Underrated '86

Something a little different for you, this time, folks.

Bob Freelander is hosting a wonderful series over at RupertPupkin Speaks, inviting guest bloggers to discuss the most underrated films of 1986.

I’ve decided to play along. 

You see, 1986 was a watershed year for me.  That spring, I graduated from the UCLA Motion Picture & Television Department, ready and raring to go conquer Hollywood.  Fueling my wide-eyed optimism was a banner crop of life-changing films that opened that year.  Yeah, I said it.  Life-changing!  Movies that spoke of love and life… And that whispered the secrets of storytelling.

Forget a Top 10 list, I could easily craft a Top 25 for 1986!

In fact, in order to narrow down my own Underrated ’86 list, I had to apply strict guidelines.

1) No films that I didn’t actually see in 1986. 

Sorry, Betty Blue, Sid & Nancy, and A Better Tomorrow, but we didn’t meet and fall in love until much later.

2) No films that were huge hits at the time

I heart you Aliens, Back to School, and The Color of Money.  And so does everyone else.

3) No films, no matter how brilliant, that I don’t re-visit on a regular basis

I’ll catch you later, Something Wild, Salvador, and At CloseRange.   It’s not you, it’s me.

What’s left are a handful of mangy mutts.  Each has some flaw, real or imagined, that wounded it in the eyes of the public.   Yet, I find my appreciation growing with each passing year.

So, let’s get started! 

Big Trouble In Little China

Big Trouble in Little China threw me a lifeline in the weeks after graduating college. 

My life had completely changed – I was done with school! – and it hadn’t changed at all.  I was still working the same dead end, fast food job in L.A., and I still had a summer job in a factory waiting for me in New Jersey.  Same shit, different year.

By this time, I was already a huge fan of both John Carpenter and Kurt Russell, but there was a third name in the mix that made me even more excited to see this film: Co-screenwriter W.D.Richter.  A couple of years before, Richter directed a film called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which is a completely uncategorizable sci-fi/rock ‘n’ roll/superhero mash-up. 

The film played a run of midnight shows at the Nuart Theater in L.A. and became a touchstone for a group of friends and I who worked there.   The movie is packed with all of these strange, nonsense asides and we loved hurling quotes at each other, as we tore tickets and shoveled popcorn.

By the time BTiLC came out, the group had become scattered.  Yet, as the lights dimmed and the film came up, I felt like I was right back in their company.  

BTiLC has some of the most quotable lines of the ‘80s:

  “It’s all in the reflexes!”

  “If we’re not back by dawn… Call the president.”

  “Everybody relax.  I’m here.”

  “I feel kind of… Invincible.”

  “You know what Jack Burton always says at a time like this?”

  “Jack Burton.  Me!”

The lines may seem meaningless outside the context of the movie, but the joke is that they are just as ridiculous in context.  Yet, when you’re in over your head, and the weight of adulthood is staring you down like a wild-eyed, eight-foot tall maniac, you could do worse than remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like this…

“Have you paid your dues, Jack?”  “Yessir, the check’s in the mail.”

I saw the film four times in two weeks, and then Aliens opened.  1986 was that kind of year.

8 Million Ways to Die

I saw 8 Million Ways to Die in a half-empty house on opening night.  That was rare in Westwood, back in the day, when even obvious crap, such as St. Elmo’s Fire, would sell out.

The ensuing years have not been kinder. 

The film has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in the US.  In fact, after my well-loved VHS started to falter, I had to import a DVD from the U.K.

Honestly, I can’t understand how this film has become so forgotten.  Written by Oliver Stone (and David Lee Henry), directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jeff Bridges, Roseanna Arquette and Andy Garcia, the production is A-list all the way. 

Have you ever heard of Andy Garcia?  Do you know why?!  This film!!

Let’s put it this way… Jeff Bridges gives one of his best performances, as alcoholic detective, Matthew Scudder.  Yet, Garcia almost over-shadows him, in his first major role.

Garcia’s performance is so unpredictable, so entertaining that he literally made himself a star here.  As the dangerously coked-up drug dealer, Angel Maldonado.  Garcia flirts with going over the top, perhaps best exemplified by his peevish insistence on pronouncing Scudder’s name as “Scooter” throughout the film.  Yet, you never doubt for a moment that underneath the cool surface, a psychotic rage boils inside Maldonado.

Accompanying the action is a wonderfully woozy score by James Newton Howard.  Certain films make me stop and watch them, no matter what I am doing, as soon as I hear the opening notes of their themes:  8 Million Ways to Die, The Dead Zone (Composer: Michael Kamen), and The Hitcher (Composer: Mark Isham) top that list.

Speaking of The Hitcher…

The  Hitcher

As soon as C. Thomas Howell’s character threw open his car door to Rutger Hauer’s hitchhiker and uttered the immortal line, “My mother warned me never to do this,” I knew that I was going to love The Hitcher.

What I didn’t expect was how much every one else would hate it.

Today, The Hitcher may seem downright restrained in its violence, but at the time of its release, it stirred up a shit-storm.  Famously, the "Los Angeles Times" ran a cover story, in its Sunday Calendar section, with the poisonously double-edged headline: “How do these movies get made?”

To this day, The Hitcher remains the most unfairly maligned film of the ‘80s.

The vitriol with which it was attacked probably helped make it one of my favorite films.  Time and again, I re-visit it, partly because it is such a great ride, and partly to mine for evidence against claims that it is misogynistic and pointless.  The film is so stripped down, in both characterization and motive, that its theme is stubbornly elusive.  Yet something deep and disturbing churns beneath the surface of this sunny actioner.

To me, the film is very much akin to the later, more celebrated Seven.  It rewards repeat viewings.

Still not convinced?   Watch it anyway, if only to hear composer Mark Isham’s complex, haunting, and otherwise unavailable score.   Man, would I love to watch this film with an isolated music track! 

Twilight Time, are you listening?

One day, I’ll give this film the in-depth post it deserves (as I’ve promised since Day One).  Until then, swing open your door and give it a lift.

Manhunter & The Fly

I lump these last two films together because I saw them together.

They were released within weeks of each in August 1986, as I was winding up that final summer at home with my mom, before moving back to Los Angeles for good.   You know, to conquer Hollywood, and all that…

Somehow, during this time, my mom and I had fallen into a habit of going to the movies every Wednesday night.   For one of our last outings, I suggested Manhunter, as my mom likes thrillers.  Once that ended, I talked her into sneaking over to see The Fly, on the screen next door!    What a strange double-bill to see with your mom, right?  Regardless, I was immediately taken with both films.

Of course, Manhunter suffers from being “that other Hannibal Lechter film,” the one made before Anthony Hopkins stole (and ate) our hearts in The Silence of the Lambs.  In fact, this film was later remade, as Red Dragon, solely so they could have Hopkins reprise the role of Lechter, one last time (Brian Cox plays him here.  Different, but no less effective). 

They shouldn’t have bothered.  There was nothing wrong with this film in the first place.

Lektor (as the good doctor’s name is spelled in Manhunter…for no apparent reason) is only the appetizer.  William Petersen’s performance, as FBI agent, Will Graham, is the main course.

Throughout the film, Graham struggles with how far to push himself, while trying to climb into the headspace of the serial killer whom he’s tracking. “They’re the worst thoughts in the world,” he explains to his son at one point.

Finally, in one of my favorites scenes of that year, Graham cracks how the killer is choosing his victims.

On the eve of the next murder, with no breakthrough in sight, Graham dives off the deep end.  He watches the 8mm family films of the previous victims, over and over, trying to see these people as the killer does. “See the woman?  See the bloom on the woman?”  He’s skating the edge of sanity, and sending back dispatches that only barely make sense

Petersen is magnetic in this scene and Graham’s sudden, stunning insight into the killer’s MO is one of the great meta- moments in cinema.

Ever wonder how TV came to be awash in crime scene forensics and criminal profiling shows?  This film (and the book on which it based) led the way.

As for The Fly, the film needs no defense from me.  Along with John Carpenter’s The Thing, it is rightly considered one of the best remakes of all time.   Yet, I’m not convinced that it fully receives its props as a love story.

I’m not kidding.

I mean, I’m all in for the David Cronenberg body-horror, as well as the quintessentially quirky performance by Jeff Goldblum.  But, as Cronenberg has pointed out, this film is at heart a tragic love story.  Befitting a tragedy, it has the most heartless ending ever. 

Spoilers ahead... 

When his final teleportation awry, Goldblum becomes an abomination, a man/pod/insect hybrid.  Geena Davis, the ex-lover, is repulsed by what he has become yet still has feelings for the man that he was.  She grabs a shotgun but can’t bring herself to kill him.   He pleads, and out of love, or mercy, or pity, she pulls the trigger.   Boom!    His head explodes. 

And… black.   The End.

Wait.  What?

Imagine for a moment, if Love Story, the weepy classic from the ‘70s, ended the second that Jenny died.  No reconciliation between Oliver and his father.  No final narration, celebrating all that was Jenny.   Just boop-boop-beeeeeeeeeeep! 

And… black.

This is a cruel and cunning move by Cronenberg.    Any other film would have had a comforting coda to ease us back into the world of the living, as we watch Davis’s character pull it together and move forward…  Life goes on, right?

Not in this film, it doesn’t.

Right at the pinnacle of despair and horror?  Black...  Show’s over, folks!  Sort through all of those complex emotions on the way home.   Have a nice night!

This abrupt cessation -- movie/no movie -- hits you exactly like your worst break-up.   There is no hope, no glimmer of light.  There is no…more.  It’s over.  Deal with it.

And you thought this was just a fable about technology gone awry, didn’t you?  Ha!  Your ex-girlfriend called.  She wants your future back.

                                                                                     *****

There you have it, folks.  1986!  An important time in my life.  Fresh out of school, whole life ahead of me, a bevy of great movies pointing the way to success in Hollywood…

30 years ago... Where does the time go? 

And… black.

Footnotes:

1. Tell me you don't want to watch the rest of the movie after hearing the opening theme of 8 Million Ways to Die, above.  Also, tell me that the credits design did not influence Nicolas Winding Refn for Drive.

2. All of the screen grabs for the posters were taken from MoviePoster.com, a site that I wish existed in 1986.

3. Big Trouble in Little China and The Fly have been treated well by Fox on home video.  Blu-rays of each available on Amazon, here and here.

4. Manhunter has just been re-released as a Collector's Edition blu-ray from the always awesome folks at Shout! Factory, available here.

5. The Hitcher and 8 Million Ways to Die are the least respected, as always.  Go region-free and pick up these great DVD releases of the title from Amazon U.K., here and here.