturity), evolving cultural attitudes, and 2008’s Rambo (hereafter Rambo IV), Sylvester Stallone’s powerful reclaiming of the character from the clutches of self-parody and blockbuster bloat. Rambo IV is essentially a stripped-down redux combining elements of the first three films; that there’s nothing particularly innovative about its plot isn’t, however, a commercial concession–what fans were really left to pander to, 20 years after Rambo III fizzled at the domestic box-office?–so much as it’s part and parcel of the movie’s thesis that Rambo’s singular talent for warfare, a blessing and a curse, will never be wasted in a world as shitty as ours. No matter how often or how hard he tries to drop off the grid. There’s a moment in Rambo IV where we hear his interior monologue as he forges himself a new blade: “War is in your blood,” he says. “When you’re pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.” The tragic weight of these words ripples backwards across the franchise upon revisitation. For the lesser entries (the second and third films), I’d say it now counts among their redeeming qualities.

Phenomena (1985) – Blu-ray Disc

January 10, 20191980s, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Esoterica, Horror, Italy, Mystery

Phenomena (Integral Cut) ***/****
Phenomena (International Cut) ***/****
Creepers ***½/****
Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
starring Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Donald Pleasence
written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There’s an extraordinary quality of dreams attached to Dario Argento’s Phenomena. It’s the mist that diffuses the light, the sudden foehn windstorms that whip up the trees at night, the logic that links scenes together by theme as opposed to narrative. It’s a naturally beautiful film, its photography of “Swiss Transylvania” almost aggressively lush and somewhat at odds with Argento’s reputation for extreme, some would say forced, artificiality. I would argue that the way nature is shot in this film is so hyperreal it’s actually as surreal as the constructed mindscapes of his more obviously surreal work. Whatever the case, that’s not the only expectation Phenomena upends, as, continuing from Tenebrae, the auteur seems to be working out what he’s described as a terrible experience (the production of Inferno) and dealing with the fallout and expectations afterwards. Indeed, by all reports, Argento was unusually energized and enthusiastic about this project, and that invention, lawless and largely lacking in any sort of guardrails, is obvious and bracing–even as he, at this point in his career, relies perhaps overmuch on recycling his greatest hits. Still, early on, he has a young woman stand in a classroom to declare “screw the past,” which plays as something of a punk mission statement for the singular Phenomena.

Tenebrae (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 2018****/****, 1980s, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

Tenebrae1

Tenebre
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Anthony Franciosa, Christian Borromeo, Mirella D’Angelo, Daria Nicolodi
written and directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Dario Argento is a stylist and a fan who pays attention. His films are shrines to Hitchcock in the way that Tarantino’s are shrines to grindhouse exploitation: imitations that transcend imitation by understanding what made the originals work. Argento’s movies invite you to engage with them at a meta-level to appreciate them intellectually, yet are so engaging on a visceral level that it’s hardly a requirement. At their best, they’re phantasmagorias mashing up stuff like Cornell Woolrich, Mickey Spillane, and Edgar Wallace with Antonioni and, of course, Hitchcock. At their worst, Argento’s films either perilously discard the gialli pillars that provide touchstones for him in favour of gothic horror (his truly abominable takes on Phantom of the Opera and Dracula), or desperately try to recapture old glory (The Card Player, Sleepless, and, alas, Mother of Tears).

The Evil Dead (1983) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 9, 2018****/****, 1980s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A- Commentary A-
starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker
written and directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw The Evil Dead defies wisdom: It’s an ultraviolent horror film made on a nothing budget (rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of three-thousand dollars) that still manages to produce an enduring and brilliant performance and demonstrate (like a Dario Argento shocker) that gore, if it’s perverse enough, can be the beginning and the end of horror. The product of Bruce Campbell’s hilariously physical turn, of Sam Raimi’s genius in fashioning dazzling camera moves, and of an uncredited Joel Coen’s flair at the editing table, The Evil Dead bristles with life and joy. It is a testament to how bliss and the spark of inspiration can elevate a film of any budget in any genre from routine to sublime.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 4, 20181980s, 2018, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando, Toshiyuki Nagashima
written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader (Japanese screenplay by Cheiko Schrader)
directed by Paul Schrader

by Bryant Frazer A little more than halfway through Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a fragmented, multifaceted cinematic biography of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Mishima expresses nostalgia for an afterlife that existed only in the distant past. “The average age for men in the Bronze Age was 18 and, in the Roman era, 22,” Mishima reckons aloud, in voiceover. “Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful.” Like the rest of the film’s narration, the passage is quoted from Mishima’s published work, in this case an article he wrote in 1962, eight years before his death at the age of 45 by seppuku. “When a man reaches 40, he has no chance to die beautifully,” Mishima continues. “No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.” In 1984, when he made this film, Paul Schrader was 38 years old. He had just come off the commercial misfire that was 1982’s Cat People, a straightforward studio assignment he tailored to address his signature concerns about sex and death, putting them in the context of a dark fairytale with intimations of incest and bestiality. It wasn’t a good experience. Coked out of his mind for much of the shoot, Schrader fell into a dead-end affair with Nastassja Kinski that he hoped was something more; she wanted nothing to do with him after the movie wrapped, and Cat People‘s disappointing box-office receipts closed the door on his Hollywood career. He thought of suicide. He scurried away from Hollywood, heading first to New York and then to Japan, in search of a life change. That’s where Mishima came in.

The Breakfast Club (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 20181980s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Teen, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers Necessity is the mother of invention, and The Breakfast Club‘s iconic plot–aped so often it’s become a modern myth, like Rashomon–was designed to ease John Hughes into directing and keep the budget low. The script wasn’t just a formality, though, proof of that being his refusal to cast Jimmie “J.J.” Walker (then in his mid-30s and a frequent passenger on “The Love Boat”) as Bender in exchange for financing from Canadian dentists; he was still able to draw a line between artistic compromise–which had given shape to the material–and selling out. Nor was it some cynical “calling-card,” unlike those one-and-done horror movies career-minded filmmakers like making to get their foot in the door. Yes, The Breakfast Club wound up capitalizing on a bull market for teen fare, but Hughes had an honest interest in telling stories about youth. Proof of that being his screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation, doctored by director Harold Ramis to shift the dominant P.O.V. from the kids in the backseat (as in the LAMPOON piece that inspired it, Hughes’s “Vacation ’58”) to the paterfamilias. Through a mixture of savvy and kismet, Hughes had crafted the platonic ideal of a directorial debut for himself, and then something funny happened: the comparatively epic Sixteen Candles became his first feature instead.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 22, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, John Hughes, Road Movie

Planes, Trains & Automobiles
****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Steve Martin, John Candy, Laila Robins, Michael McKean
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers It took thirty years and multiple viewings before I finally realized that John Hughes’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles is about many things, but mostly it’s about a trunk. A behemoth fit for a starlet taking a cruise to Skull Island, the trunk is the property of travelling salesman Del Griffith (John Candy), who peddles shower-curtain rings for American Light & Fixture.¹ Indeed, it’s his avatar. Stuffy ad exec Neal Page (Steve Martin) trips over it while racing special-guest-star Kevin Bacon for a New York City cab at rush hour. It’s fate. Del will obliviously steal the taxi Neal does manage to flag down, but it’s not until they wind up sitting across from each other in LaGuardia that Neal puts a face to the trunk, reinforcing his bias against the moustachioed stranger–a sort of benign Ignatius J. Reilly who, between his girth and his luggage and, arguably, his indifference to Neal’s boundaries, is the textbook definition of a man-spreader. The trunk disappears for long stretches, though it has a habit of bobbing back up into the frame the second you’ve forgotten about it completely. It’s uncanny that way.

The Slayer (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

October 27, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Sarah Kendall, Frederick Flynn, Carol Kottenbrook, Alan McRae
screenplay by J.S. Cardone & Bill Ewing
directed by J.S. Cardone

by Sydney Wegner As co-writer/director J.S. Cardone insists, The Slayer is not quite a slasher. More than titillate or thrill, it seeks to unsettle, to dig at the viewer with emotion rather than throwaway jump scares. The set-pieces have the imaginative gore of any good slasher, but a sadness permeates the film so deeply that all the dorky banter and melodramatic murders in the world can’t disguise it. The slow pace and heavy emphasis on the psychological trauma of its lead doomed The Slayer to be drowned out by the deluge of early-’80s slashers, and most viewers who might have been drawn to the carnage implied by the lurid title and poster were likely left unsatisfied. The Slayer opens with a nightmare: Wandering wide-eyed through a house, the protagonist, Kay, is strangled by long, inhuman hands encrusted in slime and blood. The opening promises the violence and sex (she’s of course wearing a classic skimpy nightgown) of the typical slasher variety, but pay closer attention to the close-ups of a chiming grandfather clock and the beautiful orchestral score–those signal the kind of movie you’re in for. When Kay startles awake from this dream, sweaty and terrified, her husband stands above her. He starts talking to her about something innocuous, but the camera, peering up from a jarringly low angle, makes him seem ominous and oppressive. This, too, is a tell. Kay will spend the movie trying to convince the other characters that what she dreams is real, and they will brush her off, and then they’ll die. They aren’t a comfort to her anymore, because she is far gone to a place where everything is at the wrong angle.

Re-Animator (1985) [2-Disc Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

October 23, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Sci-Fi

H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A
starring Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Jeffrey Combs
screenplay by Dennis Paoli, William J. Norris and Stuart Gordon, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West–Re-Animator”
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Bryant Frazer An extremely loose adaptation of a generally unloved short story by H.P. Lovecraft (“Herbert West–Reanimator”), Re-Animator is a genre miracle: a low-budget horror movie with a smart script, strong performances, genuinely nightmarish gore effects, and a wicked sense of humour that avoids smugness or condescension. Director Stuart Gordon, who co-wrote the screenplay with gothic fiction specialist Dennis Paoli (from a teleplay by William J. Norris), moderates the ghoulish overtones of Lovecraft’s Frankenstein parody by first establishing an ordinary young-doctors-in-love scenario. In this version, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), an idealistic young M.D.-in-training at Miskatonic University, is covertly romancing Meg Halsey (Barbara Crampton), the daughter of the med-school dean (Robert Sampson), when the arrival of transfer student Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) starts to put a strain on their relationship. Strapped for cash, Dan takes West in as a roommate over Meg’s objections, and he proves to be a problem tenant for a few reasons. Most obviously, he is a prideful twerp who begins his studies at Miskatonic by picking a fight with one of the teachers, the towering, imperious Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), whose work West regards as derivative. (“So derivative,” he opines in the deliciously bitchy scene that introduces the characters to each other, “that in Europe, it’s considered plagiarized.”) But West is also a budding sociopath with a monomaniacal focus on developing the green-glowing serum he believes brings the dead back to life, and he’s looking to procure fresh bodies on which to experiment. The trouble really starts when goodness is corrupted–when the generally level-headed Dan decides to help him with his research.