Felonious Monks and Furious Egos: one of the best films you’ve probably forgotten. The Name of the Rose (1986) took over four years to make and faltered several times before it finally ascended to cinema screens. Casting a washed-up action star was a long shot that nearly crucified the film’s finances but the decision turned … Read more
Every now and then a movie comes along that was so clearly assembled from a checklist of things that sell, you can almost picture the meeting. A John Carpenter screenplay? Put his name on the poster. A cool-looking supercar? Put that on the poster too. Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn? Recognisable, affordable, and … Read more
A Future, In Hindsight. Youth is indeed wasted on the young. That’s the overarching point most 80s-time travel movies and body swap movies were trying to make. You were either too naïve or too wrapped up in your own time to fully appreciate the weight of the next 30 years. You made impulsive decisions at … Read more
I’ve always wanted to love this movie more than I do. I know that’s a strange thing to admit about a film where Jeffrey Combs gets his pineal gland stimulated until it pokes through his forehead like a fleshy phallus. It’s got Ken Foree, Barbara Crampton, Stuart Gordon directing, Brian Yuzna producing and H.P. Lovecraft’s … Read more
There’s bad timing, and then there’s SpaceCamp. Director Harry Winer watched the final cut of his film the morning of January 28th, 1986, about an hour after Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic. The movie had been shot, wrapped, and was ready for an early spring release. But seven astronauts died on live television while … Read more
Dino De Laurentiis changed the title from Red Dragon because he was convinced that audiences would mistake it for a martial arts film. Which, ok I can see it. But DEG was already bleeding money and lurching toward the bankruptcy, so nobody with the power to override Dino was inclined to fight him on branding. … 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
Thanks to some gorgeously lavish full-body makeup effects by Rob Bottin, to me, Tim Curry will always be the definitive rendering of the devil. Legend was Ridley Scott’s attempt to course-correct after Blade Runner pretty much tanked. Fantasy was supposed to be bankable and the studios were desperate to find the next Star Wars by … Read more
The 80s had a strange relationship with brainy kids. Most of the time, they were played for cheap comic relief – overly serious dweebs or helpless nerds waiting for a jock to throw them in a locker. But The Manhattan Project (1986) takes the “teen genius” idea and twists it into a full-blown thriller. Like … Read more
HBO aired it in the United States on October 22, 1986, just ahead of Halloween, and ITV followed with its UK broadcast on November 1st. It then spent the next fifteen years haunting Cable, burning itself into the retinas of latchkey kids. Even decades later in the 2010s, Tim Curry’s “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” … Read more