Lost in America

Lost in America (1985) is about a successful L.A. ad man (played by Albert Brooks, who also directed the film) who quits his job and then buys a motor-home so he and his wife (Julie Hagerty) can travel the country and find themselves. It left me disappointed because I'd heard such good reviews. Within about thirty minutes my mood for the film had gone from hopeful to sour. (It happened at precisely the moment where Hagerty is gambling in the casino, repeating the number "22" over and over again, and Brooks is asking, repeatedly, how much money she's lost.) Perhaps this movie resonates better with people in the shoes of these two characters: they're frustrated yuppies who love the movie Easy Rider but didn't have the courage to go riding into the sunset when they were younger. Now that they've spent the better part of a decade building up a sense of financial security (the concept of the "nest egg" is bandied about often, but never with as much comic force as Brooks seems to think it contains), they're bored and disappointed with the normal life, and feeling a bit left out of the not-so-real idea of people just leaving society and doing their own thing. Hagerty's unexpected gambling splurge becomes a plot device so that Brooks, who wrote the script, can critique the yuppies, not only for their banal materialistic lives, but also for their condescending attitudes about Americans who aren't like them. And while the performances are good and the ideas interesting and clever, Lost in America feels like flat coke: the comedy doesn't really work much of the time, and the charm of Brooks and Hagerty slowly drains out of them as their characters' actions become increasingly irritating. The final twenty minutes picks up a bit--as they soon realize the gravity of their decisions--but not in time to save the movie from feeling a bit inconsequential. It's a smart comedy, and relatively well-plotted if you can forgive that very obvious device, but its ideas are stronger than its laughs. ★★

The Breakfast Club

I can't remember the first time I saw The Breakfast Club (1985), but I know I was younger than the intended audience by more than a bit. And I do remember the blank videocassette tape on which we recorded the movie via TBS, so that all the swear words were edited out. It's the kind of film that seemed emotionally raw to me as a child. Now that I'm an adult, the obvious commercial aspects of The Breakfast Club are apparent. It seems more than a bit calculated to appeal to the egos of bored, spoiled American adolescents who hate their parents, and I think in that respect, The Breakfast Club errs.

I'm not exactly making a novel point here. Many critics before me have noticed that this movie inflates the problems of young people in order to draw them in. And yes, it does do that. It's kind of an odd trick, this idea of luring viewers in via flattery. It may bespeak a lack of confidence in what this movie has to offer that's actually real and true and funny, which is the fresh-faced cast. But despite its flaws, there's something to this movie, a kind of alchemy that exists in spite of its singular movie studio marketing designs on its audience. And I'd be willing to bet that teenagers of 2014 (I almost wrote 2013!) could still relate to the five kids in what may be writer-director John Hughes' most iconic film. (What's more iconic than Judd Nelson raising his fist in the air as the credits role, ticking away to that grand Simple Minds song, "Don't You Forget About Me"?)

Beneath the commercialism, there are five characters who come to life thanks to the performances of Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, and Ally Sheedy, all of whom--as most of us already know--embody various American teenager stereotypes, gathered in the library of their suburban Chicago high school for Saturday detention. There's the jock, the spoiled girl, the bad boy, the nerd, and the consummate weirdo.

The latter is played by Sheedy. I really just have to stop and talk about about her performance for a moment. I've always liked Ally Sheedy--I even had a little crush on her as a kid--and I always feel validated when a critic likes her performance in this movie. It's the most authentic performance in The Breakfast Club, and when everyone else gets involved in big speeches full of emotionally charged dialogue, Ally Sheedy's off in her own little world doing something joyfully weird. She confesses late in the movie--after everyone else has been bearing their decidedly much younger souls--that she came to detention because she didn't have anything better to do. It's a refreshingly unexpected confession from a movie that's chock full of confessions of a lesser, more obvious kind. Sheedy saves this movie from being totally pre-fab.

I think that when it comes to comic/dramatic perceptions of high school culture and adolescent malaise, Sixteen Candles holds up as the better John Hughes film. But The Breakfast Club still works nearly thirty years later as a kind of Hollywood product's idea of what it would be like to be an alienated teenager. It's as much a part of its decade as Rebel Without A Cause is a part of the 1950s, and you really have to have grown up on the movie to appreciate it. That or you have to love the movie's over-the-top drama, which John Hughes still manages to reign in to a degree. (It's the opposite of what happens in the movie St. Elmo's Fire, which got completely away from its director, and which stars three of the actors from this film.)

Paul Gleason plays the dean, a contrived villain whose badness unites the five disparate students: They may not like each other much, but they're in accord with their disdain for him. The dean doesn't see them or care to know them as human beings, and as a teacher I resented him because I don't think every teacher is like this. Granted, there are plenty of them--desk jockeys who teach for the summers off and despise the kids more and more every year--and maybe John Hughes was right to make this guy such a dick. But I also think he's a convenient obstacle for the kids to overcome and be drawn to each other. It's as if John Hughes were trying to say, "See? I get how awful grown-ups are." He prompts what may be the most ridiculous line in the movie, uttered by Sheedy's character: She says that when you grow up, "your heart dies." Is it a youthful exaggeration or some kind of brilliant, cynical truth? Maybe a little bit of both. The Breakfast Club is at least a happy reminder of how movies used to be: unashamedly dramatic and funny at the same time without a shred of that abysmal self-awareness that plagues current cinema. ★★½ 

Phenomena

Probably the most outre of Italian horror director Dario Argento's body of work. Phenomena (aka Creepers) (1985) has just about everything one could ask for in a schlocky horror movie: a girl (Jennifer Connelly) who has some kind of psychic connection with bugs, a serial killer, a razor blade-wielding monkey, and a kid with a deformed face. Argento revives the old boarding school device (Connelly travels from America to study at a Swiss girls' school where most of the other girls are snooty little shrews who pick on her), but the director remains true to himself by once again avoiding (for the most part) the demands of logic or plot.

While Phenomena is less violent than some of Argento's earlier films (Deep Red comes to mind), it certainly ranks high on the "ick" factor. And after a slow start, the dumb aspects of this rather standard thriller start to actually have an effect on you. The ending--as contrived as it is--is genuinely spooky, with Daria Nicolodi trapping the heroine in a vast Swiss estate with some pretty amazing electric-powered shutters and a pit in the cellar full of skeletons and maggots. (Fun!)

Donald Pleasence appears as a kind-hearted old entomologist who studies bugs on murder victims to determine their time of death. He befriends Connelly and becomes a kind of grandfatherly influence on her. Dalila Di Lazzaro plays the suspicious, bossy headmistress of the school, Patrick Bauchau plays the ineffective inspector, and Federica Mastroianni plays Connelly's roommate. One of the film's greatest weaknesses is that it doesn't establish the school or its students very well. The girls only figure into the movie when Argento needs to show another victim being stalked. Also, I am perplexed by Argento's obsession with pushing his victims through glass. He did it in Deep Red and Suspiria also. Granted, it never ceases to be horrifying, and Argento will never be accused of abandoning previously used techniques. But haven't they suffered enough by then? 110 min. ★★½

St. Elmo's Fire

Bad. Really bad. The writing--by director Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander--is utterly preposterous. It's about the fear of encroaching adulthood that upsets the relationships of seven tight-knit college friends. Some of them self-destruct so ridiculously and so unexpectedly (such as Emilio Estevez, who becomes obsessed with a girl he dated once and starts stalking her) that all you can do is laugh, while others are too obviously predetermined to some kind of tragic separate peace. For example: Demi Moore, playing the vapid, cocaine-addicted party girl who's buying everything on credit and sleeping with her married boss. These people stab each other in the back with relish and laugh it off as they slide the knife back out. It's hard to care about characters who are so obviously the concoction of a slick Hollywood marketing campaign, complete with a sentimental music score that forces the audience to feel sympathetic toward them. With Rob Lowe as the alcoholic rock star/party animal who always seems to be carrying his saxophone around, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy as the not-so-happy co-habitating couple, Andrew McCarthy as the pensive, cynical writer who's in love with Sheedy, Mare Winningham as the frumpy friend who loves Rob Lowe too much, Martin Balsam, and Andie McDowell as Emilio's obsession, who delivers perhaps the worst performance of the movie. (Her character strikes a heavy blow toward women's lib: when the stalker crashes a party she's at, she takes him home to talk things out!) David Foster composed the sappy music, which you've probably heard on the radio before. 110 min. 1985. ★½

Real Genius

Real Genius (1985) has a group of precocious students at Pacific Technical University developing a laser beam for their professor (William Atherton), who is, unbeknownst to them, working in conjunction with the CIA to use this technology unethically. The plot and characters of Real Genius seem somewhat lazily slapped together by the screenwriters (Neal Israel, Pat Proft, and Peter Torokvei), but Real Genius has a quick wit and an endless supply of one-liners that keep it buzzing along at an agreeable (if overlong) pace. Val Kilmer demonstrates his ability to play the aloof genius with an affable, smartass charm. He plays Chris Knight, the star brain of the college, who welcomes a 15-year-old newcomer, Mitch (Gabriel Jarret), who's something of a child prodigy, into his dorm room and his laboratory.

Director Martha Coolidge has a tendency to let her films ramble along in a breezy sort of fashion. It usually results in likable but unfocused movies like Valley Girl, but in Real Genius the relatively snappy writing helps lift some of that aimlessness. Besides, that aimlessness works better for a film like Genius: it has one of those kids vs. big-bad-adults plot lines that made movies like War Games (1983) seem heavy-handed and simplistic. Instead, you get something a lot more tongue-in-cheek that does not take itself seriously, even when it does resort to the cliches of its particular plot line. The end--in which the professor's house is filled with laser-beam-produced popcorn--is quite odd but very amusing. There's always something slightly surreal going on in Coolidge's movies.

With Michelle Meyrink, Jon Gries, Robert Prescott, Ed Lauter, Yuji Okumoto, Patti D'Arbanville, Joanne Baron, and Deborah Foreman. 108 min. ★★★ 

Just One of the Guys

Frustrated that nobody takes her seriously as a journalism student because she's an attractive girl, high-schooler Terry Griffith (Joyce Hyser) switches schools and assumes a new identity as a boy. Just One of the Guys (1985) is a charming teen comedy that navigates the terrain of a  "message movie" with surprising adeptness. While Terry is certainly incensed by the stereotypes that "gender" people's ambitions, she doesn't stay on a soapbox for the entire movie. It's just as much about her relationships--be they platonic, romantic, or somewhere in between--as it as about her mission to prove herself as a budding journalist and rankle the boys' club mentality that exists even at the high school level.

Along the way Terry meets a nice guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), and the two form a confusing but genuine friendship, and she also manages to arouse both the sexual interest of an impressionable girl and the disdain of a musclebound bully. Just One of the Guys has everything you could ever want in a movie: gender confusion, bad fashion, nerds who pretend to be aliens doing "research" on adolescent earthlings, a pretty awesome scene where Rick stands up to the bully who terrorizes all the unpopular kids in the school, and then of course there's Terry's sexually insatiable younger brother, Buddy (Billy Jacoby), whose idea of good interior decorating is covering his bedroom walls with Playboy centerfolds.

It's not a brilliant movie by any means, but it's a fun one. And are there any movies geared toward teenagers nowadays that are half as smart or as bold as this one? I ask you! Directed by Lisa Gottlieb. With Toni Hudson, William Zabka, Leigh McCloskey, Sherilyn Fenn, Deborah Goodrich, and Stu Charno. 100 min. ★★★

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

A new dreamer moves into the house on Elm Street. This time it's a young man named Jesse (played by Mark Patton), and the killer from Elm Street I, Freddy Kreuger, turns him into a sort of murdering vessel. For some reason, he has to kill through Jesse. Why? It's never quite clear. (Very little in this movie is. It's very difficult to tell whether we're in a dream--and whose dream--or reality, for much of the film.) The scenarist, David Chaskin, and the director, Jack Sholder, were obviously trying to come up with some kind of sustainable plot so they wouldn't be stuck remaking the first Nightmare. So there's a lot of bad pop psychology going on of the Jekyll and Hyde/Freudian variety, and lots of hinting around that Jesse might be gay, only he just can't admit it to himself. But the characters are well-drawn, for this kind of film. Jesse is sympathetic, and the girl who's in love with him--or at least, with the idea of saving him--is likable. With Kim Myers, Robert Rusler, Clu Gulager, Hope Lange, and Robert Englund. 89 min. 1985. ★

Weird Science

Risky Business meets Frankenstein. Two unpopular high school boys (Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan-Mitchell Smith) use a computer to design the perfect girl. To their surprise, it actually works. Kelly LeBrock's performance, as the man-made beauty who helps her makers become less uptight, is this movie's most obvious charm. She's a lot of fun, and when the movie takes a turn for the chaotic (during a big party scene, where a gang of mutants trashes the house), her casual, go-with-the-flow mood is a welcome respite. This isn't the smartest comedy writer-director John Hughes ever came up with. It's too much of a male wish fulfillment fantasy. But it's got some fun moments, and a few up-and-coming actors turn up here in supporting roles: Robert Downey Jr., Bill Paxton, Robert Rusler, and Suzanne Snyder. Followed by a short-lived television series. 1985

Secret Admirer

Michael (C. Thomas Howell) and Toni (Lori Loughlin) are childhood friends, now high schoolers. Toni has a mega-crush on Michael, but he's head-over-heals in love with her self-absorbed friend Debbie (Kelly Preston), so Toni writes him an anonymous love letter that causes a whole bunch of trouble for them and their parents. When Michael inadvertently slips the letter into his dad's night-school textbook, his mom (Dee Wallace) finds it, and thinks her husband is having an affair. The letter eventually gets seen by the dad's teacher, who happens to be a long-time friend, and who in turn believes he's coming onto her. This is the stuff of Shakespeare, people. 

Secret Admirer (1985) was directed by David Greenwalt (he also co-wrote the script, with Jim Kouf). Neither of them has the imaginative vision to take their story into original directions, so you can pretty much guess where every situation is headed, and the implausibility of it all threatens to put a damper on the good things in it, namely, its sweetness. Plot complications are the only way the writers could fill the time, while there's a wonderful pool of acting talent waiting for some good scenes.

The actors still manage to come through with some lively performances, but you wonder what could have been done had there been stronger material. Fred Ward stands out as Debbie's father, a live wire police chief who doesn't take well to the thought of his wife screwing around with one of their oldest friends. Kelly Preston seems overly convincing. She plays the shallow blonde, a girl who utters such unknowingly ironic statements as, "I don't want to go too far on our first date. Could you hand me my bra?"

Co-starring Cliff De Young and Leigh Taylor-Young as the other halves of the two grown-up couples, all of whom turn into children as fast as their own children are trying to act like adults. Michael's goofy friends (who have an amusing camaraderie together that numbers among some of the movie's most amusing sequences) are played by: Casey Siemaszko, Geoffrey Blake, Rodney Pearson, Courtney Gains, and J.J. Cohen. Also with Scott McGinnis, and a young Corey Haim as Michael's brother, who's always stealing money out of his brother's wallet.

Brazil

Terry Gilliam of Monty Python directed Brazil (1985), a bizarre thriller that turns bureaucracy into a vehicle for a horrific comic satire, in which a government flunky named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) becomes involved in anti-government terrorism and generally frowned-upon behavior. The film is set "somewhere in the 20th century." Everyone wears suits, coats, and fedoras (it's like watching a movie where all the men are played by Humphrey Bogart), and the general atmosphere feels very 1940sish, as if Stanley Kubrick and George Orwell suddenly converged into the space of a single body and made a movie in 1948. Gilliam co-wrote the script with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown. Surely they have concocted one of the strangest movies ever made, but it's also a pretty accurate comment on the enslaving capabilities of red tape and forms and going through the proper channels, all trademarks of government.

The scene where Sam's AC breaks and a rogue repairman (played by Robert De Niro) opens up the walls to reveal a jumbled labyrinth of wires and tubes, is a spot-on analogy for the ugly tangled web that is bureaucracy. And there are a number of quirky scenes where this theme is embellished upon, including a scene with a government stenographer who records phone conversations for accurate records, and one particularly horrific exchange (a woman being attacked--viciously, judging by the screams) is taking place while she records every line with a banal, unfazed devotion to her job.

The problem with Brazil is that it's a lumbering movie, clocking in at nearly two hours and thirty minutes, and by the end of it you feel you've been hit over the head repeatedly with the same metaphors about the sluggishness of government, and how the encroaching tentacles of bureaucracy turn people into dulled out slaves, whose only means of feeling any hint of pleasure come in the pursuit of superficial things. (Sam's mother, played beautifully by Katherine Helmond, is a cosmetic surgery addict. She and her batty friend see opposing plastic surgeons, with alternately freaky and horrifying results.)

Jonathan Pryce feels like a combination of Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Bean, or maybe he's just a younger version of John Cleese. He's an okay Everyman, but certainly not the most compelling performer in the movie. De Niro's brief scenes do brighten things up a bit, and one can't help but marvel at the film's grandly imaginative set designs and the frequently astonishing camerawork of Roger Pratt. But overall it's a mixed bag, one that has apparently developed a cult following. Many have seen it as a sort of re-imagining of George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984.

With Kim Griest as a girl Sam keeps dreaming about, who shows up in his real life as a potential terrorist, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins, Derrick O'Connor, Jim Broadbent, Ian Richardson, and Peter Vaughan.

Day of the Dead

The third zombie flick from Pittsburgh writer-director George A. Romero (following 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1979's Dawn of the Dead), Day of the Dead (1985) takes place in an underground military base where a handful of scientists lock horns with a band of macho army thugs. The world has been overtaken by flesh-chomping ghouls, and these are the only living members of society left, as far as we know. One scientist, nicknamed "Frankenstein," has tamed one of the ghouls. Frankenstein believes that wiping out the zombie population is impossible, so the next best thing (and the more scientifically appealing, perhaps) is  figuring out a way to domesticate the walking dead.

Day has some wonderfully freaky moments (especially at the end), and Romero captures a richly ominous mood (with the help of its authentic set, which is a network of underground caves that the government uses to store a menagerie of valuables) and the music of John Harrison.

Romero's penchant for inserting contrived conflict is glaring: Why is everyone so concerned with staying in this gloomy bunker, anyway? And there are moments when the dialogue gets away from him. Some scenes should have been shortened slightly to keep the film from going too far over the top. But it's also a wonderfully apt finale (or at least, it was the final Romero zombie film for a good while), once again bucking the tropes of the genre by avoiding any kind of resolution to the zombie problem. Also, Day features some of make-up master Tom Savini's most impressive (and hideous) effects (just don't watch this if you're turned off by excessive amounts of gore).

Much has been said of Day of the Dead's unfair treatment. It flopped at the box office (competing against the funnier, slicker Return of the Living Dead, a semi-spoof and not a direct sequel to the Dead films), was almost universally reviled by critics who had raved about Dawn, and seemed to usher in a new period of disinterest in zombie movies. In fact, there weren't many noteworthy zombie films after 1985. Romero later worked on a remake of Night (released in 1990) but by the end of the 80s, zombies were largely out of fashion at the movies (having been replaced by slashers a la Jason Voorhies). Now that zombies are in vogue again, it's worth noting that Day of the Dead is far more interesting a film than most of what has been released over the last few years of the zombie craze that has swallowed pop culture. Indeed, the zombies continue to be disturbing commentary on society. And the zombies in Day are perhaps the scariest looking (they've been rotting for quite some time by now).

Featuring a strong lead performance by Lori Cardille as one of the scientists, and the only woman in the cast (she reminds you of Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien). With Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Jarlath Conroy, Richard Liberty, and Howard Sherman.

Fletch

In Fletch (1985), Chevy Chase gives his best comic performance. His brand of humor was never put to better use than as the wise-cracking investigative reporter Irwin M. Fletcher. Set in L.A., the movie is based on Gregory McDonald's 1974 mystery novel of the same name. While I haven't read the book, just skimming a summary of its plot makes me wonder if screenwriter Andrew Bergman oversimplified the story, weakening it in the process. The two separate mysteries are woven together with clumsy indiscretion. What could have been a fine, richly layered and exciting comic-mystery is rendered something less: it's a superficial and transparent middle-finger-valentine. Fletch is nevertheless an entertaining lightweight comedy. You find yourself enjoying it with ease, and the flaws are somehow mitigated by Chase's mugging and the movie's laid-back tone. Harold Faltermeyer's music score adds a wonderful campiness to the production. The cast is quite a good one, but their characters are never fleshed out. Everyone takes a back seat to Fletch. Followed by Fletch Lives in 1989. Directed by Michael Ritchie. With Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Richard Libertini, Joe Don Baker, Tim Matheson, and Geena Davis.

Re-Animator

All in Good Fun: If Re-Animator (1985) isn't the goriest movie ever made, it's gotta be at least in the top ten. You've heard the story before in Frankenstein and you've seen it parodied before in Young Frankenstein, but never to this degree of unbridled insanity. It's about a pompous, eccentric med student named Herbert West (played by Jeffrey Combs), who discovers a serum that can bring the dead back to life. Trouble is, they're not really controllable, they seem to acquire inordinate amounts of strength during the reanimation process, and they're really rather cranky (and a tad ungrateful, given that they were brought back to life).

Re-Animator is director Stuart Gordon's first feature, based on the short story, Herbert West-Reanimator (1922) by horror icon H.P. Lovecraft. It makes calamity out of and jeers lovingly at the interplay between stability and instability of the human body. When West severs the head of a prominent surgeon (played by David Gale, who bears an uncanny resemblance to John Kerry) and then reanimates him, it's as though the divided body has become two selves instead of one, and so the movie makes you think, are we separate from our bodies or not? Are we our bodies or simply our brains?

It's quite a philosophical question for a movie so saturated in blood and matter, and yet this is the work of the horror genre, if the horror movie in question is worth its salt: it not only touches a nerve of whatever is freaking out the culture at that precise moment, but it pokes around at our subliminal fears and addresses them in ways we could never imagine. Somehow, there's relief to be had in this process. We've vicariously lived and died through this experience, and we come out alive knowing it was only a movie.  

Re-Animator won't be the selection of the squeamish movie-goer, but it delivers a deliciously funny good time to those who can stomach its icky moments. Those gory outbursts are so over-the-top that it's hard to really be affected by them (up to a point). It's as if the viscera becomes completely artificial (the 80s make-up and special effects hold up pretty well, although there are moments when they don't quite work--CGI has similar problems too, though).

There are interesting little moments in the camera work that register well. A shot of the leading lady (Barbara Crampton) walking from the elevator to the morgue is handled with an eerie superfluousness. The camera glides backward while she walks forward but very slowly. It's a cool effect. Later, the doctor summons forth his zombie minions in the morgue, and the effect of their springing forth simultaneously from their body bags gives that moment a wonderful zing. The whole movie is fluid and alive. It's so fresh and unpretentious. Perhaps because Gordon doesn't hold back on the gore, he doesn't feel the need to withhold or delay plot information either (which we are smart enough to figure out anyway). He's an honest and an efficient director, and he plays up the campy aspects of the material nicely, too.

With Bruce Abbott as a fellow med student who becomes caught up in West's bizarre experiments, and Robert Sampson as the dean of his med school (who becomes one of Gale's shambling zombie goons).

Followed by Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator. 86 minutes.

Fright Night

Vampire freaks, rejoice! I recently revisited Fright Night (1985), writer-director Tom Holland's valentine to the horror genre in which a teenager named Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) becomes convinced that the suave bachelor who recently moved in next door (Chris Sarandon) is actually a vampire. Lacking any empirical evidence, Charley turns to a has-been TV horror host named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), as well as his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) and his friend "Evil" Ed (Stephen Geoffreys), who has some knowledge of how to successfully ward off vampires.

Fright Night works because it's the right balance of funny and scary. Holland's script and directing offer plenty of amusing moments for film buffs (such as Sarandon's imitation of the vampire in 1922's Nosferatu rising from his coffin). Meanwhile, Charley Brewster is a character absorbed in horror movie culture in a very surfacey way. He enjoys watching them on TV with the campy narration of Peter Vincent, but the real horrors render him unable to respond on his own.


Chris Sarandon is perfectly cast as the bloodsucker, Jerry Dandridge, and McDowall is a wonderfully spineless foil. The special effects become the star at the end, and although they were probably impressive 25 years ago, they're a bit dated now. Fortunately, the movie itself has endured with its sharp sense of humor and well-calculated scares. The vampire is indeed an enduring literary and cinematic figure, and of all the vamp flicks to come out of the 80s, Fright Night is the most successful overall. It has all the things a good vampire movie needs: strong characters who are often somewhat ambiguous rather than black-and-white in their morality, set pieces that truly stand out (like when Peter Vincent makes a terrifying discovery in Charley's mom's room), and dialogue you can quote: "To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?" "Welcome to Fright Night...For real." ★★★

The Return of the Living Dead

In The Return of the Living Dead (1985), writer-director Dan O’Bannon treats us to a garishly funny and violent zombie spoof that seems like a strange mix of 1950’s science fiction and 1980’s punk. The production design often makes us feel like we're watching an expanded version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video. The exuberant comic-book-feel of the horror is in that kind of vein, and the humor is in-your-face, as it should be with this kind of material.

Referencing George Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead early on (partly to dispel confusion that this was a sequel to that movie), Return purports to tell us the "true" story of the living dead, and how it was all the Army's fault.

The disheveled corpses, sleeping peacefully in a dilapidated cemetery, are inadvertently revived when a military-developed chemical leaks into the atmosphere and over their graves. To the horror of some unsuspecting punk teenagers (with nicknames like “Trash” and “Suicide”) who unwittingly picked the graveyard as a place to party the night away, these zombies are hungry for brains and can run—fast. They can also talk, a gimmick that allows for at least two good jokes involving police radios. Despite all the problems in store for the adolescent characters, the adults apparently have much more at stake than their safety. Clu Gulager, as the owner of a nearby medical supplies warehouse, recognizes his culpability in hiding the lost military canisters that unleashed the troublesome gas into the air (infecting two of his employees—James Karen and Thom Matthews—in the process).

Return of the Living Dead is as much a part of its time as Night of the Living Dead was a time capsule of the 1960s, and yet both films seem to be telling us something very disturbing about our culture, then and now. Instead of the Bomb coming from the Russians, it comes from within our own borders, a rather chilling concept that endures even now.

Better than most of the walking dead movies, Return of the Living Dead spews gore and humor in equal doses. Despite its deviations from Romero’s “form,” zombie fans have embraced this as a minor classic with an ending as ironic as that of Night. With Don Calfa, Beverly Randolph, Miguel Nunez, Linnea Quigley, Brian Peck, Jewel Shepard, John Philbin, and Mark Venturini. ★★★½

Transylvania 6-5000

Come to think of it, it was a bad movie. I rented Transylvania 6-5000. I had read the crummy reviews, but held out a tiny seed of hope that in spite of its critical scorn, the movie would hold some amusement. I tend to enjoy lame horror-comedies if they're at least entertaining (i.e. fall into the so-bad-it's-good category). One would expect at least a few laughs with a cast including Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley, Jr., Michael Richards, Geena Davis, and Carol Kane. However, one would expect in vain. The script by first-time director Rudy De Luca (of the Mel Brooks School of Comedy) was just awful. I am a fan of even Mel Brooks' mediocre efforts (with the exception of the abysmal Life Stinks), but it seems his proteges fail to rise to the level of even his least successful offerings. Something just doesn't work. You know a script is bad when you can imagine yourself writing it (unless you're Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The plot, about two reporters going to Transylvania to track down a wanna-be Frankenstein, is hair-brained enough, reduced to one of the most inept, unfunny attempts at schlock-comedy ever beheld on screen. ★

Clue

Clue (1985) is, I think, the kind of movie you appreciate more as a kid than as an adult. From my grown-up mind, it seems pretty hair-brained to try and adapt a board game into a movie. But I remember how thrilled I was to discover, retroactively you might say, that someone had turned my favorite murder-mystery-board-game into a feature film, a comedy no less, with some of my favorite actors!

Madeline Kahn, the underrated, red-headed beauty with that unmistakable voice (Megan Mullally may be her distant cousin), donning a black wig as Mrs. White; and Lesley Ann Warren, who I remembered from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella. Warren and Kahn both have beautiful singing voices, but neither of them ever really got to do as much with their voices in the movies (at least, not as much as I would have liked). There was Kahn's astonishingly funny and naughty performance as Lily Von Schtpp, the German saloon singer a la Marlene Dietrich, in Blazing Saddles, and Warren's effortless-looking performance as a floozy with a shrill, unsophisticated voice (not unlike Jean Hagen's in Singin' in the Rain) in Victor/Victoria, but as much as their talents were on display in these films, these women were never really given their due.

I think both of them shine in Clue, which isn't a particularly sophisticated comedy. It's not even a very well-thought-out comic mystery, about as subtle as Neil Simon's amusing but misfired Murder By Death. In Clue, Lesley Ann Warren plays Miss Scarlet, and she looks stunning and comfortable playing a cool bad girl, someone who once ran a brothel in Washington D.C. Warren is at her best here because she's not acting the dumb blonde: I think she's funnier when she's smart. And Kahn, as Mrs. White, delivers a subtly insane performance that may not stand out next to Lily from Blazing Saddles or Elizabeth from Young Frankenstein, and yet it's appropriately weird and Kahn-esque.

The plot of Clue is about what you'd expect from a movie adaptation of a game. The six suspects (Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, et al) are gathered at an ominous Victorian mansion on a dark and stormy night (the film is needlessly set in 1954 so that it can exhaust the already exhausted limits of the comic value of the Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover). They are confronted with various crimes (a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) and then it's revealed that the seventh guest, Mr. Boddy, is blackmailing all of them. Pretty soon, Boddy winds up dead, and the task of figuring out whodunit is put on them.

The jokes are hit and miss, and the story itself fizzles out long before the movie ends. But the performances make it worth seeing, particularly that of Tim Curry, as the butler and the man who's ultimately running the show. Curry's energy is unmatched. He's like a wind-up toy that keeps going and going despite all the punishing efforts of the children who are winding him up and laughing every time he runs into a wall or falls on his face. Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, and Lee Ving co-star. Written by the director, Jonathan Lynn, from a story idea by John Landis, and produced by Debra Hill. ★★½