Metallica- ... And Justice for All (1988)

This album is strangely overlooked, having been released between Master of Puppets and the Black Album, both of which get much more attention. And that's odd, because it contains "One", the only song on the album that truly ranks as one of the band's best known. "One" is, of course, a truly great song about something truly horrific, at one the band's first music video and the reason why Metallica ended up owning the rights to the film version of Johnny Get Your Gun.

Yet, that one song aside... this album is strangely unloved. The first album with the painful absence of Cliff Burton, the first with Jason Newsted desperately trying to fill his shoes... and, by all accounts, being given a rather hard time. And, while remastered versions now abound, the album is rather oddly mixed.

And yet... if we consider the songs themselves, they're as good as any collection of songs that Metallica did in the '80s. "Blackened", the title track, "Harvester of Sorrow". This is the last album the band would make with their trademark long songs with a Sabbath-esque structure and all those superbly done transitions before adapting their style towards shorter and simpler songs. And... it deserves more love!

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

 "It's not hands that summon us. It's desire."

I write this on 23rd December, 2022. What film could so well instil the Christmas spirit?

This is one of those sequels which challenges the original for top billing. It's that good. It's also fascinating, if at btimres rather gory in a pleasingly latex, stop motion, pre-CGI manner.

The themes, more blatant to me than in the first film are... yeah, kinky is far too soft a word. The underlying, horrific theme here is a sexual fetish for the eteernal torments of Hell, which, well, more tea, vicar? It's a deeply disturbing premise. This is, of course, no bad thing.

This is, really, the perfect horror sequel, building upon and deepening the horrors of the first film. Kenneth Cranham is superb as the occult-obsessed doctor who, desapite his earlier uplifting monlolougue as a brain surgeon, has a massive thing for Cenobite lore.

And the Cenobites are existentially terrifying, distilling the very concept of flesh-ripping torture as they are wont to do. The effects are evilly sublime. And, of course. Ashley Laurence as the star is faultless. Clare Higgins, desapite the odd accent slip, deserves similar praise.

I hope the forthcoming sequels are as good as thois. I have my doubts. But this was superb.

Robo Vampire (1988)

 "Since Tom's dead. I'd like to use his body to make an android-like robot, Mr Glenn."

Oh dear.

This is, let's be clear from the start, a bloody awful film. Yes, the dialogue is awful. And it's awful throughout. See "Listen, we must find a way to handle Tom, that goddamn anti-drug agent." Yes, marvel at the crude, "as you know, Bob" exposition.

The poster, of course, in no way invokes RoboCop, released the previous year. But the film isn't so much of a straight rip-off as a mish-mash of bonkers ideas. It is,indeed, a series of set pieces and bonkers dialogue. One cannot help but love its un-selfconscious rubbishness.

I mean, there are "Dao vampires", who jump like rabbits and serve the Hong kong drug lords for some reason. That there is a ghost who resents that she has been denied afterlife with her beloved and vows revenge with gloriously terrible dialogue... "You can kill us, but not until our love is consummated".

Yes, quite. Such naturalistic dialogue..

She then proceeds to work for the baddies in return for marrying her vampire beloved. And it can't be stressed how terrible said vampires look.They have Rice Krispies on their faces, and  the jumping about is... yeah.

I thought this film would be enyertaingly rubbish. I mean, it's by Godfrey Ho, rhe king of dun B-moviesa, But... wwll, this fulm does havew many entertaninglynrubbish moments. But I cannot ewmphasise how shite it is,

If you much watch this film, prodigious quantities of alcohol are utterly essewntial. Teetotalers shouls avoid at all costs.

Willow (1988)

 "Ignore the bird. Follow the river,"

This is, let's be honest, a fantasy B movie script made to look like Hollywood fare by Ron Howard, a very conventional Hollywood director but ina good way. Yes, the evil Quene (a delightfully proto-Morgaine-ish Jean Marsh). Yes, the whole concept of an evil monarch destroying all babies because of a prophecy, let alone the narrative of a baby floating down the river, have potentially pretentious Biblical overtones.

This isn't a clever film. It isn't a great film. It's a highly polished B movie, where one may freely chortle at Warwick Davis' shifting accent even while conceding he's acrtually bloody good as a lead, outshining the disturbingly young pretty boy Val Kilmer who is merely adequate as a rogue turned hero. His arc works, though, from petty thief in a cage to lover to a princess. And the tempedtuous beginnings of their relationship are fun, as is much else.There;s a nice mix between straightforward adventure and comedy.

Jean Marsh is, as if it needed saying, the perfect baddie, chewing the scenery exactly to the right degree. It's good to see Billy Barty, a year after Masters of the Universe, as a cheerfully winging it wizard. The cast is, overall, a success. There's no CGI here;the special effects are real, eithet green screen or stop motion.

Yet it's hard not to see this film as a cheeky reworking of Lord of the Rings, and a cheeky little prompt to Peter Jackson in doing the real thing,

Die Hard (1988)

 "You macho assholes!"

It's December. Merry Christmas. This is, of course, the consummate Christmas film, so there can be no better time for me to watch it again for the first time since, disturbingly enough, the twentieth century.

The conventional opinion is that a film lives and dies by its script, or at least for those not convinced by the French school of the director auteur. Now, I love France and its cinema (I voted Remain, to boot), but I am one of said school. Except... this is a so so script, perfectly fine but no more than that. And yet this a magnificent film, one that has been remembered. Why?

Admittedly, it's because of not only the superb direction, which makes the many extended action scenes entertaining rather than boring, as action sequences often can be, because of the movement and the tension which is ALWAYS present, but because of the superlative individual performance by the excellent Bruce Willis, the everyman who faces a group of cynical, materialistic, one may almost say Thatcherite terrorists, led by the almost equally charismatic Alan Rickman. His performance is truly magnetic.

The script really is middling. The direction is brillianty, but focussing on the two main principals, Bruce Willis makes this film, and solidifies his career as action hero leading man. Alan Rickman chews the scenery in the best possible way.

But let's agree on the main point. This is THE Christmas film, set on Christmas Eve, with lot of Chritmas tree. It's the epitome of Christmas, right?

Right.

Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988)

  "OK, you big hunk of a man. Come and get me!"

I've reached the seventh film on eight years. The pace at which I'm watching the Friday the 13th film is a bit of a blatant clue in how bored I've been with them- although the fourth on was nicely metatextual.

Perhaps part of the problem is that ever since Scream, and certainly with The Cabin in the Woods, we've thought of the slasher genre (and it is a very trope-driven genre) in a very fourth wall-breaking way- sex means death; drugs mean death; nerdiness means death; going out in the dark means death... and that's all just literally from this film.

Halloween wasn't the first slasher film, as late as 1980. Psycho and Black Christmas were predecessors, and so the first Friday the 13th film turned up and proved to be a fairly perfunctory recital of previously established tropes. The sixth film stands out for the fact that it does as much violence to the fourth wall as to the characters, but the franchise is mostly meh.

And yet... this film cheerily announces its cheesiness with the voiceover during the opening recap. The conceit is that Tina, a telekinetic teen a la Poltergeist, has resurrected Jason through her passionate guilt at killing her father (who hit her mother and was thus irredeemable scum) and the shifty doctor who is "treating" her. There are no stars, as one woid expect for the seventh film in the franchise, but Tina's mum is Susan Blu- Arcee from Transformers: The Movie.

This film doesn't pretend to be anythng more than a B movie. But it's a sound, an fun, example of ts genre, far more so than it's firsr five predecessors. Even the writing is hack-like but solid. This is ctualky, and by far, my second favourite film after the sixth. However, I must confess that I have just imbibed a splendid bottle of classy Rioja.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988 Film)

 "Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

And so we end the 1980s for Granada's Sherlock Holmes adaptations- they will next resume, after a gap, with The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1991, a new decade, unless one happens to be gulping them all up thirty years later. Nevertheless, The Hound of the Baskervilles- the most famous, most often adapted, and most familiar story that Conan Doyle ever wrote- is a fitting coda to the decade.

It is, of course, only right that Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke should get their own Hound, and this does not disappoint. Yes, the budget is clearly lower than with the previous year's The Sign of Four- some of the mire scenes are fairly obviously done in the srudio- but the programme hardly looks cheap and, above all, the story (as ever with Hound) and performances, barring a few dodgy Mummerset accents, make this a quality production nevertheless, although perhaps the ending is a little rushed. And the much-maligned hound itself looks pretty decent, I think. It's hardly B movie stuff, and I should know.

Ronald Pickup impresses with a nuanced performance as Barrymore, and it's a delight to see good old Bernard Horsfall as Frankland. But it's James Faulkner (looking just a little older than he was in I, Clavdivs) who stands out as that rotter Stapleton, and never mind that the emphasis on Stapleton in this production makes it perhaps a little too clear that he's the killer.

Overall, though, this is an enjoyable version of the story, much better than its reputation.

Godzilla vs Biollante (1989)

 “Biollante is just a cross between a plant and Godzilla...!"

It’s been more weeks than I realised since the last Godzilla film so here's the next one- and it's one of the most impressive with a cool antagonist and high production values.

There's a lot of fun here, from the concept (we get to see a Godzilla cell merge with a plant cell to create Biollante, because that's how genetics works...) to the appearance of Biollante, with the rubber tentacles and Venus flytrap maws. Its all very '80s, with the industrial espionage (we get to see the contemporary industrian rivalry between the Americans and Japanese in this decade from a Japanese perspective, ESP nonsense, car chases and action, 80s fashions, 80s action film music and all those things which are fun to look back on from a vantage point of thirty years later.

And yet, despite the B movie silliness of the concepts, the plot is bloody good and the whole film is superbly shot. It's also positive to see a new monster antagonist for Godzilla after all these years, and a different type of monster at that. We carry directly on from the previous film, with the same impressively realised Godzila (the set piece where he destroys Osaka is extremely well done) with excellent use of his familiar fanfare. Brilliantly, it's Godzilla who remains the antagonist throughout, with Biollante being the eventual means of his destructtion in a well-plotted series of events.

I'm not ranking these films in order of best to worst, as this isn't that sort of blog, but if I were, this would rank quite highly as a genuinely good monster film that nevertheless offers plenty of low camp fun.

Scrooged (1988)

"Where are we? Trump Tower?"

This is my Christmas movie to slot in before said holiday properly commences. There may or may not be others. We shall see. It's a good way, for now, to try and forget that bleeding election.

And a bloody good Christmas movie it is. The opening is wonderful with a series of bizarre scene of Santa, his elves and, er, Lee Majors, all taking part in a shootout at the North Pole. We soon learn that this is just a television programme, and are introduced to the mean and cynical Frank Cross, a Sscrooge for our time who just happens to be producing a live televised version of A Christmas Carol.

The plot runs as we'd expect, of course, but that's the point- this is like a very different cover of a classic song. So here we have a Christmas Carol in '80s New York, where the Ghost of Chrstmas Past not only drives a yellow cab but is played by the lead singer of the New York Dolls. Bill Murray is awesome, and behind the scenes arguments with Richard Donner don't seem to show up on screen at all. We even get the great Robert Mitchum in a supporting role as Frank's boss.

The ending wouldn't fly today- a hostage situation, with a gun, as a major part of a happy ending. But there's no denying that this is a true Christmas comedy, full of Christmas spirit without being excessively schmaltzy. It's warm, it's comforting, but it's not afraid to use the dark side of humour too. A real seasonal classic.

A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

"Touch his dick and he's dead!"

I first saw this magnificent farce back when I hired out the video, which shows you how long ago it was. It not only stars but is written by John Cleese, and the figure behind Fawlty Towers certainly knows how to do a good farce.

Cleese is bloody good as Archie, of course, the (ahem) archetype of repressed, sexually stultified exemplar of a certain type of public school educated Englishman. Jamie Lee Curtis is also bloody good as the cynically feminine and deeply greedy Wanda with her foreign languages fetish. But truly outstanding are Kevin Kline as the psychopathic Otto and Michael Palin as the stuttering Ken, an extraordinary performance. All four give splendid comedy performances.

There are some laugh out loud moments-  I loved Archie’s apology to Otto- but it’s largely an intricate and character based farce, perfectly constructed. I’m not a fan of the farce in general but John Cleese is a master of the art.

Archie’s speech to Wanda about the stultifying embarrassment of being English is both funny and true, up to a point. I tend to think the stiff upper lip stereotype applies only to the public school educated, separated from their parents and put into a strange and repressed existence that I know mainly from popular culture; the English are fundamentally open, emotional, beer swilling north Europeans quite culturally close to the Scandinavians, Germans and Dutch, but something about that sense of very English embarrassment has permeated throughout our culture. Perhaps the upcoming horrors of Brexit will change that. Perhaps they won’t.

Be that as it may, this is a true comedy classic, and possibly the last creation of John Cleese to have true greatness.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

“You shouldn't have buried me. I'm not dead!"

After the huge disappointment of the second film it's pleasant to find that I've rather enjoyed both subsequent sequels. This fourth film is, if anything, a more straightforward use of the basic premise than the third and is, as a result, probably the best instalment since the first. The franchise seems to be in rude health at this point.

Partly this is down to the solid central premise, but also the excellent script and superb use of the camera, as well as the first class pre-CGI effects; the early resurrection of Freddy's body looks so much more convincing than the parallel scene in the previous year's Hellraiser, and all those big effects shots mean so much more when you know it's not CGI.

But essentially it's all about Freddy's truly scary presence, the solid plot based simply around Freddy killing various kids one by one in entertaining ways, and the fact that all the prospective victims are likeable in their own way. We actually care about what happens to the characters and thus are invested in being scared, something many horror films forget.

But ultimately it's about the set pieces- death by waterbed, Debbie being turned into a cockroach in a way which is proper Cronenberg, a set piece for every character. And through it all the clothes, hair, cars and music are all gloriously '80s, as is Alice's montage at the end, where she Super-Skrulls all of her dead mates' attributes. We even get a character, Rick, whose main trait beyond "loving boyfriend" seems to be that he's seen The Karate Kid.

We get scares, we get likeable and nuanced characters, we get a genuinely good film and we even get nostalgia. What's not to like?

Dead Ringers (1988)

"She's heard that it makes sex come on like Nagasaki..."

This is the fourth David Cronenberg film I've seen (and blogged) and I've yet to see any with his famous body horror. Even here, beyond a weird dream sequence and the bloody ending, body horror is quite moderate and I've yet to see anything that would be described on Rick and Morty as "a Cronenberg".

That aside, the film is superbly shot, choreographed, scored, and contains a sublime and extraordinary performance by Jeremy Irons as the twins which is so outstanding that you forget he isn't even bothering to sound Canadian. On the surface it's all brilliant. And yet...

It's a weird film; Elliott and Beverly are twin gynaecologists and Elliott, being the more confident, seduces women and lets his brother have the sloppy seconds while letting them think it's the same person, which is a bit rapey, and they both live happily under this arrangement until Bev goes and falls in love with a movie star called Claire who, as a very Cronenberg detail, has a weird mutant vagina. This leads to a slow unravelling of first one twin and then the other, neither being quite an individual.

So, yeah, weird. But it doesn't really play with any of the ideas it brings up, and for me the bloody climax doesn'y quite feel either earned or weird enough. A well-made but oddly empty film.

Twins (1988)

"Actually, I hate violence."

"But you're so good at it!"

How '80s can you get? We even get a montage, for heaven's sake. 

This film is a silly old piece of fluff, of course. It's 80s Hollywood comedy by the numbers. But it's fun. And it features the always excellent Danny DeVito, Chloe Webb from Sid and Nancy and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger in a comedy role.

Arnie is the revelation here. He can do comedy, and he can do it well. Comedy is hard. This means he can actually act when he puts his mind to it. People are shocked. Also, I must admit, this may be no one's favourite film but it's entertaining to watch, with a decent if silly plot and sufficient laughs to get away with calling it a comedy. Arnie's even gets to say "I'll be back" at one point. The film's best moment, though,  is Arnie's face after he pops his cherry. Yep. He can do comedy. 

In fact... I say this through gritted teeth, but the straight man in a comedy double act is often underappreciated and, well, Arnie is great at it.

What next, then? Kindergarten Cop?

Beetlejuice (1988)

"You know what they say about people who commit suicide- in the afterlife, they become civil servants!"

Heaven forbid. What an awful fate.

I can't believe I've never seen this strange yet brilliant film before, a Tim Burton film from before he had quite settled on a particular style. It's delightfully quirky, and has the best stop motion effects I've ever seen in a film not involving Ray Harryhausen. Who needs CGI? Not the young Tim Burton.

It's also arresting to see Michael Keaton being brilliant in a comic role, and a very young Winona Ryder showing that she was the Dakota Fanning of her day. Best of all is the premise; a silly look at the haunted house genre from the perspective of those doing the haunting.

The whole things screams "late '80s", from the weird landscapes outside the house that look just like a contemporary music video to the fact that Lydia is an actual Goth who listens to Bauhaus rather than Evanescence. Along with the opera, that is.

There are some nice touches (I noticed the nod to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) to both the premise and the design, but probably the best thing is the bureaucracy after death. I'd better get used to it- I'm already a civil servant...

But the one thing I'll remember above all is the stop motion. It's glorious, and cartoonish, and, well, ripped off somewhat by Drop Dead Fred three years later. This movie rules!

Beaches (1988)

"I just want to get rid of us before us gets bad."

Yes, I know; this is a chick flick. I watched it because my lovely wife wanted to show me one of her favourite films and I'm blogging it because it's quite well known. And you know what? I quite enjoyed it. I won't put it any stronger than that; it isn't superlatively brilliant in the way that Pretty Woman is (yes, I did just say that), but it's a good film.

The film follows the lives of two women from childhood to one of them suffering a tragic, early death. CC is poor, Jewish and very much a New Yorker, while Hillary is a rich WASP girl from an established East Coast family. They bond over shared ambitions to go into musical theatre- a world of which I know nothing- but their very different natures later lead to both friction and reconciliation.

Much as CC may struggle in her early days through lack of money, she benefits from being carefree and unrestricted, while Hillary is pressured into becoming a bored housewife to an awful, snobbish husband, and CC's telling it like it is here leads to the big clash between them that drives the structure of the main plot. Their eventual full reconciliation only comes at the price of Hillary's sad decline and death. There is a happy ending, of sorts, as CC adopts Hillary's orphaned daughter.

It's a fairly gripping drama, and Bette Midler is superb. I won't pretend this is my cup of tea but there are many things to enjoy in this film.

Child's Play (1988)

“I have to go tinkle.”

It took me ages to remember where I remembered Catherine Hicks from: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. That distraction aside, I rather enjoyed this movie, much as it tended to follow the formulaic course that ‘80s movies often did. The central concept is delicious, though. The 1980s, after all, are the perfect decade for what I assume must be the ultimate satire against the aggressive marketing of crass commercialised toys to kids. And yes, my love of Transformers in no way makes me a hypocrite on that point.

I had to raise an eyebrow, too, at the very ‘80s portrayal of Karen’s blatantly gay boss, with his pink bow tie, but no matter. The only real horror in this film is the 1980s interior décor, but I loved it nonetheless. I suppose the horrors that happen to Karen and her brat in this film all boil down to one single moral: don’t buy knock-off shite.

The design of Chucky is brilliant, of course, and probably the biggest single factor behind the film’s success. There are some great set pieces, too: I love the moment when Karen realises that there are no batteries in Chucky, and the deliciously dramatic irony in the death of the psychiatrist Dr Ardmore, played by the journalist bloke from the 1970s series of The Incredible Hulk. The camerawork from Chucky’s POV is good, too.

You have to wonder about the things that go unmentioned, of course. If I was Charles Earl Ray, reincarnated as a doll, then I’d be rather less sanguine about the sexless existence that would lie before me. No wonder he tries to knife the cop in the balls.

I had to laugh, of course, at the scene where an old dying man reveals Chucky’s weakness with his last words, a trope which is far too well-worn to take seriously and which illustrates the formulaic nature of the film. It’s a good laugh, though, and the ending is pleasingly inconclusive.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988)

"How's your head?"

"I haven't had any complaints yet…"

I love goth girls. I have a bit of a thing for them. Also, I love witty women. I have a thing for them, too. Elvira is, in fact, my dream woman, although perhaps one might venture to criticise her cooking skills. That's a plus before we even start. The fact that the film is extremely funny is an added bonus. Not bad for a film I'd barely heard of just a couple of weeks ago.

Just as a bit of a primer for my fellow non-Americans, Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) was a sort of Vampira for the 1980s, but with added irony and witticisms, a sort of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but with bigger boobs and, judging by the evidence of this film, a lot more wit. She's sexy, sassy, and looks fantastic with a really big gun.

We first see her in an LA television studio, commenting on a 1950s sci-fi B movie of exactly the type I've come to know a fair bit more in the recent weeks of this blog. It isn't long, though, before she loses the job and has to somehow raise $50,000 so that she can perform at Vegas. It's all rather unfortunate for her, but let's be fair; a film's gotta have a plot. And said plot soon throws up a rather well-timed inheritance over in less-liberal-than-expected Massachusetts, right on the opposite coast, meaning we get a brief but rather cool montage of Elvira travelling through America in the coolest car known to humanity.

When she arrives, though, she discovers a town full of the most horrible people imaginable, proper old-fashioned New England Puritans who are- in the phrase cheerfully stolen from H.L. Mencken by Elvira's bit on the side, Bob- terrified that someone, somewhere, might be having fun. So terrified, in fact, that the whole town is quite happy to burn Elvira as a witch without a trial or anything, in deference to good old Massachusetts tradition. It's all good fun, so I think perhaps we ought to gloss over the fact that it isn't 1692 any more, and the USA has a Constitution and everything now. It's an old-fashioned town.

Edie McClurg gives great ham as the delightfully boo-worthy Chastity Pariah, who is responsible for perhaps the most unlikely act of face-sitting in cinematic history. But we also get some pleasingly nefarious moustache twirling from the suitably evil W. Morgan Sheppard as Uncle Vinnie.

On top of this there are loads of naughty double-entendres and some fantastic, subtle sight gags, one of which involves the unfortunate placing of a letter "E", but my favourite was the group of kids toasting marshmallows at Elvira's witch-burning. There's even an issue of Amazing Spider-Man on screen with the cover, I believe, by the one and only Todd MacFarlane. We might not know a lot about Elvira on this side of the pond, but the film is well worth seeing and very, very funny.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

"These clowns aren't people. They're creatures, things from another planet!"

No, I kid you not. This really is a film about, literally, killer clowns from outer space. And it's quite hilarious. And very, very late '80s. It has the fashions, the hairstyles, some very '80s bikers, and even an end-of-level baddies. And, incidentally it has a superb theme tune from top Californian punk band The Dickies.

This is a "B" movie, of course. You'd guessed that. It's mainly about the set-pieces, with a rather basic by-the-numbers plot with just a few broadly drawn characters to give us a bit of camply humorous melodrama to string everything together. The acting is hammy, but deliberately so, with a standout comedy performance from John Vernon as the gruff, violent Officer Curtis Mooney. So let's just talk about the set pieces.

I suspect this movie didn't exactly cost much, but it looks great, with absolutely no sign of cheapness anywhere, probably because  the film doesn't exactly call for realism. But there's so much cool stuff here, right from the comedy hillbilly (with a dog called "Pooh Bear"!) who kicks off the set pieces. We get a high point early on as a clown twists a balloon into the shape of a bloodhound and uses it to follow Mike and Debbie, our heroes, but the film manages to top even that, many times. Custard pies, silhouettes, candy floss, ventriloquist's dummies… everything you can think of is used to terrifying effect and there's a shower scene that's, yes, more terrifying than Psycho and even more terrifying than the one and only Jasper Carrott in Jane and the Lost City, if such a thing is possible.

The climax, in a perverted version of an amusement park, is perfect- full of suspense and laughths in equal measure and, this being the late '80s, there's an end-of-level boss straight out of the Sega Mega Drive, with highly prominent puppet strings, no less.

I'd heartily recommend this movie, in the highly unlikely even you can get hold of it. The combination of affectionate piss-take of '50s sci-fi "B" movie with a very '80s fixation on the inherent terror of clowns is a winning one. It's funny, but it's very, very scary indeed, and not one for those with a phobia of clowns. It's also, of course, interesting to see this so soon after Vampire Circus! And it deserves to be adored for the title alone.