My ’80s adolescence was filled with movies about zombies, aliens, exploding heads, and axe murderers.
Penetrate the dream, and you’ll understand the nightmare.
The most chilling thing about Mann and Brian Cox’s version of Lecktor is his verisimilitude.
The film is an elegy for Chris, and so it became an elegy for the youthfulness and beauty of River Phoenix himself.
Reiner and company seem to be giving permission to the men in the audience to succumb to the lumps in their throats.
Today, what stands out most about the film are the strange narrative tangents that occasionally lighten the mood.
As far as frightful childhood figures went, to me the Boogeyman had nothing on Jason Voorhees.
Jason Lives is the sort of sustained, fatigued overkill that you’d expect from Scream 8, not a slasher flick from 1986.
There is very little wowwww in Maximum Overdrive, but it is not as bad as its reputation.
The film sings an ultimately joyful song.
Remember when your mother used to tell you that, if you made faces and somebody hit you, your face might get stuck?
Bad reputations can follow films and their makers for years (even decades) after the initial theatrical release.
Peter Hyams’s Running Scared is one of the finest examples of The Jungle Fever Cookie Buddy Movie.
It belongs in the same bucket as another unfairly maligned 1986 mythical fantasy with a bad script, The Golden Child.
It laughs at its hero, but recognizes that he is a hero nonetheless.
The Great Mouse Detective is a Disney movie primarily concerned with character instead of story.
Under the Cherry Moon is terrible, and it really didn’t have to be.
The M.C. Escher stairs sequence is especially memorable, as is the one number David Bowie doesn’t sing.
Legal Eagles is a comedy, if you believe its ad campaign, but it’s funny in all the wrong places.
No 1980s flick is really complete without a music montage, and The Manhattan Project boasts one of the most bizarre of them all.