1983 - FIRE AND ICE, an animated fantasy epic.

Probably looking for a commercial hit after the success of Arnold's Conan the Barbarian. The director Ralph Bakshi along with the comic book artist Frank Frazetta dreamed up this story of muscle bound heroes, nearly naked buxom babes, evil magicians, scary monsters and did I mention nearly naked buxom babes.

To save money on animation Bakshi and his crew rotoscoped the main characters. This is a technique which involves tracing over live actors to make them look like comic book people.  The now animated characters are then placed in exotic backgrounds  The result is interesting if a little jarring at times when viewed.  Bakshi had used this technique on several R rated cartoons notably Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic.  He had uneven success in Hollywood as R rated animated cartoons didn't exactly make for a family night at the moves.

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Fire and Ice is loaded with lots of fighting and entertains as an action film although the story is really nothing special.  The good vs evil fantasy stuff had been done before and in better films.  Fire and Ice is at best an okay time killer.  The weird looking animation does give it an interesting look.

The film was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, a couple of comic book writers.  The running time is 81 minutes.

1983 - AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD, a sidebar in British history

You have to know something about Great Britain in the 1930's, Cambridge and the Soviet Union's espionage efforts in Britain to appreciate this fascinating little film.  It seems during the 1930's the Soviets were able to recruit a group of disaffected upper class Cambridge students into spying on their own country.  As the years went by these students managed to make their way into the British intelligence service and in one case Buckingham palace.  None of them were exposed until the CIA broke a code naming them as Soviet agents.  Instead of being arrested by the authorities three of them managed to defect to Moscow.   It was a major scandal for British Intelligence who had managed to keep the exact circumstances of their spying secret from the public for years.

Jumping ahead a few years later. A touring company of actors went to Moscow to perform Hamlet as part of a cultural exchange program.  While there one of the defectors Guy Burgess approached Coral Browne one of the performers in Hamlet.  Burgess was looking for a favor.  It seemed he wanted Browne to get in contact with his old tailor in London and have the tailor make and send him a new and proper English three piece suit.  From this story, the director John Schlesinger and the writer Alan Bennett have dramatized Browne's encounter with the now ex-spy and ex-Englishman, Burgess.

 

The cast is a relatively small one with Alan Bates as the traitor Guy Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself.  Although supposedly a committed socialist and communist, Burgess is still a very proper Englishman.  The film is a clever and amusing look at a man now exiled from the country he grew up and lived in and the reality of his drab life in Moscow.  

 

This is one of the director John Schlesinger's better latter day efforts in his career after a series of less than interesting films.  When Schlesinger was on his game nobody was better at getting good performances out of his cast and filming interesting stories.  An Englishman Abroad turned out to be an excellent film about the English character and mentality.  Definitely worth a look.

The running time is 60 minutes. 

1983 - CHRISTINE, the possessed car horror film

Christine is an adaption of Stephen King's story of a classic car owned by a high school student which just happens to be possessed by an evil spirit or something.  The film is yet another variation of King's favorite theme possessed stuff.  In King's world, houses are possessed, dead pets are possessed, husbands are possessed, clowns are possessed etc.  John Carpenter was approached to direct this film and apparently it was just a job of work for him.  Not that he didn't bring his usual skill to the story but it sure seems like he didn't have much interest in it.

For a horror film nothing really happens for about an hour.  The viewer sits through a lot of plot about a nerd high school kid played by future director Keith Gordon who restores the possessed vintage  57 Plymouth.  The car then decides to go out on it's own to kill the mean high school shop boys who have been harassing him.   The nerd kid improbably gains confidence and starts dating the hot transfer student played by Alexandra Paul.  Alexandra Paul made a few movies but she is primarily remembered for running down a beach in a swimsuit in the TV series Baywatch.   I suppose it needs to be said that the mean high school shop boys don't exactly look like boys in this film, I would say they were probably pushing their early twenties.  Hollywood just can't get that high school age thing right in these teenager movies.

 

John Carpenter staged a few decent car kills particularity one where the car is on fire and chases one of the bad kids.  However the climax where a bulldozer battles Christine is anticlimactic.  It's just a scene where a bulldozer drives over the car for about ten minutes.

 

When you stop and think about it the premise of this film is a little lame.  It you want to make a film about the horrors of high school, just the basic situation of kids getting picked on by bullies should be enough to build a story around.   You don't need an evil vintage car to drive the point home.

The film was written by Bill Phillips, the running time is 110 minutes.

1983 - THE SURVIVORS, redneck/right wing satire doesn't really work.

The director Michael Ritchie had a reasonably successful career in Hollywood, he could move between mainstream comedies but probably the genre he really excelled at was satire.  The problem with satire is that it's not a particularly popular theme in movies.  Ritchie's film The Survivors is kind of a case in point.

The Survivors is about a couple of New Yorkers who are essentially beaten down by the city and the system.  Walter Matthau owns a gas station and ends up losing it.  Robin Williams is an office worker who gets laid off by a parrot of all things.  Down on their luck, they happen to get mixed up with a robbery at a diner.  The robber is played by Jerry Reed star of many Burt Reynolds redneck comedies.   After identifying Jerry Reed to the police who eventually release him for reasons I can't remember. They go on the run from Reed who now wants to kill them. Fed up with being a victim Williams joins a survivalist group in Vermont where he embraces their philosophy of self reliance and shooting people.

 

The story is a lot for a film that wants to be a comedy and particularly a satire on this country's mania for guns and the right wing self reliance philosophy.  Some of the comedy works some of the time but for the most part it fumbles along while attempting to score some fairly obvious points about the silliness of the survivalist movement. There may be a place for taking pot shots at right wingers in a comedy, but this film ain't it. 

 

Part of the problem with the movie beside the uneven comedy in the script, is the performance of Robin Williams in this film.  It's been a while since I've watched Williams in anything and I have to say he's a lot more "Johnny One Note," than I remember.  He seems to be in only one gear the manic childlike character he created in Mork and Mindy.  After a while he gets very tiresome.  Walter Matthau the old comedy pro barely has to move a muscle to steal the scenes they appear in together.  Even Jerry Reed is funnier than Williams.  In the end the whole thing just kind of sinks into one of those Vermont snowbanks where the film is set.

The film was written by Michael J. Leeson, the running time is 102 minutes.

1983 - STRANGE INVADERS. possible spoof of 50's science fiction films

First let's get the plot out of the way.  In the late 1950's, space aliens show up and take over a small Midwestern town.  They possess the bodies of the people living there for some nefarious purpose.  Jump ahead about 20 years later and a college professor played by Paul Le Mat in an incredible piece of miscasting, shows up in the town,  He is almost incinerated by these space aliens.  The film involves Le Mat and Nancy Allen, playing a reporter for a National Inquirer type of newspaper, returning to the town to save Le Mat's daughter.  She has been kidnapped by the space aliens because she is half human/half alien.  I'm not even going to get into how this contrived subplot developed.

Strange Invaders slavishly follows the formula for 1950's science fiction films particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers and It Came From Outer Space two films that are a lot better than this mess. This film can't decide if it wants to be a parody or a straightforward recreation of those films.  In either case it fails.  I can't understand what the intentions of the writers and director were and I doubt they had a clear idea themselves.  I'm all for a parody of those old films but again what is the point if you don't have something to say besides "look how clever we are duplicating those old films."

The director Michael Laughlin stages every scene so flatly that it's almost like watching middle school kids make a movie with a video camera which in a way is an insult to middle school filmmakers. The film appears to be deliberately photographed with a piece of gaze or something over the camera lens to give it a 1950's look but all it gave me was a headache.  The composer John Addison was clearly told to write an over the top film score but his loud screechy music just make my headache worse.

 

Probably the best thing about the film are the supporting players, Kenneth Tobey, Charles Lane, June Lockhart, Wallace Shawn (?) and Michael Lerner.  It's a great group of actors but the director doesn't seem to know what to do with them which is unfortunate.  Strange Invaders is a complete failure.

Written by Michael Laughlin, Bill Condon and Walter Halsey Davis.  The running time is 94 minutes.

1983 - WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND, aka THE NEW BARBARIANS

Well then here is this low budget Road Warrior rip off coming from who else, the Italians.  The Italian industry never met a popular film genre they wouldn't steal from and this film fits the bill.

In the year 2019 after the nuclear apocalypse,  roving bands of drivers are zipping around the countryside killing any human life they can find.  Apparently they are part of a cult who feels it's necessary to purge the earth of the remaining human beings.  Into this situation comes the Mad Max like hero called "One" who takes them on.  "One" is assisted by actor Fred Williamson looking ridiculous with a bow and arrow set, he's called "Nadir."

 

There's lots of stunt work and crazy driving.  Cars blow up, people get beheaded, crushed and run over in very creative ways as befits a low budget and the imagination of the director Enzo Castellari.

 

 Castellari was one of Italy's best filmmakers when it came to stuff like this.  He could make something out of a nothing budget and frequently did.   Castellari was comfortable with thrillers, spaghetti westerns, and war movies, a very versatile guy for the most part.

Written by Tito Carpi and Enzo Castellari, the running time is 91 minutes.

1983 - SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE, more bad science fiction movies

Bad science fiction films continues with this odd piece of junk.  Television actor Peter Strauss, completely miscast,  is a Han Solo type who lands on a planet where some hot science fiction babes have landed.  Strauss must save the women from the evil ruler "Overdog McNabb,"  in order to claim some reward money.  Along the way Stauss teams up with a teenager played by Molly Ringwald in a very shrill and loud performance which is just about impossible to endure. Ringwald was on the cusp of her John Hughes teenage film series after she appeared in this film.

The director was Lamont Johnson a very talented television director who really never made a successful transition to feature films.  Johnson was good with actors and dramas but there was nowhere in his resume with the exception of The Twilight Zone that showed he had any understanding of the science fiction genre.

The film firmly has it's tongue in it's cheek but it's not enough to redeem this mess.  The action scenes are not bad.  There is a conscious effort to copy Star Wars right down to the sound alike musical score.  Clearly the makers of this film knew they kind of had a "dog" on their hands.  They deliberately waited until a week before The Empire Strikes Back to release it.

 

The film was produced by Ivan Reitman and was written by David Preston, Edith Ray, Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum.  The running time is 90 minutes.

1983 - ZU WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, crazy Chinese fantasy film

 Just reading the plot synopsis for this film lets you know immediately that you are in for something very weird and special.  A Hong Kong fantasy with action and humor.

Directed by the incomparable Tsui Hark.  The film jumps from one outlandish scene to another.  The special effects were contributed by a team of American technicians which included Robert Blalack who had received an Academy Award for special effects on Star Wars of all things.

 

This is an extremely influencial film in Asian cinema and was clearly a source of inspiration for John Carpenter's Big Trouble In Little China.

 

Written by  Shui Chung-yuet and Sze-to Cheuk-hon, running time 98 insane minutes.

1983 - THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND - Peckinpah's final film

There is just not a lot you can say about this film.  Sam Peckinpah took on the film to show that he was still employable.  Peckinpah's drug and alcohol abuse had seriously affected the later part of his career.

 
Peckinpah didn't care for the story or the screenplay and as usual didn't get along with the producers.  He was in ill health at the time of filming and the film does seem to reflect his disinterested attitude.

As it is a few of the action scenes come off, but overall the film is a disappointment.

 

The running time is 103 minutes, the screenplay was by Peter S Davis and William N. Panzer with contributions from Peckinpah.

1983 - PAULINE AT THE BEACH, the 3rd film in Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series.

Another Eric Rohmer talk fest but the talk is good.  Pauline and her cousin Marion are vacationing off of the coast of France.  Here they meet several men who they fall in and out of love with throughout the film.

This is a typical well thought out Rohmer film,  The women are beautiful, the men are kind of stupid, the scenery is nice and the dialog and situations are rather clever.

As usual the cast responds well to Rohmer's screenplay which believe is a real yak fest. 

Rohmer wrote the film,  Néstor Almendros did his usual good job with the cinematography.  The film runs 94 minutes

1983 - OCTOPUSSY, Bond movie number 13.

The last Roger Moore James Bond film that was any good.  Moore was entirely comfortable in the part.  The production was the usual classy job from the Bond producers.  The action and stunts scenes were well done.  The final action scene in an airplane was particularly outstanding.   

 

Roger Moore was always a particularly lightweight actor and the part of James Bond was tailored for him accordingly.  His films had a lighter touch to them than the Connery films.  Roger Moore's Bond did toughen up later in the series but he was always a pretty laid back kind of actor.

This Bond film actually has an espionage plot for a change and the typical Bond gadgets are a little more realistic than usual.  Even the sexist girl stuff is not too tiresome in this film.

131 minutes written by George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson.

1983 - SUPERMAN III, pretty bad

Christopher Reeve who did well in the first two Superman movies but he  really got taken to town when a 3rd film was produced.  

Richard Pryor had made it known he wanted to be in a Superman film, so a part was tailored for him.  It just completely threw the whole film off.  Pryor's humor just seemed out of place for a super hero film and it wasn't particularly funny to begin with.

The director was Richard Lester who was definitely on the downside of his career.  Lester was known for fitting anarchic sight gags in his films but he seems to have lost his touch.  The gags are still here but they just aren't funny.  It seemed like Lester was just going through the motions in this film.

The special effects which seemed so good in the first Reeve movie now look kind of crappy and the bottom line was that whole thing just turned out to be an unfunny mess.  Superman III is a warning sign to people who make these kinds of films.  There is a fine line between sincerity and camp with these kinds of films.

125 minutes, written by David and Leslie Newman.

1983 - UNCOMMON VALOR, a forgotten war film.

This film stirs memories regarding a forgotten time in history.  At the end of the Vietnam War there was a lot of speculation that the North Vietnamese government was holding American POW's as slave labor in prison camps.  The United States military even put together a joint task force to investigate these rumors which as I recall were never confirmed.  Uncommon Valor uses this as a starting point for the story of a United States Colonel played by Gene Hackman who pulls together a team of former soldiers to search and find his son who he believes is still a prisoner.

This is a real "guy" movie.  Besides Hackman who bring a lot of authority to his role the film is a list of real tough guys.  Fred Ward is the PTSD soldier who pulls it together for the mission, Randall "Tex" Cobb is the nutcase who never adjusted to civilian life and Reb Brown is the explosive expert who runs around in really short shorts and never seems to be wearing a shirt (hum).  Finally there is "Elliott Ness, " Robert Stack as the millionaire who finances the whole thing.  In other words it's the usual bunch of Hollywood stereotypes.

The film was produced by right wing director/writer John Milius and directed by Ted Kotcheff the man responsible for inflicting Rambo movies on the world.  What the involvement of these gentlemen means is that the film featured plenty of gunfire at the expense of the dramatic aspects of saving the POW's.  

Uncommon Valor is  a standard action film expertly made and a film that exploits the tragedy of the MIA soldier for entertainment value.  Basically Gene Hackman holds this film together.

105 minutes, written by Joe Gayton.

1983 - KRULL, kind of flat footed fantasy

Krull never quite had the stuff to make it as a fantasy film.  The film is a Lord Of The Rings type story which came out years before those films but was clearly influenced by the Tolkien books.

There is enough going on to keep you engaged in watching the film but all of the episodes don't add up to an interesting story. Every scene seems to have come from low budget fantasy films from the 1940's and 50's.  Almost any Ray Harryhausen film had more imagination in it than Krull. 

The film also suffers from very bland characters which the actors can't get a handle on.  There is the handsome prince, beautiful princess, the magician, the comedy relief and a little kid who is tagging along for no particular reason.

Krull was an expensive film to make at the time, it has big sets and bright color photography,  However the special effects were standard movie making stuff, with optical tricks, stop motion, animation and matte painting effects used throughout the film.  This was very old fashioned approach considering Star Wars had come out in 1977 and had completely changed the way special effects were used in films.

The climatic fight at the end of the film with the prince throwing come sort of souped up Frisbee called a "gaive" at the monster was kind of lame and anticlimactic.

Krull belongs in the film category called "OK time killer."

121 minutes, written by Stanford Sherman.

1983 - TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE, is pretty bad considering the talent

Four big names directors pay tribute to Rod Serling's anthology series and for the most part the segments can't touch any old black and white episode of the series.

John Landis directs, Time Out, the only original episode in the series.  This was the notorious episode that killed the actor Vic Morrow and 2 children.  It's a hit you over the head story about racism that is about as subtle as a steamroller.  Pretty bad.

Steven Spielberg directs Kick the Can and he directs poorly.  This slop about elderly people at a nursing home discovering their youth brought out the worst in the director, the sloppy overblown music, the too glowing photography, the sentimental garbage about old age and childhood, it’s just awful.  This is a director barely in control of his story, possibly the worst thing he has ever been associated with.

Joe Dante directs It's a Good Life and sort of redeems the film.  Dante is able to indulge his interest in cartoons and does make the segment his own.  The problem is that the original episode was a brilliant horror story and Dante chooses cartoonish silliness over horror.

The director of The Road Warrior George Miller, directs Nightmare at 20,000 Feet like it's a Mad Max movie but he has the same problem as Dante, he can't really capture the  horror of the original black and white episode, still probably the best of the short films.  John Lithgow's over the top hysterical performance is pretty fun but he can't top the original actor William Shatner.

 Considering how influential The Twilight Zone still is, this is a pretty poor tribute.

101 minutes, written by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson and Melissa Mathison.

1983 - NATE AND HAYES, 1980's pirate movie

Nate and Hayes is an action adventure film in the style of Spielberg's Indiana Jones series.  The film was not a success.  

The film looks good, has some magnificent New Zealand scenery and some decent action set pieces. Tommy Lee Jones is a semi charismatic lead and an actor names Jenny Seagrove as the "damsel in distress,"  is pretty good given the limitations of that part.  The 2nd lead Michael O'Keefe is a complete stiff who can't seem to work up any chemistry with either Jones or Seagrove.  He brings the film down big time.

Among the writing credits are John Hughes the author of Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and other teenage ilk films that were popular for a while in the 80's and 90's.  I'm not exactly sure what he brought to the table.

Nate and Hayes is no better or worse than any of the Indiana Jones films, and is short enough not to wear our it's welcome, essentially  it's a time killer.  The scenery is nice.

96 minutes, the film was written by John Hughes and David Odell

1983 - PSYCHO II, is the further adventures of Norman Bates

Where to begin.  This is not some cheap rip off of the original Psycho.  The producer was an assistant to Hitchcock, the director of photography was Dean Cundey who had worked with Spielberg and Carpenter and Jerry Goldsmith scored the film.  Most importantly the director was Richard Franklin, a friend of Hitchcock's and an expert on his  films

If you set aside the thought that this was a completely unnecessary film sequel, even on it's own merits Psycho II does not work very well.  The whole idea that Norman Bates has been declared sane and allowed to return to the Bates motel seems pretty ridiculous.  Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates as such a complete weirdo at the beginning of the film that it's impossible to believe that anyone would think he is healthy enough to be allowed out in the general public.

Vera Miles returns as Marion Crane's sister and apparently she married Sam Loomis after the original events of Psycho.  She's upset that Norman has been released and plans to drive him crazy in order to send him back to the insane asylum.  Miles has a daughter played by Meg (whatever happened to my career) Tilly who befriends Norman.

Franklin tries to invoke the spirit of the first film.  There are cinematic quotations from North by Northwest, and the shower and swamp scenes in the first film.  The famous butcher knife makes it's appearance as the body count begins to mount up.  Franklin may have been an admirer of Hitchcock but he lacks Hitchcock's touch in staging vivid murders.

The whole mess finally grinds to a halt with a ridiculous twist ending that unfortunately allowed Psycho III and Psycho IV to be made

Psycho II with it's plot holes and red herrings is a complete disappointment and doesn't even work as a slasher film.

113 minutes, written by Tom Holland