80's-piece theater

[MAC]

Good evening and welcome to 80's-piece theater
tonight we'll be looking back on one of the shining examples of cinematic perfection which the 80's are so noted for

TURK 182 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090217/)

yes, it's a classic tale of a jobless, clueless, (artistic) punk-kid with a good ole down to earth hard working brother who just wishes he'd grow up.
Then the brother does something heroic and gets hurt and the system trys to fuck him and the worthless younger brother decides to set things right by spraying grafitti on everything.

Timothy Hutton (falcon & the snowman and Iceman!) is entirely believable as as the protagonist "David Lynch" who likes Crowded House, paints horrible looking paintings and eventually gets nekid with Kim Catrall (Big Trouble in Little China & Mannequinn {MY all time favorite sappy 80's flick, I still sing the soundtrack in the shower})
Robert Urich (Spencer for Hire & Love Boat: The Next Wave ) gives a chilling performance as a drunken fireman falling out of a window onto a 4 door american made car in 1985 (I hate plot flaws like that.)
Timothy Hutton decides to get his brother's disability pension by spraypainting things. But no one cares about this so he grabs some story from the newspaper and starts spray painting that instead. It's about the mayor who is played by Robert Culp (the guy who ALMOST got to be JR on Dallas and did the voice of Halcyon Renard on the TV cartoon Gargoyles) The governor pressures the mayor to kill the story, the mayor pressures the cops to kill turk 182 and it all ends with a bunch of lights on a bridge at some big galla event with thousands of common folk gathered around chanting for turk 182.

This entire movie was shot in Depress-O-Vision and is grainy as fuck even on the very best VHS copies but the horrible Day-time-TV sound quality and background music mixing brings it all together.
Now I should mention that th edirector Bob Clark, has done such prestigous films as porky's, porky's II and rhinestone. He's a true legend from the zinc plated era of movie making.

yes this is a piece of cinematic history which made me declare
"there's a saturday afternoon I'll never get back."

Join us next week when I'll be discussing Judd Nelson's shining moment in 1986 (when he did the voice of Rodimus prime in the transformer's movie)

[ms. bing]

wait a minute!
there was some great cinema in the 80's!
of course you can't find it now.... actually the 80's is when all the directors who were washed up in the 70's turned in their last reels and all the guys who became big guys in the 90's made their first stuff.
"Blood Simple" mean anything to you? of course not! it was the coen brothers first movie. came out in the 80s and was shot outside of austin for about $90 plus beer. good movie, decent directing, not the best camerawork, but these guys were getting their feet under them and trying to produce something for the cost of beer that would get them noticed by the studios who had real money to pay for camera men and cameras.
there were a bunch more, but i cant think of them off hand. it was an in-between decade in cinema, but the indiana jones movies were good. and roger moore was a kick ass bond.

[Uberwonder]

Man, that is the best description of turk 182 ever.

I now know that I will never be wrong for having a hard time liking that movie.

[MAC]

The Wraith

Ah…..for the days when you didn’t need to deal drugs to be thugs!
Like the thugs that killed Charlie Sheen in the 1986 classic thriller “the Wraith”
Of course he doesn’t STAY dead (then there’d be no need for a movie and all those grips and sound guy's babies would have starved to death!)

No, he comes back in a futuristic car! Well futuristic for the late 80’s. Ok, NOT futuristic for then either....but they put a lot of crap on it and painted it black! Not unlike Knight Rider!!!! And we all loved knight rider right? Well if we’d have loved it MORE we wouldn’t have had to put up with David Hasselhof running around looking like Liberace’s slightly less gay brother in a dozen seasons of Baywatch! Anyway....

Randy Quaid puts on a stunning performance as the annoying actor pretending to be a asshole sheriff of some po-dunk stretch of highway in some desert in the South Western US somewhere. For this theatrical crime against humanity Quaid was forced to play LBJ in 1987 and almost single handedly save the movies, Caddy Shack II and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Finally in 1996 he had paid his dues and was allowed to act in Independence Day. But he turned around two years later and put on his evil cop hat again to give us “hard rain”. I must admit, those years of playing cowboys on TV must have taught him something because he did a good enough job to make me ALMOST stop looking at the very wet Minnie driver and pay attention to his sparse dialogue and shallow character.

So I watched the Wraith at least a dozen times one summer when I was 14 or 15 and all I remember clearly about it is that I drank too much vodka one night, puked everywhere and passed out behind the couch. But what can I say? It’s basically a cheap fucking precursor to “the Crow” (except without the plot, bad guys, musical score or impressive cinematography)

Good points: Sherilyn Fenn’s tits...you probably recall her as Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks....what was I saying about her tits?...oh, and she got her legs cut off in Boxing Helena, but no one watched that, right?

Bad Points: Charlie Sheen’s career some how, miraculously, survived this piece of audio/visual crap and he went on to:
1) shoot actress Kelley Preston (who later married John Travolta)
2) testify against Heidi Fleiss
3) beat up his super-model wife and get divorced
4) date Ginger Lynn Allen (one of the biggest porn stars of the day)
5) assault some other chic at his house
6) then assault his other porn star girl friend, Brittany Ashland
7) overdose on drug

anyone else get the feeling that he should stay away from Hollywood whores?

So what did we get from him during all this?
He got Willem Defoe killed in platoon.
He got Terence Stamp killed in Young Guns.
But does he ever die? Nooooooooooo.....

So in summation, The Wraith was another prime example of a non-existent story, shot in the most unappealing manner and edited by thumb-less primates to fill pop-culture time between The first Back to the Future movie and the first Roxette album.

[MAC]

The Pirate Movie

“What’s better than a musical?”, asked some gay guy in a tu-tu with a lucky charms box taped to his back outside a bar one night.

A musical spoof of a musical!

Woo hoo!!

and that’s exactly what the pirate movie was!

Kristy McNichol set the stage for the age of featureless skinny blonde chics in the movies the way twiggy had done it in the fashion world.

Christopher Atkins played the curly headed blonde guy in tight pants (for his trouble he got ONE WHOLE SEASON on “Dallas”!!1983-84)

Combining this pair’s acting ability caused the thespian thimble to runneth over in a hilarious movie that could only have been improved if had been rated “R” and we’d seen some tits. This movie was bright and colorful and stupid. I didn’t want to go listen to Ozzy Osbourne and bite the head off a movie producer even one time while watching it!
For this I wish they’d change the “PG” rating to “ND” (Not Depressing)
I watched it 6 times per day on HBO for an entire summer in 1983 (in between Star Trek: the wrath of Khan).

It had all the classic elements:
Midgets (Marc Colombani the only dwarf in Hollywood who DIDN’T appear in Under the Rainbow or Willow )
Mullets (1980’s style mullets of course)

Mallots (Well…I’m sure there was a mallet in there somewhere...there were pirates after all!!)

Some of the cast went on to do great things to!
Bernard Ledger played a random pirate in this movie and a random bad guy in the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher. What’s better than playing second fiddle to a guy who couldn’t kick Sylvester Stallone’s ass in Rocky MCXVMXCXMIIV?

Paul Grahm got to be in “Poltergeist III: The bad keeps getting worse”

Garry Mcdonald played a doctor in Moulin Rouge...hrmmmm

That’s about as well as anyone in this movie did afterwards...

So I guess it was a tale of nothing, cast with nobody’s who went on to do nothing noteworthy!

Balance remains in Hollywood!

They’ll think twice before the fuck with Roger’s and Hammerstein again, huh?

Man, I gotta look for better movies to review

[MAC]

Maximum overdrive!!!
It’s the movie that asks the question: Who made hells bells all night long?

In this classic 1986 thriller Stephen Kings turns the tables on a diner full of machine abusing humans!! They all deserve to DIE! (I knew things where going to be gruesome when the electric knife cut the waitress!!!)

The 80’s where a good decade for Stephen King. He started off with the shining. A movie which turned one of the greatest actors of our time (Jack Nicholson) into the craziest typist ever and gave Shelly Duvall a REAL acting job (she also managed to find the time to portray Olive Oil opposite Robin Williams in “popeye’ that same year) Stephen King then went on to wow us with Cujo (big dog, small car, sick child, screaming woman…sorry did I ruin the plot?), John Carpenter’s Christine (looser gets a possessed car….sort of like “Knight Rider” but you get to kill the annoying talking car in the end), Children of the Corn (bunch of kids, bunch of corn, bunch of murders…how does he come up with this stuff?), Firestarter (the movie that GAVE us Drew Barrymore….now if she’d just burn Adam Sandler to death instead of doing another feel-good love comedy with him), and lets not forget silver bullet……a kid in a wheelchair kills a werewolf (The American’s with Disabilities Act was passed 5 years later, I wonder if vampires have to put ramps on their castles and those rails by the commode.)

But these made chump changed compared to the hardcore rock-n-roll head-banger thrill ride that was MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!!!!!!

Emilio Estevez is just another cool dude hanging out at the truck stop in North Carolina until a comet passes over the Earth and the highway equipment, semi trucks, and everything else in the parking lot decides to take over! As the ice cream truck patrols th streets looking for stragglers the hicks, truck drives, and assorted skanky waitresses make for a colorful cast of no-name actors (well except Yeardley Smith who does Lisa Simpson’s voice and Pat Hingle who’s done more bit rolls than I have room to mention)

The protagonist is a big diesel semi rig from a toy company with a giant fiberglass green-goblin grill. Its looks crazy! It looks menacing! It looks like marvel comics got a check!

Naturally there’s always some reason they just HAVE to TRY to run across the parking lot. Mostly they do it so someone else will get killed and we won’t get bored.

When it’s all done they sail away in a sail boat to an island or some shit…who cares
The movie exists so that AC/DC could get their entire Who Made Who Album played without the radio execs getting any money.

So when you watch a movie today and they play you shook me all night long as the credits roll I want you to remember Stephen King and the green goblin and young guns....you know, like the 2001 block buster smash "A Knight's Tale"

[Cruise Director]

Maximum Overdrive was originally a short story called "Trucks." You could also give a good 80's rundown of Stand By Me, which was also a short story by King called "The Body."

Great movie reviews! Makes me want to put on my Member's Only jacket and head to the drive-inn.

[ms. bing]

[post with no point]
damn, there was some movie that just reminded me of about a guy being chased across country by a big rig. i wanna say it was dennis hopper, but it wasn't. ok, dad just told me it was dennis weaver. anyway, that movie scared the crap out of me.
[/post with no point]

[MAC]

In honor of it's DVD release today we will explore the movie that proved that somethings from the 80's are timeless.

Crossroads.

Yes, Ralph Macchio's one and only noteworthy non-karate kid movie.

The plot is simple:

old blues man in nursing home in NYC

punk kid going to juliard in NYC

kid gets hung up on the romantic imagery of being taught the blues the "old way"

old man wants to go back home to mississippi to settle and old score

lots of references to Robert Johnson

oh, there's also a chic and dirty cops and rain and trains and dance halls and whiskey and the devil and this little known guy named steve vai (the last of the berkley school of guitar that spawned ppl like joe satriani and stewart hamm)

ry cooder was the primary composer for this movie about the blues and I think he did a pretty good job. He does dark, bluesy, stuff anyway like the soundtracks to the longriders, southern comfort, johnny handsome, last man standing and 1 hour photo.

Ralph Macchio is a stupid kid who gets a lesson in reality. Joe Seneca (who is an old black man who always played old black men and did a damn good job of it) is a great old blues man! Jamie Gertz (who went on to do Lost Boys and Less Than Zero but seems to have topped out when she played Gilda Radner in her biography "it's always something") played the pivotal female role which inevitably leads Ralph's character to understanding the blues. And not one of them offended me for having watched it...well maybe Ralph Macchio.....

so...the plot's pretty easy to follow, the soundtrack is enjoyable, the cinematography actually fits the changing moods and lends atmosphere to this flick and the characters aren't too bad.

So what makes it classic 80's, you ask?

The ridiculous ending of course!!!

Ole Scratch (aka legba, aka the devil) shows up in a church with Steve Vai in tow to cut-heads with Ralph Macchio for Willie brown's soul......

of course we only ever see ry cooder's hands on Ralph's guitar when the cool stuff is being played (apparently it actaully took about 4 guys to play all that crap and it was originally 15 minutes long)...however you can download the music for your cellphone ring here (http://www.ringtonesgalore.co.uk/enhanced/rock/guitar-duel-from-crossroads-version-3/steve-vai/)

aaaaaaaaand it sounds like a whitesnake concert

aaaaaaaand ralph dips back into his classical training at Julliard to beat out steve via (the man who has forgotten more about guitar than Ralph Macchio will ever know about acting)

aaaaaaand there are dancing, singing, happy, fat, church-going black people

just like at a real classical/rock concert

however, it's one of those 80's movies that stuck with me and now it's stuck on you.

[Cruise Director]

I am almost afraid of your "Cliff Clavin" knowledge of b-movies.

[ms. bing]

you think that's bad? wait til he does a bit on "ladyhawke".

[MAC]

ladyehawk ruled....except for the super-VHS-highschool-instructional-video-style soundtrack

but guess who did all that ultra crappy music!!!!

alan parsons......and the philharmonia orchestra.......

*sigh*....the 80's

[ms. bing]

ladyhawke was very possibly the only film that came out with matthew broderick in which i wasn't waiting for ben stein to show up and say "Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?"

[Pinecrika]

All right smart ass, break down "Red Dawn"

[Pinecrika]

My favoritest movie of all time.

[MAC]

Red Dawn!

Now here’s a truly great & timeless flick.

Except for the part where the USSR invades the US in airliners…..
Aaaaaand there’s the little problem of why they chose to assault Wyoming (Or Colorado or which ever empty non-strategically defensible state that was)

But those things are trivial compared to this movie’s crowning achievements: it got Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen to ACT in a manner that didn’t suck.

If Senor Swayze could have maintained this type of character I’d add him to my list of mediocre action actors. A list which contains the likes of Mario Van Peebles and Eric Roberts! And Charlie Sheen played…gasp!...a punk kid. But the absolute best part is they both DIE in the end. If Keanu Reeves died in more movies I’d watch more Keanu Reeves movies.

But I digress; the story breaks down pretty simply.
*MAC puts on his John Madden game face and grabs the play book and marker*

The Latinos come up from the South, the Russkies come across from the north west and cut down just past the rockies. They meet up in the middle and divide the US just west of the Mississippi (like ANYONE in NYC or LA gives a rat’s asshole about Kansas, the state that is giving away land for the second time in 150 years) The west coast has heavy coverage and the president is forced throw his nukes out of bounds and stop the clock. The offense (the grown up citizens of no-where ville) don’t do very well against the well trained Russian team’s defense and soon it’s time to punt. Special teams is mostly made up of local high school kids who are the only ones smart enough to leave town when the soldiers start shooting everyone. They line up outside the far hash-mark (in the mountains nearby) and make some on side kicks (shooting soldiers) which causes the invaders to run up to the ball and frequent turn-overs ensue. Powers Booth takes time out of his busy acting career to play special teams coach and give the over-40 crowd someone to admire, then he dies a glorious death and the cinematic sodomy resumes with swayze's dramatic acting style flashing like Joe Namath's sideburns and long hair at superbowl III.
The Russian’s call up a new head coach (colonel Strelnikov) and he hammers the ball straight towards the milita’s endzone like he knows all the plays in their book (he does). But QB Patrick Swayze and running back Charlie Sheen die dramatic deaths in the freezing snow blowing up most of their old home town and the wolverines win the superbowl! THE WOLVERINES WIN THE SUPERBOWL!!!!!!

Hmmmm

Where was I?

Oh yeah.

I liked this movie, don’t knock it.

[Pinecrika]

Your'e awesome MAC. Did you have to watch it again to remember Col. Strelnikov? Even I didn't remember that.

I wasn't knocking it, I was serious about it being one of my favorites.

[Cruise Director]

Pretty sure Red Dawn was the first PG-13 movie ever. It was that or Dreamscape, they both came out about the same time.

/cliff clavin

[Torque]

Red Dawn was such a badass movie. I might have to go rent it. Or buy it, and watch it on evenings I dont use gone in 60 seconds as my background noise.
.

[Pinecrika]

It's not on DVD yet. I'm waiting. My daughter needs to see it.

[Pinecrika]

Its a horrible thing to desensitize you firstborn, but one must do what one must.

[Mudflap]

Originally posted by Pinecrika
It's not on DVD yet. I'm waiting. My daughter needs to see it.

I bought Red Dawn on DVD last year.

[MAC]

yes red dawn is on DVD (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0792838041/qid=1092315529/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9536647-4495808?v=glance&s=dvd) and I have a nice rip of it. :)

Now, I don't mean to give away my secrets or anything but imdb.com is chock full of info + there are a million or so websites about crappy B-movies. i started doing this because some of the movies I recall clearly aren't offereed on DVD while others are popping up everywhere! (YellowBeard can't be had on DVD for any price :()

I have stuck to movies that I clearly remember (or clearly remember sucked) and I mostly use imdb to see "what ever happened to that sorry actor"

Mostly this is my subconscious cinema clearinghouse thread. Like when I can't get the theme to Mannequin out of my head I'll just come here and sing the chorus over an dover until it's stuck in YOUR head too.

....and we, built this thing together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!!!

[ms. bing]

you are an evil, twisted, little man.

[jess]

Mission accomplished, I'll be singing that song all day. :(

[MAC]

and when this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each other, nothing's gonna stop us...nothings gonna stop us now!!!

oops

anyway, while slaving away in the welding shop today I had a sudden recollection of one of my favorite movies of the 80's

MY Science Project (http://imdb.com/title/tt0089652/)

Typical 80's props & cast:


cool guy with cool car (well cool in the same way anyone older than you who has a car is cool)

pseudo-nerdy girl who's not supposed to be hot (which was easy to do with those frizzy/poofy hair-dos from the 80's, the age of chemically induced hair)

comedy relief side kick idiot character

piece of alien technology from area51

dennis hopper


the story is entirely superfluous. But I will tell you that there's some sort of time line rift thinger opened and we get to see VC and past presidents and cavemen. Dennis Hooper calls white ppl "honky" and there's an appearance by your typical Hollywood stupid-cop-detective.

there's also the wonderful line that Fisher Stevens (Ben from Short Circuit 1 & 2!!! The guy who supplanted Steve Guttenburg for star of a sequel!!) character delivers when he's asked why he wears his sunglesses at night
"Because when you're cool, the sun shines on you 24 hours a day"

now THAT"S writing!!!!

ok, that's all well and good but this movie has a subplot that most ppl never caught
it's an important lesson that hollywood has to teach all of us

the movie has two main stars: John Stockton and Danielle von Zerneck

John Stockton has a spotty acting career at best (he had a bit part in Eddie and the Cruisers), but he writes and produces movies now. We have him to thank for such fine flicks as "Blue Crush" and "Rock Star" (haha! my hot surfing chics cancels out my mark wahlberg!!)

Daneille's daddy was a famous producer and now she owns a production company with mia sara!!! The hotty who played sloan peterson in ferris bueller's day off! (6 degrees of seperation anyone? Vin Diesel was in the fast and the furious with Michelle Rodriguez, who was in Blue Crush which John Stockton wrote, who was in My Science Project with Daneille von Zerneck who owns a production company with Mia Sara who was in ferris Bueller's day off with Matthew brodrick. So Vin Diesel and Matthew Broderick are 6 ppl apart. See, Kevin Bacon knows some things.)

so, the totally forgettable movie, "My science project" actually gave us a couple of unknown hollywood insiders who are still kicking around hollywood despite never achieving the glamorous fame and fortune we associate with movie stars.

I guess that means you never know what the sorry actors in today's movies will be doing tomorrow. I hope Tom Cruise gets a nice job at whataburger someday.
That'd be fitting.