1982 - WE OF THE NEVER NEVER, drama about living in the Australian Outback is really boring

Good intentions in a film about a do gooder do not a good movie make.  You actually have to have a compelling story to maintain a viewer's interest.   This is not one of these stories even though it is apparently true. We Of The Never Never was an acclaimed novel which was a thinly disguised true story which the author modified by replacing the names of the actual people with fictitious names.

In brief, this film follows the story of a woman named Jeannie Gunn who marries a man who is relocating to a cattle station (ranch) in the Australian Outback circa 1902.  After a difficult journey Jeannie is confronted by the drovers (cowboys) who work at the station and think that a woman has no place in the Outback.  Jeannie also decides to befriend the Aboriginals living at the station much to the disgust of the drovers who are a bunch of wouldn't you know it racists.  Will Jeannie win over the drovers and the Aboriginals at the station or is she setting herself up for failure?  Well it's fairly easy to guess which way this plot is heading if you've ever seen an episode of Little House On The Prairie. 

 

We Of The Never Never is actually decently acted.  The main role of Jeannie Gunn is performed by an Australian actor named Angela Punch McGregor who plays her like a regular down under version of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  She's basically the whole show as she struts around the cattle station doing good deed stuff.

 

This is frankly a very boring film.  It is so low key there's nothing actually dramatic that happens in it's very long running time.  The best thing the film has going for it is the cinematography.  The Australian Outback may be a hell hole but it is certainly a very photogenic hell hole. We Of The Never Never is available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure and is a great way to fall asleep for insomniac viewers.

The film was written by Peter Schreck, the running time is 134 minutes.  

1982 - FERAT VAMPIRE, aka UPIR Z FERATU, the vampire car movie

Well here's a plot you don't see everyday.  A race car company has developed a car that runs on human blood.  A doctor suspecting something is not right tries to get to the bottom of this unusual situation.  This leads him into a conspiracy where the automobile company that has developed the car now wants to market and sell it around the world.

The director Juraj Herz really plays up the horror elements of the story but he also seems to be making some sort of statement about the need for human kind to commit suicide by getting into a moving four wheel machine and driving faster and faster until it finally kills him or someone else.

 

Unlike the previous Herz film I viewed Beauty and the Beast, which had a lot of atmospheric gloom and doom, much of Ferat Vampire takes place in the daylight and is set in contemporary Czechoslovakia to emphasize the modern horror of the situation.

 

Does Ferat Vampire succeed as a horror film or a commentary on people's fascination with killing themselves in fast cars?  I have no idea.  However one thing you can be sure of is that this is certainly a journey into weirdo film world. I know there have been other possessed automobile films like The Car and Christine, but Ferat Vampire definitely has a tire up in the evil jalopy story sweepstakes.

The film was written by Jan Fleischer and Juraj Herz, the running time is 90 minutes.

1982 - HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a misfire of a movie.

Obviously the third in the Halloween series and usually thought of as the movie that didn't have Michael Meyers in it.  John Carpenter only took a producer credit on this film and turned it over to his production designer/editor Tommy Lee Wallace.  Carpenter hired British writer Nigel Kneale author of the Quatermass films.  However Kneale was dissatisfied with the direction the film was heading and left the production.  So besides directing Wallace handled the screenwriting.  The final result was a mess of a story.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch has a rather ridiculous plot involving Stonehedge, an Irish businessman who wants to pull the ultimate Halloween trick and robots of all things.  The original Halloween movie shows up on television screens that people are watching thoughout this movie but it's only a reminder of what a better film that was. 

 

As for the cast, a doctor played by character actor Tom Atkins teams up with the female lead Stacey Nelkin to investigate all of this stuff.  Nelkin was a sort of an actor whose chief claim to fame was as the very young real life girlfriend of Woody Allen.  Also showing up is Dan O'Herlihy as the evil CEO.  O'Herlihy at least brings a little gravitas to this film.  It's fun to See Atkins in a leading role for a change he certainly knows his way around genre films.   

 

Frankly this movie is terrible, the story is at best ridiculous, the scary stuff isn't scary and the action scenes are barely competent.  This film made money but it was not the big bucks payday the producers were looking for.  If anything redeems this film it's the cinematography of Dean Cundey, but nobody is going to watch a film because they want to see how the film looks.

The producers learned their lessons and Michael Meyers came back from the dead to star in all the other Halloween sequels. Halloween III: Season of the Witch is now considered a cult classic but it's an undeserving cult classic.

The running time is 99 minutes.

1982 - YOUNG DOCTORS IN LOVE, sort of funny comedy.

A spoof of those hospital drama TV shows, the formula is take a bunch of medical interns stick them in some dramatic situations and you have a hit.  Shows like Medical Center, MASH, House, Ben Casey, ER, and even the current flavor of the month the Pitt have been a reliable staple in the world of entertainment.

Young Doctors In Love was put together by some old comedy writers.  They were clearly trying to duplicate the success of The Zucker Brothers films particularly Airplane.  I would  say the ratio of hits to misses is roughly 40 percent and that's being generous.

The jokes are a scattershot mess with some slapstick, some "little people" humor, some sex jokes and this being an 80's comedy lots of gratuitous female nudity.  The film weirdly enough has some sentimental moments which seems like they should be in another film.

 

The director was television producer Gary Marshall who was certainly an old comedy pro running shows like Happy Days, Mork and Mindy, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple and Joanie loves Chachi. But Marshall would probably be better off not mentioning that last one.  Marshall apparently got it into his head that it was time to be a film director.  Well, the really big bucks are in the movies if they turn into hits.

Marshall was smart enough to load his cast up with lots of funny actors and they certainly are experts at spinning straw into gold.  I am ashamed to admit I did laugh at the dancing Candy Stripers and Héctor Elizondo as a gender confused gangster.

The film was written by a couple of comedy veterans Michael Elias and Rich Eustis, the running time as 96 minutes.

1982 - KOYAANISQATSI - life out of balance = pretentious

Astutely described by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as a "glorified music video."  Koyaanisqatsi is a silent film with music and at times stunning photography.  The film according to its creator, Godfrey Reggio is about "how we live technology," whatever that gobbly gook means.

 The film starts out with stately images of the American Southwest desert where all is calm and mellow.  As the camera moves past these images the viewer gets a lot of time lapse photography of human beings racing all over a Metropolitian city like a colony of ants on speed.  

 

It all comes to a crashing end with stock footage of a rocket blowing up as the camera follows pieces of it falling back to the earth.   What does it all mean?  In the end should we abandon our fast paced and out of control lives for a more simpler existence in the southwest desert trying not to get bit by scorpions? Or is the film just a bunch of interesting locations tied together by at times stunning photography and editing that achieves a visual impact on the viewer?

One thing is for sure the minimalist film score by composer Phillip Glass is an important contribution to the film and kind of saves the day.

The film was written such that it is by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio and Alton Walpole.  The running time is thankfully under 90 minutes.  A little of this stuff goes a very long way.

1982 - FANNY AND ALEXANDER, the extended version

Hang in there we're getting to the end of this Ingmar Bergman mini film fest.  With Fanny and Alexander, Bergman announced this would be his final film.  Hyperbole being what it is from film directors,  he went on to make a few more films although they were primarily for Swedish Television.  It's probably more accurate to say this was Bergman's final theatrical film.

In recent years Bergman had been challenged to find financing for his films.  In order to get this film made he agreed to make two versions, a television mini series that runs over five hours and a theatrical version that runs almost three hours.  Apparently Bergman preferred the television version of this film.

 

The film tells the story of the Ekdahls an upper class family living in Uppsala,  Sweden.  The Ekdahls own a theater which is managed by one of the sons of Helena Ekdahl (the matriarch of the family) named Oscar.  Oscar and his wife Emilie in addition to running the theater are also performers. They have two children, Fanny and Alexander.  Alexander is a boy with a very vivid imagination which will bring him a lot of trouble. 

The film starts with an extended scene of a Christmas party at the Ekdahl home where all is happiness and joy.  But this is an Ingmar Bergman film and in the second act of the film Oscar suffers a heart attack and passes away.  Cue the entrance of the chief villain of this film the Lutheran Bishop Edvard Vergérus a character so frightening he could be in a Wes Craven film.  For reasons that would take to long to explain and are actually kind of unbelievable the grieving widow Helena ends up marrying the bishop and moves into his very austere residence along with her two children.

The film gets very harrowing at this point as the Bishop turns out to be a tyrannical figure who takes out most of his anger on Alexander.  In some very brutal scenes, the bishop physically punishes Alexander to the point of drawing blood from the ten year old child.  The remainder of the film involves the Ekdahl's  attempts to rescue Fanny, Alexander and Helena from the Bishop's household.

At this point in Bergman's career a lot was known about his early life growing up with a father who was a strict Lutheran minister.  The character of the Bishop is clearly based on Bergman's father and Alexander is obviously a stand in for a young Ingmar Bergman.

Fanny and Alexander is one of Bergman's best looking films.  The photography by Sven Nyquist is excellent and the sets and costumes are a real treat to look at.  The film is a mixture of new and old actors who Bergman had worked with in the past.  Jari Kulle, Gunnar Björnstrand,  Erland Josephson, and Harriett Andersson were part of his famous stock company.  Incredibly Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow turned down roles in this film.

Fanny and Alexander is in many ways a rehash of Bergman's favorite themes but it's a well made and involving film even in the extended television version.

The film was written by Ingmar Bergman.  The running time for the theatrical version is 188 minutes, the television version runs 312 minutes.

1982 - I THE JURY, very sleezy but entertaining private eye film

Ralph Meeker was the definitive detective Mike Hammer in the 1950's Aldrich film Kiss Me Deadly.  This updated version of  the Hammer character features Armand Assante as the brutish private eye a bigger lowlife than even Ralph Meeker was.  The formula is lots of sleazy sex scenes and lots of gun play.  The plot has something to do with the CIA programming people to become assassins with the unfortunate side effect being that they end up also becoming deranged sex maniac killers.  Mike Hammer in his own nasty way has to sort this all out and put a stop to it. by killing a whole bunch of people.

This is probably one of the few films I have seem that makes sex and eroticism kind of disgusting especially when in involves crazed sex killers.  The action scenes are actually well done since this is right before the era of computer imaging where the stunts and action are basically manipulated by some nerd in front of a computer.

 

Mike Hammer's assistant is the ever faithful Velda who is either his secretary, lover or maid played by a stunning blonde named Laurene Landon.  She's equally capable of flirting with Hammer or pulling out a gun and blasting away at some disagreeable bad guy.  Also in the cast is 1980's babe Barbara Carrera as a creepy sex therapist who Mike Hammer gets involved with. 

This is not a film that you want to watch with your mother or spouse, its tough, brutal, nasty and very entertaining.

The screenplay was by  B movie and exploitation screenwriter Larry Cohen in the best cinematic tradition of completely unredeeming story telling. The running time is 111 sordid minutes.

1982 - SORCERESS, extremely crappy Roger Corman production

Even by the standards of movie producer Roger Corman this exploitation film is very poor stuff.  Sorceress was directed by B movie director Jack Hill.  Clearly the intention was to make a cheapo version of the John Milius film, Conan The Barbarian.  According to Hill the producer Roger Corman stepped in after filming and did a lot of reediting ruining Hill's film.  Hill's comments are kind of laughable since this was the guy who directed, The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage and The Swinging Cheerleaders, hardly award winning stuff.

Sorceress is a typical Roger Corman production with sex, violence and nudity but when it comes to female nudity in a Roger Corman show, it's nothing below the waist.  Corman was strangely prudish about female nudity in his films while still managing to exploit his female cast.  In this film the nudity is kind of ineptly photographed.

 

 Corman has recently passed away as of this writing and has been getting a lot of accolades about his career mostly I think because he was a survivor of the B movie Hollywood film scene which has been surpassed by  the crap that now shows up on streaming channels.  A lot has been written about Corman giving opportunities to filmmakers like Bogdanovich and Scorsese at the beginning of their careers but the bottom line was that it was all about turning a profit for Corman.

 

Sorceress is sort of a cult film mostly because it is so ineptly made and poorly acted and I'm not even going to get into the dialog.  I suppose there are a few chuckles to be had with some of the ridiculous scenes and characters, a guy in a Viking costume shows up for no particular reason and the climatic special effects at the end of the film are hilariously poor.  Well you get the picture.

 The film has a writing credit for Jim Wynorski although Jack Hill claims he actually wrote the script probably something he shouldn't be talking about.  The running time is 83 minutes.

1982 - ACE OF ACES, another entertaining Belmondo film

Ace of Aces kind of follows a pattern of lightweight but entertaining Belmond films that sort of began with Cartouche.  Some of his other adventure films in this vein were That Man from Rio, Up to His Ears and Le Magnifique.  They were all directed by Philippe de Broca. Ace of Aces had Gerard Oury as the director, he was also a good man when it came to directing comedy.  All of these films helped establish Belmondo as a great action hero.

Ace of Aces is a period piece which finds Belmondo as the coach of the 1936 French Olympic boxing team.  While in Berlin, Belmondo gets involved with smuggling a Jewish family out of Berlin literally right under the nose of the Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler himself.

 

There are fights, car chases and lots of goofy humor especially with an actor in the dual role of Hitler's  love starved sister and Hitler himself,  It's a rather amusing bit of casting.  Through it all the unflappable Belmondo easily defeats all of the obstacles put in his way by the German Police the Gestapo and finally Hitler.

Belmondo was close to 50 years old when he made this film and it's impressive that he was clearly doing a lot of his own stunts.  The romantic lead for Belmondo is the actor Marie France Piser who was ten years younger than him.  This is the kind of likable action film that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny should have attempted instead of the overlong mess that they released instead.

The running time is 100 minutes, the screenplay was by Gérard Oury and Danièle Thompson.,

1982 - STILL OF THE NIGHT, misfired tribute to Alfred Hitchcock

Probably one of the worst films I have recently seen.  This attempt at a Hitchcock type of thriller is a complete misfire.  The plot such that it is involves the  murder of Meryl Streep's lover.  Psychiatrist Roy Scheider sets out to find the killer all the time wondering if Streep is the murderer.

The director and screenwriter Robert Benton for some reason got it into his head that he wanted to pay tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's films.  There are references to Vertigo, The Birds, North by Northwest and Spellbound.  Benton has set up a series of clues for Scheider to solve and we dutifully sit there as he goes through the crime solving motions.  What Benton apparently forgot was that Hitchcock rarely made whodunits.  Mystery stories were not a primary interest for Hitchcock in his films.

  

Meryl Streep has been directed to play one of Hitchcock's famous "cool blondes."  She has gone on record as saying that this is one of her worst performances in a film, no argument here.  Scheider is I guess the Jimmy Stewart character. a man obsessed with mysterious Meryl.  But it's hard to understand what he sees in her bland and frankly uninteresting character. The fact of the matter is that the plot necessitates that he become involved in the murder mystery by falling in love with creepy Meryl even though it is never explained why he is so obsessed with her or exactly why he is even bothering to solve the murder.

The movie is so poorly directed that at the very least Benton could have  copied Hitchcock's visual style with some interesting camera angles but this film is shot almost like a TV show.  The cinematographer was Nestor Almendros who had done outstanding work for Eric Rohmer, Terrence Malik  and  Francois Truffaut, but you won't find anything special about his photography in this film.

Running time, 93 minutes.

1982 - DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID, spoof of 40's film noir is more silly than funny.

 The second of four silly comedies that Steve Martin and Carl Reiner teamed up on.  Martin usually has a writing credit on these films and Reiner directed.  Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is a spoof of 1940's detective films with the gimmick being that excerpts from these old films which feature actors such as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fred MacMurry, Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster to name a few are blended with footage shot by Reiner featuring Steve Martin as private detective Rigby Reardon.

Reardon is trying to solve some confusing series of murders in a takeoff of one of those complicated plots that always seemed part of those old film noir stories.  Rachel Ward is the sexy female lead who Reardon falls in love with.  With her Australian accent and the glamorous film lighting she looks very good.  Ward is essentially the "straight man" for Steve Martin's silly character which she plays very well.

The real stars of this film are the group of old timers that Carl Reiner assembled as part of his production team.  Legendary costume designer Edith Head dressed Ward and Martin in 40's outfits.  John DeCuir was the production designer.  DeCuir had been in the business a long time and had done sets for films as diverse as Cleopatra and The Naked City.  Another veteran was composer Miklos Rosza who wrote the score, this was Rosza's final film before he passed away.  Mention should also be made of editor Bud Molin and especially cinematographer Michael Chapman who had to blend Reiner's footage with black and white film scenes shot in the 1940's, an impressive achievement.

 

Frankly, the film isn't all that funny.  Martin works hard to find the silliness behind the supposed tough guy private character but a lot of the humor is pretty dumb.  Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is probably more interesting for movie buffs than the general public.

Written by Carl Reiner, Steve Martin and George Gipe, the running time is 88 minutes.

1982 - 48 HOURS, a buddy cop film

 A big financially successful film for Paramount and director/co-writer Walter Hill.  Also, probably one of the more impersonal films that this director has made. Since there are no original plots anymore, 48 Hours is the old opposite personalities forced to be partners.  Eventually they  begin to show a grudging respect for each other as the story progresses etc.  In this case Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy are a respectively a cop and a con man who team up to find a bad guy running around shooting people.

This was the breakout film for Eddie Murphy and propelled him to the top of the heap until has career crashed with Beverly Hills Cop III.  Still for much of the 198o's he was big stuff as a movie star.  Nick Nolte had been working in film for a while until he kind of crashed and burned with a variety of personal issues.  Third billed Annette O'Toole a very good actor got stuck with the part of the sexy girlfriend who's kind of a bitch, she's probably in about 3 or 4 scenes.

 

This is a very macho piece of film.  Women are relegated to running around topless and playing prostitutes. The guys all run around talking really tough.  It's very much a boy's club in this film which really dates it.  In some ways the attitudes in the film are even more out of it than a 1940's crime drama.

 

48 Hours did give Walter Hill commercial respect for a while but this is really not one of his more interesting films.  However no one could stage a gun fight or a fist fight like Hill probably the chief reason to even watch this film.

The film had a lot of writers,  Roger Spottiswoode, Walter Hill, Larry Gross and  Steven E. de Souza all professionals at writing this kind of Hollywood action stuff.  The running time is 96 minues.

1982 -THE THING - on Blu Ray

For once a remake of a film classic that doesn't disgrace the original film.   John Carpenter an admitted fan of Howard Hawks takes the old Hawks film and rethinks it completely. 

Carpenter and his writer Bill Lancaster go back to the original short story and update it with 80's state of the art special effects.

The monsters in this thing are really something to see, the special effects wizard Rob Bottin and his team really outdid themselves in the practical effects department.  When I saw this film on first release this was when I realized that they could now put anything into a motion picture when it came to special effects.

The film probably suffered from being a little too graphic for the general public.  It wasn't the box office success it should have been.  Going against E.T at the time probably didn't help it's commercial possibilities.

109 minutes.

1982 - STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, paired up with 1967 - SPACE SEED

Double feature night at the local neighborhood theater which can't make up it's mind whether it wants to show independent films or old classic films.  Anyway we zipped over to watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan and much too my surprise they showed the original episode Space Seed which the film was based on. 

Well, Space Seed is from Season One of the original cast when the series was very fresh.  It looks like a television show, a lot of light on the sets everywhere to put it mildly.  Forgot how sexist the show was when it came to women, those Star Fleet uniforms sure are short and tight.  Ricardo Montalban is as over the top and hammy as he was in The Wrath of Kahn, he is a good villain for Kirk to go up against. Actually a pretty fun episode of the series which had had a lot of crappy shows particularly in the third season.

However all hail Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the first real Star Trek film.  The troublesome Gene Roddenberry was pushed out of the film after making a mess out of Star Trek The Motion Picture.  His replacement Harv Bennett television producer of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman was brought in to put together another Star Trek film.  It was Bennett who realized Space Seed could be a jumping off point for another Star Trek film.  When you get right down to it Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn is really just another episode of the old television series. 

After cutting the necessary deals with the cast, Bennett hired Nicholas Meyer and inexperienced director to shoot the film.  Meyer did an uncredited rewrite of the script and actually managed to get the old feeling of the show in the film something Roddenberry completely failed to do.

 A very enjoyable big screen version of the television series.

Space Seed 50 minutes.

Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Kahn  113 minutes.

1982 - MEGAFORCE, a Hal Needham film.

From Albert Ruddy the producer of The Godfather and auteur director Hal Needham comes this would be Star Wars ripoff of I don't know ineptitude, stupidity, unintentional action comedy, you name it. 

It would be easy to write a "rip into the movie review' on this one but suffice it to say this movie lays it self wide open for a barrage of cheap shots from amateur film blog reviewers like myself.

However we can look at some of the peripheral parts of the film.  A quick google search on this film shows websites with a lot of Megaforce toys for sale.  As part of the marketing for this film a whole series of little toy cycles or souped up trucks were created, when Megaforce bombed the toys disappeared as fast as the movie only to find a home on ebay like websites.

Finally there is this account from the IMDB page on this film.

"One of the first jobs I ever had was with a catering company. Imagine our excitement being hired on for the desert-location filming of MEGAFORCE! Everyone involved with the film seemed quite confident that it was going to become a smash summer hit.

Watching the filming at Nevada's dry lakes, it did feel like something momentous was in the making, but nobody could have imagined just how negative a reaction this movie was going to receive. I almost didn't want to see it, but curiosity got the better of me. Truthfully, I don't think it's nearly as horrible as many have made it out to be, though it's certainly not *good*, either. There's enough vehicle stunts, random explosions, and weapons futurismo to keep average 12-year-olds very entertained, and I think that may be exactly what Hal Needham intended for this project.

I still have a box filled with t-shirts, ball-caps, and other promotional crap emblazoned with "DEEDS, NOT WORDS". It may not have the iconic carriage of, say, "MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU", but I'll keep these things for posterity, anyhow...

...and I hope everyone on the set enjoyed the food..."

99 minutes.

1982 - UNE CHAMBRE EN VILLE or A ROOM IN TOWN

Jacques Demy's film about a 1955 workers strike in a French town called  Nantes is a musical.  Like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg every single word of it is sung by every single member of the cast.

It looks like Demy's concept of dramatizing the strike and the love affair by one of the strikers and a married woman somewhat exceeded his ability to actually put what is essentially an intimate opera on film.  Still you have to give Demy credit for attempting something so audacious.  You just don't see films like this every day if at all. 

Demy must have worked very carefully to get the cast to seem as natural and unaffected as they are considering they are constantly singing, it's very tough to build a character in a film that has such an unusual approach to story.

Worth a look and doesn't overstay it's welcome.

90 minutes.

1982 - THE PIRATE MOVIE, musical for teenagers is basically dumb

File this one in the kind of stupid movie ideas folder.  1980's semi teen idols, Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins, sing and mug for the camera in this updating of The Pirates of Penzance, the light operetta from Gilbert and Sullivan.

I guess the idea was to appeal to the kids using these two American stars and have them race around and camp it up with lots of slapstick, silly references to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and frequent breaking of the fourth wall as the actors spoke directly to the audience.

Even for a pretty boy Atkins is really hopeless.  It's hard to see what the big deal about Kristy McNichol once was.  She was an Emmy winning actor in the late 1970's and did lots of those after school specials and guest spots on 1970's TV shows.  She was always more of dramatic actor than a comedian.   Her role as Mable in The Pirate Movie calls for her to be funny and sexy.  She's not very funny and not particularly sexy even running around in skirts slit up the side of her leg.

The whole thing has the smell of desperation and probably needed a director like Richard Lester to pull it off.  Ken Annakin really wasn't the guy for this type of film.  Annakin had done some good work early in his career when he was involved with Walt Disney.  But I doubt  Disney would have ever gotten involved with this kind of silly musical fantasy.

105 minutes.