They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for August, 1985
Flesh + Blood (1985)
I know nothing about how the medieval adventure Flesh+Blood got to the screen, but I suspect that someone has been keeping up with all of the recent fantasy adventures like Dragonslayer, Excalibur, Krull and even further Clash of the Titans and wanted to inject it with a dose of “the real.” That’s fine but in […]
Day of the Dead (1985)
I come to George Romero’s Day of the Dead as Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead still holds fresh in my mind. That movie declared itself by stating that Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was only a movie – that Return was the real thing. Watching Day of the Dead I was […]
Godzilla 1985
Godzilla 1985 is a very bad movie, horribly bad because it has been made to be deliberately bad. We all know about the bad dubbing in those old Godzilla pictures from Japan, but Godzilla 1985 opens with a scene in which this is done on purpose. That kind of pulls the rug out from under […]
Crossover Dreams (1985)
I love it when a talented performer can take a shopworn, tired old genre and, just through the power of their own engaging personality can make it seem new again. That’s what actor/musician Ruben Blades is able to do in Crossover Dreams which has a story that is as old as the hills – a […]
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Ten minutes into The Return of the Living Dead I was smiling. Frank, the manager of a medical supply warehouse has been showing his new employee Freedy the ropes and has sat down to do some paperwork while the kid leafs through a medical book. The kid reasonably asked “What’s the strangest thing you ever […]
Real Genius (1985)
I love smart characters. I love watching smart people do smart and unpredictable things. Dumb characters are predictable and often tiresome – they’re also easier to write. Real Genius is a movie that illustrates how seldom we get smart characters. Here they are college kids, smart but also quirky and individual. That may be even […]
Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science has been criticized for building up a premise that it can’t quite muster the courage to carry out. The premise offers a sort-of teenage porn fantasy all about creating the perfect woman with all the right curves, and hopefully all the right appetites. Yet, since this is a John Hughes movie, we’re not […]
Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night starts out as a commentary on the state of modern horror and ends by being and assault on it. The problem with modern horror, the movie says, is that the age of gothic castles and Dr. Frankenstein’s lab have been overturned by chainsaws and hockey masks. There’s just no room anymore for your […]
