by ·Comments Off on Dead Heat (1988, Mark Goldblatt)

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help.

Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie reanimation chamber – and just in time, since Treat gets himself killed in another room.

Lot of fishtank drama in this movie:

“Rich dead people, what does it mean?” Funny, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Zero K, which asks the same question. But here the screenplay is just something you’ve gotta get through, an obstacle to the heart of the movie, which yearns to show us more reanimated corpses with machine guns (and admittedly good makeup), now including Treat. The PR woman joins them, saying she didn’t mean to be evil. When she belatedly admits that she’s also dead, the company keeping her alive as long as she’s useful, she corpse-rots immediately. Now they need a new hotgirl on the team, and fortunately we’ve got Treat’s ex, morgue attendant Becky.

Treat, Gremlins Salesman, and the zombie army:

More stuff: the zombie chemicals run through Chinatown, where the Gremlins salesman makes a getaway by turning on a lightning machine which reanimates all the chickens and ducks and pigs in his butcher shop. The zombie company is run by Dr. McNab (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and PR woman’s father, VHS Vincent Price. You expect the happy ending is gonna be finding a way to keep Treat unalive so he doesn’t rot like the PR woman, but no, everyone ends up dead, and when a cornered Kolchak shoots himself, they reanimate him just so they can kill him again. Good commitment to the bit, though overall the movie doesn’t move swiftly or smartly. Director Goldblatt was better known as editor of James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven and Joe Dante movies (the evil company here is called Dante).

The split-second before John Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People” took a bullet intended for Joe Piscopo:

Treat’s final form:

by ·Comments Off on White of the Eye (1987, Donald Cammell)

Good bright color and 1980s slow motion, bad Pink Floyd music. Women be shoppin’, then be gettin’ murdered at their homes in Tucson. Was it possible for artists working in the 1980s to not produce an “80s movie?” Certainly not in this case, and the music is largely to blame. Cammell pulls off some great angles and edits, like a glitchy Nic Roeg movie, and overall I felt bad not liking it after reading this.

David Keith is an audiophile home stereo installer, who drives an ugly green van while listening to opera. The cops start questioning him about being nearby the recent savage serial killings, leading his wife (Bronx blonde Cathy Moriarty) to ask questions, leading to marital discord. Her husband is very upset about being considered a possible murderer, although he is the murderer, and now he sets out trying to murder her and their daughter. If you’ve seen a 1980s movie, you know this will all lead to machine guns and explosions, somehow. The husband is the Firestarter dad, while the murder investigator is from Christine. I checked to see if I could find enough Stephen King movie veterans to form a pattern but just ended up with The Keep, Matinee, Witch Hunt, and Return of the Killer Tomatoes.

by ·Comments Off on 9 to 5 (1980, Colin Higgins)

We visited my aunt Dolly the week Dolly Parton died and somehow it never came up. A week earlier I saw the Lily Tomlin Snow White fantasy sequence from this movie at a Hard Light pre-show and didn’t recognize it at all from having seen snippets of this on TV through the 1980s, back when everybody knew who Dabney Coleman was. Sterling Hayden doesn’t show up until the very end, after they’ve kidnapped their boss and improved the company without him. Dolly somehow got three Globe nominations for one movie, was beaten by Sissy Spacek (fair), Nastassja Kinski (??), and the song “Fame” (booo).

by ·Comments Off on The Color of Money (1986, Martin Scorsese)

1961 original: downbeat, guys go broke and get injured, the girl dies
1986 reboot: a party, guys get rich and have a good time playing the game

“He’s gotta learn how to be himself, but on purpose.” The Hustler finds a hotshot kid named Vince who is such a hotshot that he busts into pool halls and beats everyone in the room while wearing a shirt that says VINCE. Newman says let’s apply some strategy to this skill, and the kid’s girl (M.E. Mastrantonio) hears him, but the kid (T. Cruise) doesn’t, and the guys end up playing vs. each other in a tournament.

Mouseover to refocus on the next generation:
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by ·Comments Off on New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way.

The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way.

Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria:

After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982 were too busy having weird sex to go out to movies or shows. Almost everything here is offputting, but the staging of some closeups and quick zooms are pure cinema, unfortunately.

by ·Comments Off on Missing (1982, Costa-Gavras)

Everyone wanted Vangelis the year after Chariots of Fire, and the two movies who landed him were Blade Runner and this downbeat drama. It’s a dialogue-heavy movie, light on the music, but whenever those classy synths kick in, you float for a little while.

Missing Charles aka TV’s Lex Luthor, talks with his pet duck:

Gavras was by now typecast as the guy who makes depressing movies about leftists getting destroyed by oppressive military governments, so the coup in Chile was right up his alley. Shot and cut like a standard prestige drama, without the nervy energy of Z. The physical action can be clunky too, but casting late-career Jack Lemmon and post-oscar Sissy Spacek as the leads really helps for authenticity. The most impressive thing here is the shifts in perspective, following one character then another, jumping through time, and rewriting history (showing different versions of a past event depending who’s telling it).

Was there a rash of “parents’ worst nightmare” movies around then, or have I just seen the poster for Hardcore too many times? Lemmon’s son has disappeared during the coup, but surely he’s fine because he is a documented American, and therefore immune to foreign political violence. Straightlaced Jack reluctantly teams up with the son’s wife Spacek and their dirty leftist friends, scouring hotels and hospitals while the embassy is being prickly. Faith begins to falter in the “helpful” men in suits, the American exceptionalism, and the safety of the son, as the bodies mount up – it doesn’t help that their government contacts are played by the stalker/murderer of Klute and the guy who fails his blood test in The Thing.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Calm (1989, Phillip Noyce)

Memorial screening for the great Sam Neill. He and Nicole Kidman are a bereaved couple on a sailing voyage when they meet Billy Zane, typecast as a sexy guy who wants to kill you aboard a sinking ship. His stories about his former vessel don’t add up, and when Sam goes to investigate, Billy takes control and speeds away, leaving Sam to sink and die. But this is one of those movies where the best mechanic / sailor / problem solver wins the day, and Neill is up to the task. Kidman’s no slouch either – nothing’s hotter than a woman whose reaction to running out of fuel is to hoist the sails. We get no insight into Zane and what his whole deal was, just a psychopath, finally taken out by a head-exploding flare gun. The same story Orson Welles would partially adapt as The Deep, screenwritten here by Terry “Mad Max” Hayes. Noyce made a movie the same year where Rutger Hauer plays a blind swordsman, and I’ve never watched it for some reason?

by ·Comments Off on Spetters (1980, Paul Verhoeven)

Follow-up to Soldier of Orange features another bunch of young male friends. These guys ride bikes together and have literal dick-measuring contests, and most of them will meet bad ends. Rutger’s getting too old to play a teenager so he’s the local motorbike champion they idolize. Still too plotty and obvious, but the great 4th Man was up next and Paul’s next couple of decades would be very good.

Rien with his girl in the good early days:

The girl on the poster is future 4th Man star Renée Soutendijk, running a food truck with her gay brother. When she sets up at a bike race, all three of the young dudes fall for her, and though she would appear to be out of their league, she sees them as a possible way out of the food truck life, dating each guy at different points.

Do not get caught ripping off a food truck:

Rien starts winning races and getting paid, then crashes on the highway because dudes in cars can’t stop littering, ending up in a wheelchair. Rien considers Jesus but settles on suicide (again on the highway). Mechanic Eef has been earning cash for his trip to America by mugging gay guys at the mall, until they catch and gang-rape him. Hans is not the greatest racer, gets mocked by Rutger on TV, but apparently still earns enough to buy a local bar after it gets trashed by bikers. This seems at least more stable than the food truck, so the girl stays with Hans and her brother moves on. Multiple Blondie songs on the soundtrack is the movie’s real highlight – also a good fake-sex-noises scene early on.

Eef considers a flasher’s offer:

Rutger can’t stop winning: