Category Archives: 80’s Movies

Vigilante (1982)

Posted on September 10, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Father dispenses street justice.

Eddie (Robert Forster) is a factory worker living in a tough neighborhood of New York who comes home one day to find his wife (Rutanya Alda) beaten and his infant son murdered. Initially he trusts the system will bring the culprits to justice, but then realizes to his horror that the judge (Vincent Beck) is corrupt and with a payout that he receives from the defense attorney (Joe Spinell) he lets the head of the gang (Willie Colon) off with a probation sentence.  Eddie becomes outraged and seeks the help of a neighborhood vigilante group headed by Nick (Fred Williamnson) to set things right.

The film is an obvious rip-off of  Death Wish  that is so uninspired that I’m surprised that the producers of that film didn’t sue the filmmakers of this one for plagarism. Both the good guys and the bad ones are such extreme caricatures that it becomes unintentional camp while the tone has an ‘everything is terrible’ approach that makes it seem like the entire planet has become one big crime-ridden urban hellhole.

The script is full of loopholes like the fact that Alda initially confronts the gang at a gas station and yet when she gets home she finds that the gang is waiting outside in their car, but it’s never explained how they knew where she lived. If they followed her then that needs to be shown and it isn’t. When she calls the police asking them to send over a squad car she neglects to give them her address even though this was long before caller ID and without the address they wouldn’t know where to go.

Although I’ll give him credit for appearing nude while trying to fight off guys who were bigger than him and fully clothed while in the prison’s shower I still felt overall Forster’s performance, who gets billed on the film’s promotional poster as Robert FOSTER, is quite poor. Most of this is due to the script, but I still found it disappointing. Usually he displays a feisty, gutsy tough guy that I enjoy, but here he comes off as transparent and when he finds out his kid has been murdered he shows barely no emotion at all. Williamson conveys a far better edge and he should’ve been made the star while Forster’s character could’ve been scrapped completely.

Carol Lynley, as the District Attorney, is barely seen at all in a thankless bit that lasts less than five minutes, which is a shame as this was the last film that she was in where she still retained her youthful appeal as her film appearances after this she displayed a much more middle-aged appearance. Spinell, who had starred in Maniac just a year before that was done by the same director, is also wasted in a part that is much too brief. Woody Strode appears here as one of the prisoners, but he was clearly aging by this point and nearing 70 at the time make the part where he beats up two younger guys who are much bigger than him look ludicrous.

Spoiler Alert!

The films ends with a nifty car chase, which is probably the best moment in the film even though there’s loopholes here as well like having Forster crash into a patrol car, but he’s able to back away and keep going, but for some reason the patrol car doesn’t continue to give chase. If it was disabled in the crash then it needs to show this and it doesn’t. Forster also plants a bomb in the corrupt judge’s car, but nothing is shown earlier revealing that Forster had the ability to build one, so how did he figure out how to make it? It’s also highly unlikely that a judge, knowing that he was corrupt and people would mostly likely be after him, would pick-up a strange looking red object that he sees on his car and stupidly press a button on it. The bomb, before it explodes, also features a recording of him handing down the light sentence to the gang leader, but how was this recorded because during the courtroom scene no recording device was shown?

End of Spoiler Alert!

William Lustig, who initially started out as a director of porn films under the pseudonym Billy Bagg, showed great promise with Maniac, but here the effort is sloppy with little imagination given to the already stale premise. Everything, even the grisly violence comes off as mechanical and derivative.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: July 23, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: William Lustig

Studio: Artists Releasing

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Exploitation, Fast Cars/Car Chase, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with Nudity, Prison Flicks

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Oh, God! You Devil (1984)

Posted on September 3, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: God versus the devil.

Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass) is a struggling songwriter who is becoming increasingly frustrated at his inability to make it big. He blurts out at one point that he’d be willing to sell his soul if it could get him success and this catches the attention of the Devil (George Burns) who goes by the name Harry O. Trophet. He offers to become Bobby’s agent as long as Bobby signs a contract that gives him his soul after an indefinite period of time. Bobby, so desperate to reap the benefits of fame and fortune that has alluded him all his life, decides to take him up on the offer and soon becomes a world famous rock star named Billy Wayne. Yet Bobby misses his girlfriend Wendy (Roxanne Hart) who he can no longer see because he’s inhabiting a different identity. He longs to go back to his old way of life and tries to contact the services of God (George Burns) to dissolve the contact he signed and return him back to the way it was before.

After the critical shellacking of Oh, God! Book II the studio realized their mistake and attempted to take the theme in a whole new and hopefully fresh direction. They commissioned both Josh Greenfield and Andrew Bergman to write separate scripts and then ultimately choose Bergman’s over the other one. While the idea may sound funny the way it gets handled is not. All Bergman does is simply rework the Faust legend while offering very little that is new or inventive to it. The plot gets handled in an extremely heavy-handed and melodramatic manner that is neither funny nor engrossing. Bergman shows little feeling for the material and the story plods along in a predictable and boring way.

Wass, who no longer performs in front of the camera and has since 1995 worked exclusively behind-the-scenes as a director, is extremely weak. His performance is one-note and his constant deer-in-headlights expression is annoying. The film doesn’t do a good job of portraying his desperate situation either. Despite making very little money he’s still able to somehow afford a chic-looking apartment and maintain a relationship with a very hot-looking woman. I realize the point of the movie is to show that he already had a good thing going and just didn’t realize it, but his situation should’ve been shown to be more bleak in order to have his signing of the contract make more sense.

Burns is the only thing that saves it. He had never played a bad-guy before, so seeing him fall into the devil character as well as he does is fun and some of the lines that he conveys are the only amusing bits in the movie. However, the big showdown between God and the devil in which the two play a game of poker is not interesting at all and they needed to do something that offered more action, which is badly missing from the film otherwise.

This marked the final movie to date in the Oh, God! franchise. There were discussions a few years back about reviving it with Betty White playing the role of God, but because of her advanced age no insurance company would back it, so the idea got scrapped, which is a shame as this would be one reboot I’d be interested to see.  It would be nice if someone would make a film that more closely resembled the ‘Oh, God!’ novel by Avery Corman, which had a satirical tone that none of the three films replicated.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: November 9, 1984

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Paul Bogart

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Sequels, Spiritual Movies

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Oh, God! Book II (1980)

Posted on August 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: God returns to earth.

Tracy (Louanne) is an 11-year-old girl who one day meets God (George Burns) when he invites her via a fortune cookie into the lounge of a Chinese restaurant where he asks her to help him spread the word that he exists. She then, with the help of her friends, creates posters that say ‘Think God’ which she puts up all over town, but this gets her suspended from school and then her parents (David Birney, Suzanne Pleshette) consider having her sent to a mental hospital after she keeps insisting that she’s spoken to the Almighty directly.

This follow-up to the 1977 hit lacks the freshness and originality of the first. The studio had initially wanted the John Denver character to return, but the producers insisted they wanted a ‘fresh start’ and not just continue the storyline from the first film. While the characters are different, the plot line remain the same causing the film to come-off like a boring reworking of the first one instead of a continuation.

Louanne, who now goes by Louanne Sirota, is adorable, which helps, but her hairstyle looks like something out of the 1940’s. She also believes in God right from the start even before she meets him, which doesn’t allow for any type of interesting character arch. It’s also quite  hard to believe that her ‘Think God’ poster campaign would have any affect and that a nonbeliever would somehow suddenly become a raging theist after spotting one of the amateurish looking signs.

Another issue is the God character who is full of idiosyncrasies. For one thing the concept of evolution gets glossed over and the film makes it like how we see things now in regards to animal and plant life is exactly how God envisioned them when they were created at the beginning of time. He also mentions having to sometimes sneeze, but why would a spirit need to do that? At another point he talks about answering phone calls, but why would there be telephones in Heaven?

It’s also confusing why God, who is supposedly an omnipotent being that knows what each person is thinking and feeling would need the help of a young child in order to ‘reach people’. He also seems like a cruel jerk as he coaxes this girl into this ad campaign, which puts her into a very traumatic situation as it gets her suspended from school and even on the brink of being put into an institution. If God is all-powerful why can’t he simply make himself appear on everyone’s TV at the same time in order to let everyone know that he exists instead of putting a young child through such unnecessary stress?

The humor is lacking and the only funny lines are the ones dealing with the big breasts of David Birney’s girlfriend (Denise Galik). I also didn’t understand why the word book gets put into the film’s title as there was never any second Oh God! novel written. Was this supposed to be a play-on-words in regards to the books of the Bible? If so then that joke, like just about everything else in the film, falls flat.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 3, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Gilbert Cates

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Movies for the Whole Family, Sequels, Spiritual Movies

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Private Resort (1985)

Posted on August 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Teens hit on women.

Jack (Johnny Depp) and Ben (Rob Morrow) are two teen pals staying at a luxury resort in south Forida. They enjoy all the bikini-clad women there and make every effort to hit on as many as they can. They become attracted to the middle-aged Bobbie Sue (Leslie Easterbrook) whose boyfriend is The Maestro (Hector Elizondo) a master jewel thief. When she leaves her hotel key on a beach chair the boys mistakenly think she did it on purpose in order to invite them back to her room. They sneak into the room, but come into contact with The Maestro instead who thinks Ben is the hotel barber there to give him a haircut. When Ben ruins Maestro’s perm he goes on a vengeance swearing that he will kill Ben if he ever sees him again and forcing the two boys to go into hiding.

Obviously the only reason to watch this thing is to see the early work of its two stars who have since both disowned their participation in this and reportedly swore that they would burn every negative of this movie that they could find after they first watched it. For the most part though their presence here is amiable and for the women and gay viewers you get ample views of both of their bare behinds including one brief bit where old lady Dody Goodman swats Morrow’s bare ass cheeks with her hand. I was surprised though why the two stars weren’t featured on the film’s promotional poster seen above instead of two bland, smiling male models that it does use.

The supporting cast features a bevy of hot-looking women who may look good in a swimsuits, but lack discernible personalities and play-up the bimbo act too much. Elderly actress Goodman is good for a few chuckles and even does some karate. It was also interesting seeing Phyllis Franklin, who has a small bit as the ‘Dog Lady’ who looks almost exactly like Alice Pearce, the original Mrs. Kravitz in the TV-show ‘Bewitched’ and could easily pass off as her daughter. Elizondo though should be embarrassed about being in this one and I hope he was paid well for having to play a part that was so shamelessly campy.

The scenery, which was filmed at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida, is pleasing, but the story is lacking. I admit I chuckled at it more than I thought and I suppose the ending, which features Elizondo shooting up the place with a machine gun deserves some mention, but it’s still pretty lame. Calling this an ‘adult comedy’ is an oxymoron as you take away the nudity and sexual innuendos and you’re left with a mindless plot that is sillier than a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon. I was also confused why Depp and Morrow were even at this resort in the first place. They looked like they could still be in high school and even if they were college age I couldn’t fathom how, with the income most college kids have, how they could’ve afforded a room there as the place looked pretty swanky and made for adults who were well-off.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 3, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Rated R

Director: George Bowers

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Buddy Movies, Farce, Movies that take place in Florida, Movies with Nudity

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Summer School (1987)

Posted on August 4, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: No vacation this summer.

Freddy Shoop (Mark Harmon) is not happy about having to teach remedial English to nine students during the summer break. He was about to fly off to Hawaii with his girlfriend, but then got picked at the last minute to teach the class when Mr. Dearadorian (Carl Reiner) who normally teaches it wins the lottery and decides to quit his job. At first Freddy lets the kids goof around and even takes them on a few field trips, but when his tenure gets threatened unless all the kids pass the test he decides he better take it seriously and make deals with the kids to do the same.

The biggest surprise here was finding that Mark Harmon could actually be funny. He was the son of a former Heisman Trophy winner and a quarterback himself at UCLA during the 70’s who I always felt had the doors open for him in the acting biz simply because of his chiseled good looks and nothing more. I remember first watching him in the 80’s TV-show ‘St. Elsewhere’ and finding him to be quite boring there and yet here he shows a whole new side of himself and in a lot of ways is the most engaging thing about the movie.

The film also manages to avoid the pitfalls of other 80’s comedies by not aiming for the gross out, sophomoric humor that permeated so many other teen films from that decade. Everything here is surprisingly restrained and in a lot ways this helps to make it funnier because it keeps things at a more realistic level. It’s also great to see a teen film that doesn’t deal with the generation gap or portray the adults as being overly stuffy, or out-of-it as Harmon comes off as being just as cool as the students.

While the film does have its share of amusing moment, with the driving lesson that Harmon gives to one of his students (Kelly Jo Minter) being the funniest, there are a lot of potential comic ideas that it never follows through on, which limits it from being as funny as it could’ve been. It also never bothers to explain where Harmon’s car keys were as one of the students took them on the first day forcing Harmon to go looking for them, but never shows how he found them, or where they were hidden.

The character of Chainsaw (Dean Cameron) I felt was a bit on the lame side. For one thing he looks too old for a high school student and was in fact already 24 when he played the part, but what annoyed me more was his obsession with the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now don’t get me wrong it’s a great movie, but it’s also very well known and obvious. It’s not all that gory either and it was the gore factor that supposedly his character like the most. If the kid was a true horror fan then he’d be aware of the obscure horror movies that the others wouldn’t be and if gore was truly his thing then the Italian giallo films would be more likely something that he’d obsess over.

The film’s feel-good ending in which Harmon is able to reach and inspire each student in some way hurts the film by not portraying the teaching profession in a realistic way. There will always be those students that a teacher will not be able to reach no matter how hard they try, which is one of the more frustrating aspects about the job, but the film never bothers to tackle this issue. Some may argue that this would’ve hurt the otherwise lighthearted tone, but good movies are able to sneak in serious side-issues and still make it work and the fact that this one doesn’t makes it glossy and forgettable.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: July 22, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Carl Reiner

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Comedy

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Resurrection (1980)

Posted on July 21, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: She can heal people.

Edna (Ellen Burstyn) manages to survive a car crash and briefly finds herself in the afterlife, but ends up coming back to this world along with an amazing power to heal sick people with the simple touch of her hands. This makes her a celebrity in the small Kansas community that she lives, but others question her ability and wonder, especially since she refuses to acknowledge religion, if it may have a satanic origin. Her newfound boyfriend Cal (Sam Shephard) thinks she may be the second coming and becomes determined to get her to admit this even if it’s through violent means.

The story is loosely based on the life of Rosalyn Bruyere a self-described clairvoyant and medical intuitive who also acted as a consultant to the film. Although initially conceived as a thriller the script by Lewis John Carlino instead takes a more spiritual route, which I found refreshing. I also enjoyed the way director Daniel Petrie captures the vast Texas landscape, which despite the setting being in Kansas, was fully shot inside the Lone Star state.

The scenes of the afterlife are interestingly captured, but I found it baffling why Edna would just write this off as being ‘weird dreams’ and not connect it to any religious connotations. Having these visions then get ‘interpreted’ by her Grandmother (Eva Le Gallienne) seemed heavy-handed as even if a person was not religious themselves they would still be able to connect-the-dots on their own without it having to be explained.

The healing scenes work off of a murky logic. Edna is told after the accident that she is paralyzed from the waist down due to a blood clot in her spine and yet after she learns of her healing ability she places her hands on her legs to help her walk again, but if the root cause of the issue is actually in the back shouldn’t that be where she places her hands instead? The scene where a woman (Madeline Sherwood) who suffers from 2 degenerative vertebrates in her back, but is able to stand-up  after she sees Edna doesn’t make sense either. Standing with missing vertebrae is liking walking without a knee or cartilage. It’s just not scientifically possible, so unless Edna’s healing can cause bone mass to grow where they isn’t any then I’m not sure how they her powers actually work.

I thought it was a bit loopy too that when Shepherd’s character gets injured in a bar fight his buddies take him to Edna’s isolated farmhouse miles away for her to stop the bleeding, but this is when Edna’s healing ability had not been fully established, before this she had only stopped the nose bleed of a young girl, which some might consider simply a fluke, so the most rational thing would’ve been to take him to a nearby hospital instead. The scene would’ve worked better had Edna been in the bar when Shepherd got injured and then jumped in to heal him after he got stabbed.

I didn’t feel Shepherd’s character had the right chemistry to make Edna want to have a relationship with him either. His beady-eyed stare made him look creepy and his father (Richard Hamilton) had accused Edna of being satanic, so why would she want anything to do with that family? He also came off too much like a nondescript redneck like all the other rednecks that made up that small town. Edna was clearly an outsider, so for her to be attracted to someone I would think that person would need to be an outsider as well.

I could never understand why Edna was so resistant to religion, or so completely confident that her powers weren’t heavenly sent. I got that her Christian zealot father (Roberts Blossom) may have turned her off from religion altogether and she didn’t want to deal with the pressures of being considered Christ-like, which is understandable, but I’m not sure Burstyn was the right choice to effectively pull off that type of character. I love Ellen and think she’s a great actress, but she’s also a very spiritual woman in real-life and it pretty much gets conveyed in her performance here whether that was the intention or not. An actress that displayed more of a cynical, snarky attitude, only to have her outlook change once these powers took hold would’ve created a more interesting and dramatic arch.

The third act has Edna going to Los Angeles where her powers are tested by researchers, but these scenes don’t have any satisfying conclusion to them, which I found frustrating. However, the scene that Edna has with her dying father I felt were strong and the best moment of the whole film.

The spiritual element gets left open to interpretation depending on one’s own perspective, which is good. It also has a really great, and to some degree, surprise ending, but I didn’t like the freeze-frame shots taken from the film shown over the closing credits, which cheapens it as this is typically something done on TV-shows and not movies.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: September 26, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 43 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Daniel Petrie

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Movies that take place in Texas, Movies with a rural setting, Spiritual Movies

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Summer Rental (1985)

Posted on July 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Family vacations in Florida.

Jack (John Candy) is an over-worked air traffic controller who’s given a 5-week vacation to rest up. He decides to take his family down to Florida, but things prove to be even more chaotic there. First they move into the wrong rental property and then Jack has a confrontation with local sailing champion Al Pellet (Richard Crenna) who is a longtime resident that openly disdains the renters who visit during the summer. When Pellet gets ownership of the property that Jack is renting and threatens to throw Jack’s family out Jack decides to challenge him to a sailboat race even though his experience in sailing is limited.

Initially this movie comes off as a welcome change of pace from the typical 80’s comedy that usually dwelt too heavily in crude jokes and adolescent humor. Outside of one segment where a neighbor lady wants John to touch her breasts, which the viewer doesn’t see, to see how much he likes her new implants there’s no sexual innuendos at all, which is genuinely surprising since most 80’s comedies, even the tamer ones, seemed to feel the need to throw at least a few in. I even like the kids here. In most films they’re played-up in too cutesy of a way, or they’re obnoxious brats, but here the balance is just right.

The story though goes nowhere. The original idea was based on a vacation experience that producer Bernie Brillstein had in Southern California where he was a father of 5 children that rented a beach home that had two elderly sisters and a mentally challenged son as his neighbors on one side and a group of gay men on the other side, but none of these elements appear in the movie, which for the most part is uneventful.

Candy’s confrontations with Crenna, whose portrayal of a snobby, rich man is too broad of a caricature, are forced and not funny. Their climactic sailing race doesn’t work either. Sailing can certainly be a relaxing excursion, but watching it as a sporting event is not exciting. It also has Candy and his crew dumping out the contents of a freezer and eventually the entire freezer itself into the lake in an effort to get their boat to sail faster, but this is also obvious water pollution and not something a protagonist in a film should be doing.

Candy gives an appealing performance as usual and Rip Torn is fun as an aging ship captain although having him walk around with an actual hook for a hand is a bit much.  Some may even enjoy seeing Joey Lawrence when he was still a cute kid, but the plot, much like stagnant water, just sits there and the pace is too breezy making the material hardly worthy of a feature length production.

There’s also a glaring logic loophole that involves Candy and his family staying at what they think is their rental property only to be awoken in the middle of the night by the homeowners and told they were at the wrong place, but how were the keys that they were given able to open the locks on the doors if it was not the right home? They also were able to retrieve the keys from the mailbox of the place, which is where they were told they’d find them, but if that wasn’t the right house then the keys should not have been there.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: August 9, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 27 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Carl Reiner

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Drama on the High Seas, Movies for the Whole Family, Movies that take place in Florida

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Commando (1985)

Posted on July 4, 2019 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Father rescues kidnapped daughter.

John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a retired colonel from the U.S. special forces who is now living the peaceful, quiet life with his young daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano) in a secluded mountainside home. Then when day he gets visited by his former superior (James Olson) who advises him that the other members of his former unit have all been killed off. Before he has a chance to react a group of mercenaries converge on his home and kidnap his daughter. John tries to stop it, but can’t and is eventually drugged where both he and Jenny are taken to a secret location where they meet Arius (Dan Hedaya) the group’s leader. He tells John that he can have his daughter back once he carries out an assignment to assassinate the President of a South American country known as Val Verde. As John is being taken onto the airplane to carry out the plan he fights back by overpowering his captors and he then goes on a mad dash to retrieve his daughter before it is too late while using the assistance of Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong) an off-duty flight attendant that he meets along the way.

The one good thing about a Mark L. Lester directed film such as this is that it moves fast, so you get reluctantly caught up into the action before you realize just how dumb and threadbare the story and characterizations really are. For the first 45-minutes it kind of works with the best stunt coming with Arnie escaping out the cargo bay exit door of the airplane and out onto the landing wheel of the aircraft before jumping into some swamp land just before the plane takes off.

Unfortunately this ends up being the film’s only highlight as everything that comes after it gets overdone to the point that it almost starts to seem like a farce and might’ve worked better had it been played up as being one. Watching Arnie fight off a bunch of security guards while inside a mall by having them all fall down like bowling pins with one blow of his fist looks too much like something used in a slapstick comedy. The scene where he tears a phone booth from a wall and lifts it high over his head is ridiculous as no matter how strong a guy is lifting something up like that will certainly destroy or injure a person’s back.

This brings to light the film’s other issue, which is the fact that Arnie never ever gets injured, or if he does he miraculously recovers from it in a matter of seconds. Watching him shoot down all these mercenaries like they were a part of a video arcade game while hundreds of bullets go whizzing by his head, but never  actually hitting him is when I got totally tuned off from it as it ceased to be believable and I was constantly glancing at my watch every two minutes just praying that the whole stupid thing would quickly end.

Chong, who is an actress that is usually able to convey a strong personality came off here as one of the most annoying elements in the movie. The fact that she would so quickly jump into helping Arnie find his daughter even though she had just met him and jeopardizing her own life and career along the way didn’t make much sense. The scene where she is able to fire a rocket launcher despite having no experience was another head-scratcher. She states that she had simply ‘read the directions’ on how to use it, but how would she have had time to read anything when every waking second is spent with them chasing after the bad guys.

Milano, who is probably better known these days for her political activism instead of her acting, gives a flat and forgettable performance. Hedaya is equally blah as the villain although I’ll give him credit for effectively looking and sounding Latino despite being Jewish in real-life. The biggest disappointment though is Vernon Wells who plays Arnie’s muscular nemesis and tries taking him on one-on-one at the end, but when compared to Arnie’s massive physique Wells looks pretty puny and an actor should’ve been cast that would’ve looked more like Arnie’s physical equal in order to come off more like a legitimate threat.

A director’s cut of this film is also available, which adds in a few more scenes and has a minute longer runtime than the studio version, but to me that’s just one more minute of your life wasted watching this dumb thing that you’ll never get back.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: October 4, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Mark L. Lester

Studio: 20th Century Fox

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Dry Humor, Kidnapping Movies, Movies with Nudity

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Music Box (1989)

Posted on June 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: She defends her father.

Anne Talbot (Jessica Lange) works as a defense attorney in Chicago and is shocked when her kindly father (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who immigrated to the US from Hungary many years ago, is threatened at having his citizenship revoked due to being accused of committing past war crimes.  Several witnesses have come forward to identify him as being ‘Mishka’ a man who headed a Nazi terror unit known as the Red Arrow that systematically tortured and killed Hungarian Jews during WWII. Anne refuses to believe this and immediately volunteers to defend him in court, but as she researches the case she finds many unsettling elements that makes her question whether her father really is the victim of mistaken identity as he claims, or actually the man responsible for committing heinous acts against humanity.

The film was inspired by the true-life case of John Demjanjuk who immigrated to the US in 1952 and worked as an auto worker for many decades before being identified by 11 Holocaust survivors as being Ivan the Terrible who tortured and killed many Jewish prisoners while working as a guard at a concentration camp. Script writer Joe Eszterhas also adds his own experiences into the story by channeling the emotions he felt when he found out that his father had been involved in disseminating anti-semitic propaganda during WWII.

The plot had all the hallmarks of being a trenchant courtroom drama especially since it was directed by Costa-Gavras who has shown a knack for helming political thrillers with a psychological bent, but it all ultimately falls flat. Much of the problem is that we learn little about Mueller-Stahl’s character as his face never shows any emotion. At first this makes it interesting as he comes off like this kindly old man who seems the complete opposite of what he’s being accused of, but after awhile we need to see what’s going in his mind and beneath the facade. Whether it’s anger, fear, madness, or evil at some point it needs to get conveyed in his face as the trial goes on, but instead all the viewer sees is a constant blank stare that keeps the character frustratingly transparent.

Having a male model pose as the younger version of him in the wartime photos was a mistake too. Googling images of Mueller-Stahl when he was young shows that he looked much different than the model in the movie making the portions where the witnesses positively identify Stahl from the photos seem off-kilter since the guy in them even when given the realities of aging doesn’t look anything like the man sitting in the courtroom. To avoid this they should’ve cropped an actual pic of Mueller-Stahl into the war time photos.

The court case itself ends up becoming quite draggy because instead of focusing on one witness they put in several of them one after the other who essentially retell the same type of story, which gets redundant. There’s also some Hollywood theatrics that get thrown in like when Mueller-Stahl physically confronts one of the witnesses in the courtroom with no one attempting to restrain him before he collapses to the floor in a completely over-the-top fashion. Having everyone in the trial then get flown across the Atlantic to a Hungarian hospital to hear testimony from a dying witness only helps to turn the entire thing into a misguided spectacle.

Lange, who was Hollywood’s darling at the time and constantly offered first dibs at every ‘important’ movie that came out, gives a good performance, but her emotional character arch is predictable. The focus should’ve been on Mueller-Stahl’s character and what made him tick, but no insights are ever given even during the climatic final confrontation, which ultimately cements this as being a big disappoint.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: December 8, 1989

Runtime: 2 Hours 4 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Costa-Gavras

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Court Drama, Movies that take place in Chicago

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Lovesick (1983)

Posted on June 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Therapist falls for patient.

Saul (Dudley Moore), who works as a psychoanalyst, starts to see a new patient, Chloe (Elizabeth McGovern) who he immediately starts having feelings for, but every time he fantasies about her he sees a vision of Sigmund Freud (Alec Guinness) in his head who advises him not to go through with it due to ethical issues. The problem is that Chloe also has feelings for Saul. Can the two work out a relationship despite being up against professional and societal obligations that won’t let them?

The biggest mystery here is why these two stars would choose to act in this project. Moore was coming off two mega hits at the box office and McGovern had just gotten nominated for an Academy Award for her work in the critically acclaimed Ragtime and yet they choose this vapid thing as their follow-up. I realize it was written by Marshall Brickman, who won the Oscar for his Annie Hall script, but not everything he touches will turn to gold and it’s pretty obvious pretty quickly that this screenplay isn’t on par with that one. In a lot of ways this thing, which was critically panned and just barely able to break even at the box office, could be blamed for sinking both of their careers. It also smothers their talents by forcing Moore to play a part in too normal of a way to the point that he isn’t funny at all and completely upstaged by everyone else. McGovern on the other hand, who was only 21 at the time, plays a woman who is more middle-aged, which squelches her youthful beauty and energy.

The supporting cast aren’t allowed to play to the full potential of their talents either. I was intrigued to watch the movie when I read the plot synopsis about Alec Guinness appearing as Freud, which I presumed would be really funny, but the concept does not get played-up enough and becomes completely dull and forgettable. Alan King with his abrasive personality is always good for a few sparks, but here his presence doesn’t add much and it would’ve been funnier had he been cast as a therapist.

The biggest disappointment is how Ron Silver gets misused. He plays the perfect composite of an arrogant, obnoxious actor that manages to give the film a slight boost, but then as it progresses his demeanor gets softened until he becomes as boring as everyone else and then by the second-half he gets dropped completely.

The story itself is unbelievable and hard to fathom how anyone could’ve given it the green light. The part where it jumps-the-shark is when Moore steals McGovern’s house key, breaks into her home, reads her private diaries and then eventually gets caught hiding in her bathtub, but instead of her becoming freaked out about this and running to the police she immediately goes to bed with him!

It’s not like therapists don’t sometimes have romantic feelings for their patients or vice versa, but that doesn’t mean they always follow through with their emotions, or if they did it most likely wouldn’t work out. The film here takes an intriguing concept and then glosses over all of the potential complications that would ensue. Everything works out too seamlessly by packaging a complex issue in too much of a cutesy way.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: February 18, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Marshall Brickman

Studio: The Ladd Company

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Romance

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