Pal @iffywizardry watched From Beyond (1986) as part of his horror-a-day Halloween watching, and I decided, yeah, I wanted to re-watch it this year. Because who doesn't need more Barbara Crampton in their movie-watching, really?
I wrote this up just last year, so no real need to re-litigate. If you read that brief write-up, I kinda underplayed the push the movie makes about the pineal-gland stuff and madness and sex intertwining. And it's right there. And leads to the most famous scene in the movie, which sure made an impression on a generation of horror fans.
But, yeah, this is a movie about a bunch of people with sexual hang-ups, and very little in the way of discussing it, and instead manifesting as weird shit. And it's kind of great.
It's a movie with transdimensional monsters, a warped villain, and a guy eating brains. What's not to like?
Anyhoo, like Re-Animator, this is an oddly perfect movie hitting all the right notes and gets better every time you watch it, which for genre film I think is *the* defining sign of greatness, whether we're talking horror or The Third Man.
I would pick this up on 4K, but it's currently $47. Which... come on, man.
As I said to Simon 3/4ths of the way through this movie, "I would have loved this in high school".
That isn't to say I didn't like it *now* on my first viewing. I did. I just never got around to it, which is kind of a bad call with John Carpenter.
Once again Carpenter tells a story about a group of people stuck in a single location as things go sideways (Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, etc...) but this time he's getting metaphysical.
Donald Pleasance plays a Catholic priest who learns a secret Catholic sect has been keeping the world's biggest secret. Apparently they have a cosmic horror buried under a church in LA, but they need SCIENCE.
To this end, they recruit a world famous physicist and his PhD students to come in and take a look at what they've got (a cylinder spinning and full of green liquid), and scientists from a few other disciplines. They all set up shop in an old church, and begin to try to sort out what's happening.
Team, what's happening isn't good.
What follows is a bit of cosmic horror that plays out over about two days inside the church. And I am not here to spoil it.
Now, the movie has some issues. I think they could have cut off the first ten minutes and we'd lose very little. We could have had more of the great characterization we got in other Carpenter films with large casts like The Thing and Escape From New York. Someone could explain who was keeping all 700 candles going in the basement of the church. And I kept wanting to know why the movie wasn't about a school like Georgetown that is both high end and is also a Jesuit school. We could have had a nice connection there, but it also might have undercut the idea Carpenter had about faith in both religion and science failing in the face of horror.
And that's the bit that I would have dug in high school. Gimme that "your much beloved rules aren't going to help you now" jazz, and back then, especially peering into the unknown.
I do wish Carpenter had found more ways to tie in the quantum physics conversation into what was going on with our cosmic problem. It's okay that it kind of doesn't, but so much time is spent worrying about Schroedinger's cat and the nature of reality once we're talking particle physics, I can make some loose connections narratively, but it would have been cool to see those things tie directly together, even with some hand waving.
Anyway, I'm super bummed I took so long to get to this one, but it sure feels like a great movie to team up with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness.
Fun fact! That's a young Dirk Blocker in this movie, who would go on to play Hitchcock on Brooklyn 99.
I checked Roger Ebert's review of The Witches of Eastwick (1987). Look, some movies are a product of their time, and this is one. Ebert found it an edgy, sexy romp. And that was how I remember the movie being discussed in 1987.
I finally got to the movie here in 2025, and in short, all of the interesting bits are left off-screen. We hear about them, can infer or guess other bits. But we're still in 1980's America here, and if you want to not wind up in the midnight movie ghetto, you keep it polite so Mom and Dad have a movie they can sneak off to go see and leave you alone with a rented copy of Beastmaster.
The Witches of Eastwick is about two divorcees and a widow (Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher) who live in a small Rhode Island town where they are hit upon by married men and saddled with lives they don't want. The three get together on Thursdays to eat processed crap food, drink, play cards and have someone listen.
During one such session, they describe what they want in a man, and, lo and behold, these three women - with what X-Men comics would call latent magical abilities - seem to summon exactly that man to their town in the form of Jack Nicholson/ some light version of Satan.
Nicholson buys a massive mansion (think Newport on steroids) and proceeds to be an ass around town and impresses everyone he meets.
He swiftly seduces Cher, Sarandon and... in front of the other two, Pfeiffer.
Last year I watched Re-Animator (1985) for the first time in forever, and was reminded of (a) what a great movie Re-Animator really is, (b) fired up a new appreciation for what the movie is doing, and (c) was reminded that Barbara Crampton is just an excellent idea all around.
She's on socials, and she does not disappoint. And so it was that I learned she and Jeffrey Combs were traveling to some cities to hype up the 4K restoration of Re-Animator on its 40th Anniversary. And, fortunately, they were coming to Austin.
Possession (1981) is one of those movies you see get routinely mentioned, but very rarely with *specifics* as to why it's on lists and recommended.
Look, this is not a movie where one bops along with an A-B-C plot. It's absolutely one of those movies - maybe likeInland Empire - where folks sure seem certain about what it is about but nobody agrees, including critics. It is an easy movie to get engrossed in and like, mostly because it falls just on this side of adding up, and your brain is working overtime trying to stitch the pieces together. Is it religious symbolism? Is it not? Is this a commentary on Berlin or using Berlin to make a point about divorce? What's with... you know... the, uh... creature, I guess?
Criterion Channel currently has a collection of "Nunsploitation" movies, and of their 7 offerings or so, I'd already seen three in my life (Haxan, Benedetta, The Devils) and I'd been meaning to catch Ms. 45 (1981) since seeing something about it a few years ago. So here we are.
Director Abel Ferrara was kind of a big deal when I was in film school, coming off of The Bad Lieutenant (worth seeing once, at least) and following up with The Addiction, with the Body Snatchers remake in between. Unfortunately, I kinda stopped tracking indie film a while ago and lost sight of him, but he's been out there making movies all along. He was not afraid of what was too much for an audience, and seemed not just to push margins but lived there.
So this early film is a pretty good indicator of what he was capable of.
I was walking through Walmart and passed the $5 DVD bin and saw UHF (1989) sitting in the pile, and realized I didn't have a copy of the movie.
I've already written this movie up twice before, so no need to do it again. But it is a delight. I may be suffering from some Space Jam Fallacy here, and I am pretty sure most of the jokes would make no sense to anyone under 40, but what the hell... there are things in this movie that I genuinely love, and I wish Al and Co. had made ten more movies.
Also, how funny is it that Fran Drescher is in this in a supporting bit like 4 years before she launched one of the biggest shows of the 90's?
With the Liam Neeson-starring reboot out, I wanted to limber up those particular muscles again before seeing the new era of Naked Gun films.
It's hard to know anymore if I'm laughing with The Naked Gun (1988) or with 13-year-old me who saw this in the theater and laughed so hard during just the opening bit with the police car driving through a variety of scenes that I literally slipped out of my seat at the Arbor IV theater.
That kid, in 1988, was not prepared for what was coming for the next 80 minutes or so. Or that he'd be quoting this movie in 2025. Or still find it funny to just say "It's Enrico Palazzo!" for absolutely no reason, but find it makes him feel better.
I'm fairly certain if I had bracketed out all the comedies I like, this one *might* make it to the end as my favorite. At least today that's true. Leslie Nielsen is at his absolute apex of Nielsen-ness, the jokes land with a wry smile to a full laugh even now - and I've seen this movie maybe 25 times.
I have no doubt this movie both plays to my sense of funny and helped shape it, just as Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker did for my entire generation with these movies, Top Secret! and the Airplane! flicks. I mean, how many times as things are going south, do you hear someone say "looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue..."?
I miss Hollywood trying to be funny. Look, my favorite show as the moment is probably The Bear, but it is insane that anyone is letting it get nominated for Emmy's as a comedy. I can't remember the last time I paid to see a comedy in a movie theater that wasn't actually a genre film with a comedic bent - Google is claiming Knives Out is a comedy, and... maybe? It literally may have been Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 - which was good. Is there a sequel coming? I feel like there is.
Anyway - Naked Gun would play well now, I think, even if I'm not sure what The Kids would make of timely and topical jokes (is Queen Elizabeth automatically funny in 2025?). I'm far less worried about the un-PC jokes as they zip by - and we mostly knew they were in bad taste then, by the way, and that was the point. And of course OJ's legacy did not turn out to be that of a wacky physical comedian. But there's something timeless about accidentally setting off a player piano while the curtains are on fire or *gestures broadly at every baseball joke in the movie*.
I still love this movie, and I very much look forward to the new one, which I've heard from some corners is very, very good.
With Superman 2025 out, it occurs to me it's been a while since I revisited some Super-Media - and I cannot tell you the last time I actually watched Supergirl (1984) from start to finish - ie: I always give up somewhere in the middle.
I always feel bad saying this, but the movie is a mess. And there's no one place to point the blame, but the culprit is neither Helen Slater nor Faye Dunaway. I don't know that you can even blame director Jeannot Szwarc, as this was the fourth Superman movie by the Salkinds, and he knew he was a hired gun. So, yeah, as with all things going wrong with the Super-movies from this era, I blame the Salkinds. But, without them, there would be no Superman: The Movie and Superman II. And likely without those movies, no Batman '89. And if none of that, then what...?
A while back, SimonUK and I podcasted this trainwreck. Over the past six years, I'd forgotten how truly terrible this movie is. Like - I don't understand how this is a studio movie with professional actors, and studio backing and intended for a human audience.
It's maybe not the worst movie I've ever seen, but.. for a studio movie? it's up there.
Jaws: the Revenge (1987) is a movie that admits - in movie, by way of recycled footage - that the only reason it exists is that they hope you liked the first one. But they have to admit, they do not know what this movie is about. Because if it's about a giant shark, they all know to stay out of the water. If it's about the lives of the Brody's, post-Martin Brody's untimely passing - no one asked or wanted to see it, and as a slice-of-life movie about mourning, they forget to be sad for the second half of the movie, and the movie instead gets very randy.
After he'd recommended it to me twice, I took JAL up on his suggestion of this particular flick. I meant to watch this for the 4th of July, but we got busy, so here you go. My salute to America.
Action USA (1989) is probably the best high-action movie shot in Waco during the 1980's.
I very much remember Waco in the 1980s. It was, aside from Baylor, a town that had seen its best days 30 years prior and was not yet recovered from the economic turns of the 1970's and 80's. In a few short years, we'd have the Branch Davidian stand-off near here. And then, much later, Joanna Gaines would convince people Waco was the shit, which... TV is a powerful drug, y'all. Somehow, the second worst college town in Texas is now a tourist destination for people who like overpriced wooden spoons and mediocre football.
Anyway, it is always weird/ a delight seeing the landscape of my part of Texas in a movie. And buildings that still stand that I am a bit familiar with from a job I had ten years ago when I was in Waco a lot.
SimonUK and I took in the re-release of This is Spinal Tap (1984) at the Alamo on Sunday evening.
I don't need to tell you what This Is Spinal Tap is, I hope. Apparently, The Drafthouse has signed up to host Fathom events, and this included the viewing of the new 4K restoration of the movie, but it's sort of America's original faux-documentary. It led directly to Christopher Guest's brilliant mockumentary* series and indirectly to the format of shows like The Office and Parks and Rec.
I have lost track of when and how I saw this movie the first time. I remember seeing it very young, and not really getting the jokes - minus the "it goes to 11" bit (I want to say as early as 1985 or 1986) but then seeing it again at the end of high school and absolutely getting it (maybe in 1992-93). By then, I'd had a subscription to Rolling Stone, so some of the references and gags - like the cricket bat - made more sense.
If you want an idea of what a different world I was in as a kid versus where we are 40 years on, I think Flashdance (1983) is a pretty interesting test.
First, Flashdance was huge back in the day. It was referenced in other movies, on TV and elsewhere. The soundtrack had a couple of great songs (I still think Gloria by Laura Branigan is phenomenal). And though it was Rated-R, it wasn't unusual for my classmates to have seen it by 5th grade, thanks to HBO.
It's also not a very good movie, but people loved it at the time. And I don't mean the movie is problematic by 2025 standards (which it is), but because it just sort of wanders around for long stretches. Like, nothing is happening. People walk around. They goof. The plot refuses to move along.
Oddly, there's barely any conflict. It's a movie that pitches that if you believe in yourself, sorta, and don't really do the work, your new, rich boyfriend will buy your way into a dance school. Because nothing about Alex's path to an elite ballet school makes a lick of sense.
I have a very strange relationship less with Back To The Future and the two sequels - maybe more strange than I maybe should have for three movies I don't really care about. I think those movies are perfectly adequate 1980's movies that were kind of an entertaining carnival ride at the time, but that was it. Over the years, like so much of Gen-X's media from our formative years, the Back To The Future movies have been elevated and elevated in the zeitgeist until, now, they're considered a major cultural touchstone. Which, to me, is like "what if The Wraith or Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend were the movie that generated a cottage industry for a studio, inspired rides, a West End musical, and endless devotion?"
Like, the movie was something I enjoyed, sorta, at the time, but it wasn't my jam.
First, as a kid I found Michael J. Fox as much fun as nails on a chalkboard. It wasn't until Spin City that I found him remotely tolerable. And in retrospect, that was probably that Connie Britton was such a distraction I didn't notice Fox as much. I do not wish to speak ill of Fox, but his general Michael J. Fox-ness was a major factor in my reaction to all of his movies. Sorry, dude.
I felt like, even at the time, "oh, here's more of that Boomer nostalgia about the 1950's and 60's" which was all over at the time. I mean, 1986 gave us Peggy Sue Got Married, and the previous years had been giving us Happy Days, Grease, Sha-na-na... As a kid who liked sci-fi, it felt like a waste of the potential for the concept, and only later did I appreciate that time travel was just the excuse to soak in this funny premise of a kid meeting his parents at the same age. And hear music from 97.7 - all the oldies, all the time.
The humor in the first one struck me as dumb. The bit about "I am Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan" just felt... lame to me.
I remember seeing The Dark Crystal (1982) in the theater as a kid and it absolutely blowing my mind.
Fantasy films were certainly a thing for kids in the wake of Star Wars, and Henson was already everywhere, from The Muppet Show to Empire Strikes Back. But all of those fantasy films, that were live action, always starred humans. I mean, understandably so.
But for 90 minutes, Henson and Co. managed to create a world that had not a person in sight, a world both grounded in physical reality and utterly fantastic. Taking what he'd learned from his many years of shows, commercials, movies, etc... and getting his feet wet with things as different as Sesame Street and Emmet Otter, and enlisting artist Brian Froud, he cooked up this world.
the rare fantasy movie that earns the art on the poster
Watched: 03/21/2025
Format: YouTube
Viewing: Unknown
Director: Matthew Robbins
In an era before CGI, a lot of love, skill and money had to go into making FX movies, and it was often the difference between a Star Wars and a Starcrash.* Dragonslayer (1981) was a VHS staple in our house back in the earliest days of home video when my folks thought *owning* a VCR was a crazy idea so we rented a VCR at the same time we rented a stack of movies from the grocery (shit was wild, kids).
My opinion of the movie hasn't budged much since I watched it as a kid. It's a gorgeous film with a miscast lead and spends too much time on being goofy at the beginning for the movie it wants to be at the end without enough connective tissue to make it all work. Maybe because of The Once and Future King casting Arthur as a nerd, maybe because this movie has serious "Sorcerer's Apprentice" vibes, we're stuck with basically a nerd as our lead, which feels like it's a particular part of fantasy fiction. Think of the near miss we likely had with Luke and Star Wars with writing, casting and editing (yes, we can always make any post a Mark Hamill appreciation post).
I like the bones of the movie *a lot* - the lottery, the corrupt government, even a novice wizard trying to solve the dragon problem. And, of course, the obviously female Valerian turning out to be a girl. All good stuff. I'd forgotten there's a whole bit about the church and the dipshit of a king sliding in and taking credit for the dragon's defeat. That's some fascinatingly cutting social satire for a mainstream fantasy film.
But we're here for the dragon puppets, both Henson-y and stop-motion, and man, they still look amazing. No kidding, because this was ILM in 1981 as all engines were really firing after Empire Strikes Back.
Anyway, I like the film well enough, still. I feel like they could have cut some business at the beginning, but I get why they did this for a more general audience and because fantasy fiction has a tendency to want to dick around before we get to the dark part.
I am sure the fact this was not CGI, even if it was computer-assisted will blow the minds of the youths, but I think it's a great example of state-of-the-art practical FX as I remember them as a kid. And maybe why Star Wars, Dark Crystal and other contemporaries seemed so special. This movie looks like a million bucks, and once you're in it, I think it's not half-bad.
I did read that Caitlin Clarke, who plays Valerian, passed back in 2004. Y'all raise a glass to her.
*that said, I will defend Starcrash with my dying breath
Both Jamie and I were convinced we'd already seen Arthur (1981), but both of us realized at some point, maybe a 1/3rd of the way through the movie, that we must have started the movie and never finished it. This doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. SimonUK had popped around, promising not to bring a horror film, and this was his selection.
Anyway, Arthur was sort of a big deal when I was very young, but because it was about a raging alcoholic, I missed it. Not that I think I would have understood it as a child. Now, in 1981, that didn't stop The Chipmunks from including Arthur's Theme on The Chipmunks Go Hollywood.
And in this way, as a child, I knew all the words to Arthur's Theme.
In some ways, it's very much a classic comedy - something that would have been made during the Depression as a screwball comedy. It's rich wackiness against rich stiffs and a working-class girl who meets a guy who so wealthy he can make all of her dreams come true.
It also would make an interesting modern remake of sorts, as the signs of Arthur's stalled maturity materialize in a fantasy setting of random collectibles, train sets, etc... and it's not too hard to imagine that in 2025 terms, along with maybe a guy who won't lay off the weed.
Moore's performance is at an 11 at the start, which is a lot. He's intentionally unlikable in his way, and it's not until Hobson enters as Arthur's butler/ father-figure that we see Arthur less through the eyes of people who are just temporarily dealing with him and instead with someone who cares about him. What blew my mind was the timing of Hobson in pop culture (not quite a Wooster and Jeeves, but close), and the complete re-imagining of Alfred in the Batman comics that would occur with Frank Miller a few years later. And, yeah, I can name another poor-little-rich-boy who also may be frozen in adolescence who sees his butler as his father...
I'm not sure John Gielgud as Hobson saves the movie, because it doesn't need that, but he absolutely wins the movie. I think the scene with Moore and Susan's father under the moose head is one of the best comedy bits I've seen in a while. And Liza is at her best - she's great in this as the waitress who dreams of being an actor. She's really funny, as is Barney Martin as her father. Or Ted Ross as Bitterman, the chauffeur.
Anyway, I agree with Simon that the script is actually really solid, and I'll add it accomplishes the difficult task of making a lout loveable and believable when he does show he can do something when he cares.
I think the last time we got a comedy like this - that wasn't a very self-aware remake - may have been Billy Madison, which is just mind boggling.
So, this movie was a staple for us middle-school basketball boys in the 1980's. I watched it a lot during a certain period in my life, but I don't think I've seen it since those magical days of knowing "I am not very good at this, but I am tall". We are now, of course, further from the release of the film than the movie was from the period in which it occurs. Because I am old. And tired.
I'll say it: Hoosiers (1986) is an odd movie. It stars three actors who were big at the time - Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper - but almost everyone else is local Indiana talent. It's also a basketball movie that focuses on the coach and gives backstory to 1.5 players out of 8. I couldn't tell you the names of half the players. One of our main players, the star, has maybe three lines. It also has the burden of having some unspoken issues with race that just sail on by, and were uncomfortable when I saw it as a kid in 1986.
Hackman is, of course, perfect. As a basketball coach dealing with a past where he had a moment of absolute failure - take heed fans of Bobby McKnight - he's getting a second chance to do what he loves. It just happens to be out here in the middle of nowhere with half the players he needs and placed in a small town that thinks coaching is a democracy.
For any younger readers hitting this site, you may be vaguely aware of the Satanic Panic of the 1970's-1990's. But it was real and really annoying. I was a kid living on the edge of the Bible Belt in the 1980's, but I think the wide-eyed and whispered warnings one would get about the dangers of playing the fairly recent phenomenon of Dungeons & Dragons were everywhere. And I don't know how much of the made-for-TV movie, Mazes and Monsters (1982), was inspired by the urban legends and actual events, and how much someone named Barb relating the plot of this movie to their friend, Donna, inspired some of those urban legends.*
I know I run on about context in which movies appeared, but I think with this one, if you don't know the context of how D&D freaked people out in the 1980's, you may believe this is just a movie, and not an important cultural conversation, and therefore loses the punch of being a part of a national conversation drummed up by folks who need a strawman to combat. In the 1970's a real kid had gone missing, and it was believed he'd freaked out from playing D&D and was lost in steam tunnels somewhere - not that he was suffering from mental illness and had left the state (which is what really happened).
The 1980's were a different time, where doing geek-things and admitting to it in public was a dicey proposition. People were not as open about hobbies like D&D, consuming Star Trek, and comic book reading, as those things did carry a very real social stigma. Plus, no one knew what you were talking about if you did bring it up. SNL or other cultural touchstones usually mocked nerds (when that was a mean label) and that constructed their impressions of geek hobbies and those that pursued them. Rather than fight those impressions, most folks just knew not to bring that stuff up in mixed company. It was very different from the "heavy metal music will make your kids evil/ kill themselves" that the metal-heads kind of embraced.**
The "comics are for geeks" stuff disappeared 25+ years ago, so it's hard to remember when Tony Stark has become a household name. Honestly, I'm still shocked that younger co-workers talk about their weekend D&D games in casual conversation, and maybe a little mad that they can. Doing so in my youth would have led to lectures about how I was going to go crazy.
