What was the 80s and why was it such a golden age for weird sci-fi and head trips? Was it thanks to the dawn of MTV and Night Flight to amuse stoned kids back from the punk shows on weekends? Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, and Night of the Creeps in theaters; Liquid Sky and Street Trash were at (shhh) inner-city theaters; and the time wherein the drive-in and the video rental place co-existed comfortably? It was films like Conan, the Terminator, and Robocop making big money. Art house wonders like Brazil and Blue Velvet occupying hallowed places in the press. It was a time of great anti-drug hysteria, and so--just as imbibing booze had become a symbol of American freedom and defiance against knee-jerk oppression in the 20s, so now that same patriotism was to be found in getting high in the 80s. Today weed is mostly legal and so innocuous - in the words of WC Fields, it's so common it's unnoticed. But back then, getting high and going to the midnight movie or going to a punk show and/or driving around 'til the parents fell asleep then sneaking in to watch Night Flight and old movies was simply what we did. And as a result, thrive-nation of the strange. We're a decade away from the grunge 90s ecstasy-and-blue recovery roller coaster of the Prozac 90s. Let us have our dollar of fame, Hollywood - it shan't come again.
1. SOCIETY
(1989) Briam Yuzna
*** / Amazon Image - A
For sheer over-the-top surreal weirdness, nothing really beats Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY which has one of the best WTF denouements in cinema history. I'm going through great pains to not spoil any of it, let's just say that in best surrealist form it taps into the Freudian Id impulse and the anxiety that one is shut out of a massive 80s upper crust orgy, that even your family are in on some licentious surreal secret. It's this very real feeling that underwrote the Satanic panic of the 80s (and continues today in things like Pizza-gate, and the conspiracies of David Icke -[here]), so it makes sense this came out in the same decade, the "#Mefirst" movement that found Reagan in office and 'yuppies' gobbling up everything, their little IZOD collars turned up and Ray-bans on in slavish imitation of their god, Tom Cruise. Not for nothing does Society then star the euphonious Cruise-clone Billy Warlock as a privileged sod ever reminded of just how much better a slightly upper cut of the pie has it. He begins to realize something is going on when his sister's paranoid ex-boyfriend-cum-stalker plays him tapes he made of her conversations with her father re: her coming out party. It sounds like she's about to be offered up to some evil reptilian throng as a sexual offering, making her way through parents and local officials in a group orgy. It can't be--can it? What's pretty crazy is that, though of course Billy's paranoid, the truth is far crazier. Along the way, he picks up a hot mess girlfriend (Devin DeVasquez) and--in the weirdest element--her "mother" (Pamela Matheson), a bizarre hair-eating nutcase that seems to have wandered in from a John Waters casting lagoon.
Yuzna produced those early Stuart Gordon gems From Beyond and Re-Animator so clearly knew how to hire and use the best, and that means great effects teams. The gooey weirdness needed here would of course be CGI today but not here, it's the weirdest coolest mess since Carpenter's The Thing. Too bad so few people saw it --did it even get a release? Either way, what a blast. Goes everywhere Eyes Wide Shut does in about 1/3 of the time, and then more besides, and it's hilarious and has a genuinely interesting bushel of things to say about the nature of desire, social-climbing, consumer culture, the parasitical nature of the rich, and what's known today as FOMO - or the feeling a massive beautiful people orgy is going on whenever you're not around. Kurbick really should have gone out more, or at least watched some horror movies --Society would have maybe saved his life.
Yuzna produced those early Stuart Gordon gems From Beyond and Re-Animator so clearly knew how to hire and use the best, and that means great effects teams. The gooey weirdness needed here would of course be CGI today but not here, it's the weirdest coolest mess since Carpenter's The Thing. Too bad so few people saw it --did it even get a release? Either way, what a blast. Goes everywhere Eyes Wide Shut does in about 1/3 of the time, and then more besides, and it's hilarious and has a genuinely interesting bushel of things to say about the nature of desire, social-climbing, consumer culture, the parasitical nature of the rich, and what's known today as FOMO - or the feeling a massive beautiful people orgy is going on whenever you're not around. Kurbick really should have gone out more, or at least watched some horror movies --Society would have maybe saved his life.
And it underwrites a real trouble: some sleazy mongers still believe there's an orgy pinnacle they can make it to, where gorgeous women abandon themselves to hairy ugly men in licentious abandon at the clang of Get Out teacup rattle. Turns out, thanks to #metoo, that they were dead wrong. How that missing the orgy feeling ties in with priapism and paranoia could be a full semester course, but SOCIETY says it all in 99 minutes and without bitter aftertaste.
3. LIQUID SKY
(1982) Dir. Slava Sukerman
***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+
There's oodles of great stuff but the ultimate in 'scenes' has got to be Anna Carlisle going down on the male version of herself while a bunch of fashionistas hanging out (while using her gorgeous roof balcony apartment for a photo shoot) start a kind of rapey group mockery thing jeering in a very punk aggro manner that would be scary if it were straight people. Luckily, as Walter Sobchak might put it, there's nothing to worry about --they're nihilists. What makes it work ultimately is Margaret's zonked renouncement of sex in favor of drugs and mind expansion. The aliens zap the life essence out of people in the moment of orgasm and--until Anna complains--leaves their corpses behind. (The scene where Adrian starts an impromptu smack-shivery poetry slam while playing the corpses's head like a conga--is one of the key highlights of this entire list). Meanwhile Jimmy's mom, who lives across the street from Anna, has a hilarious lunch with sneezy, withdrawing son (now that the image is so lustrous, the sun streaming down makes the lighting so beautiful and uniquely NYC I got a 90s sympathy strung out chill). All in all, this is the female east coast parallel to REPO MAN. Was it an influence on Alex Cox? Surely his dreck track record afterwards lets you know some kind of lightning must have struck. Either way, a film to be revisited, again and again - especially now - it probably never looked this good even in its initial NYC run.
7. BRAZIL
(1985) Dir. Terry Gilliam
***1/2 / Amazon Image - A-
Time was this was the bee's-knees and it's still a riot with a cold sucker punch chaser - it's one of the most gamely dark and savage satires of modern bureaucracy in the history of cinema, but now it's big social messages can seem rather labored, the whole bureaucratic hodge podge and endless ducts and malfunctions feel so yesterday since we've gone--thankfully--paperless. It's as if the entirety of the Dept. of Information Retrieval has been reduced to a roomful of geeks on laptops. Still, as the missing link between Kafka (a rather heavy debt is owed) and--alas--one of those whimsical too-obvious Danny Kaye 'daydreaming office drone thinks he's a swashbuckler' odysseys, the level of detail and imagination is stunning. Since it's all before CGI we can really savor the level of obsessive termite craftsmanship (the clouds in the fantasy flying sequences alone are worth the price of admission). Terry Gilliam's trouble as a director has always been that--like Ridley Scott--he can never trust the story to work on its own so his films gush over with detail and interesting things while the mythic root is lost like a child in a Black Friday opening door crush. Here, since that crush is what it's all about, the density works perfectly, to turn it all into a ballet of post-futuristic 30s decor crumbling under the weight of add-on tech (temporary things installed to fix problems with the fixes to other problems, etc). If Jonathan Pryce's flustered Walter Mitty-everyman schtick starts to get wearisome during his prolonged panicky run-for-it with the girl of his dreams, who--with her short hair and trucker's job would be instantly pegged as a lesbian today, making her initial resistance all the more glaring. It never even occurs to Pryce to ask - this is his universe.
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That's the cool thing about Gilliam's vision - though a knee-jerk leftist reading is that Pryce is a hapless hero in an amok universe run by evil corporate bloodsuckers, a close reading shows that the dystopia is the fantasy as much as the flying bits. Reality chokes itself on its own exhaust so he can relax in air conditioning and dream of angels, or girls can watch The Cocoanuts in the bathtub while smoking a joint rather than working one's way up to try and create genuine progress. Hey, I relate. Maybe a little too well. Either way, it's all so gorgeously done with an extended wordless chase set piece finale that finally fishtails into pure fantasy with knowing nods to everything from American in Paris to The Red Shoes and (of course) Potemkin under a dazzlingly expansive Michael Kamen score. And the cast is top notch: Ian Holm has never been funnier as Pryce's nervous wreck boss; Michael Palin is a chilling blast as Pryce's nonchalant torturer college friend and--marvelous as ever--Bob Hoskins as a sinister duct worker and Robert De Niro as the the ultimate in post-Kafka wildman freedom fighters, zip-lining in and out of windows and balconies along the tall apartment complexes--a combination Groucho Marx and Che Guevara. If Gilliam never made another movie after this, he'd be remembered as one of the masters of surrealism and dark comedy. But dystopia has a habit of dragging on...
6.THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI
(1984) Dir. W.D. Richter
**3/4 / Amazon Image - A+
The problem with this film was that it kind of expected itself a shoe-in for cult status, and that's not how cults are made. Cult films are born of legitimately weird outsider types trying to make a Citizen Kane, not Kane trying trying to deliberately make a weird outsider film. BUT just because the motives are baffling and the weird hybrid Captain Midnight-brain surgeon-mad scientist-Formula 5 racer-rock band frontman thing is just a little Too Much Johnson to doesn't mean the cast, effects crew, and moments in the script, aren't worthy of Sub-Genius-style lionization. Let the lamp affix its beam, even if one can't simply whip up a franchise out of thin air (Lucas, never forget, used carefully imported mythic ingredients, plumbing Joseph Campbell as well as Alex Raymond); the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream ("No matter where you go / there you are" became an instant.... whatever you'd call it, debatable point?)
7. MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS
(1988) Dir. Thomas R. Burdman
**1/2 / Amazon Image - D+
I confess, I was only able to finish Meet the Hollowheads over several 20 minute viewings, as it's too weird to endure for longer than 20 minutes at a pop, especially in such bad quality (it's about akin to what you'd find on youtube, duped from some old first run VHS scored at a close-out) --was there ever even a negative or was it all just an old failed cable pilot? Either way--if you like the kind of 'family sticks together'-ness of Animal House Vacation movies, the friendly day-glo oddity of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and post-industrial ennui and alienation of Eraserhead, then just watch it from far enough away you don't get any on you. It's all worth it for the wacky climax which finds the boss running amok, the kids coming home wasted (after hacking into a forbidden drug tube) and Lewis brought home by two Hardy-esque cops (one played by a pre-screech Bobcat!), the wasted son almost giving the whole show away by acting like the bruised near-dead boss is a monster. Good shift to you!
8. NIGHT OF THE COMET
(1984) Writer/dir. Thom Eberhardt
*** / Amazon Image - A
With a weird cult-ready veneer that's quintessential 80s, this sci-fi/cult/horror/comedy checks a lot of bases, but does 'em all right (the heroine survives the comet night apocalypse because she was shacked up in the El Rey theater's projection room in a sleeping bag with cult douche Michael Bowen, for god's sake - and rather than work her usher job she eats Twizzlers and rules the Galaga high score in the lobby). Writer/director Robert Thom was one of those almost-iconic auteurs who made too few films to have a following, aside from weirdos like me who love both this and his Sole Survivor (also 1984, though much less widely known and now, alas OOP) - I saw Night on the big screen in the suburbs during its initial release--by myself, while skipping a high school--so you you know I'm the right guy for it. If you love Mary Woronov and any movie where the teenage heroine warns a guy trying to kill her that she's "been trained" and doesn't want to hurt him (and means it, and does) then you'll love this film which now looks better than ever thanks to a great Shout Factory dusting and color-depth-asizing). The dazzlingly-haired Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) star as the cool sisters--capably rescuing children and mowing down punk mall cops thanks to their CIA op father teaching them home defense before departing for Nicaragua. Woronov's fellow Eating Raoul star, Robert Beltran is a truck driver who answers the girls' survivor call (they set up base at the local LA radio station). Woronov heads an underground lab looking for a cure to the slow decay that hits those who survived the initial mystery dusting of the comet, tying this all into the following year's Day of the Dead. God, zombies were so much cooler back then.
One thing may turn some folks off: this is the film with the quintessential first "Girls Just Want to Have Fun"-set post-world shopping montage (echoing Dawn of the Dead as much as foreshadowing Day with its underground scientist think tank bunker) but not the film's fault that the song and the trying-on-clothes montage set to Lauper songs have become inescapably and inseparably cliche. We might wish for a world in which it was cliche instead to have super cool, capable girls like Regina and Samantha in horror and science fiction films, but they're still rare in any genre. (see also Anita Skinner in Thom's Sole Survivor for another cool Hawksian, this one even quoting To Have and Have Not). (see fuller review here)
9. PHENOMENA
(1985) Dir. Dario Argento
*** / Amazon Image - B
1. BLUE VELVET
(1986) Dir. David Lynch
**** / Amazon Image - A
Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell, lip syncing Roy Orbison as a nightmarish gay stereotype (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle tries not to tremble, coming off like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer on the wrong night. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their loving abuse (like Sonny Boy!). Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart - though that too is open to debate and changes as a viewer's psyche). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open' after all the talk he'd sunk his career after 1994's Dune debacle. This Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. It endures and like a dream you'll find that it's never the same movie twice. It's always, always disturbing, the dark nightmare of childhood brought into the light like a screaming tar pit vagrant.
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SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS
(1989) Dir. Alex Proyas
** / Amazon Image - A
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TOO WEIRD EVEN FOR ERICH:
These are definitely cult/surreal and look great on Prime but --me--personally - I couldn't stand them. And I'll give you my reasons why, in case your mileage varies. One critic's bias should never lose a film's chance at the right viewer.
SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS
(1989) Dir. Alex Proyas
** / Amazon Image - A
With its weird mix of cloistered shack in the middle of a nowhere post-apocalyptic outback, with two wildly overacting eccentric siblings helping a monosyllabic stranger escape into the air, this has that desperate over-wrought hammy whimsy that needs either a genuinely macabre element (ala Burton's Scissorhands) or some component of savage gallows satire (Gilliam's Tideland) or flamboyant camp zest for living (ala Kusturica's Arizona Dream). This has none! NONE! I hate it but the the deep aqua blue tint of the wide open sky and the burnished gold sand indicate gorgeous cinematography and color-grading and the Tangerine Dream soundscapes keep it all at a dreamy windswept beguilement. Proyas went on to direct The Crow and Dark City, so he has his fans. The rest of us will find this insufferably Australian, though we might imagine it as some kind of prequel to Bruce Spence's pilot character in The Road Warrior. Nonetheless it's too much like those feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere I used to have as a child in the suburbs. God, being forced to hang out with these people the rest of my life is far worse than any death by dehydration.
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
(1980) Dir. Richard Elfman
N/A / Amazon Image - B
Zany and familiar to any one who's watched old Betty Boop cartoons while high, but the ceaseless toilet humor gets very old fast, in fact before it starts. There's so much shit imagery and septic tanks. that I can never stand more than ten minutes or so - too bad as clearly a lot of effort went into it. Also, I dislike the nerdy lunchroom food fight faux-ska whatever of Oingo Boingo. But that's just me!