Alan Smithee was one of the most prolific directors of the 80s and 90s. His filmography includes Stitches (1985), Let’s Get Harry (1986) and he had a very busy year in 1990 with Gypsy Angels, The Shrimp on the Barbie, Catchfire and Solar Crisis. Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987) is one of his better 80s … Read more
You’ve probably seen this one mentioned on nostalgia sites, right? It often gets dropped in the same breath as Pretty in Pink, like it was always right there in the conversation, another beloved Jon Cryer joint from the golden age of teen comedies. A film we all rented one Saturday afternoon and fell in love … Read more
If you were twelve at any point during the 80s, chances are that you had a bike, a video store membership card, a couple of bucks in your pocket, and the general understanding that if you weren’t back by dark, someone would eventually get around to noticing. Or not. You saw this reflected in the … Read more
Wacky Packages were hard currency in my schoolyard in 1985. Every recess turned into a stock exchange where kids traded cards with the urgency of Wall Street brokers. A full set wrapped in a rubber band made you a playground legend. But then something happened that toppled our carefully built card empires: those Garbage Pail … Read more
The original made 40 million on an 8 million budget in the summer of ’84. It was a scrappy, raunchy, underdog comedy that caught a wave, and the wave was bigger than anyone expected. So when Leonard Goldberg took over as head of 20th Century Fox, his very first act was to greenlight a sequel. … Read more
Before they were the Fat Boys, they were just three chubby teenagers from the same Brooklyn block. In 1983, they won a rap contest at Radio City Music Hall and walked away with a recording contract… and an Atari 2600. Within a year, Kurtis Blow was producing their debut album using the same drum programmers … Read more
Coffee, gunfire, and the last known expression of the original punk scene before it all went… Straight to Hell arrived on Home Video today in 1987, after a limited June theatrical release. Alex Cox followed Sid & Nancy by dragging Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Courtney Love and The Pogues to Spain, then pointed … Read more
While the Material Girl’s cinematic vehicle suffered the supposed bad luck reserved for movies with actual question marks in the title, the lack of punctuation served the theme song and concert tour much better. Both were huge hits. So the superstition lived on? I guess. No, this was seriously a thing. There’s an old Hollywood … Read more
This warm-hearted Spielbergian cryptozoological adventure didn’t fare quite as well as the colossal hits he was producing earlier in the decade, but it’s far from being the Skunk Ape critics panned – the boy-and-his-bigfoot formula is still a fun Sask-watch 38 years later. While John Lithgow and Melinda Dillon are excellent as the harried parents, … Read more
Making Mr. Right arrived on Home Video this week in 1987, after an April 3rd theatrical release. Ann Magnuson and John Malkovich star in director Susan (Desperatly Seeking Suzan) Seidelman’s high-concept bot-com about a woman’s infatuation with an emotionally unavailable android. We’ve all been there, am I right? An absolutely delightful franken-flick for fans of … Read more