1980s Movie Reviews

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life Review

October 3, 2016 by JD Hansel

This is it – the last film in the Monty Python “Holy Trinity” – and it’s certainly the weirdest.

Its “prologue” is the worst part, and it is very clearly directed by Terry Gilliam. I have mixed feelings about Gilliam, and I think this short is a good example of what bugs me about his work. Somewhere between the films of Terry Gilliam and the books of Roald Dahl is the land of “Semi-Horrific, Mildly Comedic, Awkward Whimsy,” or “SHMCAW” for short. Shmcaw is my least favorite thing in cinema, or at least it’s up there. This is that nauseating feeling I have when a film presents uncomfortable dehumanizing in a whimsical way, causing my face to scrunch up. It happens in Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry’s aunt inflates, and all throughout The Witches, and it happens in The Crimson Permanent Assurance when we’re supposed to laugh at random businessmen being forced to jump out of a building to their deaths by delighted elderly folks. The whole thing just feels wrong, but I will not detract any points from my rating, because this is the short feature that plays before the main feature, and Wikipedia gives it a separate article as its own short film, but I felt the need to mention it because it is (in some respects) inseparable from the film.

There is very little for me to say for the film itself. I think that it offers much of the kind of comedy I expected, but its main focus seems to be doing whatever any other directing, production company, writers, or group of performers would never, ever, ever be allowed to do in a film distributed by Hollywood. It breaks rules of cinema that no one ever invented – there was no concept of a rule against showing a man in an elephant suit for no reason, or devoting half the movie to unimportant fish for no reason, or giving an impossibly fat man who vomits profusely and eats until he explodes his own scene for no reason. Monty Python made up rules to break, all in the spirit of giddy, childlike (or perhaps childish) fun. There is, however, the question of purpose – Life of Brian has good reasoning behind its scenes, with an important message, but why does this film need to exist? Is it merely here to weird out the audience as much as possible?

Personally, I’d prefer to see more sense to the senselessness, more logic to the lunacy, and more method to the madness, but that is not what the film is for. Many have said before that it is essentially an extended episode of Flying Circus, and that’s what it feels like to me. It is not their best film, but it is pretty good, with several, several moments that continue to pop up in my head many weeks every watching the film, and they continue to give me a chuckle. The music is some of Python’s best, making for a very enjoyable soundtrack. This movie offers a fair mix of some of the best and the worst that Python has to offer, but by the 1980s, the Pythoners had learned how to ensure that their worst was still rather fun.

Masters of the Universe Review

August 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

Yes, I know this movie is crap, but hear me out.

There are times in life when we need a certain kind of movie to deliver a certain kind of experience. Very often for me, the experience I’m seeking is a movie that consistently bounces back and forth between being excellent . . . and being so bad it’s good. The area in the middle is obviously dangerous territory – that’s where all the bad movies live. But once in a blue moon, there’s a film that has many very strong elements, but its weak elements are so laughable that they don’t harm the movie at all; instead, they add to the film’s charm by being silly and dated. I seem to have the easiest time finding this experience with cheesy ’80s movies, and I picked up Masters of the Universe from the library because it looked like a fairly standard example of an ’80s movie. As luck would have it, this movie is the most ’80s movie I have ever seen – in all the best and worst ways – which makes it the perfect example of a movie that prances gracefully across the valley of mediocrity, leaping right from excellence to nanar and back again.

Let me be more specific about what makes it so bad (which I think paradoxically makes it delightful). First of all, this is immensely cliché, to the point that they even stole elements of their story from Spaceballs (as was pointed out in the Nostalgia Critic review) and made all of the villain’s soldiers look just like Darth Vader. The actors don’t give great performances for the most part, and everything feels scripted and rehearsed. At times it feels almost as though they were trying to make the movie as underwhelming as possible, by moving the plot from a fantasy world to friggin’ New Jersey suburbs. The logic of the film also makes no sense, as there are several occasions when the people of New Jersey should have noticed the crazy magic going on around them – and don’t even get me started on how ridiculously illogical that ending is. (I mean, the ignorance of the obvious “grandfather paradox” problems makes the ending almost unbearable in a way.)

On the other hand, this movie looks gorgeous. It’s one of the best looking I’ve seen because of its perfectly ’80s use of light, color, makeup, and old-fashioned special effects. The movie fully embraces how ridiculous it is, and offers plenty of over-the-top performances, which only get better when James Tolkan (Mr. Strickland from Back to the Future) arrives on scene, making the movie even more ’80s. The villain is so perfectly extravagant, and gives a wonderfully satisfying post-credits scene. The story is also very focused on music, particularly from synthesizers, so at this point I think I might be overdosing on ’80s nostalgia. And did I mention how awesome the color looks?

However, at the end of the day, I can understand why someone wouldn’t like this movie. I can especially understand why a fan of the original TV series would hate this movie. On the other hand, for those who want to inject deadly amounts of retro, nostalgic ’80s fantasy into their eyeballs, this movie delivers. Enjoy responsibly; don’t drive while high on ’80s.

Romancing the Stone Review

July 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

I’m a little conflicted. This movie is loaded with clichés. I generally don’t like it when a film is very cliché, but this movie is different. First of all, it’s from the early ’80s, so many of these things that seem cliche today may have been totally original at the time. Secondly, the fact that the movie is cliché does not mean it’s boring – it’s actually very exciting.

I’m not a fan of action for action’s sake, but the action in this film works well. I’m very impressed by the way that what would traditionally be considered a “man’s action flick” that makes up one part of the story and the “chick flick” that makes the rest of it are integrated excellently to make a rounded film that anyone can enjoy. It’s a very ’80s movie with a fun adventure, good performances, interesting twists, enjoyable romance, and one heck of a theme song. It’s no surprise that this team-up of director Robert Zemeckis and composer Alan Silvestri soon led to Back to the Future, but let’s not let the magnificence of the BttF franchise overshadow the delightful movie that launched Zemeckis in the beginning.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

May 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

I had to watch it at some point – it’s unfortunately my duty. That being said, by coming into this film expecting a terrible movie, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of it is interesting and enjoyable. Starting the movie with a laughing Vulcan is enough to make one curious, and the curiosity keeps cropping up throughout the film, which I think is a sign that the story can’t be that bad. True, the premise is strange and ridiculous – I mean, they essentially go find God in space – but I can enjoy just about anything as long as the character dynamic of the original Kirk, Spock, and Bones is present (unless it’s as tedious as Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture). I really don’t have much else to say about this one because, while I recognize that a lot of it is awkward, clunky, corny, unbelievable, bizarre, needless, and boring, I have to admit that whenever they focus on the relationships between the characters, I’m happy to be along for the ride.

Blade Runner Review

May 12, 2016 by JD Hansel

I must say, I did not like this film as much as I hoped I would – as much as I expected I would. That being said, since my expectations were based only on what I knew of its exemplary visual style and eerie aura, they were “sky-high” to say the least. What I soon discovered is that it’s the kind of movie that’s more of an environment than anything else, in that (after seeing it and learning the plot) it can be kept on in the background to set the tone or mood of the room, like a fireplace or lava lamp. Much like The Dark Crystal, the goal here doesn’t seem to be to tell a new and exciting story so much as it is to explore a world. However, the story and world are completely intertwined here, both necessary to explore, reveal, and shape one another, which makes it a good film.

I suppose I should explain the reasoning behind my previous statement. At the root of a story – or at least the great majority of mainstream novels, classic fables, and Hollywood films – is a very simple concept: given this unique set of conditions, here is the surprising outcome that follows. Need an example? Under the conditions that a boy travels through time to the year when his parents met, he could accidentally keep them from falling in love, erasing his own existence. I hypothesize that what is most often the driving factor in determining what movies we want to see based on their trailers is in fact our desire to find out “what would happen if . . . .” When we heard about a movie with the premise that toys come to life if no one’s looking, we were curious enough about what would follow from these conditions that we paid Pixar plenty of money just to see them show us . . . three times.

While I would certainly not wish to imply that any story based on this logic is a good one, I do think that this shows how Blade Runner is a step above other ambiance films. Consider again The Dark Crystal. The whole point of the film is exploring this unique world, but most of the key aspects of this world that make it unique are essentially inert as far as the plot is concerned. The puppet designs, inventive sets, and practical effects do not necessitate the plot and mostly aren’t necessitated by the plot (or at least not specifically, because the story only requires that fantasy elements of any sort be present to signify the kind of world it is). Reciprocally, the fact that there are weird sandy turtle hippies called Mystics and purple Shakespearean pterodactyls called Skeksis does not entail that they were once the same species before a big crystal broke – that stuff had to be added so the movie could have something of a story. With Blade Runner, the world’s defining quality is a problem with robots (that are indistinguishable from humans) running amok. From this premise, it follows that authorities would try to find, follow, and destroy these robots, and so it is no surprise that the story follows someone working with the authorities to do just that.

Still, the story is not the most interesting I’ve ever heard, and I wonder if perhaps this is because the movie is rather slow. I can deal with the slow pacing because I enjoy getting to wander around in this special, vivid version of Earth that’s been so creatively envisioned, but consequently, the movie runs rather long for such a simple storyline (at least in the version I watched, which is the original two-hour theatrical cut). It’s largely the visuals and sound that make this film work, not to mention the actors, and I generally do not reward a film based solely on mastery of these secondary elements – which are arguably mere affectations. This film, however, unlike other artistic works such as 2001, uses its visuals, sounds, and people not as a substitute for plot, but to highlight and saturate the plot. They do not distract from the story’s drama – they bring it vivid life, which does not make this movie perfect, but does make it a very special film that must never go unappreciated.

Romero Review

April 1, 2016 by JD Hansel

I have decided to relieve myself of duty. For almost 21 months now, I have been reviewing every movie I watch for my first time, with only a few exceptions (such documentaries, or movies I have only seen through Mystery Science Theater and related productions). At this time, however, I am concluding this journey by ending the “mandatory” status of my online movie reviews. This is the 100th movie I have reviewed in this series, so it is a fitting place to end. Why is this particular film special enough to serve as the conclusion to an important chapter of my life’s story? Because I believe that experiencing Romero was a significant turning point in my life; for I now understand the nature of humankind.

Pardon me for being even more pretentious and over-dramatic than Romero itself, but this is a very telling film about what people always have done, and what we always shall do. What we see in this movie is the struggle to combat oppression. Over and over and over again, all throughout history, people are required to stand up and fight just to be called people. Humans are always finding new excuses to oppress people, as can be seen in just the recent history of Africa, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, and of course the United States, among several others that my readers will just have to research for themselves. I haven’t time to list every instance in the past century in which an entire populations have been denied their basic rights, and have been treated worse than animals.

This is what humans do. We harm without reason, we kill without cause, and we torture for pure pleasure. We silence those with whom we disagree and deafen ourselves with the gunshots that kill them. We invent new ways to kill more people more quickly, to hurt more people more violently. We dehumanize anyone we feel we must in order to manage our own fragile, pathetic emotions. This is what we do. This is what we are.

However, it is not all we are. What makes the human race such a fascinating species is not the fact that we are so oppressive and abusive that revolutions of liberation are commonplace, but rather the fact that we have made these revolutions commonplace by refusing to tolerate intolerance. People consistently demand liberty and are even willing to die in order to obtain liberty for the posterity of their people. If evil is in power, we will find a way to overthrow that power, no matter how long it takes us to do so. This is what we do.

This is what we are.

This movie contains many other elements that I could obviously discuss in more depth. The Hollywood white-washing is, of course, quite embarrassing, and the way that this movie cherry-picks information (such as the unsettling fact that the United States was supporting the oppressive government of El Salvador at the time by providing training and arms for the abusive soldiers) can be frustrating. I have little to add about any connection to certain characters in the story, and some of the characters were a mustache shy of a cartoon villain, but I will say that Raúl Juliá’s performance as Romero truly did move me. If one considers it to be a religious film – which I suppose is fair since it was produced in part by a Catholic production company – than it is certainly one of the best. It may be slow and boring at the start, but the more the film reveals about the evils humankind must endure, and about the powerful response humankind fires back at these evils, the more the viewer must appreciate the beauty of liberation.