Category Archives: 80’s Movies

The Island (1980)

Posted on March 23, 2024 | Leave a comment

island

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Journalist investigates pirate hideout.

Blair (Michael Caine) is a newspaper reporter who becomes intrigued about the reports of missing boats in the Caribbean. He gets the permission from his editor to travel down there to investigate and he takes along his 12-year-old son Justin (Jeffrey Frank). The trip proves dangerous right from the beginning when the plane they’re traveling in crashes on one of the islands when the wheels of the craft fail to operate as its trying to land. They then go on a fishing trip only to be attacked by some pirates living on an uncharted island. Justin is brainwashed by the head of the group, Nau (David Warner), to become heir while Blair is put to the task of being the resident scribe and in the process becomes the source of romantic affection to Beth (Angela Punch McGregor) whose husband he killed earlier during the attack on their fishing boat. While Blair desperately searches for an escape he becomes even more worried about his son who no longer shows any loyalty to his father and instead considers himself a descendant of the pirates.

This was another one of Caine’s ‘paycheck projects’ where he’d do the film simply on the basis of the monetary offer regardless of the script quality. He has since regretted this decision and refuses to talk about it in any of his interviews while privately labeling it the worst film of his career. The script was written by Peter Benchley and based off of his novel of the same name. Since Benchley also wrote Jaws he was for awhile deemed a hot commodity in Hollywood, but after this movie tanked his status diminished completely and he was never offered another script deal again though his 1991 novel ‘Beast’ did get adapted into a TV-movie.

The main problem is the disjointed tone that comes off at times as a thriller and at other moments a comedy. The scenes of violence, which start out right away, are completely botched. The first one has what’s clearly a mannequin put in place as the victim and thus makes the stabbing sequence unintentionally laughable. The second violent episode where the pirates raid another boat has the victims not making a single sound as they’re being hacked and thus allowing their daughter to sleep through it, but I feel men and women will definitely yell out in terror as their fighting for their lives. The third raid features one of the victims trying to take on the pirates, one-by-one, karate style, but this turns the thing into a farce and makes the pirates engaging in a weird sort of way, which saps away all the suspense.

The concept that this pirate community would be inhabiting an uncharted island for centuries and not found out is unbelievable to the extreme. They come-off like people lost in a time warp who are confused and baffled by modern technology, but they’re clearly able to get off the island whenever they want, so why wouldn’t they travel to other islands, or even the mainland where they would come into contact with the modern day civilization? Even if the whole group didn’t go there would most likely be a few who’d be curious enough to want to explore what else was out there. Having the pirates get into a time machine from the 1600’s to the modern day, or be the ghosts of pirates from long ago, as wacky as those concepts may be, would still be better than doing it the way it gets done here.

The Caine character is boring and the way he gets put on this assignment is ridiculous as his boss just tells him ‘to go’, without putting up any provisions like how long he’ll be staying, where exactly will he be traveling to, how many articles would he be writing and when would they be due, or even whether the newspaper would even be compensating him for the cost. With terms this loose a person could frolic away on some tropical vacation and his employers wouldn’t have known the difference. He’s also never shown writing anything on a notepad, or typewriter, or dictating into a tape recorder, so it barely seems like he’s a journalist at all. The idea that Caine would be the only person on the planet intrigued by these disappearances is absurd too as relatives of the victims would be demanding answers and there would be other news reporters wanting to travel there in an effort to be the first to get the ‘big scoop’.

It’s also odd that a father would choose to take his son on such a dangerous mission knowing full well that others who have traveled to this area have disappeared without a trace making it seem like he’s an  irresponsible parent. The kid also gets ‘brainwashed’ too quickly, literally overnight, making it seem like he might have some sort of mental disorder if he’s able to change personalities and allegiance that fast. The idea of putting match sticks in his eye sockets and thus not allowing him to sleep would most likely dry his eyes out and blind him instead of getting him to come onto their side and like them. The pirates are also able to do the same ‘brainwashing’ with another young girl they kidnap, but how is this primitive group so adept at child psychology in ways that modern man isn’t?

Spoiler Alert!

The ending, which features Caine annihilating the entire group via a M2 machine gun is cool though it should’ve been done in slow motion to fully accentuate the violent depravity. The subsequent chase through the dark bowels of the ship between Caine and his son and Nau where you hear the creepy splashing of the sea water hitting against the ship’s bottom isn’t bad either. Unfortunately everything that comes before is a wretched mess making it by all accounts one of the worst and most inane films I’ve ever seen.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: June 13, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 54 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Michael Ritchie

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD-R, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Black Comedy, Cult, Drama on the High Seas, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity

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Movers & Shakers (1985)

Posted on March 17, 2024 | 1 comment

movers2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: No ideas for script.

Joe (Walter Matthau) is a head of a large movie studio who makes a promise to a dying friend (Vincent Gardenia) that he’ll make every effort to get his concept, which is to make a movie around the title ‘Love and Sex’, made. Joe then hires struggling actor Herb (Charles Grodin) to write the script, but Herb has no idea of where to begin and seems more concerned with mending his troubled marriage with his wife (Tyne Daly). Joe then hires wacky director Sid (Bill Macy) to helm the project, but he too is devoid of any ideas and more preoccupied with his getting his young wife (Gild Radner) to go back to him.

The behind-the-scenes history of how this movie even came about is far funnier than anything you’ll actually see on the screen. It all started when Paramount Studios paid a large of sum of money for the right’s to the sex manual ‘The Joy of Sex’ because they felt the title would have a large commercial appeal. They then hired Grodin to write the script telling him it could be about anything just as long as the title of it was ‘Joy of Sex’. Grodin, like the character he plays in the movie, was at a loss of ideas, so he finally decided to base the script around his real life situation about an actor hired to write a screenplay based solely around a sexy title. When he submitted the completed script to the studio they decided to pass on it and gave the duties of writing the script around the Joy of Sex title to someone else, which later got made into a movie directed by Martha Coolidge. Meanwhile Grodin became determined to get his script made even though he could no longer used the same title since Paramount retained the rights to that. He spent 7 long years peddling the script around to all the major Hollywood studios and even a few independent ones until he finally decided to use his own money to fund it and get his actor friends to agree to be in it for as small of a pay scale as they could with Grodin himself accepting only $5,000 for his work despite being both the star and producer.

While the concept sounds funny and even novel the final product isn’t. A lot of the problem is that outside of the inciting incident nothing much happens. Everyone just sits around complaining about a lack of ideas, which soon gets quite boring and redundant. The marital spats that occur in-between, both with Grodin and his wife, but also with Macy and Radner, and even Steve Martin and Penny Marshall, who appear briefly in a cameo, is neither lively, or clever and just helps to make any already dull movie even duller. Satirizing the Hollywood studio heads isn’t exactly ground-breaking either.

I also had a hard time understanding why a big studio mogul like Matthau would want to put up a giant statue of a dinosaur in the middle of the studio backlot since it was from a movie that didn’t do well at the box office. Supposedly it was due to his friendship with the director, but to me that just didn’t jive. If the movie had done well then yes a statue was in order, but to be reminded of a flop that cost the studio money seemed very hard to imagine and too stupid to be comical. If the character’s motivations don’t make sense then it’s hard to get into the story, which is where this thing really falters.

For his part Grodin himself is quite amusing. Nobody does deadpan comedy the way he does, so his scenes still work, and there are a few humorous comments made here and there, especially by the character played by Earl Boen, but everything else just dies. The voice-over narration by Grodin, which got added later in an effort to make the movie ‘funnier’ after the responses by the initial test audiences were quite negative, doesn’t help things at all. A good movie should not have to rely on narration as everything should be conveyed by either dialogue, or action, or through other forms of visuals. Once you need narration to ‘improve it’ you already know it’s a mess.

Turning the thing into an ill-advised romance at the very end, which even includes a sappy love song, between Grodin getting back together with his wife just sinks it even further. Their fights weren’t too interesting to begin with and neither person was well-defined enough for the viewer to care what happened to them.

Grodin would later write in his autobiography of how bitter he was that the studio didn’t market the film better and the poor treatment Hollywood elites gave it, but it really is a bad movie and I think his ego got the better of him with this one. I’m a fan of his comic style and even the offbeat talk show he had during the late 90’s, which didn’t go over well with everyone and didn’t last long, but I draw the line with this. It just doesn’t work at all and can’t blame anyone for disliking it in fact I’d be very surprised if there was anyone other there, outside of Grodin of course, that did like it.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: May 3, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: William Asher

Studio: MGM/UA

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 80's Movies, Obscure Movies, Satire

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Blind Date (1987)

Posted on March 10, 2024 | Leave a comment

blind1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Don’t get her drunk!

Walter (Bruce Willis) needs a date as he’s having dinner with a very important client that he has to impress in order to get a business deal to go through. Walter’s brother Ted (Phil Hartman) sets him up with his wife’s cousin Nadia (Kim Basinger). She’s a very beautiful lady who’s just getting over a bad break-up with her possessive boyfriend David (John Larroquette). There’s only one hitch: Walter must make sure that she doesn’t drink any alcohol because if she does she’ll go ‘wild’. Walter though dismisses the warning and offers her a glass of champagne, which soon leads to a night of massive calamity.

Blake Edwards directed a lot of duds in the 80’s and I thought That’s Life and Skin Deep were two of his worst, but this one clearly beats those by a mile.  It has shades of After Hours and had this thing kept the story revolving over the happenings of one night it might’ve worked a bit better, but the second-half goes way off-kilter, which really kills the whole thing and turns it into a complete catastrophe. Screenwriter Dale Launer shouldn’t be blamed either as while his name is still on the credits the script was rewritten so may times that it shared nothing with his originally concept and he ultimately disowned it.

The problem starts right away with the whole alcohol thing as Basinger acts overly drunk after having only a few sips. Her transformation into this crazy lady is more creepy than funny like she has a split personality, or some sort of mental condition. Most guys would be running from her almost immediately and never look back and how someone could ‘fall-in-love’ with her after such obnoxious and erratic behavior defies explanation. If there was ever a bad date night this would be one. The fact that she puts up $10,000 for his bail the next day shouldn’t make-up for it like it does here and where exactly is this lady getting her hands on such quick cash anyways since she can’t afford a place of her own and must reside with others?

Willis is great when he’s the one making wise-cracks like he did in the classic TV-show ‘Moonlighting’, but playing the straight-man who simply responds to all the nuttiness happening around him doesn’t work at all. Having Basinger sober up and then Willis be the one to act zany at a later party they go doesn’t make any sense and seems more like it’s some ‘crazy personality virus’ going around or a possession of some kind that like with the cold or flu can easily transfer from one person to another.

Larroquette as the psycho boyfriend pops-in way too conveniently and becomes a bit hard to imagine how he’s able to constantly track the two down no matter where the go and the fact that his car crashes into the three different storefronts, but the front end of the vehicle remains completely intact, defies logic. His character gets neutered by adding in his parents (William Daniels, Alice Hirson) during the second act whose presence doesn’t really help propel the plot along, but instead seems to take the story in an entirely different direction. Having Larroquette defend Willis in court even though he had a lot to do with why he was in trouble and whose name was mostly likely on the police report and then to have the judge turn-out to be his own father is so outlandish that it’s beyond stupid.

This movie also has somewhat of a personal connection as I was living in L.A. in June of 1986 when it was being filmed and stood around with other pedestrians for a day to watch one of the outdoor scenes that was being shot in a nearby neighborhood. The scene that I saw being filmed comes around the 1-hour mark and entails Willis throwing a beer bottle at the rear window of Hartman’s car and smashing it. The scene took several hours to film as Edwards, who sat under the shade of an umbrella while the cast and crew and had to stand under the hot sun, seemed to be dissatisfied with every take and kept making the actors do the same bit over and over that I found it to be really boring and didn’t think there could be anything duller until of course I finally watched the finished movie, which I found to be even worse.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: March 24, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Blake Edwards

Studio: Tri Star Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Farce, Movies with Nudity, Romance

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Without a Trace (1983)

Posted on March 4, 2024 | 1 comment

without

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Her child goes missing.

Susan (Kate Nelligan) works as a college professor while also raising her 6-year-old son Alex (Danny Corkill) as a single parent. Alex normally walks 2-blocks to his school every morning in their Brooklyn neighborhood, so Susan thinks nothing of it when she waves goodbye to him as he turns the corner towards his school while she goes the other way to her job. However, when she returns home and finds that he’s not there she begins to worry. She calls her friend Jocelyn (Stockard Channing), who has a daughter the same age as Alex, only to learn that Alex never showed up to school that day. She then immediately calls the police and Detective Al Manetti (Judd Hirsh) becomes the lead investigator in the case to find the child.

The story is loosely based on the real-life case of Etan Patz who disappeared one day while walking to school on May 25, 1979. Not only did he become the first child to appear on a milk cartoon for missing children, but it also inspired Beth Gutcheon to write a novel, which was a fictionalized account of the his case that was later purchased by producer Stanley R. Jaffe in the amount of $350,000 to turn it into a film, of which Gutcheon was hired to write the screenplay.

While the film has a riveting quality that keeps you watching it does also have a certain ‘genteel atmosphere’ that critic Leonard Maltin complained about in his review, that keeps it a bit sterile for its own good. The film acts like child abduction is almost a novelty that’s rare to happen and shocking when it does though kids can go missing each and every day in this country. The detective states that children can be sexually molested by adults though if children came forward about it they’d ‘never be believed’ or ‘taken seriously’, which is something that I think has certainly flipped the other way in this day and age. He also brings up the subject of child porn, which gets called ‘chicken porn’ here, and parents respond in a naive way to this concept, which again is something I think most adults in this era would’ve been familiar with its existence and not act like they’re being told about something completely new they had never heard about.  The police also ‘set-up-shop’ in the women’s apartment turning it into a virtual police station and remain there day-and-night for 6-weeks, which I couldn’t see happening now.

The sequence with a psychic, played by Kathleen Widdeos, I found unintentionally laughable. Her ‘visions’ are quite vague and when she gets pressed to give something specific, like the license plate number of the car, or identity of the kidnapper, she can’t. Yet the mother acts relieved when the psychic says the child is still alive, but since her ‘information’ is so nebulous she could be a con artist making it all up and no one would know the difference.

David Dukes, who plays the ex-husband and father of the child, who at this time was best known for playing the man who tried to rape Edith Bunker, in a memorable episode of the classic TV-show ‘All in the Family’ of which he received several death threats, plays the only character that shows any emotion and thus the only one who stands-out. The movie also examines the detective’s home-life, which I didn’t feel was needed. Normally I say it’s good when we learn more about a cop’s private side, but since he wasn’t the film’s protagonist I didn’t find it necessary and only helps to lengthen the film’s runtime, which was too long anyways and could’ve neatly been told in only a 90-minute time frame instead of 110 minutes.

I did come away liking Nelligan’s performance, some critics at the time labeled her as coming-off as ‘cold’, but I felt she did alright, but was kind of disappointed that Stockard Channing didn’t get the lead instead. At the time Nelligan was considered the up-and-coming star while Channing had been mostly relegated to comedy including two failed sitcoms, but in retrospect Channing has become the better known actress and proven to be highly versatile, so seeing her in the part of mother would’ve been quite interesting and she might’ve even been able to do it better.

Spoiler Alert!

My biggest beef though is with the ending, which is much different than in the actual incident. In the Patz case his body was never found and it turned into a cold case for many years before a man named Pedro Hernandez came forward in 2012 and confessed to the crime. Here though the boy gets found alive having been kidnapped to help take care of a man’s disabled adult sister, but it’s very hard to fathom how much help a 6-year-old could be expected to give an adult woman nor has there ever been in the annals of crime where a kidnapping has been done for this reason. Having the kid immediately answer the door of the home he is supposedly being ‘confined in’ hurts the tension and would’ve been more suspenseful had the police had to search the place before finally finding him hidden somewhere. Also, if the kid is able to open the front door then what’s stopping him from running out at some point and finding help?

The fact that a neighbor woman named Malvina Robbins (Louise Stubbs), who lives next door to the kidnappers and keeps calling the police about it, but they ignore her, really hurts the credibility of the Manetti character who we’re supposed to like and he’s portrayed as being ‘super dedicated’. If that’s the case then he should’ve followed-up on every single lead he could’ve even if he thought some of them might be ‘cranks’ it shouldn’t matter because you just never know. The fact that he doesn’t do this even after she calls the police hundreds of times makes it seem like a dereliction of duty who should be investigated for not  following up and certainly not some ‘hero’.

I realize most audiences want some sort of resolution and making a movie like this that doesn’t have one might prove frustrating, but in real-life a lot of cases like these don’t get resolved, or if they do the findings are a grim one. To have a movie stay realistic the whole way only to tack-on a feel-good ending does a disservice to the many parents whose missing children never come home and thus hurts it from being as insightful and compelling as it could’ve been.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: February 4, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 50 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Stanley R. Jaffe

Studio: 20th Century Fox

Available: DVD-R, VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Kidnapping Movies, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Obscure Movies

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Fast-Walking (1982)

Posted on February 25, 2024 | 1 comment

fastwalking

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Guard helps prisoner escape.

Based on the 1974 novel ‘The Rap’ by Ernest Brawley the film centers on prison guard Frank Miniver (James Woods) a pot smoking man who’s unhappy with the low pay of his current job and helps supplement his income by pimping prostitutes to the local Mexican laborers. Wasco (Tim McIntire) is a prisoner at the jailhouse Frank works at who has many outside connections. When a black political prisoner William Galliot (Robert Hooks) arrives at the prison Wasco fashions to have him assassinated by Frank, but Frank has other ideas. He’s already made a deal with Galliot to have him sprung from the inside and in so doing he’ll be given a cool $50,000. Wasco become aware of this other deal, but insists that Frank follow his plan, or he’ll put a hit on Moke (Kay Lenz) an attractive, sharp-shooting lady friend that Frank’s been sleeping with who is also Wasco’s girlfriend. Will Frank choose money over the girl, or will he have a plan-B of his own?

Filmed on-location at the old Montana State Prison building in Deer Lodge, Montana the film has an interesting look to it, which helps accentuate the characters. The American west has always had the allure of escape and individualism, so the rustic landscape here brings out not only Frank’s need to get out of the shackles of his dead-end job, but the prisoners as well. The small town setting has a sort-of renegade vibe where everyone is eager to  push-the-envelope of the law and feeling more than confident that they can get away with it. The guards seem almost as corrupt as the men they incarcerate and in some ways even worse. The entertainment is not seeing good conquer evil, but more with which side will manage to out con the other.

The story takes its sweet time getting told with the entire first hour spent just showing Frank’s on the job frustrations before it even gets to the prison break plan. It works more as vignettes than a plot with one amusing moment taking place in the visiting room with one prisoner named Ted (Sydney Lassick) more fascinated with Moke taking off her panties underneath her skirt than with what his own wife (Helen Page Camp) is saying who sits directly in front of him. The cat-and-mouse game that Frank plays with Moke who each challenge the other with their rifle skills with Frank shooting flat the tire of Moke’s motorcycle from a long distance only to have Moke do the same to Frank’s tire on his jeep while he’s driving it is a lot of fun too.

The acting is excellent and the film’s main driver. Lenz looks great, both with her clothes on and off and this marked her career peak as her roles after this were of the supporting variety, or stymied in obscure, low budget flicks. Tim McIntire is also quite good in his second-to-last feature before his untimely death. He spouts a lot of dialogue, which seems almost like a never ending rant at times, but he conveys it in such a snarky, articulate way that it’s still fun to listen to though I was confused why, being a prisoner himself, he was allowed to sleep in the same room as the guards and even socialize with them out in the open. At first I thought he was a guard since he’s given a lot of their responsibilities including lowering the lever each morning that open up the other cell doors. I could only presume that given the corrupt environment and the fact that he was Frank’s cousin that he was given some under-the-table leverage to get these perks and privileges, but it would’ve helped had it been explained better, or given some backstory.

It’s also interesting seeing M. Emmet Walsh here doing yet another nude scene. He has an aging, out-of-shape body type that you’d think no one on this planet would want to see naked, nor would ask to, and yet in a span of 2-years his bare body figured prominently in two different films. In Straight Time he gets his pants pulled down while chained to a fence overlooking a busy highway, which I thought was edgy enough, but here he again gets shown sans his clothes this time from the front side where you get to see underneath his bulging belly his little wee-wee dangling about as he stands outside the front door and yells at Woods who is pulling away, which makes for an image you may want to forget, but might have problems doing.

As for the action there’s not much of it. Sure there’s a couple of shootings, which are quick, and a few fleeting scenes of prisoners falling to their deaths, but that’s about it. No riots, rapes, knife fights, or prison yard fist-fights all stuff that most viewers have come to expect with these types of movies and thus unless they get into the subtle quirkiness may leave disappointed. The inmates are also strangely docile and respectful of authority and even though they greatly outnumber the guards and at times could easily over power them they don’t, which makes it seem not as gritty as it could’ve been though others may not mind this and instead enjoy the film’s offbeat quality including Lalo Schifrin’s bouncy score.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: October 8, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 55 Minutes

Rated R

Director: James B. Harris

Studio: Lorimar Productions

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive), Amazon Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity, Prison Flicks

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Three Men and a Baby (1987)

Posted on February 23, 2024 | Leave a comment

threemenbaby

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Infant on their doorstep.

Peter (Tom Selleck) is an architect, Michael (Steve Guttenberg) is an artist, and Jack (Ted Danson) is an actor. All three live in a large apartment in downtown Manhattan. None are married and spend most of their time, when not working, hosting lavish parties and dating beautiful women. One day a baby gets left at their doorstep while Jack is away starring in a movie that’s filming in Turkey. Peter and Michael find the infant and attached note stating that it’s from one of Jack’s previous girlfriends whom had a brief fling with while starring in a play. The two men have no idea how to take care of it, which leads to many amusing mishaps. Once Jack returns they find themselves in even more chaos when drug dealers appear at the apartment looking for a package of heroin that had also been delivered there.

This is the American version of the French hit Three Men and a Cradle and while I’ve been routinely critical of most Hollywood remakes from European films this one, which was directed by Leonard Nimoy, makes many improvements on the story. There’s nothing that’s hugely different, but there’s enough small changes to the plot that helps fill in the caveats from the first one.

One of the things this one does better is it shows the men’s partying side, which the first one didn’t do as well as it started pretty much right away with the baby’s arrival and only elaborated about their wild ways while here, in perfect movie fashion, we see it. Although a bit garish, I enjoyed Michael’s artwork that gets drawn all over the outside walls of the apartment and creates a rather surreal look. There’s also definite strong 80’s vibe that permeates almost every shot at the beginning from the colorful lettering of the opening credits to the theme of ‘Bad Boys’ by Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, which was a big band back in the day. There’s even Guttenberg doing a corny imitation of Robin Leach from ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ though anyone that didn’t live through the decade will most likely not get that one.

The characters are much better defined with each having a distinct personality. While his movie career never really took-off Selleck shines as the leader of the group due to him being the oldest and at times the most stern. Guttenberg, with his boyish face, is perfect as the immature and clueless one while Danson scores as the eccentric actor. I liked that the men continued to work their jobs even as they looked after the baby, while in the first one they would just call in ‘sick’, which became excessive and unrealistic. In fact probably the funniest moment in the whole movie, at least for me, is when Danson is on stage rehearsing a play with the baby strapped to his back.

Even the drug dealing scenario gets handled better. In the first one the guys return the drugs to the dealers by putting it into one of the babies diapers and then tossing it into a trashcan in a park, but here the men use the opportunity to catch the crooks in the crime by having Guttenberg secretly filming them as they take the drugs back and there’s even some legitimate tension as they try to outrun them when the bad guys catch-on to the scheme. I also liked that the dealers infiltrate the apartment while a babysitter is there as in the French version the infant gets left alone and even though it was supposedly only for a short time was still irresponsible.

There’s a girlfriend character as well, or in this case ex-girlfriend, gets added for Selleck, she gets played by Margaret Colin, and reveals how Selleck just automatically presumes because she’s a woman she’ll know exactly what to do with a baby even when she states she doesn’t. This I felt finely observed how the different sexes can misjudge the other, or project characteristics onto them that they may not actually have.

Spoiler Alert!

Even the ending is a bit better though there’s still the issue of the girlfriend leaving a helpless child at someone else’s doorstep without warning, or making sure there would be someone there to take care of it, which in the real world would be dangerously reckless. At least though there’s more action as the three rush to the airport to try to stop the plane the girlfriend is on with the baby while in the French version the three guys just sit at home moping around, which isn’t as interesting.

It’s still problematic that the girlfriend, played by Nancy Travis who speaks with an accent, moves into the apartment with the bachelors to help take care of the kid. This though goes against the title as it states Three MEN and a baby, so I felt the Travis character should’ve just given up her parental rights and let the guys do all the parenting since they had become better at it anyways.

End of Spoiler Alert!

The only change that I didn’t like is when Danson brings his mother, played by Celeste Holm, to see the baby and tries to get her to agree to take care of it for awhile. In the French version the Jacques character tries the same ploy with his mother only to learn, to his shock, she has no interest in raising another kid and wants to spend her retirement having fun like traveling the world, which I felt was a good statement on ageism and how not all seniors want to be stuck being homebodies. Here Holm’s acts like a strict parent who doesn’t want to be bothered with a kid because Danson needs to ‘grow-up’ and learn to amend for his mistakes though if she was really a proper parent she probably should’ve warned him when he was younger to always wear a condom, so he wouldn’t have gotten himself into this mess in the first place.

This is also the scene that became a bit notorious back around August of 1990 when a rumor started that an image of a little boy, who it was said had killed himself in the place where it was filmed, can be seen in the window that Holm and Danson walk past. Granted it does look a little spooky at first, but upon second glance you can plainly see that it’s actually a cardboard cut-out of Danson wearing a top hat. The whole film was shot on a soundstage in Toronto and not a house where any boy past or present had ever lived.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 23, 1987

Runtime: 1 Hour 42 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Leonard Nimoy

Studio: Touchstone

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Movies for the Whole Family, Movies with Nudity, Remakes

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Three Men and a Cradle (1985)

Posted on February 19, 2024 | 1 comment

threemencradle

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Stuck with a baby.

Pierre (Roland Giraud), Michel (Michel Boujenah), and Jacques (Andre Dussollier) are three bachelors living in a swanky apartment who routinely bed hot women and throw wild parties. During a party one of Jacques’ friends informs him that he has a package and wants to have it delivered to their apartment for safe keeping. Jacques agrees and then goes flying off to Japan for a month as an airline steward. Pierre and Michel then find a baby at their doorstep that gets left by Jacques former girlfriend. Thinking this is ‘the package’ they begrudgingly bring her in and try caring for her despite having no idea what they’re doing. Meanwhile the actual package also gets delivered, which is a small box secretly full of heroin, which they think nothing of until the dealers arrive looking to pick it up and mistakenly take the baby instead.

A highly insightful look at bachelors and their ineptness and downright ignorance at infant care is brought splendidly to screen, at least with the first act. There’s many keen moments as they run around to pharmacies not knowing what sized diapers to get the kid, or the type of baby food, thinking it’s ‘all the same’ and needing to constantly go back and speak to the female druggist for clarity.  In fact the first 30-minutes are probably the funniest and could’ve just kept it at that theme and been a success though having Jacques away so much starts to make it seem like the title should’ve just been ‘2 Bachelors and a Cradle’ since the third one is little seen until much later on.

I also really adored the kid who is able to somehow cry on cue. Most infants are understandably hard to control, but this one reacts to the scene and situations perfectly and is in it surprisingly a lot. In most other films dealing with babies they usually get only shown in a crib for a few seconds here and there, with these shots spliced in, but here she’s like a genuine character that’s in it almost as much as the main ones. We also see her grow where at the end she’s doing her first walk and it’s cool that the ‘music’ done over the closing credits amounts to recordings of her baby blabbering.

Where the film starts to fall-off a bit is with the drug dealer side-story. I think the baby chores that the men had to go through could’ve been enough to carry it and adding in the crime thing made it seem unnecessarily exaggerated. It’s also ridiculous that the dealers tear up the entire apartment, and I mean they literally ransack the place cutting up and breaking all the furniture to the point that’s it’s an extraordinary mess. Then suddenly a little later it all goes back to normal, but how could they find the time to clean it all up while also taking care of the kid? This clean-up would’ve quite frankly taken many weeks and buying all new stuff, so this should’ve at least been shown, but instead it gets portrayed like they’re genies who can seemingly turn a trashed place into a clean one with a snap-of-a-finger.

The characterizations are rather weak as Pierre and Michel respond to things too much the same way and have very little distinction between them and could’ve easily morphed into being one person. The idea that these guys could just call off from work for not only days, but weeks at a time without even giving an excuse as to why and not lose their jobs for it seemed implausible. Granted the French culture isn’t a workaholic one like in America, but it’s pushing the bar to the extreme here and might’ve been more amusing seeing the guys taking the baby to their work and trying to somehow still get things done.

Spoiler Alert!

My biggest beef though comes with the girlfriend named Sylvia, played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who has the audacity to leave a helpless infant on somebody’s doorstep, walks away, and doesn’t think anything of it. What’s to say some stranger couldn’t come along and snatch the kid up before the occupiers of the apartment find it? What’s to guarantee that the guys in the apartment are even going to want to take the baby in, or if they do won’t inadvertently harm the child since they have no training on how to handle it? The fact that she returns months later with this bright beaming smile demanding to see her baby immediately like she’s some loving mother entitled to her kid whenever she pleases makes her seem even more outrageous. In most jurisdictions her behavior would’ve been considered reckless child abandonment and her parenting privileges taken away. Instead of handing over the baby she should’ve received a very stern lecture

Granted the film tries to make-up for this by having her return to the apartment saying she can’t keep up with the mothering duties and agrees to hand the baby over to the men. She also gets shown lying in the baby’s crib in a fetal position in order to symbolize that she’s immature, but still for a playful comedy this has some serious undertones that it glosses over, but are still readily there if you think about it.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 18, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 46 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Coline Serreau

Studio: Soprofilms

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Foreign Films, French Films, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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Cutter’s Way (1981)

Posted on February 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Friends help catch murderer.

Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) driving his old beat-up car, a 1966 Austin-Healey, which breaks down in a dark alley during a late night rain storm. From behind comes another vehicle where the driver dumps something into a nearby garbage can that turns out to being the dead body of a young girl. Since Bone’s car is still at the crime scene the next day when the authorities arrive he quickly becomes suspect number one. Bone’s friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard), a Vietnam vet struggling with alcoholism and PTSD, takes on the process of investigating the case to help get his friend out of trouble. The two soon hone in on a rich local businessman named J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliot) whom Bone swears was the man he saw driving the car that dumped the body.

The film is based on the 1976 novel ‘Cutter and Bone’ by Newton Thornburg. Producer Paul Gurian bought the rights to the book and asked struggling screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin if he’d be interested in adapting it to a screenplay. Since Fiskin was broke at the time, he last sold a screenplay, Angel Unchained, 10 years earlier, he was forced to shoplift the book in order to read and adapt it. David Field from United Artists was open to backing it for $3 million, but only if they could find a big-name star. Gurian then went to the home of Jeff Bridges, where he got attacked by one of Bridges’ dogs thus motivating Bridges to accept the part unseen in order to avoid a possible lawsuit. The film was released in the Spring of ’81 where it fared poorly with the critics and the studio was ready to scrap it only for it to pick-up good reviews a few weeks later. The studio then decided to place the film in their ‘classics’ division where it got retooled from it’s former title of ‘Cutter and Bone’, which they felt made it seem like a comedy about surgeons, to it’s current one and then rereleased it in the fall of that year were through good word-of-mouth it managed to recoup a modest profit.

Director Ivan Passer has stated that his motivation for directing the film was to go against what he felt was the ‘cripple mania’ at the time where film characters would get maimed usually through being in the war and then come back better, stronger people. Here he wanted to show that it didn’t make them better, but instead more dangerous.

While Heard certainly gives a good performance, it was originally intended for Richard Dreyfus, I felt he was too much of a caricature of an angry, wounded war vet and I didn’t find him interesting at all. Bridges was his usual transparent self and thus the interactions between two not all that captivating. Elliott is rather blah as well as the bad guy since for most of the runtime he’s only seen from a distance and never has any lines of dialogue until the final 9-minutes, though this does at least give him a certain creepy/mysterious vibe. Out of everyone I was most intrigued with Lisa Eichorn who plays a woman who bounces between the two friends and seems to want to play-off them both.

The emphasis is on the character study with long takes of Heard snarly at everybody he meets including the next door neighbor’s whose car he crashed into and the the subsequent police report, which goes on too long and doesn’t help the film or story move forward. The mystery isn’t as intriguing as it could’ve been because elements of it fall into place a little too conveniently. Bridges witnesses the killer driving away and then right away the next day spots the guy in a parade. Then a couple of days later the friends are talking about the case at a restaurant where the guys’ wife (Patricia Donohue) is sitting right next to them and overhears everything, which again is letting things fall too neatly into place without much effort.

There’s also questions about why the killer didn’t just run Bridges over with his car when he had the chance in order to avoid any witnesses. Also, Bridges is able to recognize the killer/driver, but when I saw the scene it was impossible to see the face of the driver. The viewer’s perspective should be the same as the protagonist, so if he’s able to get a good look at the culprit then we should’ve too.

Spoiler Alert!

Since everything is tied into circumstantial evidence I was hoping for some unexpected twist at the end. For instance having Bridges’ house get burnt down not because of Cale like they initially thought, but instead from the neighbors still angry over their car. The final confrontation in which Bone apparently shoots Cale (the screen fades to black and we only hear the noise of the gun going off) leaves more questions than answers. Does Bone and to an extent Cutter, who was there in the room with him, now go to jail for this? Seems like that should’ve been confirmed one way or the other and leaving it vague is like showing the viewer only half of the story.

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My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: March 20, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 49 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Ivan Passer

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Pluto, Freevee, Roku Channel, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Buddy Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity

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Ten Little Indians (1989)

Posted on January 22, 2024 | Leave a comment

tenlittle

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Everybody is getting killed.

Ten strangers get together on an African safari. The group includes: A doctor (Yehuda Efroni), a judge (Donald Pleasance), a captain (Frank Stallone), an actress (Brenda Vaccaro), a General (Herbert Lom), a nanny (Sarah Maur Thorpe), a detective (Warren Berlinger), along with a man named Marston (Neil McCarthy), and a couple with the surname Rodgers (Paul L. Smith, Moira Lister). They’ve been invited by a man named Mr. Owen, but upon their arrival he’s nowhere to be found. Instead they hear his voice that’s been recorded onto a phonograph where he tells them that they’ve been invited because they’ve been accused of committing a crime years ago and gotten away with it, but he intends to put a stop to that by killing them off one-by-one. As each guest gets murdered one of the heads from the ten little Indians statues that sits in the middle of the dining room table goes missing.

The film has the distinction of being the third movie version of the story done by producer Harry Alan Towers as the first one was produced in the 60’s and the second, which also starred Lom, in the 70’s. The story itself is based on the Agatha Christie novel ‘And Then There Were None’ though the ending was changed to replicate the stage play, which was considered more upbeat. While in the novel and play the setting was an island here it’s the desert of South Africa, which I liked as it gives the proceedings a distinct atmosphere. However, there’s an unusual moment at the beginning where the natives help carry the guests’ luggage to the camp site, but then halfway there for no explicit reason they turn on them by clicking their tongues in unison and ultimately abandoning them, which is creepy, but there’s never an explanation for why they do this.

The landscape looks hot and dry though there’s no sweat glistening off the actor’s faces leading me to believe it was shot in the winter time and thus the complaints about the heat, which are casually mentioned are invalid. I did get a kick out of one of the tents, the main one, having an upright piano. Don’t know who in the world would want to painstakingly haul a piano into the desert sands, or essentially the middle of nowhere, but the appearance of it gave me a chuckle. I was also amused by the elevated lift, held together by a frayed rope, that each guest is forced to sit-in as it takes them many feet in the air of a wide gorge, in order for them to get to the campsite. The contraption looks flimsy and it’s rather unnerving seeing them get into it and ride it all the way down.

The acting is entertaining and made-up of many B-stars whose faces you’ll recognize though not necessarily their names. Vaccaro fares best as a bitchy, spoiled, Hollywood star whose career has gone on the decline. Lom is good as an aging man whose memories plays tricks on him, but Stallone, who’s the younger brother of Sylvester and could almost pass of as his twin, has little to add. Berlinger had gained a lot of weight to the point that he’s rounder than a beach ball, is adequate, but the normally reliable Pleasance appears elderly and lacking energy making his presence almost sad. Smith continues in the mold of the jail guard in Midnight Express, a part that made him famous, but his heavy breathing and lurking ways are not interesting and his acting one-note.

The mystery angle doesn’t get played-up too well as the guests get killed-off with a boring regularity making it at times seem almost like a low-grade slasher. The characters don’t respond to their stressful conundrum realistically. For instance one of the guests dies by drinking alcohol that was linked with cyanide, but the rest of them in the ensuing days go on eating and drinking even though you’d think they’d be nervous about ingesting anything for fear that whatever they put in their mouths could also poisoned. They also go back to their tents each night and peacefully sleep despite seeing the other guests get offed by a unseen killer, which would’ve made me, and most others too fearful to get any shut-eye and instead stay wide awake for fear that the killer would attack the minute anyone closed their eyes.

Spoiler Alert!

The tension is nil and there’s really no interest in finding out who the culprit is. In the book everyone dies and the authorities are only able to figure out what happened from a message that they find written by the judge. Here both Stallone and Thorp make it out alive though Thorp lets go of the rope that had been around her neck just as Stallone comes to her rescue making me believe that she would’ve hung herself before he would’ve been able to get her out of the noose. The rescue plane flies over them instead of landing making it unintentionally seem like they had been left stranded and not saved after all. Having everyone die except for Stallone, which is what I thought was going to happen, and then having him arrested for the murders he really didn’t commit would’ve been a much more ironic twist.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 17, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 38 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Alan Birkinshaw

Studio: Cannon Films

Available: Blu-ray, Tubi

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies with a rural setting, Mystery, Remakes

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Garde A Vue (1981)

Posted on January 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

garde1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Interrogation of a lawyer.

Jerome (Michel Serrault), is a rich and powerful lawyer who is brought into a police station late one night during New Year’s Eve in order to be questioned about the rape and murder of two young girls. Antoine (Lino Ventura) is the lead investigator while Marcel (Guy Marchand) sits in the back and assists him during the interrogation. At first the conversation is light and civil, but as Antoine brings more circumstantial evidence to the forefront Jerome becomes nervous yet insists he’s still innocent. Marcel even implements some physical force against him, but Jerome’s stance never changes. In another room Antoine has a conversation with Jerome’s wife, Chantal (Romy Schneider), who confides to him that she secretly suspected Jerome to be in-love with an 8-year-old girl. Once Jerome gets confronted with this his story soon begins to change.

The film is based on the novel ‘Brainwash’ by John Wainwright and shot entirely in a studio soundstage and in chronological order. Why director Claude Miller would want to film a story that had very little if any cinematic elements to it is a mystery and if anything this might’ve fared better as a stage play. I was initially impressed with the police station room as you’d swear it was an authentic building and not just a prop built for the production. The drenching rain seen pouring down outside the windows is impressive as it gives the viewer a claustrophobic feel and I liked how eventually, when the clock hits midnight, you hear car horns honking outside to represent the New Year. However, every interrogation room I’ve seen, and I watch a lot of confession videos on Youtube from real-life cases, the rooms are very small and with no windows and the film would’ve been better served had it reflected a setting like this as it would’ve brought out better the psychological tension of the suspect and his feelings of the ‘walls closing in on him’, which with here you don’t get.

You can’t help but connect this movie with The Offence, which starred Sean Connery and was directed by Sidney Lumet. That movie came out 8 years before this one, but had the exact same theme of a suspect being brought in over the murders of some school girls. That movie was well directed but did annoy me for the fact that in that one the suspect, played by Ian Bannen, did nothing, but give off this smirk the whole time.  This one has a much better back-and-forth between the investigator and suspect, which helps keep it compelling as more evidence gets introduced. However, in the Lumet film it had constant shots of this big bright light shining into the camera giving the viewer a point-of-view feeling of what someone in that situation would feel and thus helping hype the sense of urgency of wanting to get out of there, or say anything one needed to in order to stop the pressure, which this film doesn’t do very well. Both films though have cutaways showing the dead girl’s bodies from a distance in a secluded area, which are visually creepy, though again Lumet’s film scores a bit higher in that category too.

Spoiler Alert!

Ultimately the ending is a letdown and rather baffling as it features Jerome caving and admitting to a crime that he really didn’t commit due to the perceived police pressure. For one thing it’s hard to imagine that a seasoned lawyer would be that dumb and wouldn’t just ‘lawyer up’ himself and demand counsel of his own when interrogation got to be too much. I’ve seen a lot of true life interrogations where the pressure put on the suspect was far worse and those people refused to buckle, so seeing the character fall to pieces so relatively quickly especially when he was educated to know better makes the whole thing pathetic.

Didn’t quite get why the wife shoots herself at the end either. Supposedly it’s because she feels guilty about tabbing him for the murder when the real killer eventually gets exposed, but she did it out of honesty as she really felt he had a thing for young girls, so why should she feel tortured about saying something she truly believed? It would’ve been more surprising if she had pulled the gun on Jerome himself as he got into the car and shot him as she would feel, even if he hadn’t been arrested for this crime, that he still had some dark perversions and thus should be killed before he goes and carries out his fantasies on some other girl. Of course if she lied about him having a thing for an 8-year-old in order to get back at him over their contentious marriage then her guilt and suicide would’ve been more plausible, but I didn’t get that from watching it, so if that was ultimately her motivation then the filmmakers should’ve done a better job at intimating it.

This is the rare case where I’d say the Hollywood remake, which came out in 2000 as Under Suspicion and starred Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman was much better done. It had a better visual balance that didn’t keep the whole thing stuck inside a police room and it better tied-up loose story ends that this one leaves open.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: September 23, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 27 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Claude Miller

Studio: AMLF

Available: DVD, Blu-ray

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Foreign Films, French Films, Movies Based on Novels, Mystery, Police Drama

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