The Best and Worst of 80's Cinema

                                     The Hunter  is an action film that is best known for being Steve McQueen's final film before his death in November of 1980. McQueen plays Ralph "Papa" Thorson, a bounty hunter who is hired to catch bail jumpers and gets rewards from his bail bondsman boss (played by Eli Wallach).                                   The Hunter  is a rather sad final film for the legendary actor, mainly because it's a flat, feeble attempt at a character piece. Papa Thorson, from what I gather, is meant to be a sort of antithesis to the typical hardened bounty hunter character. He's a fifty-year-old disenchanted schlub who is terrible at driving and attached to objects of the past (hence his collection of old, antique toys) who is also expecting a baby with his live-in girlfriend (...

                                          Death Ship is an 1980 horror film about a group of shipwrecked castaways who come across a haunted Nazi freighter. The captain of the downed ship, played by George Kennedy, becomes possessed by the Nazi ship and terrorizes the other castaways.                                           Death Ship  is like "The Little Nazi Freighter That Almost Could". It's a movie that almost succeeds in being a pretty good haunted boat movie. It has good atmosphere, the rusted, bombed-out look of the freighter is a perfect location, and the filmmaking is not half-bad. The film gets a solid B for effort.                                        H...

                                Humanoids from the Deep  is an 1980 monster movie, produced by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, about a small California coastal town overrun by green "Black Lagoon" creatures who kill men and rape women so they can produce more "Black Lagoon" creatures.                                Who doesn't love a Corman movie? Despite their low-budgets and their lurid, pulpy subject matter, his films managed to be fairly well-made B-movies. They walked the fine line between trash and sophistication. However, Humanoids from the Deep  is not one of his strongest efforts.                              Though it's meant to be an homage to camp creature films like The Horror of Party Beach , it feels too much like a pale Ja...

                          Maniac  is an 1980 slasher film starring Joe Spinell as Frank Zito, a lonely and deeply disturbed serial killer who goes on a killing spree throughout Manhattan.                         Maniac is vile, ugly, and repellant. Not to mention, one of the best slasher films of the 1980's. Bolstered by a strong lead performance by Spinell, it is a tense, scuzzy experience that makes one want to rush to the nearest shower. That is a compliment, by the way.                       Frank Zito is an amalgam of every serial killer trope you could imagine: his disordered one-room apartment with its posters of women and odd picture of fetuses and organs, his collection of doll-faced mannequins (wearing freshly plucked "wigs" for good measure), a creepy obsession with his dead mother, his re...

                                The Boogeyman  is an 1980 horror film about a brother and sister (Jake and Lacey) haunted by the ghost of their mother's dead lover (who was killed by the brother), who uses a haunted cracked mirror (which is broken by Lacey after seeing his ghost-image in it) to get revenge on the siblings. It's also worth noting that this film was directed by German actor, Ulli Lommel, who is associated with the New German Cinema movement (especially with celebrated director Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and iconic pop artist, Andy Warhol. Then he directed this, and a bunch of other crap afterwards.                               The Boogeyman  is an awful, clunky mess. It is abound with logic leaps and vague details that barely register as a narrative. We have the basic framework (two siblings trying to figh...

                                      Prom Night is an 1980 Canadian slasher (starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielson) about a mysterious killer stalking four teenagers responsible for the death of a child six year earlier. This all takes place on the night of the prom, so the movie can have a killer disco soundtrack.                                   The first time I viewed Prom Night , it was a dismal experience. The reason being that it was a terrible video transfer, so it was damn-near unwatchable, especially the darker-lit scenes. Also, the movie seemed like another run-of-the-mill slasher so it just felt like a lost cause.                                  So I rewatched it, this time on Tubi, and the video qual...