Category Archives: 80’s

Slasher New Wave: A Nightmare on Elm Street

It is not a new or interesting point that slasher, and by proxy horror, filmmaking was in a rut in the mid 1980s. The slasher genre had reinvigorated American horror briefly (extremely briefly, like maybe for a year or two) in the late ’70s and early ’80s by incorporating Italian giallo bloodletting into the mix, but the well went dry before anyone could say “blood geyser coming out of a bed and onto the ceiling”. Luckily, long-lost grubby horror maestro Wes Craven (what a last name for a horror film director) – who had shepherded cinema’s most distraught, devilish Bergman remake ever (Last House on the Left) and the latter grotesque haunt The Hills Have Eyes – was looking to have a little fun with the genre, and the stars had finally aligned after years of wallowing in semi-obscurity.
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“American New Wave” New Wave: The Outsiders

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the-outsiders-5564ad8a2bd79 Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 release, One From the Heart, was given a good long three year gestating period for Coppola to recover from the bowels of hell he’d thrown himself right up against while making his edge-of-sanity opus Apocalypse Now. That 1979 release itself had gone gaspingly over budget and seemingly came close to mangling, killing, or rendering insane every one who worked on it at one point or another, and Coppola himself lost four years of his life producing his stunningly indulgent rambling mess of a war film less interested in exploring war than in burrowing into our soul with some of the finest tone poem imagery the American New Wave ever saw. The film is regarded as a masterpiece, but having their pride and joy screw with their hearts and wallets so did not make our corporate masters happy.
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New Wave(s) of Blood: Conan the Barbarian and First Blood

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Edited for Clarity

It is at this point, deep down within the most magical year of 1982, where the 1980s really began to “do” the 1980s, and things start to become much more symmetric with what those of us in the good ol’ 2010s might imagine when we pontificate about three decades past. For this reason, it felt wholly appropriate to cover a pair of films, one of them very much of the 1980s, and one rather shockingly not of this decade, but both of which would birth the two “biggest” (yes, this applies to both box office draw and muscle-mass) and most “1980s” stars of the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian should not work, and, honestly, it kind of doesn’t. It is just about the most hyperbolic, fetishistic-ally 1980s macho fantasy action film one could possibly imagine, the kind of product that sounds more like a modern person’s hindsight imagination of the 1980s than the real deal. The script, for one, is a non-entity from beginning to end, and its prurient, excessive, almost psychotic violence and tawdry childishness is about as straight-faced as it gets. It is totally and completely describable as “moronically and obsessively stupid”, and such a description doesn’t so much miss the point as ask us to consider what “stupid” even means. For Conan the Barbarian is so idiotically committed to being its chintzy self it creates its own special place where only it dares preside. This is an eccentric, weirdly watchable film, the kind of work that just defines guilty pleasure.
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1981 Bonus Reviews: Clash of the Titans and Heavy Metal

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Clash of the Titans

1981’s Clash of the Titans is famous for one reason and one reason only: being Ray Harryhausen’s last major motion picture release as America’s stop motion icon extraordinaire. Yet herein lies the sad shame of his last go-around: the aforementioned statement was a lie. This is not a Ray Harryhausen film. Sure, he does his best to do grace the film with some fine, finicky creatures, at least one of which is one of his all-time creations: Medusa. Incidentally, the only sequence in the film that works on every level is the serpentine crawling king snake of the Medusa battle, given life as a sort of pure horror never seen in these sorts of big budget monstrosities. Medusa herself is nothing less than Harryhausen’s most fully formed achievement, trading in the hulking grandeur of his earlier creations with expressionist fever. She moves with a finesse never seen in a Harryhausen creation, yet it is still not life-like; the stilted, jittery motions caused by the stop-motion lend the figure an eerie, worrying quality like an impression of a nightmare rather than true reality. Never before or after did Harryhausen use the limitations of stop-motion, namely their jankiness, to such nail-baiting, demented effect.
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American Imperialism New Wave (AKA Ronald Reagan New Wave Part Deux): Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

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Updated June 2016

After the completion of my American New Wave series, I found myself hungry for more, and with the rather stark delineation of mainstream ’70s American and ’80s American cinema, continuing chronologically seemed a fair idea indeed for it’s ease of access without necessarily plumbing the same self-consciously raw, arty cinema I generally stuck with to define American film during the 1970s. This is an opportunity for me to plum an type of film I have almost entirely avoided thus far for the purposes of this blog: classic genre filmmaking, or pop fare as we call it when we’re feeling particularly feisty. The series will continue, albeit with a generally more slap-dash rule set fitting the parameters of the generally lighter, airier cinema of the ’80s like a glove. Essentially, I’ll go by year, but within each year, I can cover one film in depth, or a few in smaller review format, or any mix in between. Whatever suits my boat, for, after-all, personal satisfaction was de rigueur in the halcyon ’80s, wasn’t it?

As for publication schedule, It’ll be more compact, a sort of Holiday treat to myself where I get to focus on “fun” movies in place of all the doom and gloom I force upon myself cinematically (I’m such a masochist aren’t I?). In other words, I want to keep things coming fast and loose, to give myself a filmic sugar rush, and to have a little fun with it. My estimation will be the series will continue into the very early ’90s (being that the first few years of the ’90s were basically the ’80s culturally and cinematically anyway, before the New American Independent bubble really blew up big time mid decade). And I’d like to have it all done by the New Year, or slightly afterward. So that’s one month of the poppiest pop I can find. Survival, without cavities, is not an option. And do excuse the titles; sometimes I like to have fun with myself, even against myself. The titles are Holiday Present Part B.

Firstly, it must be said before anything else, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a fairly stupendous lark, a work of cheerful insouciance at minimum, and a sky-high stratosphere-piercing pop machine at best. As a pure action-adventure, it’s an apex of economical storytelling, from-the-hip visual stylization, and gloriously unstabilized anarchy that owes as much to Chuck Jones (of Looney Tunes fame) as John Huston. This is true not only for its wit and physicality (Chuck Jones was a maestro of movement above all), but in how it is a master-class in editing and framing on-screen action (and it climaxes with a wry, none-too-subtle jab at the protagonist that wouldn’t be out of home in either malevolent John Houston molasses or a spring-stepping Chuck Jones firecracker). Almost unthinkably so thirty years on, it is palpably, vigorously indebted to the Midnight Cinema tradition, the so-called reprobate genres epitomized not only by Jones but more live-bodied directors like Fritz Lang. In straying perilously near the B-serial, it unearths a morbidity that stresses how – 21st century bloodlust aside – children’s entertainment was quite a bit more scarlet in the olden days. Populist though it may be, the thing about Raiders is how it turns the disreputable into the divine.

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The Ronald Reagan New Wave: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

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Edited June 2016

After the completion of my American New Wave series, I found myself hungry for more, and with the rather stark delineation of mainstream ’70s American and ’80s American cinema, continuing chronologically seemed a fair idea indeed for it’s ease of access without necessarily pluming the same self-consciously raw, arty cinema I generally stuck with to define American film during the 1970s. This is an opportunity for me to plum an type of film I have almost entirely avoided thus far for the purposes of this blog: classic genre filmmaking, or pop fare as we call it when we’re feeling particularly feisty. The series will continue, albeit with a generally more slap-dash rule set fitting the parameters of the generally lighter, airier cinema of the ’80s like a glove. Essentially, I’ll go by year, but within each year, I can cover one film in depth, or a few in smaller review format, or any mix in between. Whatever suits my boat, for, after-all, the ’80s was all about personal satisfaction, wasn’t it?

So much has been written about Star Wars it’s almost impossible to add anything new to the corpus, and I won’t try to, except to say that everyone who criticizes it and everyone who adores it are really speaking past one another. Their arguments enjoy fundamental similitude. It’s no secret that a great many people loathe the Star Wars prequels – I’m none too heavy a fan myself – and the reasons are obvious and multitudinous: indulgent filmmaking, superficial visuals, self-serious, haphazard dialogue, druggy, ham-bone acting. As a rule, I won’t argue with these flaws, but I will say this: many of them, particularly in the writing and acting department, are true with as full a force in the original three films as in the prequels. Insofar as people wish to pump up the Star Wars films as implacable, fertile, drip-fed drama in the traditional way people discuss drama, they’re out of luck come their proof. Insofar as the Star Wars prequels misunderstand or avoid the human condition, so too do the original films.
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