There’s no such thing as an overnight success. And those who’ve had overnight success are usually the first ones to tell you they don’t exist. They take years of toiling around in the margins, keeping your ear to the ground and putting in hard labour. If you’re a starving artist, it means you’re hungry. The … Read more
When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cleaned up at the box office in 1990, Hollywood learned exactly one lesson: ninja kids were bankable. Sure animatronics are expensive and any big sci-fi elements would just complicate things. But kids doing martial arts? That’s just a bit of casting, some choreography and black pyjamas. Strip out the costly … Read more
As a remake of the 1953 cult classic, it takes the original’s Cold War paranoia and cranks it up to… the high ’80s. This one’s got all the hallmarks of Hooper’s awesome Cannon Films era – ambitious visuals, over-the-top performances, and an over-anxious embrace of pulpy B-movie absurdity. For the uninitiated, it’s the story of … Read more
We think of decades as starting when the calendar says they do, but pop culture doesn’t work that way. If you ask someone to picture the 1960s, they’re not imagining 1961. They’re imagining 1967, maybe 1969, flower children and Woodstock and the Summer of Love. The early 60s still looked and sounded like the 50s … Read more
Twin Movies happen more often than coincidence can explain. Sometimes it’s studio espionage, scripts getting pitched around until someone decides to loosely interpret the core idea without technically stealing it. Sometimes it’s a cultural fad everyone wants to cash in on before the window closes, like when breakdancing briefly convinced multiple studios they needed to … Read more
When Ford Fairlane hit theaters in 1990, the Andrew Dice Clay phenomenon had already peaked. You had the MTV ban from September ’89, the MSG sellouts in February ’90, the Nora Dunn walkout from SNL in May, the protesters chanting as he took the stage, all of it contributed to the Dice explosion, and the … Read more
Comic book artist Rob Liefeld couldn’t draw feet to save his life, so he made sure there was always something in the panel to mask them. If you can only draw two expressions, and one involves gritted teeth? Write stories where every beat requires gritted teeth. Play to your strengths, mask your weaknesses, deliver exactly … Read more
Everybody has their first Bond. Roger Moore was mine, and I wasn’t about to shake off that sentiment overnight when Timothy Dalton was introduced in 1987’s The Living Daylights. In fact, I first discovered 007 by way of Cannonball Run, where Moore was playing a satire of a satire of himself – but I was … Read more
By 1988, westerns were probably more your dad’s thing. The genre had essentially vanished from screens after Heaven’s Gate cratered United Artists in 1980 and made studios terrified of anything with spurs and chaps. When westerns did appear, they were cautiously aimed at people who already loved westerns like Silverado and Eastwood going back to … Read more
Yeah, it’s a rock and roll takedown of the man, a scathing look at radio politics, and a rocking good time that feels like a proper middle finger to the style gatekeepers. But like watching an old home movie and catching a glimpse of a forgotten poster on the wall, or the familiar upholstery of … Read more