1980s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[domino harvey]

I think both domino and I both preferred the longer cut. Or else we both preferred the shorter cut. I can't remember, I was too unnerved by the "domino and I both preferred. . ." part.

Forum search reveals that you watched the shorter Director's Cut, and I didn't specify but I'm nearly positive I did as well. I wouldn't say I praised it so much as thought it was better than Killer of Sheep, which it is (though I didn't like that one at all). Maybe the prospect of us coming together more than once on the same director was just too beautiful a fantasy to be denied fruition!

[zedz]

Maybe I hadn't watched the other cut at that time, in which case my vague recollected recommendation is totally meaningless!

[Emak-Bakia]

Does anyone have a recommendation as to which version of My Brother's Wedding should be seen first? The director's cut is almost 40 minutes shorter!

I've only seen the longer version, but my memory of it is that it felt a bit too long. I think I'll watch the director's cut for this project. Thanks for the reminder!

[swo17]

Since asking the question, I've found the following information which is pointing me toward the shorter cut:

In 1983, after many long months of shooting, Charles Burnett sent his rough-cut of My Brother's Wedding to his producers. Ignoring his request to finish the editing of the film, the producers rushed it to a New York festival screening, where it received a mixed review from the New York Times. With distributors scared off, My Brother's Wedding was tragically never released. Film critic Armond White called this “a catastrophic blow to the development of American popular culture.”

When Milestone first acquired the rights to My Brother's Wedding, Charles Burnett's one request was a chance to complete his film the way he wanted to almost 25 years ago.

[bamwc2]

Viewing Log:

Ah Ying (Allen Fong, 1983): So-ying Hui stars as the titular character in the semi-biographic film about her own life. When the movie begins, she's a young, dissatisfied woman who spends her days manning her family's outdoor fish market stand in Hong Kong. Dreaming of something more to life, she walks away one day mid-order and takes a job at a film and television studio. Soon she finds herself enrolled in an acting course, which leads to a romantic relationship with her teacher. But will it give her the fulfillment that she craves? There are many wonderful moments in this understated romantic drama, but none caught me more than Hui singing "Scarborough Fair" to her date. She was pure magic in that scene. I have to admit, though that I was a bit depressed by the film given that it's a semi-biographical look at Hui's life. She plays a woman who wants to make it as an actress, and in real life this was her last film for almost twenty years. I have to wonder...

SpoilerShow

whether Hui ended up back where she started just as Ah Ying found herself serving fish back at her parent's stand.

Dead & Buried (Gary Sherman, 1981): Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) keeps the peace in a tiny New England town just off the Atlantic coast. Unfortunately, visitors to the town have an odd tendency to turn up dead shortly after arriving. As we find out in the film's very first scene, the deaths are only staged to look accidental. Instead a mob of town residents murder them in a gory fashion only to have them reappear seemingly alive and well a few days later. Sheriff Gillis begins to suspect the unthinkable: the dead are rising and killing the living. Could this be true and if so, who's responsible? The town seems to be littered potential suspects? Could it be his own wife Janet (Melody Anderson) who teaches a class on witchcraft and seems to have a strange connection to the departed? Could it be Dobbs (Jack Albertson), the frail but creepy undertaker who is disappointed that his art gets buried instead of being put on display?

SpoilerShow

Surprise! It's everyone, including Sheriff Gillis. Dobbs reanimates the corpses using black magic and has them bring him a steady supply of mutilated cadavers to remake in his image. Everyone in the town is dead (including Dobbs and Gillis), and answer to the commands that he gives them. I can't even begin to tell you how great it is to see Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as an undead sorcerer/undertaker!

It's not a great horror flick, but if you're willing to turn your brain off for the duration, it can be a fun one. Sherman doesn't do anything too remarkable as a director, but the final product is competent enough for a mild recommendation.

The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, 1989): Another lengthy outing from Rivette (this one clocking in at just under three hours), follows the lives of four young women who live together in a house while also attending acting classes at an all female academy. Little happens in the film other than the various performances given by the women and the introduction of the duplicitous Thomas (Benoît Régent) who's ulterior motives for being there ultimately lead to a violent conclusion. It's a very difficult film to assess; I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it. Like other films by Rivette it's certainly well made, but large swathes of it just come off as tedious.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (Charles E. Sellier Jr., 1984): This nasty little flick starts off with a seven-year old Billy cornered by his just-faking it catatonic grandfather and told that Santa punishes the wicked on Christmas Eve. Hours later his parents are both murdered by a sociopathic criminal dressed like Santa. His plight only worsens after he's sent to an orphanage run by a vicious nun who browbeats (and just beats) lessons about sexual purity into the young boy. The day that he turns 18 another nun finds him a job working at a toy store as a stock boy. However, after the drunken owner forces the now adult Billy (played by Robert Brian Wilson) to don a Santa suit at their holiday party, he snaps while witnessing an attempted rape similar to the one that claimed his mother's life. Billy then goes on a killing spree about town punishing all those that he deems "naughty", but giving a present to an innocent child (a bloody box cutter!). Billy's rampage ultimately leads him back to his orphanage and ends in a manner setting up the sequel. I watched this out of curiosity because of the moral hysteria that it created upon its initial release. Make no mistake about it, it's one sleazy flick--never missing a chance to show a pair of breasts or a fountain of blood. But it's also a very lazy and uninteresting film following the slasher formula by the numbers with the only uniqueness coming int the form of the sympathetic back story that we get for the killer. Really, the best reason to be offended by this film is just because its so ho hum. Fun side note: Director Charles E. Sellier Jr. would go on to spend the rest of his career producing inspirational Christian "documentaries". Praise the Lord!

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Lee Harry, 1987): Perhaps even more notorious than its predecessor if only for its hilariously over the top performance by Eric Freeman, its atrocious writing (yes, it's the "Garbage Day!" flick), and its lazy and seemingly endless recycling of scenes from the original. The first forty minutes of the film play as the world's goriest flashback episode as Billy's younger brother Ricky (Freeman) recounts the events of the first film to a prison psychologist (James Newman). Somehow they manage to work in every nude scene and every killing from the first film, so good work there director Lee Harry! Eventually Ricky's story gives way and we find out that seeing his brother gunned down at the end of the first film (um...spoiler alert!) combined with the stories of his family curse and abuse at the hands of Mother Superior have caused him to go on his own killing sprees. There are some truly hi-larious kills in his one, including a loan shark that Ricky witnesses beating on a man, so Ricky impales him with an umbrella which then opens postmortem. Eventually Ricky escapes and goes after Mother Superior who we're told retired after suffering a stroke, but for some unexplained reason now has half her face covered in boils(?). This film is a lot of dumb fun, much more so than the original. Have a good time and check it out for free on Youtube someday. Fun side note: Elizabeth Kaitan, who plays Billy's girlfriend Jennifer before he strangles her to death with a bent car antenna (because of course) moved to America at age 8. Her mother helped her to pursue her lifelong dream of acting, and she made a name for herself in Shakespeare productions before moving to Hollywood. Once there she spent almost all of her career in B horror films and skin flicks without her clothes. She retired in 1999 in order to become the personal secretary to right wing radio host Michael Savage, who regularly rails against Hollywood smut.

[domino harvey]

Hey, I've seen most of those! I'm sorry you didn't like Gang of Four more, as it's probably my favorite Rivette (though I have a lot of gaps in viewing). I also disagree on Dead and Buried, which I think is a great horror film and I voted for it in the Horror List-- it has such a novel premise and the tone is just right. I wish more horror movies I've sat through were half as enjoyable! Silent Night isn't very good, I agree, but I do like the humorous, often surreal tone the sequel takes once the recap ends halfway through. If you haven't seen them and want more Christmas slashers from the decade: Christmas Evil is the best of the lot, with a surprisingly respectable tone and portrayal of its central character. To All A Good Night is fairly tedious but has a clever twist regarding the reveal of the Santa-dressed killer. But there's far better slashers to spend time with ("Better" being relative, of course)

[knives]

Christmas Evil also has a very fun John Waters commentary on one of the releases.

[Michael Kerpan]

I also like Gang of Four a lot. Why? The possibly scrutable (but amybe not) mystery, the atmospher, the performances, the cinematography. But unless you can get in sync with his rather peculiar rhythm(s), I can see why his films may not appeal much.

[domino harvey]

I see I actually placed Gang of Four in my Top FIVE last time we voted on the 80s... I still love the film, but I don't think it'll be charting quite so high this round for me!

[knives]

I also like Gang of Four a lot. Why? The possibly scrutable (but amybe not) mystery, the atmospher, the performances, the cinematography. But unless you can get in sync with his rather peculiar rhythm(s), I can see why his films may not appeal much.

What mystery? I don't mean to be sarcastic in appearance but having only just recently seen the film too I don't recall any element of mystery to it though perhaps that just shows where my focus was at. This is such an amazing and beautiful every sort of story that the fact it didn't conform to what I thought it was going to be based on comments like yours only makes it better. I went in with the understanding this was another leftist parody like Chabrol's Nada, but instead the film seems devoid of such mechanics. Instead I saw a psychological contrast of their interior lives as a group of actresses learning their craft with the exterior psychology being living together though I wonder if maybe I should switch my binary descriptors since Rivette so beautifully interlocks the meanings between the segments. I'd really like to talk about it more as I am left a little puzzled though absolutely delighted.

[domino harvey]

What mystery?

They are actually forming a pictogram

[knives]

I thought they had just eaten bad fish?

[domino harvey]

I just checked the internet to see if there's any more 80s Christmas slashers I wasn't familiar with and sure enough there is

Elves (1989)

A young woman and her friend are trapped in a department store with a Killer elf (all part of this bizarre Nazi experiment-subplot) and it’s up to Dan Haggerty (a renegade Santa) to save them. Strange and fairly boring, it does feature some decent effects. Also only available on VHS.

EDIT: Yep, it's on YouTube!

[colinr0380]

In terms of Gary Sherman films, I would recommend anyone interested to check out Poltergeist III. It has a problematic reputation, trades in unlikeable supporting characters (Particularly the smugly superior child psychiatrist and the drippy boyfriend. Although where has the boyfriend been left at at the end? He might have been annoying but nobody seems to care about his fate after a certain point!) and is sort of ho-hum in storyline terms but it shows a lot of imagination in its set pieces.

The whole film is set in an apartment block-shopping centre-indoor parking garage structure (with its own swimming pool and art gallery!) and a lot of the fun comes from the way that the filmmakers manage to use every location to maximum effect, from car chases to window washing gantries, to meat lockers, to the swimming pool, to the various hallways, stairwells and bedrooms, and so on. And the film really deserves some sort of award for most innovative and varied (and relentless, if being uncharitable!) usage of mirror imagery in a horror film!

[bamwc2]

Domino, thanks for the recommendations. The only other Christmas themed horror films that came to mind were both from the 70s: Black Christmas and the Joan Collins segment from Tales from the Crypt. Maybe I'll check your suggestions out as part of a Christmas in July celebration along with a Santa Claus: The Movie rewatch. I saw that one in the theater as a kid and thinking about it now, there was definitely some very scary elements in there as well...

SpoilerShow

Mr. & Mrs. Claus pretty much freezing to death at the beginning of the film, John Lithgow floating off to his death, Dudley Moore...

As for Dead & Buried, perhaps I was too hard on it. I think that it might be because I saw 95% of the film's Shyamalanian (that's a real adjective, right?) twist ending fairly early on. So, I kind of felt like it was building up to the obvious. The only thing that I missed was that

SpoilerShow

Sheriff Gillis was also dead the whole time.

As I said in the previous invisotext, Jack Albertson was awesome in this film; just pitch perfect in his role. The more that I think about it, the more I like it. Thanks for voting on it. That's probably why I had it on my queue.

However, I can't say the same about Gang of Four. Perhaps I'll rewatch it, but I really have no desire to at this point.

[bamwc2]

Colin, now that's a film that freaked me out as a kid! By age eight I could handle most horror, and probably would have had no problem with Poltergeist III as well, but knowing that Heather O'Rourke was actually dead when I saw it made everything about 100x scarier to me.

[domino harvey]

Poltergeist III def spooked me as a kid too, and instilled a lifelong fear of living in window-walled skyrises-- I should revisit!

[bamwc2]

Poltergeist III def spooked me as a kid too, and instilled a lifelong fear of living in window-walled skyrises-- I should revisit!

I seem to recall being most freaked out by the puddle in the parking garage scene. I used to like splashing in those. Afterwards, I was terrified that I'd be pulled in. Now the more that I think about it though, the less I want to stand by my earlier assertion of not being scared by horror at that age. The same year I had to hold my Louisville Slugger while watching A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 in case Freddy came out. My father also tried showing me The Night of the Living Dead around the same time and I couldn't make it past the "It's coming to get you, Barbara" scene. I was really quite the wuss.

[domino harvey]

The only thing I remember really scaring me as a kid was the first ten minutes of It when it first aired-- I didn't make it past the corpse coming up from the water with balloons and could not sleep at all afterwards

[bamwc2]

The only thing I remember really scaring me as a kid was the first ten minutes of It when it first aired-- I didn't make it past the corpse coming up from the water with balloons and could not sleep at all afterwards

For whatever reason I never had a problem with It. I'm a few years older than you. Perhaps that helped.

[Michael Kerpan]

There's a whole set of mysteries in Gang of Four. Not sure I can recall all of them off the top of my head. First, Bulle Ogier's character is swathed in mystery - what was her past, why does she operate her school the way she does, why does she take the risk she does towards the end...

The pasts (and to some extent) and presents of most of the main characters are enigmatic.

There's the mystery of why the authorities are after who they're after.

Obviously this only one dimension of the film -- the psychological one is intertwines with this pretty inseparably. I never ever would have thought of this as having political parody as a major element, however.

[Michael Kerpan]

However, I can't say the same about Gang of Four. Perhaps I'll rewatch it, but I really have no desire to at this point.

I would say it's a better bet to keep trying out other not-yet seen Rivette films from time to time (one a year, maybe). Perhaps one will resonate -- and then the other already-seen films will come into better focus. This certainly happened to me with Naruse -- where it was the fourth and fifth (or maybe fifth and sixth) films I saw that caused something to finally click on in my brain (and turn me into a rabid fan).

[domino harvey]

Partners (James Burrows 1982) If you are in the market for a comedy sure to make everyone regardless of political or sexual orientation uncomfortable, here it is. TV sitcom-vet Burrows directs Ryan O'Neal (straight) and John Hurt (gay) as two cops ordered to go undercover as gay lovers in order to catch a gay serial killer. O'Neal is such a manly stud that he constantly beds women just by being in their general proximity, and Hurt is such a prissy little queer that he starts getting jealous over these flings as though the two were an actual couple. If that sounds like a recipe for hilarity, keep it to yourself. This is a film with no conceivable audience because right away it alienates potential homosexual viewers with obnoxious gags like the police chief commissioning a lavender VW bug for the two, or the ha-ha-ha-ha-larious sight of a straight man being hugged by a naked gay man. Whoa, no way! That's BRILLIANT! And these gags reinforce the sense of Otherness regarding gay culture that would keep many of those who'd find this a riot out of the theatres anyways. The film of course talks out of both sides of its mouth and preaches understanding and how it's hard out there for a gay man, but still can't resist poking fun at all those effeminate homos, &c. If this film had any balls it'd follow the premise down and have both mismatched officers fall in love with each other rather than going for the regrettable choice of letting the gay one get a crush on the straight one. But that might have been actually progressive and entertaining, and not this, whatever this is. In the film's defense, they did wait about eleven minutes before using the word "faggot," which I would have lost a bet on going in.

This part of the New York Times review is hilarious, by the way (concerning the goddawful, "Wow, fuck this movie" last minute or so):

At the theater preview at which I saw ''Partners,'' a group of irate patrons hissed and booed the film's end. I assume it was not because they were disappointed that the film was over too soon.

the Postman Always Rings Twice (Bob Rafelson 1981) A beautiful-looking film, with some fine period detail, smart wardrobe choices, and great camerawork. And that will be the end of our praising portion. As for the rest of this mess: What happened here?! A lot of talented people went out of their way to ruin the source material, and through a string of bizarre elisions, the film is literally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't either read the book or seen the 1946 film adaptation. Why cut out all of Cora's motivation? The movie strips her of everything but base sexual appeal, and the result is a blow-up doll beguilingly portrayed by one of the decade's greatest actresses in a colossal waste of effort. And why add in all of the disgusting sexual violence (At one point Jack Nicholson literally sees Jessica Lange bending over and punches her with full strength in her ass before passionately wrassling with her)? I know it has an sketchy rep but one of the things I appreciate about the adaptation of the Killer Inside Me was how it deglamorized the idea of the brooding man who beats a woman by making that abuse terrifyingly graphic and grotesque, and that film could very well be a full-on statement against earlier noir reimaginings like this that grossly vaunt these kinds of behaviors as something resembling brooding charm and/or sexual intrigue. Oh man, and that ending, wherein the climax of the film is not Frank getting his just punishment but instead crying over the loss of his masturbatory prop? Jesus Christ. If you like me saw the stars, the director, David Mamet at the helm adapting it all (or rather, parts of it all), and thought popular opinion on this had to be wrong, well, no. There is no conceivable reason to see this.

[colinr0380]

Colin, now that's a film that freaked me out as a kid! By age eight I could handle most horror, and probably would have had no problem with Poltergeist III as well, but knowing that Heather O'Rourke was actually dead when I saw it made everything about 100x scarier to me.

Poltergeist III def spooked me as a kid too, and instilled a lifelong fear of living in window-walled skyrises-- I should revisit!

I find it a strange film to assess: it throws out the rest of the family from the first two films to replace them with the new extended family kind of resentful of Carol-Anne, whenever they notice her at all, which really should make it a disappointing downgrade or retread of the previous films, just in a different setting. Yet despite not really getting too into all of the metaphysical afterlife stuff, I think I prefer this one to Poltergeist II for just going for an ingenious and straight ahead focus onto set piece moments and throwing logic out of the window, and all ties to reality, somewhere around the mid-point. I prefer the (somewhat) subtler earlier scares such as the Speak-n-Spell or the 'child freaking out alone in the apartment while the parents are at a swanky party downstairs' scenes to the stuff later on such as the squealing meat carcasses or frozen cars, but it certainly shows some imagination.

Oh, and I love that the stereotypical black friend, who seems assured of being a victim at some point, disappears for a while then turns up for a jump scare in the parking garage three quarters of the way through the film, takes one look at our leads wet through lying on the ground in a car park and makes the very sensible decision to get right back into her sportscar and drive straight out of the film with just a wave goodbye as she disappears in the distance!

[oh yeah]

Would Lumet's Prince of the City be too well-known for a spotlight film? It is hard to say because it seems at once highly acclaimed and yet strangely obscured, even by film buffs. In any case, I would certainly place it in my top five or so of the decade.