Monster Watch: The Monster Squad (1987)

When I was about twelve, one of the signs that The Admiral was secretly listening to me, and not just thinking up new and interesting fatherly pearls of wisdom to dole out, was when he took the afternoon off from work to take me to see The Monster Squad (1987).  I'd wanted to see the movie, no one else did (except for him, I guess), and so one day he took the afternoon off in the middle of the week - I guess it was summertime - and we hit the Showplace 6, ate some popcorn and watched Wolfman take one in the crotch.

I recall we both liked it, it was darker than I expected, maybe even a little grittier, and Dracula was straight up frightening in my twelve year old eyes.  And, as anything you consider to be not-dinner-table-conversation occurred, I sort of cringed at having to let my dad know I knew what a virgin was outside of the Christmas story.

The prior year, he'd also taken me to see Little Shop of Horrors when no one else wanted to go, so apparently The Admiral was into taking me to see movies that would bomb at the theater, but gain a following on home video.  But he also got really jazzed at the opportunity to watch old sci-fi movies like War of the Worlds with me, and was always up for a trip to see something like The Last Starfighter or The Untouchables.  Way to go, man.

But, man, it really seemed like nobody else but The Old Man and myself had seen this movie until the last fifteen years.  Although, eventually friends did see it on VHS or cable, as did I.

At some point, maybe in 2008, pal JackBart and I caught a screening at The Alamo Drafthouse with a good chunk of the cast, director Fred Dekker and screenwriter Shane Black in attendance.  The place was packed, the Q&A was great, and the cast and crew pretty forthcoming with details.  I was one of five people who let out a loud whoop when Black mentioned he was working on Doc Savage.

One thing that really stuck with me from that screening was the honest recollection of studio compromise, of what was originally envisioned, and a script that the director felt had been very watered down to serve studio hopes for a Goonies-type film leading to franchise dreams, rather than a movie about adolescents growing up when you know, Dracula shows up.  I'd love to read that original script some day.

80's Watch: Valley Girl (1983)

I was 11-ish when Valley Girl (1983) hit cinemas, and didn't wind up seeing the movie until circa early 1995 on VHS.  I have almost no memory of that 90's-era viewing, and it wasn't just the case of "Red Dog"we were going through.

Unfortunately, its safe to say that Valley Girl is not a movie for me.  That's fine.  It was never aimed at me as an 11 year old, a 20 year old dude of the 90's nor was it ever supposed to be watched by a 40-something me.

I mostly see the movie as an interesting artifact of the era, but it's not like the movie was reflective of much more than a very regionally specific view into kind of dull high-schoolers with an after-school-special obsession with popularity.  I don't like to use the term "shallow", but if I had difficulty remembering the film, perhaps it's because it's hard to get past the notion that both the main characters and A Plot of the movie wouldn't even really get your shoes particularly wet were you to wade through them.

In 2015, the movie is remembered for three things:

80's Watch: Repo Man (1984)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Repo Man (1984) may be the best time capsule for a 1980's that's been mostly lost to time.   Co-opted and reprocessed into mall fashion (eat hot death, Hot Topic), and generally been intentionally run over and run into the ground since, the subculture of disaffected, aimless youth of the 1980's has no real footprint remaining aside from the occasional nod to The Circle Jerks somewhere on a music website.  We've sort of made up the 1980's in the image of John Hughes movies and a Reagan's America that doesn't include the nuclear annihilation threat or the stagnant economy.

80's Watch: Blue Thunder (1983)

We'd bid some friends good-evening and I was following my usual post-cocktails routine of drinking a couple of glasses of water and eating something when 1983's helicopter actioner, Blue Thunder, came on our local UHF-channel/ CW affiliate.  Then, somehow, it was suddenly 2:00 AM and I'd watched the entirety of Blue Thunder again.

It happens.

No one is going to confuse Blue Thunder with a good movie, and, cut for TV, it's an even less good movie.  But when it's midnight and you're a few drinks in, Blue Thunder is, apparently, exactly what's needed.

In the cold light of day, I think I remember the plot.  It's been at least fifteen, maybe twenty years since I last watched Blue Thunder, but it goes something like this:

80's Watch: UHF (1989)

In the glorious summer before my Freshman year of high school, I saw UHF (1989) in the theater.  Twice.  I admit, once was at the dollar theater, but still.  In fact, one of those dates would have been right around now as my ritual was to go see a movie the night before school started, and that year, our movie of choice was UHF.  For a dollar.

You're welcome, Weird Al.

"Weird" Al Yankovic was an extremely well known figure by 1989, having broken through with his 1984 album "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3D and - much to my delight and surprise - he's still going strong in 2015.  He just played two nights in Austin.  His last album actually hit #1 on the Billboard charts.  Not bad for a song parody man who has managed to outlast and/ or outlive about 90% of the acts he's spoofed.

The movie has a razor-thin plot and is more or less an excuse for Al to move his talents for translating rock songs into jokes about processed foods into the more visual realm of pretty spot on spoofs of TV and movies.  And, really, he sort of very casually takes on the culture of TV in the 1980's in general.

80's Watch: Tapeheads (1988) - Let's get into trouble, baby

Tapeheads (1988) is most certainly a cult movie, but it's a sort of under-the-radar cult movie that feels like it should be one of those movies people talk about a LOT more than they do.  If people have seen it, it's one of the movies they saw 20 years ago, but probably not a lot since, and maybe not that many times.

80's Watch: Real Genius (1985)

I like this movie.  I still like this movie.

I saw it on VHS as a kid, and it was in heavy rotation at our house.  Highly quotable.  I remember being at a kid's birthday party in 6th grade-ish, and found out upon my arrival that this was what we were going to watch, and he got all sad I'd already seen it (why that mattered, I don't know), and I reassured him "man, I love this movie.  No problem." and all was well.

Let me get my problems with the movie out of the way, and then we'll all kumbaya around what I like.

80's Watch: Stripes (1981)

I didn't see Stripes in 1981 when I was six.  I know I was in middle school, and I'm pretty sure I watched this one sometime after my dad figured out I could watch an rated-R movie with him without blowing our cover when it came to the content of whatever it was we were watching.  After all, both of us knew The KareBear could be a little sensitive about language, violence and nudity in movies, and Stripes provides a bit of all of the above.

The movie is from an era in Hollywood when they were trying out these SNL alums as movie comedians and releasing the Second City performers into the wild.  It was also the era when female nudity made its way into movies in a big way, with a seeming prerequisite for many a comedy to include unnecessary shower scenes.

So, hats off to us, Dad, for silently agreeing to not discuss the many topless scenes in this movie with Mom.

80's Watch: Weird Science (1985)

Ah. John Hughes.  What exactly happened to you in high school, man?

What's weirdest, Mr. Hughes, is that it's the filter through which you experienced your formative years, applied to a very small handful of films, either created or so reflected a vision so all-consuming that its seemed to rewrite reality for your audience, leading decades of suburban kids to believe your movies have something, anything, to do with reality, and rewriting how movies and TV would portray high school, and allow all of us to cast ourselves as the outcast and the geek.  Hell, we all knew we were Cameron, not Ferris.  And that was the point.

Pretty clearly, Mr. Hughes, your perspective is that of a highly privileged suburban Chicagoan, something that is both incredibly specific and still enough part of fly-over country and enough a part of the generic American public school experience that we can't help but recognize the surroundings and relate a little when we see a gym with kids in PE dress-out uniforms* or the lockers along the hallway.  Even if the same public missed the point during those test screenings of Pretty in Pink and insisted on the wrong happy ending (which I imagine must have killed you inside, Mr. Hughes).   

Maybe in middle-school we believed it, but even by high school, we knew it was never as simple as the jock, the nerd, the princess, the criminal and the freak.

Comedy Subterfuge Watch: Spies Like Us (1985) and Top Secret! (1984)

I dunno.  Do I really have to talk about these movies?  I'm tired.

Yeah.  I'm not going to write about these movies.  I like Top Secret! much, much more than Spies Like Us.  How's that?

Bloom County Returns

Kids today will never understand a world with 3 TV networks, 1 or 2 newspapers and you all kind of know what's going on with those media outlets at all times.  Up to and including newspaper comic strips.

I was a kid who got up every morning to make enough extra time to read the funnies in their entirety.  I followed Mary Worth for years and will never understand any appeal to that strip that wasn't entirely ironic, but read it every day in order to not miss the one or two days per year where something actually happened.*  Like every other kid of the early 1980's, I liked Garfield first, and spread out to the rest of the comics page thanks to, first, stuff like Peanuts and Tumbleweeds, and later The Far Side and, of course, Calvin and Hobbes.

Back then, syndicated comic strips were big, big business.  Because strips appeared in the paper, you bought collections, the cartoonists would sell dolls, t-shirts, etc...  Maybe even cartoons, like Peanuts.  But if you did well, you could become a household name.

I don't remember exactly when I first noticed Bloom County, but I do remember my brother purchasing the first collection somewhere along the line.  He kept reading, bursting into laughter, then showing me the strip, so we wound up sitting on the floor reading it together, laughing so hard we cried.

SW Watches: Predator (1987)

I love the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Predator, with the kind of unironic enthusiasm you never really recapture after the age of 13, when we rented this flick during the golden era of action movies with a hard R-rating.  And this is not a movie that earned its hard R from gratuitous nudity of the era (in fact, nary a boob is seen that isn't an oiled pectoral muscle).  It's just straight up Reagan-era ultraviolence from Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Shane Black, Bill Duke and more.

And, of course, The Predator, one of the groundbreaking action movie concepts that no one has still really improved upon almost 30 years later.

I watched the movie for three reasons:

• I was recently gifted a Predator-themed shirt by CanadianSimon, and so I wanted to watch the movie in his honor
• Last summer I heard rumors that screen-writer/ actor Shane Black (who is in this movie) would be rebooting the franchise - and I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what he does.  I wouldn't trust too many other folks to take this on, but Shane Black is the right person for the job
• I was more than half-way into a bottle of Malbec and watching Predator suddenly seemed absolutely necessary*