They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for July, 1980
Prom Night (1980)
I think somewhere in their hearts every critic who championed John Carpenter’s Halloween knew what was to follow. Success breeds imitators, and none quite so bold as the massive post-Halloween overstock of hack-strung slasher pictures made on a tiny budget by every two-bit producer hoping for a sleeper hit. The most interesting, for me, are […]
Honeysuckle Rose (1980)
Honeysuckle Rose is a movie that I wish had gone through one more pass of editing before being released to the public. There’s a wonderful story here about regret, familial discord, fractured relations and unwise love affairs, but it runs about half an hour too long. The story is comfortable in the way that it […]
Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (1980)
Given the sort of indifference that I gave to Cheech and Chong’s first movie, Up in Smoke, I guess I approached their second feature Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie with the sense that either they would improve or prove themselves to be basically insufferable. My conclusion is somewhere in the middle. I like them. I […]
The Blue Lagoon (1980)
The Blue Lagoon is the lamest tease ever produced, a movie that reaches for nudity and the promises of something titillating and ends up being about as sexed-up as those paintings of Adam and Eve with the fig leaves covering their genitals. The producers don’t want to sell this movie for the soft-core hatchet job […]
Airplane! (1980)
I don’t know, you might have thought that by this point in movie history that a movie like Airplane! might have seemed superfluous. After the hack-strung folly of would-be latter disaster epics like Concord . . . Airport ’79, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out, Meteor, Hurricane!, Avalanche and Cyclone it might have been safe to assume that the disaster picture […]
