Category Archives: 80’s Movies

Alligator (1980)

Posted on October 31, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Reptile in the sewer.

In 1968 a young girl (Leslie Brown) brings home a baby alligator, which she stores in her small aquarium, but her father decides to flush the thing down the toilet where in the sewer it feeds off the carcasses of dead animals which were given an experimental growth formula from a nearby clinic. 12 years later the alligator having ingested this formula for years has grown to massive lengths and escapes from the sewer where he now terrorizes the citizens of the city.

The screenplay was written by John Sayles and has a nice blend of comedy and scares. In most other horror films there are usually some long boring segments in between the shocks that get filled with awkward drama or banal dialogue, but here these same segments convey a playful sense of the absurd and are some of the best moments in the movie including showing all the street vendors who come out and try to cash in on the alligator scare by selling alligator related merchandise at the river where the police are searching for the beast. I also enjoyed the ad-libbed lines by the supporting characters mentioning Robert Forster’s receding hairline, which become the movie’s running joke.

The scares are still present and for the most part effective although the scenes inside the sewer work best. I liked the way the beams from the flashlights reflected off of the tunnel walls and created a surreal look as well as how quiet it would get when the police and S.W.A.T. went into the underground caverns, which helped accentuate the tension.

When the gator breaks out of the sewer is when the thing starts to go south especially when it attacks guests at a dinner party, which is too graphic and ghoulish and destroys the film’s otherwise playful tone. I also didn’t like when the alligator breaks through sidewalk having the camera shake, which is something directors would do in old movies to create an earthquake-like visual effect, but comes-off as quite tacky looking. Having the gator roam the city for as long as it does and not get caught seemed implausible as something that big would attract lots of attention no matter where it went and most likely would get cornered by the authorities a hell of a lot sooner than it does.

The film also suffers by not effectively conveying the size of the beast visually. We see a lot of quick shots involving its open mouth, but not much else. An animatronic one was built, but it malfunctioned and was little used and then later donated to the Florida Gators as their mascot. An actual gator got used in some shots, which they superimposed onto a miniature set to make it look bigger, but the final result of this looks awkward.

The truth is alligators are by nature very timid towards humans and will usually swim away if approached by one and only attack if they feel threatened. They prefer much smaller prey that they can eat with one gulp and thus avoid people altogether. It’s actually the crocodile that  is much more dangerous and in fact the saltwater and nile crocodile kills hundreds of people each year, which for the sake of accuracy should’ve been the species that got used.

I also thought it was a bit bizarre that someone could keep an alligator as a pet like the young girl does at the beginning. Now don’t get me wrong watching them flush the baby gator down a toilet is one of the best parts of the movie, but what would’ve happened had the gator been allowed to grow into an adult? How would they be able to house or control him, which only makes the father, who gets portrayed here as being obnoxious, look smart by getting rid of it when it was small and he still could.

The cast though still makes it worth watching. Forster is great in the lead as he plays against his stoic tough guy image by conveying vulnerabilities with his finest moment being the horrified expression on his face when his partner gets attacked and he’s unable to save him. I also liked Jack Carter as the corrupt Mayor and Dean Jagger, in his last film role, as the nefarious animal clinic owner. Angel Tompkins can be seen briefly as a news reporter as well as Sue Lyon in her last film appearance to date.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: November 14, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Lewis Teague

Studio: Group 1 International

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Horror

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Razorback (1984)

Posted on October 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Giant boar terrorizes outback.

Jake (Bill Kerr), who lives in the Australian outback, gets attacked one night by a giant razorback who takes off with his infant grandson. Jake is later accused as having made up the story as no one can believe that there could be a razorback of such mammoth proportions and yet Jake spends the rest of his life hunting after it and determined to get his revenge for what it did to his grandson. During his quest he meets up with Carl (Gregory Harrison) whose wife Beth (Judy Morris) was also killed by the same wild boar.

The film was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who rose to fame by directing many influential music videos and his unique visual style is what sets this film apart. The way he captures the vast, flat outback is stylish and the dream sequence out in the desert is both creepy and surreal. I also really enjoyed the part where the razorback tears apart a man’s house forcing him to helplessly watch as the part of the home with the TV, which he was watching, goes literally gliding away in front of him, which  may not be realistic, but a very funny image nonetheless.

The story though, which is based on the novel by Peter Brennan, is too indicative of other better known movies. It starts out with Jake going to trial over the death of his grandson and no one believing his account, which is loosely based on the Azaria Chamberlin incident who was an infant that got taken away by a dingo in 1980, but the public didn’t believe the story and accused the parents of killing the child instead. However, in this instance the razorback creates a giant hole in Jake’s house, which should be enough for most people to think that there might be something to what Jake was saying and makes the opening court room bit seem both protracted and unnecessary especially since he quickly gets acquitted anyways.

The second act resembles the film Wake in Fright as Carl and two other men go on a nighttime kangaroo hunt. It also examines the poor way Carl adapts to the rough nature of the outback men, which again seems too similar to the plot of the other film and really wasn’t needed since it slows up the pace, which needed more scares and appearances of the giant razorback that are completely missing during the middle part.

The third act comes off too much like Jaws, with Jake channeling Quint, which might’ve been alright as I found Jake’s rugged individualistic ways to be both endearing and amusing to the point that he could’ve been made the main character. However, is untimely demise is both graphic and cruel and gives the film an unnecessarily mean tone.

Having Carl single-handidly take on the razorback at the end while inside an abandoned warehouse is boring as it rehashes the man vs beast theme that’s been done many times before. I was actually more interested in seeing the townspeople work together to hunt down the boar, which is an idea that the film teases, but then ultimately sells-out on.

My biggest grievance though is the way the beast gets photographed. Supposedly a  giant animatronic model of the razorback was built at a cost of $250,000, but you never really see it. Shots of the beast are edited so quickly that you only get brief glimpses of the animal and never its whole body and no true idea of how big it really is. There’s also no explanation offered for  how it grew so big.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: April 19, 1984

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive), Blu-ray (Region B/2, A/1), Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Horror, Movies from Australia, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity

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Mother’s Day (1980)

Posted on October 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Rednecks murder for mama.

Trina (Tiana Pierce), Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), and Jackie (Deborah Luce) are three friends from college, who are now in the adult world but still enjoy getting together one weekend of the year for a ‘mystery trip’ where they go to some place they’ve never been before. This year they decide to take a camping trip into the dense woods of New Jersey. It is there that they come into contact with a redneck family consisting of two grown sons: Ike (Frederick Coffin, but billed as Holden McGuire) and Addley (Michael McCleery, but billed as Billy Ray McQuade) who kidnap the girls and bring them back to their secluded home where they torture and rape them all for the amusement of their twisted mother (Beatrice Pons, but billed as Rose Ross in order to avoid losing her actor’s union membership for starring in a non-union film.)

The film is loosely inspired by the true story of Gertrude Baniszewski, a single woman with 7 children living in Indianapolis in 1965 who got her kids to torture and murder a 14-year-old girl who was boarding at their home while her parents went off to work in a carnival. This same story was done in two other films: An American Crime starring Ellen Page, and The Girl Next Door with Blanche Baker. While both of those movies took a more serious approach this film tries to spin in goofy satire which kind of works and kind of doesn’t.

I enjoyed the graffiti sprayed painted on the walls inside the mother’s home and the silly TV references as well as the two sons arguing over the merits of  whether ‘Punk sucks’ or ‘disco’s stupid’, but the opening bit where the mother attends a weekend encounter group, which was a parody of The Erhard Seminars Training, which was popular during the 70’s, should’ve been cut. For one thing there’s no logical reason why this reclusive old woman would be motivated to attend this group. It also telegraphs too much of the plot by having her car break down and her two sons then jump out of the forest to kill two of the people that she had met at the seminar. Not having the mother and her boys introduced right away but waited until after the girls were kidnapped would’ve created more tension and mystery.

Spoiler Alert! 

The women characters are better fleshed-out than in most other slasher films and a great deal of time is spent showing their backstories. They’re also not made to seem like bimbo party girls, but portrayed more like everyday women who are smart and more average looking, which was a refreshing change of pace.

However, the ending, which consists of them turning-the-tables on their captors and savagely killing them doesn’t work. Had they still been held hostage and forced to kill in order to escape then it might’ve been more believable, but instead they successfully escape and then decide to come back and murder the family for ‘street justice’  after one of them dies. This though was too wide of arch as nothing is shown before hinting at this violent streak that harbors within them. Screenwriter Warren Leight tries to justify it by having the redneck mother remind Abbey of her obnoxious mother back home and thus letting out all of her pent-up frustrations that she with her own mother onto the old woman, but it’s all still too extreme and heavy-handed.

End of Spoiler

Despite all of these issues I still felt this was a step above most other slasher flicks. There’s enough interesting elements to it that I was convinced that director Charles Kaufman, who is the brother of Troma President Lloyd Kaufman and not to be confused with the famous screenwriter with the same name, had the potential of being a good cult film director, but since 1988 he is no longer in the filmmaking business and instead runs the successful bakery Bread & Cie in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: September 19, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Charles Kaufman

Studio: United Film Distribution Company

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

 

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

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Creepshow (1982)

Posted on October 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Five stories of horror.

This film was the collaboration of Stephen King, making his screenwriting debut, and George Romero, who filmed the entire thing in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with many of the scenes done in an abandoned boy’s school. The production was a homage to the horror comics like ‘Tales of the Crypt’ and ‘The Vault of Horror’, which were published between 1950 and 1955 before being shutdown because they were considered ‘dangerous’ to the well being of children and contributing to juvenile delinquency.

The script consists of five stories with the emphasis more on camp than terror and outside of the cool comic book effects fall pretty much flat.  The first story entitled ‘Father’s Day’  comes off more like a one-joke skit and deals with an adult daughter (Viveca Lindfors) who kills her obnoxious father (Jon Lormer) on his birthday with an ashtray and then years later visits him at his grave site where his corpse comes back to life.

The second story entitled ‘The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrill’ should’ve been extended out more as it has some intriguing possibilities to it. It consists of a redneck (played with campy glee by Stephen King) who finds a meteor that’s landed in his backyard, but realizes to his horror that everything it touches grows a greenish foliage including on himself.

‘Something to Tide You Over’ is the third entry and it’s about a man (Ted Danson) being buried alive in the sand and then drowning as the tide rolls in. It’s shot in a way where the viewer sees the water rushing in from the victim’s point of view, which gives it a frightening quality, but suffers from having the victim  too easily lead into the trap and a twist ending that involves a metaphysical phenomenon, but with no suitable explanation for how it could’ve occurred.

‘The Crate’ involves an arctic monster being found inside a crate that was underneath a college stairwell. One of the professors (Hal Holbrook) uses this monster as a way to kill his obnoxious wife (Adrienne Barbeau), but the logic on this one is loopy. First how was the monster able to survive four decades inside a box without any food or water? Having him encased in a block of ice and then unfrozen would’ve been a little more plausible, but the story is further hampered by the casting of Barbeau, who’s too young for the part, which would’ve been better suited for a fat old bitty that was more Holbrook’s age. The biggest question though is why would Holbrook bank on the idea that the monster would kill his wife and not attack him first and why would the wife, or anyone with half a brain, be dumb enough to get tricked into driving all the over to the college campus and then crawling under the stairwell to begin with as the reason he gives her to do it is pretty dumb.

‘They’re Creeping Up on You’ has the most potential and a fun performance by Marshall, but ultimately gets botched. It’s about a rich Howard Hughes-like billionaire (E.G.Marshall) who lives alone in this fancy, hermetically sealed penthouse that gets overrun with cockroaches. Watching the roaches crawl around is creepy and apparently over 20,000 of them were used. Yet having them pile onto each other until they create a roach-like mountain loses the effect, many of them weren’t even roaches by this point but instead nuts and raisins. This segment would’ve been better had it been a fancy penthouse with all the elaborate furniture trappings as King intended instead of a white room with barely nothing in it. This story also features a dead body, which clearly looks like a wax dummy that ultimately ruins the intended effect.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: November 12, 1982

Runtime: 2 Hours

Rated R

Director: George A. Romero

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Campy Comedy, Cult, Horror, Movies based on Comic Books, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with a rural setting

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The Final Conflict (1981)

Posted on October 22, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Monks battle the Antichrist.

Damien (Sam Neill) is now appointed the US ambassador to England the position his adoptive father once held before he died. He uses this position as well as being the CEO of Thorn Industries to try to halt the Second Coming of Christ, which happens on March 24, 1981 during the alignment of stars known as the Cassiopeia Constellation, but problems occur when they don’t know which child it is. This causes him to order his assistant Harry Dean (Don Gordon) to kill each child born in England between midnight and 6 AM of that day unaware that Dean’s own child was also delivered between those hours and this secret he tries to keeps from Damien until it is too late.

This third entry is an improvement over the second film as it pushes the plot progression forward and enters in all sorts of interesting new wrinkles. The budget is high and allows for different setting locals including a genuine fox hunt, which I found entertaining. Neill plays the part pretty well and unlike in the first two is sinister throughout with his best part coming when he gives a prayer to the devil in a secret room next to a giant crucifix. The film also has a scene that reveals a secret underground movement of devil worshipers, which is made up of hundreds of ordinary, everyday people who get together at a secret, hidden location and take orders directly from Damien. This helps to explain where these people came from who help Damien in his cause, which is  something that was never shown in the second installment, but should’ve.

It also continues the trend of having novel deaths occur including a graphically brutal one that happens inside a TV studio that apparently due to its complexity took two weeks to film. However, the intended shock effect from these, that was so strong in the first film, gets lost here. Instead of being horrifying they become almost laughable especially since they mainly occur to the monks who are each given one of the seven daggers to kill Damien with, but they are so incompetent  that it becomes more like comic relief.

The killing of the infants, which Damien’s followers carry out, are equally goofy and include a segment where a baby carriage with the baby inside rolls down a hill, which will do nothing but remind cinephiles of the famous scene in the classic Russian film Battleship Potemkin. I was also confused during the baptism scene where the Priest supposedly kills the child while baptizing it with water, but it’s not clear what he does as we only see the shocked expression of the mother when he hands the baby back to her, which only creates more questions than answers. Like wouldn’t the priest get arrested for killing the child since he did it in front of so many witnesses and if so wouldn’t he unravel during the subsequent police interrogation and reveal Damien’s plot to them?

Spoiler Alert!

The film’s biggest letdown though comes with its ending. Initially it seemed that Harry and his wife would be forced to go on the run to hide their infant from Damien, which could’ve involved a very exciting cross-country chase, but the film ruins this potentially interesting idea by having the mother get brainwashed by the devil dog to kill the baby herself.  It then ends instead where Damien travels to some church ruins where the Christ child is being hidden, but we never see the baby and no explanation for how it was able to avoid being killed by Damien’s followers. The novel version explains that it was born to a family of gypsies and therefore no record of its birth was made to the authorities, but this is something that should’ve been stated in the movie.

Having his girlfriend Katherine (Lisa Harrow) stab Damien in the back with one of the daggers comes off as being too easy and ultimately makes the climax seem anti-climactic especially after such a big buildup. It also gives off too much of a happy ending feel. This is after all still a horror movie and therefore the viewer should be left it with a certain unsettling feeling when it’s over, which this film doesn’t do.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: March 20, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 49 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Graham Baker

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Horror, Movies with Nudity, Sequels

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Frenchman’s Farm (1987)

Posted on October 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Witnessing a past murder.

Jackie (Tracey Tainsh) goes traveling in her car throughout the Australian countryside while bush fires rage all around her. When her car breaks down she visits the nearest farmstead for help. It is there that she finds herself suddenly swept back to the year 1944 where she witnesses a murder and then just as quickly she comes back to the present day. When she tries to tell others what happened nobody believes her, but eventually her boyfriend Barry (David Reyne) takes up her cause and with the benefit of old news articles help find the real killer and the secret behind what motivated it.

Although marketed as a horror flick, it seems more like iffy sci-fi and could’ve easily have been targeted to a pre-teen audience since it’s not all that tense, or scary, especially with the majority of it filmed in the bright sunny daytime. When it does finally take place in the darkness of night a cliched thunderstorm gets conveniently put in while the killer is made out to being a ghost who pops in and out like it’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Initially I kind of liked that that she didn’t stay stuck in the past and was able to be her own detective, which kept me intrigued for awhile yet it started to make me wonder why the time traveling event occurred to begin with, which the movie has no suitable explanation for except to say that the bush fires created some sort of ‘atmospheric disturbance’, but if that was the case why was she the only one affected? The film also does a poor job of recreating a past era, as Jackie and her boyfriend go back to the farm where the murder occurred, but do it in the present day and yet the trees in the backyard where she witnessed the killing 40 years earlier all look the same even though they should’ve either died or grown bigger.

I found it annoying too that the boyfriend, who has a generic ‘surfer dude’ presence, starts to take over the investigation even though it really wasn’t his personal battle to solve. In order for him to take such an interest he should’ve been transported back in time with Jackie, or for a more original touch, it could’ve been Jackie and a female friend who witnessed the killing and then proceeded to becoming amateur sleuths together.

A few veteran Aussie character actors, such as an aging John Meillon, help give it some stature, but the production overall is quite bland and how it ever got considered as being a part of the Ozploitation genre, which stands for Australian exploitation cinema, is beyond me since outside of a brief skinny-dipping minute there’s nothing titillating or shocking about it.

The ‘surprise ending’ is also really dumb and doesn’t even involve the main character who gets phased out of the storyline before the ending even comes about, which is not satisfying for the viewer to follow a character around  for the whole movie only to have her ultimate fate left open to a murky explanation.

 

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: September 9, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Ron Way

Studio: CEL Film Distribution

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Movies from Australia, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Mystery

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Allison’s Birthday (1981)

Posted on October 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Teen ages very rapidly.

Allison (Joanne Samuel) decides to spend her 19th birthday with her aunt (Bunney Brooke) and uncle (John Bluthal) who live in rural Australia and have been raising her ever since her parents died when she was just a child. However, this visit includes her meeting her elderly grandmother (Marion Jones) for the first time and a mysterious illness that also affects her while she is there. Her aunt and uncle refuse to allow her boyfriend Peter (Lou Brown) to visit causing him to go to great lengths to get her away from them and back to safety as he fears they’ve come under the influence of a cult.

This low budget Australian sleeper managed to become a hit in its own country mainly from its attempts to work against-the-grain of that era by creating a horror film that did not involve blood and gore, but instead relied on good old fashioned creepiness. For the most part it succeeds, but gets hampered by a plot that plays itself out too slowly.

It becomes too obvious that her aunt and uncle have some evil intent in mind and this should’ve been camouflaged better because when the big reveal finally does come about during the third act it’s not surprising at all. The cult that they’re involved with is portrayed in such a cliched way from the tacky black robes that they wear to the Stonehenge-like meeting place that  it seems like high camp. The opening sequence featuring a ouji board and a talking spirit, is equally heavy-handed and almost sinks this thing before it’s barely begun.

Some of the action segments particularly her boyfriend’s attempts to outrun the cult members who try chasing him down is exciting, but he’s in too much of the movie, while Allison remains virtually bedridden making it seem like he’s the main character instead of her. A good protagonist should be able to fight her own battles and in this case she does too little, which doesn’t elicit enough emotion from the viewer to want to cheer her on.

Spoiler Alert!

The film’s twist ending in which, due to the ritual ceremony done by the cult, a young Allison suddenly wakes up to find herself trapped inside the body of her grandmother, is pretty cool and genuinely quite horrifying when you think about it. However, this should’ve occurred during the middle part and the rest of the film spent with her trying to return her spirit back to her youthful body, which could’ve involved a wide array of intriguing and unique elements. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen making the film only a skeletal blueprint of what it could’ve been.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: May 1, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Ian Coughlan

Studio: Australian Film Institute

Available: VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Movies from Australia, Obscure Movies

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April Fool’s Day (1986)

Posted on October 9, 2019 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: It’s all a prank.

A group of college students get together at an excluded island home of one of their friends Muffy (Deborah Foreman) to celebrate their last year in school together. Then as the weekend progresses they find that a killer is knocking them off one-by-one. Will the remaining survivors be able to escape, or is there something more to these murders that no one realizes?

The film was an attempt to revive what at the time was a lost interest in the slasher genre by creating a irreverent tone to the staid formula and in that regard it does an okay job. The main issue though is that it gets too jokey making it seem more like a misguided comedy that losses sight of its intended horror fan audience completely.

I didn’t mind a few of the pranks, but too much time gets spent on them and 40 minutes seemed to be a ridiculous wait (if you don’t count the injury that occurs on the initial boat ride in, which seemed more like an accident) before we even get to the first killing. The pranks bordered on being too elaborate and something a regular person wouldn’t be able to pull off. For instance one deals with Rob (Ken Olandt) turning off one light in a room only to have another one turn on, all to the amusement of his girlfriend (Amy Steel) who apparently (I guess?) rigged the lights to do this, but where did she  get the electrical background or time to wire the room in this manner?

If the pranks are supposed to revolve around the fact that it’s April Fool’s Day then all the action should  take place within a 24-hour period instead of over several days. The scenery doesn’t have a spring-like look either as there should be blossoms and buds on the trees, but instead, since it was filmed in August, it looks more like late summer.

The cast comes-off too much like crude and obnoxious junior high kids whose only topic of conversation is sex instead of young adults ready to enter the working world and their dialogue doesn’t seem genuine.  One dumb bit has Harvey (Jay Baker) trying to make amends with Nikki (Deborah Goodrich) by trying to prove to her he really isn’t as much of a ‘dick’ as she thinks, but then proceeds to tell that he’d like to ‘plow her field’, which would only convince her otherwise.

Spoiler Alert!

The killings are brief and feature virtually no gore at all, which will disappoint those expecting to see at least a little. The ending, which reveals the killings to being just another gag, was novel, but there still needed to be a secondary twist. In the film’s original cut Skip (Griffin O’ Neal) kills Muffy after everyone else has left the island, but the studio execs nixed this opting for an ‘upbeat’ ending instead. Upbeat endings are fine if it’s a comedy, but a horror film should have a dark undertone and the fact that this one doesn’t have one at all makes it woefully undernourished.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: March 28, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Fred Walton

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube.

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, College Life, Cult, Horror, Movies with a rural setting, Mystery, Offbeat

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Dad (1989)

Posted on October 4, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Son cares for father.

John (Ted Danson) is a busy executive who learns during one of his business meetings that his mother (Olympia Dukakis) has had a heart attack and rushes back home to care for his father (Jack Lemmon) who isn’t use to doing things on his own. John teaches his father how to do the every day chores while also learning to bond with his own son Billy (Ethan Hawke) who comes to visit. Just as things seem to be getting better and his mother gets out of the hospital it is the father who then gets sick with cancer leading to even further complications.

The film is based on the 1981 novel of the same name by William Wharton, which I’ve never read, but if it’s anything like this script then it’s not too good. One the main problems is the extreme shifts in tone that starts out with elements of Rain Man and then at the halfway mark becomes like a dark satire of incompetent medical delivery in the vein of Hospital and then in the third act turns almost fable-like.

My biggest beef is the pseudo-science that gets thrown in after the father goes to the hospital with his cancer. This is when the old man suddenly without warning starts going delusional and then ultimately into coma only to one day miraculous snap out of it. We’re told that the explanation for this is that the father was so fearful of cancer that the brain produced some sort of enzyme that acted as a defense mechanism that shut off the mind so it wouldn’t have to deal with it and it was the love shown by the son that ultimately allowed the dad to come back to consciousness, but what reputable medical journal has ever discussed this phenomenon?  Things get even more ludicrous when the old guy starts thinking he’s on a farm in a different time period and we’re told this is a schizophrenic condition caused by the cancer and everyone needs to play along with it, or he’ll go back into a coma.

Danson, for what it’s worth, gives a strong performance here, probably the best in his otherwise lukewarm film career. I found it frustrating though that his character doesn’t have all that much of an arch. Supposedly he’s self-centered at the start and needs to learn to be caring, but this only gets explained by the character during a long soliloquy during the middle part, when the viewer should’ve instead seen the transition play out. I also thought it was wacky that he’d be allowed to bring in a cot and stay with his father inside his hospital room as I’m pretty sure most doctors would not allow this.

Lemmon’s performance is good too, but I didn’t like how a tuft of white hair was kept on his otherwise balding head as I found it distracting. While it was nice that his character wasn’t a crotchety old man, which has become a bit of a cliche, I found his extreme dependency on his wife, to the point where he allowed her to dress him and even butter his toast despite the fact that he was physically able to do it himself, as pathetic. His later transition to laid-back hippie who wears colorfully garish outfits as he takes on a whole new perspective on life is too jarring and extreme.

The film never comes together as a whole and if anything could’ve been shortened with the first half dealing with the mother’s heart attack taken out and just started with the father’s cancer diagnosis as that’s when the main plot gets going. In either case it tries too hard to be cute while compromising too much on the believability.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: November 10, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 57 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Gary David Goldberg

Studio: Universal Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a Hospital setting

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Raising Arizona (1987)

Posted on September 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 8 out of 10

4-Word Review: Childless couple kidnap baby.

Hi McDunnough (Nicholas Cage) is a repeat offender who goes in and out of the state penitentiary. It is there that he meets Edwina (Holly Hunter) an officer in charge of taking his mugshot each time he gets rearrested for holding up convenience stores. Eventually the two form a bond and when he finally gets released they marry, but find that she’s unable to bear children. They then hatch a plan to kidnap one of the quintuplets of furniture store owner Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), but find this leads to more complications than they were prepared for.

While the Coen’s directing is sharp and on-target there were still those that criticized it as being overly stylistic and, as critic Vincent Canby stated, outside of the technical expertise the story has no life of it’s own, which is kind of true. The editing does give the film a personality, but there were times where slowing it down and allowing the scenes to breathe could’ve heightened the humor. For instance having Cage break into the Arizona residence to kidnap the baby happens much too quickly and there should’ve been a scene showing Cage trying to figure out which window to break into to get to the baby’s nursery as it was a big house, so how exactly would he have known where to go?

With that said there are still plenty of times where the distinct directorial touches spark the comedy and make it years ahead-of-its-time. I particularly liked the Coen’s patented camera tracking during Cage’s dream sequence where he views things from the bounty hunter’s (Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb) perspective as he rides his motorbike over obstacles on the front lawn and then supposedly straight into a bedroom. A chase sequence that starts out on the street and then winds up going through a person’s private residence is quite ingenious and the running-joke dealing Dr. Spock’s child rearing book is very funny too.

The script offers only caricatures, which would normally be a detriment, but here it just adds to the zaniness. I really enjoyed Wilson as the stereotypical aggressive, brash salesman and the scene where he talks to the police after the kidnapping has occurred I found to be the funniest moment of the movie. John Goodman and William Forsythe are also great as a pair of inept bank robbers and Sam McMurray and Frances McDormand are hilarious as the in-laws from hell.

Spoiler Alert!

My only real grievance, and it’s on a minor level, was the kidnap scenario, which could’ve been played-out more. I also thought it was weird that this rich couple would have all these kids and not hire a nanny to help them care for the babies. It’s a head-scratcher too that when Cage and Hunter decide to return the baby that they were able to break-into the same window that they did before. Wouldn’t you think that after a kidnapping this rich couple would’ve implemented crime alarms and cameras in ever room? Also, Nathan Arizona, catches the couple in the bedroom returning the kid to his crib and then after talking to them a bit he leaves the room with Cage and Hunter still with the baby, but you would think that after they took the kid once that the father would be too paranoid to ever leave the baby alone with them again.

The ending in typical Coen fashion doesn’t equal the same energy and imagination as the rest of the story and is a bit of a letdown. It deals with a dream that Cage has where he imagines having a really big family, but I thought it would’ve been funnier had the dream started out pleasant where he thinks about all the good things about family life only to have it slowly deteriorate into a nightmare where the harsh realities of raising kids come into play making him wake-up in a cold sweat and feeling lucky that they couldn’t have children after all.

My Rating: 8 out of 10

Released: April 17, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Campy Comedy, Kidnapping Movies, Movies with a rural setting, Offbeat, Robbing Banks

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