FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 6: JASON LIVES @ 40

Tommy from Parts 4 and 5, returns to Crystal Lake (now Forest Green) from his stay at a mental health hospital to kill the already dead Jason Vorhees to prevent him from ever returning. He and a friend dig up the grave and Tommy impales Jason with a fence spike which catches a bolt of lightning which brings Jason back to lethal life. Good one, Tommy.

And then it's kill kill kill, thrill thrill thrill and then the credits. Except that this part takes up the challenges of the previous one (which I won't be spoiling) and runs with them. The franchise holds its own from the first to the fourth better than most comparable horror franchises of its time. The second sequence begins with an acceptable twist but then we're really only retreading the formula with a few threads of commentary on the times to extend it. Where once there were hillbilly families and bikie gangs there are now white collar paintball teams. The summer camp is back, having been absent for a few installments, and this time we get the kids who go to it, not just the counsellors, adding a potential quarry for the man in the mask.

Also, there's the Tommy thread which has to do with indentity and agency as defined by suspicions against him. This is difficult to detail as it involves spoilers for gthe previous two parts but I can say that it's treatment of Tommy's predicament lifts it from the generally disappointing Part 5. If you remember that this is part six of a slasher franchise, Jason Lives does its job with some inventive kills that include character setups sufficient to prevent the murders from simply adding to the kill count. And there is the line, early in the piece: "I've seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly." Ten years on and that self-reflexivity became de riguer with Scream and its imitators.

What is there left to say about this installment in time, as its own film? It's lean and muscular and does what it says it will do. Neither particularly profound nor trying to be, ressurecting the monster and leaving him at the door to any number of sequels, the way everything should work.

I witnessed the origin of the F13 franchise as a one-off during Schoolies Week in 1980. It worked great magic. I'd seen Halloween the year before at the drive-in and its memory towered over this. Much later, when I relaxed my cinephilia with the admission that I love horror movies, I caught up with both franchises (along with Nightmare on Elm St, Hellraiser and a few others). 

Comparing the descendants of Halloween with F13 is a sobering exercise. While Halloween kept going off its own rails by copying the thing that copied it (F13) and strayed into potentially interesting territory with the third installment, once it relaxed into dishing up the kind of slasher movies that the original's imitators did, it lost touch with its inspiration and became the game it had changed. F13, for all its callous copying and base exploitation, kept showing it could try new things. That's pretty much why I bought a blu-ray set of the first eight plus the 2007 remake as I knew it would feel less try-hard than a comparable set of Halloween. F13 doesn't beg too much but does get on with it. That beats a fading current of nostalgia any time.

THE FLY @ 40

Seth Brundle picks up journalist Veronica at a science and technology convention when she tells him everyone says their invention will change the world and he says, "yeah, but they're lying." He does have a point. He's developed a matter transporter which he demonstrates back at his digs in the rusty quarter of town. She talks her skeptical boss (and romantic ex) into putting her on the story and one night when Seth gets drunk and jealous he puts himself through the machine, not noticing the stray fly that's followed him into the pod.

The Fly is often cited as the moment that David Cronenberg met the mainstream but he'd already done that with The Dead Zone (which even fans forget, however unjustly).  What The Fly more accurately signifies is Cronenberg bringing his trademark body horror to Hollywood. The one before Dead Zone was Videodrome which would not have flown in Hollywood with its paranoid themes of controlling media but The Fly was a remake of a '50s move (incidentally, one set in the Canada of Cronenberg's childhood years) and felt like a bankable update the way that Body Snatchers had in 1978 or The Thing in '82 (though that one didn't hit).

Regardless of what they thought they might have been in for what the suits and the public got was the work of an auteur glad to have a roomy budget and one careful not to waste a cent. What they also got was one of his most toughly visceral outings, an unflinching look at bodily disintegration and mutation. Cronenberg consciously chose against an allegory of AIDS which he felt would not only date the film but provide an irrelevant distraction from Brundle's story. To that end he encouraged his FX and makeup crew to concentrate on the effects of human aging, rendering Brundle's transformation all the more universal.

As it had in almost all Cronenberg's previous films, the exchange between strange technology and corporate interests gives way to the most profound aspects of the horror. The exclusivity of the Starliner housing development in Shivers serves as a perfect incubator for the sexually transmitted parasite. The pop psychologist's cultish manifestation of his patients' rage in The Brood gives literal brith to an army of homicidal monsters. In The Fly the initial entry point of greed is through fame, Brundle's in the science community and Veronica's in the publishing world, but the obvious commercial potential of the invention is there to begin with and, while not exploited in the running time, is clearly pointing to the future.

What doesn't point to the future is the effect on Brundle as he edges toward life as Brundle-Fly. Going from constant sexual arousal, climbing the walls, predigesting his food with acidic vomit, he is soon enough filling a display case of his unnecessary human features. They adorn the glass shelves of his museum of human history. The shedding of his humanity is reduced to a series of squelches and tearing dead tissue. As he narrates to a video camera how he is changing, we are increasingly aware that he is travelling on a one way ticket. This is a major departure from the '50s original in which rthe hapless Dr. Delambre continually resists his new state. Brundle not only accepts it but, thinking his new strength is a result purely of transporting, encourages Veronica to try it. When it's clear that he has fused with the insect his chief drive is curiosity and excitement. Only when this turns into deterioration does his philosophical acceptance emerge. Before the catastrophes of the final act, this is the scientist and his examination of his own passing.

The casting of the film included real life couple Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum who were about to have very good '80s and '90s. Goldblum exhibits the nervous intellect that still keeps him famous and it is perfect for Brundle's mix of rapid thought and frenetic self-effacement that gives the character his depth. He'd already delighted audiences with his similar turn in The Big Chill and this is his rarified version. Geena Davis with her sharp intelligence and warm deeper voice provides a presence that can complete the picture, beat for beat. This film always feels like a two hander rather than Goldblum's showcase and that is down to Davis' presence.

Also starring is the work of Cronenberg's workshop of effects and make up masters who served up a wealth of grotestquery that outdid all of Cronenberg's previous body horrors put together. From the mangled baboon to the various stages of Brundle's disintegration, to the maggot baby (with Cronenberg himself as the obsretician) to the final mess of a thing that yet invokes our pity and sorrow. All of it looks both physical and a little dated but dramatically so strong that we effortlessly watch along. 

The Fly saw David Cronenberg, the maestro of the weird idea in contemporary city life, reach the point where it felt he was finally comfortable with his actors. He's already worked with many highly accomplished casts but their performances can feel, in those earlier films, on the stilted side. With the young power couple at the centre of The Fly for the first time we know warmth in his stories. That final ingredient that makes The Fly more easily rewatchable than anything he'd already done (though my favourite will always be Videodrome) and it was an experience he took to almost everything he did thereafter that didn't require a cold touch (like Spider or Cosmopolis) completing the pieces to allow him to move between the mainstream and the personal without stylistic compromise. It depicted a terrifying transformation but it resulted in his own creative one. 

Viewing notes: I don't know if there will be a 40th Anniversary 4k of this in 2026 so I went ahead and watched my old Blu-Ray which is a superb transfer with clear impactful sound (frequent collaborator Howard Shore really got to play around with a big orchestra this time). On Disney+ with subscription, rent from Apple, Prime and Youtube, and out of print in Australia but always affordable through a market for around the $20 mark. 

SOMETHING WILD @ 40

Charlie, white collar on the rise, gets caught out in one of the microrebellions he stages to assure himself he's still vital (skipping out on a lunch bill). His pursuer is a young woman named Lulu with a flamboyant dress sense who recognises his motives and invites him on an adventure. Action by action, his resistance is broken and soon he's cheating on his marriage with her in a motel paid for by the work Christmas Club cash he was bearing. All the corporate heights he was heading for, with their rewards of status and riches in the conventional world are about to be stripped away, leaving him at rock bottom. Is he about to find out that that's exactly where he needs to be?

Jonathan Demme had over a decade's worth of exploitation flicks and thrillers, graduating from Roger Corman University in the '70s to the heights of Oscar nominations by the mid-'80s. By the time Something Wild hit his desk he had the luxury of taking his pick. It read like an old screwball comedy but with a harder more contemporary edge. The director who would launch the formalised serial killer genre in a few years with Silence of the Lambs would have seen that right off.

This is why the whacky looking poster art sent out for this movie is such a bait and switch. Melanie Griffith looks wickedly alluring and Jeff Daniels, upsidedown, is worried. But despite the meet cute outside the restaurant and the initial joyride she takes him on, the comedy steadily cranks down and gets replaced by darker matter. That's before the disruption in the middle act.

The '80s saw the emergence of a new kind of American upwardly moving salary jerk or perhaps just a new name for them. The Yuppie was a figure of fun or malevolance, the notion that the future of western culture would be in the hands of greed driven psychos was a terrifying one and, whether it was comedy like Desperately Seeking Susan or thriller like Fatal Attraction, the Yuppie Nightmare movie appeared to assuage our fear with their disintegration or satisfy our powerless envy through ridicule. This bled into the following decade even more extremely and had already been taken far enough by Martin Scorsese with After Hours that the jokes landed so hard they stopped being funny.

If I say that E. Max Frye's screenplay takes a softer approach, it's not to suggest that Something Wild is a lightweight piece but concerned less with attacking the Yuppie than understanding them. Demme ran with that, adding enough to let the gravity takeover feel natural. Demme keeps his eye on character and nurturing performances that give the extraordinary situation credibility.

Melanie Griffith, if she had started today, would have been called a nepo baby because she was Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren's daughter. But that would still be unfair considering she was a child actor and as a teenager played opposite Gene Hackman Night Moves, and then in Roar with the lions she grew up with. This role feels like a vindication of her life experience to date. After the whacky update of a Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn screwball agent of chaos has worn out and the wig comes off in her mother's house, she's Audrey with a real life story that involves pain. Griffith assumes the dignity smoothly, risking the audience's resentment at the loss of the sexy flake, and gets away with it. This is her film.

Jeff Daniels as Charlie has a tougher job winning us over from his ginger token rebellion. He's exactly the starched effigy the audience has been warned against, using everyone else's money to make his fortune regardless of everyone else. He is given his own pain and it's fed to us piecemeal but his playing of the turning point is exceptional, winding up the spring that shoots him into his new life he ums and ers and appeals to everything his antagonists should superficially assume about him. All of that suit-deep convention is jettisoned as he physcially leaps toward Audrey. He is careful, after that, to retain Charlie's timidity, tiny tics and casting of his gaze that speak of a life of passive aggression. Daniels was a realitive newcomer to the screen and while he might have been initially chosen for his clean-lined all American look he gave depth to prevent the kind of caricature that would have plunged this film into obscurity.

Ray Liotta, lean and hungry, who would soon hold his own beside De Niro and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, provides a prototype performance, adding a growling narcissism to his bad boy role. He is unpredictably dangerous. When Charlie stops a train of conversation about Audrey's sexual performance, retaining the better part of his old conventionality, Ray surprisingly relents but then moves on to further violence, a walking hair trigger.

Something Wild does look like the '80s cinema around it with big bright colour and soft light in the dark and a mix of needledrop and scored music. The credits open with a solo David Byrne track that sounds like Talking Heads, the score credits for John Cale and Laurie Anderson cover both arthouse and mid-'80s cache. Those are ticked boxes but there is one moment I noticed in the most recent watch that struck me. In a brief establishing shot of a street, a convertible glides past with a brace of yuppies in it, the song on the car speakers is New Order's Temptation, a song four years old at the time. While the chaos is transforming Charlie inside, the rest of America is still in the Yuppie dream, driving a vintage convertible, consuming the Noo Wave now that it is safe to do so. Such a pleasant alternative to something like About Last Night's constant screaming mainstream pop.

Jonathan Demme chose to quietly subvert the film he was expected to make by finding the sobering core in the screenplay. He might easily have got away with making the movie of the poster, raked in a good opening weekend and moved on but the question of what lay beneath the designer shirts and investment portfolios of his culture proved too compelling. It was an example that the film culture didn't heed, with the likes of Basic Instinct or The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Then again, it was Demme's Silence of the Lambs, showing he was happy to dress up base exploitation in glossy-budgeted finery and start one of the most detestable, convention-guarding genres in recent cinema history, so he wasn't really above anything. Except there was this moment where he went with his gut, plied his craft and made something durable.

Viewing notes: I watched this free with my Prime subscription in an HD presentation. Also available to rent through YouTube and Apple.

DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS @ 40

The Whitemans are rich but dysfunctional. Dad's boffing the housemaid while Mum's a shopping zombie. The daughter is anorexic and choosing bad boyfriends. The son is gender curious and irritates the rest of them with his invasive videography. Even the dog is depressed. One day, having lost his own dog to yet another Los Angelene bourgeois, the homeless and also depressed Jerry attempts to drown in the Whitemans' pool. Summoning the liberalism we've already seen in him, Dave rescues him and, feeling guilty, offers him the spare place until he can get on his feet again. One by one the Whiteman's essential issues are variously challenged and alleviated by the oafish but charismatic Jerry.

Jean Renoir's Bodu Saved From Drowning wasn't such a far fetched choice for Paul Mazursky in 1986. At the time, high concept comedies were machine gunning and hitting big. The master of the arch and strong Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice had plenty to broach with the conspicuously wealthy of Los Angeles with their gurus, pet psychiatrists, faux consciences, piling up the bank accounts and buying to be seen to buy at the expense of their humanity. 

All the targets are here and one perfect segue between a meditating Barbara humming and the buzzing of flies around Jerry, sleeping under a tree by the footpath says a lot about the approach. Mazursky is going to take pot shots but they will be coated in warmth and magnanimity. So, for a movie that has a lot of shadowy capitalism, sexual infidelity, risque sexuality and hot topics like dietary disorders, Down and Out is a comfortable satire.

Richard Dreyfus had a scandal to redeem himself from and does so with a complex blend of anxiety and base reason. Bette Midler gives Barbara a visible longing under the purchase-makes-perfect tornado. Nick Nolte plays his lumpen phsyicality and claimed worldliness as a smooth continuum. Evan Richards never allows Max's sexual curiosity to spill into camp. Jerry's cosmetic advice to Max is a touching moment, an encouragement rather than a sneer. Come to that, the Chinese business partners are just business people, nothing like the honking-accented alien in something like the then recent Sixteen Candles. Even the money grubbing pet psychiatrist can offer a word or two of genuine advice.

Mazursky's comedy is a natural inheritor of Renoir's, being worldly and intent on finding the foible and flaw that gives the characters strength. Could Little Richard's neighbour with his call-out of systemic racism have been given more gravitas? Yes, it's the one area that doesn't quite resolve. When he is banging out one of his classics, the party around him is distracted and flees toward a spectacle. Little Richard is playing in your living room; if you're running to look at something, it had better be walking on water. It reminded me of the heavily glossed depiction of the proto-rock star in the Girl Can't Help It when he and all the other early rockers perform in opulent venues they would never have been admitted to. Perhaps it's a subtler caspule of his vocal comments.

But Down and Out in Beverly Hills works because of its heart and the incsision that prevents it from blanding out into feelgood or getting overly caustic. It's a very happy coincidence of a well chosen tale to cover, and a cast at full strength. If you see that it's a mid'80s satirical comedy and you're thinking Splash or Bachelor Party be prepared to be warmed rather than slapped. So, it still works.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT @ 40

20 somethings Dan and Debbie hit it off and get serious. They both have complications for this: Dan has an ongoing thing with a married woman and Debbie has been doin' it with her boss. Despite this and each one's best friend warning them off each other, the pair are increasingly drawn and make the leap into moving in together. As candour and indulgent untruth collide we head for the big breakup. Will the breakup take?

Edward Zwick's mid-'80s rom com is, on its surface, one of the most refreshing of its type from its time in that it prefers a more naturalist approach to the high-concept big screen quirk surrounding it. Moonstruck was exuberant, When Harry Met Sally was subversive, but About Last Night plays those traits down in prefence for a play-though of a young relationship, how the youth in it adds volatility, how the hard bits feel alienating and ugly.

And this approach is not suggested by the cast of then-rising young stars. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore in the centre show us constant vulnerability. Is this belied by a physical beauty that makes them magnetic on screen? Now, that's just price on the popcorn, these two are giving real performances. The darker undercurrents throughout are survivors of the adaptation by Tim Kazurinski Denise DeClue of David Mamet's original play. Mamet struck his digestible severity early and while the adaptors do add a lot of '80s sass they are respectful of the mechanics Mamet set up. 

Elizabeth Perkins fits into her constant sass as though it's sprayed on. Jim Belushi as the boistrous Bernie is kept almost entirely at cardboard level. He's the most mid-'80s character of the entire cast with risque dialogue and claims of sexual exploits. He's closer to what a real Ferris Bueller would have been if John Hughes's star hadn't already made him a mainstream guardian. The spiky offsider was a staple and, while he's played down along with the rest of the cast, he's still only a double entendre away from the same role in Weekend at Bernies or Splash. Perkins' more passive and machine-like female counterpart to Moore's alpha girl Debbie fares a little smoother by the actor's own careful balancing.

Possessiveness, notions of pregnancy, total compatibility, double standards and more are inserted into the narrative but, unlike lesser efforts, these feel naturally discovered rather than shoehorned. The expection is the inevitable breaking point which feels, after everything we've seen them go through, the kind of contrivance that one of the other contemporary rom coms would insist on. Here it means that the bolstering of the two's unequal response to the scission must be industrial strength to merely play as narrative rather than emerge from it. The scene and aftermath suffer from anticlimax, as a result.

A bugbear of mine about American '80s representation of youth or young adulthood is the glaring AM radio hits that blare out at every point of silence in the scenes. This is to be expected in a film of its time and clime but it's just a thing I have about how mainstream American culture's lack of a punk period to shake it up, only ever got the vanilla knock off versions of punk and post punk. Think of how painstakingly careful the jukebox choices were made in Donnie Darko, it's almost all UK post punk pop. Then again, it was made in period costume; the times themselves were a lot more dire. I did say it was personal.

While the likes of Harry and Sally and Splash found descendants in the following decades, the kind of concerns of About Last Night morphed into the more serious fare like Blue Valentine. It's not a bad report card and it certainly says more for the heightened seriousness of the relationship movie and its place. About Last Night has a place. You might walk past it but the door is worth a knock.

Viewing notes: I hired this through Prime. You can still get the Blu-Ray for under $20. I'd recommend it for a freshener to any rom com playlist.

THE GOONIES @ 40

A local bad guy escapes from prison. Across town, a group of friends gather at one of their houses to help prepare for the move due to the imminent buy-out from the local real estate money grubbers. The Goonies from the Goon Docks, they stumble on an adventure which could get them out of the move. It leads them to the bad guy's lair. When the bad guy finds out about the Goonies' treasure map, things collide and the adventure just won't quit. Through old houses, waterslides, caves rigged with traps, and an old pirate ship and a cast from the sidelines of a Spielberg movie, this is everything that a mid-'80s American movie needs to be.

While characters are clearly defined with text book keynotes and the world building is of the magical suburban that was sold to audiences from the Spielberg stable and its imitators, we are treated to a plot that works a treat and moves at a clip. If you have seen Stranger Things but not The Goonies you might be struck with an odd deja vu. You might also notice that this PG rated piece with its hard on jokes and sex references got away with that. If anything the rating system has become more protective of the sensibilities of the under fifteens. Then again, with a cast dominated by that group, for whom else was this movie made?

Answer: for the family night at the movies and then the home video night. John Hughes had already nailed the teen and young adult date night market, Spielberg's concerns went straight to the audience that got into everything else he'd made or oversaw. The Goonies is a kids Raiders of the Lost Ark. It won't have the goofy Nazis but it can have the kind of baddies that would later appear in the likes of Home Alone. You don't get a single Indy Jones but why would you need him when each of the kids has his or her own quest?

The difference between just squeezing it down to essentials and making a movie that the kids want to see again and again is a director who can bring some serious mainstream muscle to the project, so that it never gets too cute. Richard Donner did the prestige TV to big screen journey like Frankenheimer or Lumet, only Donner kept at the big movie side of things, hitting huge with The Omen and Superman. Reigning in the cutesy tendencies of a Spielberg story that were allowed too much bloom in things like Gremlins, was part of the assignment for him. What we get from this is a non-stop fun ride with some acceptable life lessons for the little 'uns along the way.

As much love as this movie gets from Gen Xers with nostalgia, there is an elephant hanging around in the corner. The Goonies fulfilled the need for a second bite at the Indy Jones cherry but it was also doing service for the lack of a property that was claimed so hard that it was in development and negotiation purgatory for a time beyond the patience of the great marketeers of the Spielberg stable. The TV mini-series of IT would not get to screens until five years after The Goonies but the book was burning a hole in the yearning of its fans. Concentrating on the kids adventure theme allowed the team to avoid too close comparisons and any copyright headaches while churning out yet another rollercoaster ride on film. 

As rides go, it's a good one. Donner, clearly appreciating the bigger budget, pulls out some dazzling set direction and complicated camera moves along with a host of practical effects which work without needing an apology. However, for me, this is like Christmas, wondrous as a child but meaningless without kids of my own. I didn't bother with it as a new cinema release at the time as Spielberg and co. had long worn out their welcome for me. I saw it on TV in the '90s and then for this on streaming. It did kick better on the recent revisit. It's a film for an appetite; if yours doesn't crave it, you'll never pick it up but if it does, you'll be eating warmth.

Viewing notes: The Goonies is available on DVD and 4K through retailers but currently streamed through SBS on Demand. 

TEEN WOLF @ 40

Scott sucks at basketball. When we first meet him he fails his shot at the hoop in front of his schoolmates. The other thing that's happening is his body is changing. He yanks straggles of hair from his chest, his nose can detect a liverwurst sandwich through a layer of socks in his friend's locker and his ears are going pointy. Sent in to buy a keg of beer a a liquor store he scares the old guy behind the counter into selling it to his underage self. Then one night there's a full moon and he finally goes full werewolf and his father comes to him in his own werewolf form and tells him they need to talk.

At first, he keeps this from everyone as he's a teenager and self conscious but, a few accidental moments later, everyone soon knows and in a bizarre twist, he is accepted as a werewolf. His game improves and he is finally getting the attention of the alpha chick. So, as long as he's ok with it, he's a lycanthrope daywalker who's come into his body and style. Well, the alpha chick has a sporty alpha boyfriend whose jealousy is growing faster than the hair on Scott's body. Also, his childhood friend with the tomboy name of Boof is becoming much more than that. And he still sucks at basketball. And now everyone wants him to be the werewolf all the time. This is going to take some working out.

Rod Daniel's amiable teen comedy takes the nebbish coming of age tale a step into magical realism with a more absurdist tinge than anything related to horror. The insistence on Scott's life tests in his basketball skills is a continuing undercurrent that feels warm rather than cute and his growing negotiation with Boof feels natural rather than the brittleness that a John Hughes would have made it. In fact, in its own way, Teen Wolf is an effective counter to Hughes's self-important teenage epics. Not as much as Heathers would prove to be but in its developing celebration of teamwork rather than peer-enforced conformity earns it a lot of points.

Michael J. Fox, still high on his Alex role in the hit com Family Ties and a smash in the recent Back to the Future is perfect casting for Scott. Credibly good looking and affectless, his charisma seems effortless next to most of the cast of stock characters. Jerry Levine slots into the kind of identikit Ferris whacky guy who surfs car roofs and comes up with publicity and money making schemes. Seldom has a high schooler looked so thirty something. Lorie Griffin as alpha Pamela shows promise but is written so flat that all she has to do is look pretty and be casually bitchy. Susan Ursitti as Boof is the only younger cast member that meets Fox on his own level. Her quiet persistence and nuanced longing are masked with the kind of day-to-day relaxed face that her character does a little too well. Of the adults, James Hampton plays a lightly whacky werewolf dad to Scott which offers both gravitas and era-typical bizarreness to a comedy parent.

For a score we get a dominance of what Americans still think of as '80s music with a kind of Neanderthal take on yacht rock broken up by sugary electronics. That's the way you had to sell it at the time, even after some promising looks away like the Risky Business score (mind you, that was Tangerine Dream). What are you gunna do, it works for the party and prom scenes.

Teen movies from this context are dominated by John Hughes whose pontificating style imposed itself on everything not touched by the Spielberg stable. This is what makes a film like Teen Wolf feel so light. The ersatz Ferris Bueller, Stiles feels like a loser without the Bueller sociopathy and when Scott does his more gynmastic turn surfing on the car roof it feels more ho hum than it should. Instead of light I got the sense that this, like everything in the same vein, had to pass the Hughes test to get funded. There is unrealised seriousness here that might have broken it out. It would be years until Heathers and decades until the power of Ginger Snaps but who's complaining, Teen Wolf was a world wide hit which is what it was meant to be, it just happened to have been made at a time when looking away from the assembly line just felt too dangerous.

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD @ 40

An old hand tries to impress a rookie at a medical supplies warehouse by showing him cannisters containing preserved zombies. He claims they are the zombies from the real incident that inspired Night of the Living Dead. A little larking about results in the release of gas from one of the containers. Across town, a group of teens break into the local cemetery for a party. I wonder if these two plots will coincide.

Yes, of course, that's all that really happens in this film but that's the point. Dan O'Bannon's horror comedy happens in the same universe as Romero's Dead canon and wants you to know it. When one character witnesses the failure of a particular zombie-despatching technique he cries, "the movie lied?" The comedy here is not trained on Romero, though, nor is it a series of Zucker-style parody scenes. There is a solid narrative arc and something on its mind.

I still find the teen gang funny with its mix of subcultures. There's the mohawk punk, the pink haired girl punk with the moniker Trash, the new wave boy in the suit, the sci-fi post punk girl, and the clean cut middle class girl. At first you think that none of these people would be seen dead with each other but this is the mid-'80s when a lot of these looks were old hat and, having been in a scene dwarfed to a tiny minority by a big flabby mainstream in the early '80s, I can swear that anything outside of normie flocked together. Really, though, it's pretty typical American tone deafness for British trends as designed by a filmmaker about a decade older than someone who'd get that. 

Even if unintentional, it just adds to the fun. There is a lot of good conceptual and slapstick gagging going on at the depot and the mortuary, especially when the initial pair of colleagues are on the turn and the zombie fragment is questioned. There are pre-Dawn-remake running zombies (they don't work here, either) and talking ones, and this is the source point for the gasping voiced, "braaaains!" As the scale drops to skirmish level before the telescoped military involvement, things fall into place but the film continues to be nothing but entertaining.

Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead came almost two decades later and lifted the game by focusing on the central relationships, much as Romero astutely had done. The British flavour of dark irony allows it to fulfil both horror and comedy demands in a way that Return cannot. I dislike comparisons in reviews as they are only ever of slight use. However, the difference between these two films is instructive. O'Bannon's plays away from any real mockery of the Romero canon but must heighten the comedy to do so. This means that the zombie prevalence that ends every Romero Dead movie can be subverted for a double take that allows for the sequels that inevitably followed. Wright's film rules out sequels, puts a stridently deadpan cast upon the nightmarish scenario of the zombie plot but raises the stakes for the principal characters while keeping the faith. That makes it durably both funny and suspenseful when it needs to be. Return feels, and will only ever feel, like an 80s curio, however welcome it is with pizza and beer. Shaun stands solid.

That said, if you wanted a zombie comedy of lower concept than Weekend at Bernies 2 with yet some serious genre credentials (Google Dan O'Bannon, you'll have titles to catch if you don't already know). You won't be watching through your fingers but you won't regret the choice, either.

DAY OF THE DEAD @ 40 (Spoilers)

During the zombie apocalypse, a group of scientists and soldiers hole up in a massive underground bunker. The boffins are studying the living dead and performing experiments with them (mortisection?) though no one is quite certain as to the purpose of the work. The soldiers are getting restless and the scientists are running out of time to produce a reason for the doings in the lab. Tensions are high and things are on course to break. The zombies just keep shuffling outside the gate. There is a helicopter.

George Romero's third Dead film (after Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead) was the close of a trilogy until the late '90s. The three are related only by premise - the dead rise and besiege a group of people - but the change of setting offers a difference in approach and theme. Very broadly, Night explored racism, Dawn consumerism and Day the military industrial complex. Because of Day's business with the face off between guns and test tubes it can suggest a kind of coldness of execution but this is a hot one.

An opening dream sequence given as a real event will be repeated a few more times to good effect and allow the film to establish its gore horror credentials. The tension rising from a sole young woman in a micro society of macho men is a constantly unsettling slowburn. The danger of the zombies is established early as it needs to and even the firmly constructed bunker offers only as much protection as a mistake will reverse. And then there's Bub. Bub is the zombie that the chief scientist is rehabilitating with the idea of creating a servant class. He's already experimented on the corpses of soldiers killed in zombie duty and has a whacked out showroom that would fit comfortably into Jeffery Dahmer's daydreams. Yes, it's the science can but should it deal that surfaced more comfortably in Jurassic Park in the following decade.

Romero's characterisation can swing wildly between caricature and grown-up depth and we get the lot here. The soldiers are mostly callous oafs and their officer a scowling, trigger happy paranoid. The head boffin, Logan, is a loud academic type with an entitled bluster. Romero's expert blocking of authority in scenes is clear with Logan's entrance in a scene. He strides in with a loud self announcement, defusing the tension between the soldiers and the junior boffins, prepared to blarney his way out of the threat in the room which soon turns to him. This opens up on the later discovery of the ghastliness of his experiments by which point disgust and morality get explosively confused.

The film culminates in the generic zombie swarm and the deaths of almost everyone at the tearing hands and penetrating teeth of the living dead. Will the final trio get away? The point of zombies that can only shuffle rather than run is that their progress is as inevitable as death and doesn't care much if the living flesh gets devoured or gets away. But when it does catch up ... That's why all three of the first trilogy always work.

The score is an '80s electronic wash very much in the style of John Carpenter's music for his own films except that in this case it just sounds quite dated. Night used sound library music. Dawn had Dario Argento collaborators Goblin and Day quotes a signature motif at one point. Day's music isn't bad as such, but it does push the film into the mid-'80s shelf more than any other production element.

Romero's conceptualising is strong in these films. His output can vary wildly in quality, depending on how much of himself he was able to invest in each. I find Creepshow soft for its slickness but Martin tough for its conviction. It was taken a fair few revisits for me to get on with Day of the Dead as I was only able to retain the cartoony soldiers in memory and let the more textured character interplay fade. It lies there, though, the warmth and heart of what really is a zombie epic with very little subtext or subtlety. From the 2000s on, the zombie trend expanded into disparate universes, all feeding from the rules of the Romero films. He even contributed with updated takes that hinder the reputation of the first three. You only need stop here and smile as the final images play out and you know that you have seen the third and final of a trio of a collective masterpiece. It will feel like seeing it before it was cool.

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray for this review. It's getting on and is not of the crispest quality. To my knowledge there is no 4K of this available nor planned for its anniversary. Pity. This version can be seen on Brollie (Umbrella's streamer) for free or with subscription to Shudder and Prime.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA @ 40

Trucker Jack Burton wins a bet with his friend Wang Chi who can't pay up straight away but if Jack can give him a lift home he can settle. Oh, he needs to pick up his arranged marriage wife from the airport. Things get a little confused and the missus to be gets abducted by a gang. Jack and Wang are hot on the trail which leads to a weird world of wizards and underground bunkers. Cue title.

By the middle of the decade John Carpenter had a swag of genre hits and cult titles up his sleeve and took to this when its writers gave him the gig. It had begun as a western but then had been modernised until it was set in present day San Francisco among the Chinese community and the netherworld below it, featuring martial arts and magic. There's not only a lot of Hong Kong style wirework but the technique itself is mentioned in dialogue.

There is little point in describing the plot of this one. The action takes over, allowing for some character development, and doesn't stop until the end brings the inevitable pairings and scissions before the credits roll. That makes it sound shallow but this movie's glee at throwing out tough situation after tough situation will keep the shortest attention span occupied for its whole runtime.

The cast does their best to stretch their cartoony characters to fit the colour and art direction. Dennis Dun adds more depth here than to his gawky goof in Prince of Darkness two years later, and makes a lot out of his action hero by accident. Kurt Russell surely has the most fun out of his boastful and bumbling self-appointed action king role, getting inadvertently injured more than anyone else and being wrong in most of the decisive decisions he makes. Standing as he did beside the Schwazeneggers and Stallones of the era, he presents something like what an action man might be like in real life, all one liners and incompetence. And then there is the young Kim Cattrall, the weak link who can't quite resolve the jarring mix of Marilyn Monroe and Kathleen Turner and ends up short of her character's comedy and decisiveness. But it is James Hong who steals everything as Lo Pan the sorcerer, an evil ancient man here and a feeble old man by the light of day, whose lust for immortality is grounded in more fleshly lusts that might have reminded the likes of Kim Cattrall of more than one casting sessions when starting out.

In a few ways, Big Trouble is like a funny presage of the more serious idea of Prince of Darkness with a pair of forces drawing together for an apocalypse. More pertinently, if you were to watch all of Carpenter's movies back to back from Dark Star to They Live, Big Trouble would be a welcome action comedy between the solemnity of Starman and the sci-fi doom of Prince of Darkness. If it is neglected in his canon even by fans it's surely not because of underperforming at the box office (the mighty Thing also had that honour) but more from the inconvenience of its jutting out. Christine is better recalled even if it is less Carpenter than Stephen King. Perhaps fans just wanted more Snake Plissken or MacReady from Kurt Russell or found the refusal to overly stereotype the Chinese community against the times. Nevertheless, it's one of Carpenter's most persistently fun from all his works and does its job with every viewing.

Viewing notes: I watched the Disney+ presentation at Blu-Ray resolution and sound which is superb and fitting. You can still buy a well polished DVD at a low price point.

NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST 2: FREDDY'S REVENGE @ 40

Jesse Walsh wakes from a nightmare that features the blade-gloved Freddy Kruger. His family has moved into the ol' Thompson house on Elm St and the bad one has been dropping into his dreams on the regular. When his little sister at breakfast hears his blood curdling screams from his room she asks her mother why he can't wake up like everyone else. It won't be the last joke in this film but it's the best. That's not to say that the Elm St's first sequel is poorly made, it's just that the nature of the gag is at odds with the rest of this film which, itself, is at odds with its own franchise. Elm St 2 is like Halloween 3.

Elm St movies generally go like this: a group of teens gets together and vanquishes Freddy Kruger. This one the victim and perpetrator are the same as Freddy possesses Jesse, forcing him to repeatedly commit murder: the protagonist is the slasher. It's significant that such an isolating approach should be applied to a character who, though new to his school, pretty much fits right in with the types who would mark him for bullying. They try but he pushes back and fits among them without a real struggle. He and the king of the jocks unite in adversity against their PE teacher which binds them.

That's the other thing about this film that needs a note. It's been outed for so long that it doesn't count as an elephant in the room. Nightmare on Elm St is a gay. From the dacked wrestling to the leather bar to Freddy's facial caress to his failed makeout with Lisa ending with his refuge with Grady to a near numberless other instances, the theme leaves subtext and becomes text progressively. If Tom Cruise a few years earlier thrilled audiences by dancing in his parent-free house to a rock classic, Jesse unpacks his things in his room to perky electro disco, bumping and grinding with an array of increasingly flamboyant specs.

These aren't the controversial aspects; those have to do with casting, writing and production. I won't cover the whole story here (it's not my community and I can't speak for them) but it's worth pursuit with some wrong-headed sleaze by writers and producers and a history of self-contradicting statements. If you've heard that this is the gay '80s horror you should know that wasn't conceived in inclusive spirit but more exploitatively. That it has become a cult hit with the community is, however, inclusive which serves as an example of cultural redemption that the horror genre seldom knows.

The story itself moves at a clip as Jesse makes his way through high school and Freddy makes his way through him, leaving a trail of corpses and a subplot of queasy manipulation. The fantasy sequences are darker in lighting and mood than in the first and Freddy's seduction of Jesse has the uncomfortable feel of predation. The mid-'80s forced pastel pallet of waking life is a strange relief after that. The finale is strong and, given the progress of the story preceding, has a persistent sexuality to it that leads to a coda of ambiguous experience (who is doing the dreaming?).

That this outlier in its franchise has been adopted by the culture it was once intended to exploit is a kind of happy ending. As an Elm St movie it is overshadowed heavily by the original and the third installment which is often pegged as the best in the best of the bunch. Later entries suffered the same dilution, boiling it down to a series of scenes and locations in a decreasingly purposeful loop. Freddy becomes a wiseacre and loses a lot of his power and the movies often muddle between quick-buck horror and teen comedy, finding an easy home in movie nights on VHS and TV movie marathons. The first three parts, however, stand as strong as a continuous unit as the first four Friday the 13th titles, each bringing something of themselves to the table other than regurgitation. If you've never bothered with it, hearing that one and three are the ones to see, press play on it and find riches.

Viewing notes: I watched my copy from the very well presented Elm St box set on DVD. While the original benefits massively from a 4K upgrade (bought separately) these discs are at the top of the game as far as the earlier tech goes and are often very pleasantly discounted by retail outlets. Otherwise, it's a cheap rent from one of the online sources.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN @ 40 (spoilers on the milder side)

Bored yuppie Roberta follows the ongoing communication between two lovers through newspaper ads. When the pair set up a meeting there in New York, she has to go and see it happen. But Susan pinches a pair of priceless earrings and Jim has to go on tour and gets a friend to meet Susan who gets carted off before he, Dez, mistakes Roberta for Susan who has been knocked over and has lost her memory and -- There is so much that I have to leave out just to say this much. For the plot, you're best getting in front of it, yourself.

Desperately Seeking Susan was an instant hit. It had the quirkiness of the comedies of the '80s, a magnetic lead player in the young Rosanna Arquette and the who-cares-if-she-can-act-or-not star power of Madonna, riding the first wave of her superstardom. It won its opening weekend and went on to a very healthy first run cinema life. And if you see it, you will not wonder why.

The assumption in the leadup was that it was a star vehicle for Madonna who would be in the lead role. That might have promised great box office but didn't bode well for the film itself which at first sounded like a vanity project. It might have been the star power that gave it that initial rush but it was the movie itself that kept it going.

First, it's not Madonna/Susan in the lead but Arquette whose Roberta whose marriage to the dully narcissistic hot tub king Gary seems doomed to evaporation and for whom the intrigue of Susan and Jim seems more like life. While Gary interrupts his own cocktail parties for all his guests to see his home made ads on late night TV, Roberta cannot keep fading into the decor. This is another entry into the Yuppie Nightmare Cycle, also inhabited by Arquette in the recently reviewed After Hours. Susan is by far the better film.

Why? Susan Seidelman. The young director had already impressed with her Smithereens which got her into  competition for the Palme D'Or at Cannes for its handling of a central character that only a mother could love such that audiences were rivetted rather than revolted. Here, she tones down the whackiness in fashion at the time for comedies and pushes forward Roberta's plight. For all the frenetic zaniness of Susan and Jim's chaos we see a steadily developing character, one who witnesses her own development as her recollection returns. She places herself in the kind of life that she probably wanted before she signed on to yuppiedom.

Arquette's career trajectory has kept her in work before and since Desperately Seeking Susan but this is her sole lead. That's a shame as the strength of her turn here carries the film. At a time when Reaganomics was creating tribes of self-entitled greed monsters, Arquette's farewell to the insubstantial Gary is quiet and poignant. And in scenes where the screwball comedy is given pause, she gives us strength.

Madonna, for her part, does not disgrace herself in the title role and emerges as perfectly engaging, possibly glad that the film was not an extension of her MTV career. Along with Richard Hell (also in Smithereens) she hits her marks and says her lines, conveying real personality. Aidan Quinn as Dez comes through as someone you'd want to know. There is moment early on when he notes that someone is carrying speakers down the stairs that look familiar and, getting to the next landing, shoots a rapid glance of concern which tells us everything about the scene to come. It's a small but naturalistic joke. 

Mark Blum has the most thankless task in the role of the icky Gary, the husband who seems to think he has bought his way into a magazine lifestyle including his wife, he's all smiles and slime, saved by his unawareness of that from self destruction. Oh, something that doesn't carry well through time is the club scene where he is weirded out by the kerayzee dancers. Sorry folks, I know it's a tie in with Madonna 'n' all, but no club in 1985 that played Into the Groove would be anything but mainstream. Maybe it's a comment on how bubble-bound Gary is, but nah. It suffers from the same try hard flopping as the similar one in After Hours. 

Desperately Seeking Susan deserves its place among the highpoints of '80s mainstream cinema. Seidelman's wise choice of avoiding the pitfalls of fashion allow it endurance as the story of a search by Roberta for herself. The comedy also undermines the solemnisation of this so that the point of Roberta's scission can have its moment strongly. Thus, in the best way, this is a great '80s movie because it does and doesn't give in.

BRAZIL @ 40

A fly in an office causes a misprint (Tuttle becomes Buttle) that sends an assault team to an apartment.  The woman in the flat above witnesses the false arrest. Across town, young and unambitious clerk solves the administrative problem by delivering a refund cheque to the arrested man's widow (he was interrogated with extreme prejudice). He catches sight of the woman in the upstairs flat and can't believe that she is the one he has been seeing in his weird heroic dreams. He gives pursuit but she evades him. He has to find her. She has to subvert him. A rom com in dystopia.

Terry Gilliam's 1985 satirical comedy shows him in greater control of his material than he ever had been. That said, the film is a wall to wall show of comic excess. City scapes are endless blocks of light and shadow, gigantic stacks and silos dominate, peaks on uniform caps are huge, the depictions of age-defying plastic surgery are bizarre, and nightmare ducting is stuffed into walls and between floors. The score swings between many versions of the title song and a stern orchestral pallet that most strongly resembles Wagner.

What Gilliam does not have under firm control is encouraging empathy for his central character, Sam. Sam is a staid bureaucrat whose motivations away from his his professionally immobile mediocrity are erotic dreams in which he is a winged superhero who battles giants to save a woman as fantastical as his self-image. When he's not a pen pusher, he's a Wagnerian superman. It is comedy that when he meets the woman in real life and she is not a long haired cloud maiden but a truck driver who might also be a terrorist and that the only weapons he has to "save" her are either clerical or pointlessly reckless. The ungenerically delayed meet cute is a perfectly timed slapstick. Their first kiss is similarly fumbled.

Out in the streets, the scene is a kind of what really might have been answer to Orwell; a capitalist totalitarianism. A little girl is overheard to tell Santa that all she wants for Christmas is a credit card. The Salvation Army band had been rebranded as Consumers for Christ. The women of influence past a certain age are having their features stretched like plasticine or remodelled to death by cosmetic reconstruction. The chief terror figure is a rogue plumber whose life was saved at the beginning by a fly whose mission is to curtail delays in repair calls. When the regime collides with irregularity it eradicates it rather than bends with it toward social harmony. We who have witnessed pubic bodies sold to private interests in the past few decades know this all too well. Dollars over service business means a ready ditching of service and localised cartels, not healthy competition.

If Sam is impossible to empathise with before he, too, is a victim, his counterpart, Jill, we're with from the first. Her anti-authority stance, sassiness and ready action make us wish that we were following her. Then, though, Sam would be a pest rather than a slowly learning saviour. The problem is in the writing, here, rather than the casting. Jonathon Pryce's Sam plays his character as written, showing intelligence above others but repressing it, he is also drab. He's meant to be but when he sees Jill for real his driving pursuit of her feels like unlovable lust rather than liberating desire. Until she gets the opportunity to pushback and deal with the consequences, there is no path to Sam's redemption. Kim Greist's playing a touch higher than the word demanded is the one of the pair who makes the difference.

The rest of the cast is stellar. Robert De Niro relishes playing funny. Michael Palin shows comfort in a serious role. Ian Holm is a kind of human Ash from Alien. Katherine Helmond as Sam's interfering mother plays it deliriously bourgeois beneath walls of prosthetics. There are so many more but Gilliam's show of skill with a large cast is clearly more developed than he demonstrated in Time Bandits or Jabberwocky.

Gilliam had intended to call this, among a few other things, 1984 1/2. This was ruined by Michael Radford's sombre adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The choice of Brazil, referring to a song of idyllic escape into fantasy, travels far better through time than the Pythonesque joke of the original title. Moreover, that Gilliam built a very different world to Orwell (and Radford's adaptation), suggesting a different choice that led to a very similar outcome. Orwell was concerned with a Britain ruled by totalitarians who had long abandoned their socialist principles. Gilliam examined the effect on a starting point of capitalism to the extent that consumerism was the doctrine. 

An interesting aesthetic choice was not so much the use of technology to oppress the populace but that it was struggling to keep up with the job. Wires stick out, tiny computer screens need large magnifiers to be read and, while there is an online world it is mechanical and past it's shelf date. This is partially done for laughs but the '80s was a time of great technological grandstanding with shrinking computers promising a miniaturised future of boundless public engagement. With the likes of War Games, Brainstorm and Tron delivering cautionary tales that also indulged in the fun possibilities, Brazil's buzzing id. checkers and faulty auto alarm clock systems suggest more the jokes about Soviet technology. The low res dot matrix print-outs depended upon in the film were actually better than in real life is an odd art department anomaly, considering the intent.

The same guy who was suspicious of Radford's film at the time was the same who thought this was another anti-Soviet taunt. When I asked him if there was a depiction of Soviet life he did like he advanced Gorky Park. Nothing from the actual USSR, a Hollywood thriller. Perfectly intelligent bloke but with the film evaluation of an apparatchik. Brazil also came under attack for adopting fascist ideology. This is mostly from Sam's dream sequences which play like Duran Duran videos if they covered The Ring Cycle. Hitler's moviemaker Leni Riefenstahl was evoked more than once by writers who didn't get that the dreams of a functionary clerk might well be epic and ironically on the scale of fascist art. Gilliam adds a real pathos to these passages. You would really have to struggle to find a sincere fascist moment in them.

Terry Gilliam was still wresting his way out of his association with Monty Python and would continue until he stopped using members of the group in his casts. His 1990s are justly celebrated with entries like 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing. Unfortunately, the troubles he had with the suits of the business are a plague to this day and he still struggles to get projects off the ground and then to release in cinemas. The only good thing about that is that, when he does, at the end of adversity, he brings a full vision to the world, it's massive and enjoyable. For all of Brazil's infrequent heights, its awkwardness and missteps, it is one of those exceptions. That it has had such a profound effect on the look and feel of so much of the imaginative cinema that followed it eases its imperfections smooth. It's still funny. It's still profound. It still works.

Viewing Notes: I watched the HD presentation on Disney +. This is the longer cut, approved by Gilliam and even though it's only ten minutes longer, it does drag. Unfortunately, the only way to see the original cinema release is to get an overseas release which includes it among the other cuts (happy to be wrong about this).

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR @ 40

The clocks have just struck thirteen in London, the capital of Airstrip One and aging Winston Smith outer party operative is grinding through another day at work. It's not all bad, though, as he exchanged a look with that nice inner party O'Brien man and you can never underrate that. Then again, it balanced out with a poisonous glance from that young anti-sex horror who is probably thought police. It's the mid-eighties and what used to be Britain has become a nightmare of oppression under a totalitarian regime waging eternal warfare with Eurasia ... or is it Eastasia? Whatever, if it were just the paranoia, made worse by the two way tele screens in every room that, unlike everything else, never seem to break down, he might have a chance at getting through a day without almost collapsing.

Michael Radford's adaptation for the cinema was produced and released in the year itself. He presents a London of Orwell's imagination that looks like the 40s if they'd never been repaired. Apart from inner party dwellings and the ministry buildings, the city is dirty and in constant slow decay. When the sense of self-fulfilling power is clarified, it is evident that none of this will improve. That which stands to fall shall fall and the Party will maintain. An anaemic colour pallet and dour score (more on that later) make the claustrophobic daily life we see feel interminable. Winston frequents old shops in the prole quarter, buying things from a past he wasn't part of like an unused plain paper bound diary. He knows this itself could doom him but considers his life past the point of struggle. The liaison with Julia (not counting that as a spoiler when it's an earl plot point) is similarly flavoured with the nostalgia of the long dead.

John Hurt as Winston was already progressing to a status as a craggy master of his art, always bringing (even to Caligula in I Claudius) a puzzled sadness to his characters who, even at the top of their game knew at moments the great ruling futility of sentient life. Suzanna Hamilton, on the other hand brings a fire to Julia. She makes her blue-grey boiler suit sexy, especially when showing how much restraint she needs to keep herself from napalming everyone around her. She shows intelligence and cheek behind an expression calculated to look party-first. And then there's Richard Burton as the inner party O'Brien who brings a quiet control to the oppressor in chief. It is his voice that, after decades of alcohol and more recently developing illness, delivers the line: "If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." It's almost a whisper but there is such solid bass below it that the strength of the sound alone would kill the fight in the strongest of us. Hurt's agonised, degraded Winston on the torture table can only respond in whimpers. If you only heard the audio of these scenes, you wouldn't sleep for days.

George Orwell's nightmare scenario became a synonym for governmental smothering and as the year approached, media pundits played spot the overtone, using terms like newspeak to augur democracy's close of play. Orwell tells the story from the perspective of the lowest of the middle stratum who can observe the elite inner party as well as the self-defeating consumers of the proletariat. By day he alters public memory when a citizen becomes an unperson or an economic prediction falls short, changing media reports in news archives. Sometimes he creates war heroes to cover public disgraces. In case you thought that all you had to do was get better at your job there in the Ministry of Truth, consider Winston's colleague Syme whose fevered enthusiasm for shrinking the English language in the Newspeak Dictionary is only singling him out for erasure. Don't slack off. Don't be too eager.

Radford's script wisely avoids the clumsier of Orwell's imagined future. Anyone who composes a story for the future will invent terms that sound too contrived to ever be uttered by people. Partially, this is intentional alienation, to press the point of a future setting. While the scarier terms like Artsem (artificial insemination) and  Ingsoc (English socialism) make it through, awkward formations like rocket bombs or telescreens don't. All terms get shortened with use (fridge, bike, TV) with very few exceptions. Radford just leaves them out as their function is already clear.

If you haven't read Orwell's novel, I'd recommend it. Not only is it an effortless task, however severe its events, it is one of the most articulately formed and interwoven warnings against totalitarianism ever written. This film is not the only one made of it but, of those I've seen, I prefer it. The intention was source fealty and, within reason, that happened. 

Oh, I need to interrupt for a second. This film was largely funded by Virgin a corporate entity that commissioned a electropop score from duo The Eurythmics. While it's serviceable, it does none of the harder work that Dominic Muldowney's already finished music does. I clearly recall the song Sexcrime being played between the last cinema ad and the start of the film and friend Sarah's look of crushed embarrassment. It sounds like a Eurythmics song but in that context also sounds like someone trying way too hard. The Muldowney score is generally the one you'll hear if you see this film but for a while there, the broadcast version had the other one, as though a few bars of contemporary pop would lift, um, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The story is claimed by each end of politics as a warning against the other. Yes, the original intent of the movement that began Ingsoc is along Marxist lines but the criticism of Marxism through this is shallow and point-missing. No one getting the hell beaten out of them by political prison staff takes a moment to think, "well, at least they're lefties". The funniest response to this film that I heard at the time was of a student council pollie who joked that the only thing he liked about it was that the good guys win. 

Anyway, by the point of the setting, whatever principles drove the initial motion have long been abandoned and hold no visionaries nor thinkers. O'Brien is a ruler of reality. He and his inner party are doing what they must because they are able. There is no point beyond retaining power over a confused population. If that isn't a lesson that this bastard of a year needs I don't know what can be.

Then again, we live at a time when a film like Civil War can get ridiculed for suggesting an alliance between California and Texas without anyone stopping to consider that the point might be that conditions had become so dire that these two odd bedfellows would need each other. O'Brien's tests of Winston's compliance, demanding that his responses be genuine, just kept reminding me that the approach of the past decade where the phrase fill the zone with shit can win elections. Freedom is slavery. War is Peace. Ignorance is bliss. Orwell's tale is a powerful one but I wonder if, now, it might not just feel more like a celebration. The good guys win, they just aren't who you thought they were. Well, that's what they're telling you.

BLOOD SIMPLE @ 40

Bartender Ray is driving his boss's wife Abby home and their talk leads to revealing their attraction to each other. The photographs of their night in a motel are given to the boss Julian by the private detective he hired to straighten out his suspicions. When Ray shows up at the bar Julian, barely under control, warns him that Abby is playing him and they part in dark moods. Time for action, Julian calls the detective back and orders a hit. The chain is on and wound tight. The line on the poster read: The thriller is alive and well in Texas. Who knew what film noir meant in 1984?

Joel and Ethan Coen did and how.  Their debut feature did modest business at the cinema but was held up to the heavens by critics who recognised its taut construction, black humour, pace and characters as one for the future. And the Coens became a brand. By the end of the decade with the likes of Miller's Crossing and Fargo in the near future, citing the team as a favourite to people you didn't know outed you as one of the warmer cinephiles who did know what noir was but wouldn't correct you on details.

The Coens' cache was a rarity for film making teams, getting the auteur stamp early. A scene where the camera, moving along a bar and then lifts over the body of a collapsed drunk and back down again in this film is the kind of takeaway nugget that anyone could donate to a party conversation when new movies came up. It illustrated the kind of knowing humour reserved for the quietly adept in the previous decade and wasn't a spoiler. The Coens made their own cache, happily wearing cult status until their titles started paying for themselves and all that brand power starts. Just shy of the kind of rote admiration garnered by Stephen Spielberg, who peaked early and stayed there, the Coens added cool.

Cool is what Blood Simple bleeds. Instead of the by then old hat means of suggesting links to past genres and shooting in black and white (that would rise again in the '90s) the Coens chose the contemporary pallet of hard neon and soft light and thick colour like Michael Mann's decade-defining Thief from 1980. They knew they were making a noir and didn't want to distract their audiences from it, they wanted it to look like a noir if made in the mid '80s when it was. Apart from the diegetic Same Old Song played in the bar jukebox, the music is brooding and electronic, keeping a tight grip on the tension.

The cast was largely unknown but fit exactly into their roles to the extent that they appear both as essential components to the narrative but also the art direction. John Getz seems chiselled out of oak, a guy who falls into his gravity and never needs to do more than mumble, sexily macho. Frances McDormand's first film role shows her as a femme fatale who offsets natural beauty with Texan deadliness and practicality. She, of course, has gone the furthest of the cast from this faux ingenue to the potty mouthed harridan of her gleeful maturity. Dan Hedaya wasn't new to any size screen and keeps his constantly threatening emotional combustion barely under control. The least forgettable turn of them all, here, is M. Emmett Walsh as the detective with his gymnastic voice drawling around a stream of southern wisdom and his dodgem car physique. It's one of the decade's most durable performances.

The Coens don't rate their own debut highly. It displays their style, leanness of writing, and clarity of vision perfectly but it ranks low with them. Of course, when your rap sheet includes Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou among many bangers, they can afford to dump on a few (though there are still The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Intolerable Cruelty and more of those, of course. Nevertheless it was the expectation of more of the tension and white knuckle comedy that kept us lining up for the next one. When they broke through it was with that cool intact which kept them on the indy side of approval long after their budgets and returns moved them into the mainstream. Blood Simple didn't start American arthouse cinema but it did embolden the style of it for over a decade as the Hal Hartleys and Quentin Tarantinos rose in the following decade.

I saw this on second run after my move to Melbourne. A bunch of us went down to the Richmond Valhalla cinema on Victoria St. After the usual quirky sketches and quirkier trailers for upcoming indy movies, this spectacle came up and we thrilled to its almost overcompetent finish, the perfectly timed visual gags, the noir intrigue and gleeful abandon to the sharpening and polishing of crime genre tropes from the '40s. It's movies from this time that I'd see in places like the long departed Valhalla that match electronic scores with edible colour visual pallets and will forever give me shivers of nostalgia. Blood Simple, the lean, little neo-noir that threw in a fable about capitalism along with its bleak adventure and belly laughs, will always be near the centre of my affection for the '80s. That it's still good apart from that makes it the same as an old stone building, beautiful on the outside, dependable shelter on the inside.