Remo Williams

 

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)

Dir. by Guy Hamilton

Starring Fred Ward, Wilford Brimley, Joel Grey and Kate Mulgrew

[content warning: discussion of yellowface, sexism]

Plot:

A New York cop is recruited against his will for the secret spy organization CURE.  His death having been faked, he is given the new identity of “Remo Williams,” and is sent to train with a Korean martial arts expert so that he can become an assassin for the government.  However, his training is cut short when the schemes of a corrupt arms manufacturer threaten to reveal CURE's existence.

Nostalgia

This is another of the movies (we had a good hundred or so) that my parents had taped off of TV sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.  I remember watching it many times, and enjoying the action and the humorous character of Chiun.  It was unavailable on DVD for forever, so I probably hadn’t seen it in at least a decade, though I know we had that VHS tape up until we got rid of our VHS collection in the late 2000s. 

Rewatch

Remo Williams really wants to be an American James Bond movie.  It was directed by Guy Hamilton, who’d helmed four of the Bond films (including Goldfinger), and was based on a popular series of pulp spy novels, much like Ian Fleming’s.  It features fistfights, shootouts, martial arts, infiltrations into secure facilities, and other Bond-like shenanigans.  It also features some of the casual sexism and racism that were hallmarks of the 60s and 70s Bond films (more on both of these later).  However, despite all of this, it doesn’t quite come together as the exciting adventure film that it clearly was trying to be. 

For the most part, I’m going to have to fault Hamilton.  The film is shot and edited like the early 70s Bond films that he’d worked on previously, and it’s clearly behind the times.  This movie came out four years after Raiders of the Lost Ark and only two years before Lethal Weapon, and yet its style seems antiquated compared to both of those movies.  Fred Ward, though a good actor (I still love him in Tremors, which we'll get to eventually), can’t quite pull off the action scenes convincingly.  It probably doesn’t help matters that he looks a lot like my childhood Tae Kwon Do instructor, former professional kickboxer Kerry Roop, and clearly can’t do moves like he could.  And most of the big set pieces, with one exception, end rather anti-climactically. 

Not quite Sean Connery

That exception is the one really good sequence from the movie, the fight between Williams and a trio of construction workers on the Statue of Liberty.  During the mid-80s, the statue underwent a two-year restoration project, and was covered with scaffolding.  While nowhere near the level of, say, Jackie Chan, this scaffolding was effectively used for a precarious fight in and around the statue.  However, even this scene is undercut slightly by having his opponents be a bunch of blue collar guys who’d been paid off to stage an “accident”, and who clearly have no combat background.  If the movie wants us to take Williams seriously as an assassin, it needs to give us credible threats against him.

The movie also isn’t quite sure what to do with its Bond Girl, an Army officer played by a very young Kate Mulgrew of Voyager fame.  First, she’s only in the movie for maybe twenty minutes tops, disappearing for almost an hour after she’s first introduced.  Second, it can’t decide what sort of character it wants her to be.  Her first two scenes have her verbally shooting down two male officers who are sexist and condescending to her with remarkable speed and wit.  Later, however, she blunders right into an obvious trap, only surviving because of Williams’s intervention, and ends up tagging along with him for the rest of the movie without providing much in the way of value besides commenting on his and his mentor’s shared sexism towards her.

Speaking of his mentor, why do I keep picking movies with extremely glaring whitewashing?  Once again we have a white actor playing an Asian character in yellowface.  At least this time it’s the Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey instead of an acting newbie (though you could also argue that he should have known better).  His character of Chiun is a walking bundle of Asian martial artist clichés, down to the terrible accent and fortune-cookie wisdom – something that Williams even calls him out on in a rare moment of lampshade hanging for the film.  Granted, it IS fun watching the arrogant, openly racist Williams get his ass handed to him in their first meeting, and then repeatedly throughout their training.  I also can’t tell how much of their interactions are meant to be serious teachings, and how much of it is simply Chiun trolling his trainee (something that he openly and admittedly engages in at numerous times over the course of the movie).  Grey was actually nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance, something that I have to chalk up to afterglow from the previous year’s Globe and Oscar nominations for Pat Morita in his similar role as Mr. Miyagi.

Seriously, Hollywood, stop doing this!

Now, all of that being said, I think that the core idea of this movie does have something there.  If done better, it probably could have ended up as something similar to the first Kingsman movie, which made my Top 10 when it came out a couple of years ago.  There’s supposed to be a Shane Black-helmed reboot in the works, and I would love to see someone like Donnie Yen take on the role of Chiun.  Until then, however, I don’t really feel the need to revisit this one again. 

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: C-

Stray thoughts

-While the scenes surrounding them weren’t all that great, there were two moments from the setpieces that I’d like to single out.  First, the incredulous reaction that Williams has when the guard dogs chasing him during his break-in at Grove Industries team up to lower a metal fire escape so they can continue following him.

-Second, the only moment that really felt like the inventiveness of the Bond franchise, when he escapes from a trap in a military gasmask-testing chamber by using the henchman’s diamond tooth stud as a glass cutter to break the bullet-proof observation window.

The Beastmaster

The movie's not this awesome

The Beastmaster (1982)

Dir. by Don Coscarelli

Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, Rip Torn and John Amos

[content warning: sexual assault, animal cruelty]

The Plot:

A prophecy states that the son of the king of the Bronze Age kingdom of Aruk will kill the evil high priest Maax (pronounced MAY-AXE).  To prevent this, the priest’s witches use magic to transport the unborn child from his mother’s womb to that of an ox, with the intent to sacrifice it at birth.  The infant is saved by a farmer from a small village, and the boy, Dar, grows up with the ability to communicate with and control animals.  When his adoptive father and the rest of his village is killed by a barbarian attack, Dar strikes out on his own, to head to Aruk and discover his destiny.

Nostalgia:

When I was a pre-teen, live-action fantasy for me consisted of three films: Willow, The Princess Bride, and The Beastmaster.  I must have seen this movie thirty times or more before I was a teenager.  I was helped by the fact that it was played on the basic cable channel TBS so often that comedians joked that TBS stood for “The Beastmaster Station.”  And come on.  What twelve-year-old WOULDN’T want a pet tiger (cat allergies nonwithstanding)?  I’ve seen this one quite a bit more than the other movies I’ve covered, enough to be able to write out a decent plot outline of the whole thing pre-rewatch.  But there’s definitely things that I didn’t recall (or were edited out of those TBS broadcasts).

The Re-Watch:

In the spring of 1982, a little movie called Conan the Barbarian came out, and was an unexpected box office smash, kicking off a brief sword-and-sorcery boom.  Don Coscarelli was busy with pre-production for what was expected to be an independently-produced fantasy movie at the time, and it was quickly snapped up by MGM and put into an accelerated production.  It managed to come out less than six months after Conan's premiere, making it the first of many Conan ripoffs out of the gate.  It’s probably the best of them, but it’s still clearly in the “Blood and Thunder” tradition of Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors.  Lord of the Rings this is not. 

The plot is definitely a disjointed mess.  After Dar is rescued from being sacrificed as a baby, there are a couple of brief scenes of him growing up and learning about his ability to communicate with animals.  Then barbarians attack, kill everyone else, and Dar decides to stop wearing shirts and start wandering around Spain...er, the ancient wilderness. At this point, the movie becomes a series of unconnected events for almost half of its run-time.  Even after Maax (whose name still sounds like a brand of laxative to me) re-enters the movie, there’s really no sense of any sort of goal for him beyond sacrificing babies and chewing scenery.  At least Rip Torn is clearly having fun as the evil priest.  Marc Singer just kind of squints his way through the movie like a low-rent Clint Eastwood, always with the same expression and tone of voice.  I will say, though, that I actually prefer Rip Torn’s performance here to James Earl Jones’s in Conan.  Thulsa Doom never really left that much of an impression with me, whereas Maax is the sort of larger-than-life villain that I associate with the pulps.

Conan + Dar = He-Man?

Also in keeping with the pulp origins of this story*, there’s a whole lot of gratuitous nudity.  I, of course, didn’t notice it during any of those pre-teen viewings, because I was watching a copy taped off the aforementioned TBS, with commercial breaks and content editing.  Viewed now, the movie almost certainly would have gotten an R if it had come out today (it’s PG, but there was no PG-13 rating at the time).  Most egregious is a scene where Dar is first introduced to his love interest for the film, a slave girl named Kiri (played by Tanya Roberts).  In a scene straight from the early 80s sex-comedy playbook, Dar spies Kiri bathing in a river, and has his ferrets steal her clothing.  When she chases after them, topless, his tiger corners her, and Dar steps in to “bravely” fight off the beast and “rescue” her.  Not content to have our hero grossly manipulate a woman during a moment of vulnerability, the script actually doubles down by having him forcibly take a kiss as “payment.”  Granted, I realize that the movie is now 35 years old, and is following a literary tradition that dates back to the much-less-enlightened 1920s and 30s.  But even Arnold’s Conan (released the same year) actually displayed some concern and affection for the women that his slave-masters forced into his cell.  This was a straight up assault, and left a bad taste in my mouth every time she displayed interest or affection for him for the remainder of the film.

On another “still very 80s” front, the movie is very very white, despite being set in an ancient culture with architecture that strongly suggests ancient Sumeria or Assur.  At least the token actor of color, John Amos, is probably the second-most-badass person in the film after the lead, and his skin color is just accepted by everyone and never remarked upon negatively.  Amos is actually really good in the role of the former captain of the guard, now a wandering protector for the disenfranchised prince of Aruk (and, unknown to him, Dar’s younger brother).  It’s a shame that his character pretty much devolves into the “listen to Dar, he knows what to do” guy by the 2/3rds mark.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time being negative about the movie, and I’d say that on the whole it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as I’d remembered it.  However, there are definitely some parts of it that I really still enjoyed.  Most notably among them is this out-of-left-field, completely incongruous horror sequence that feels like it was borrowed from Robert Howard’s colleague H. P. Lovecraft.  While wandering, Dar investigates weird lights at the top of a ridge.  He finds strange glowing pods hanging from a tree, and a man in a cage.  He frees the man, who is immediately grabbed by a strange bat-winged, no-mouthed creature, which digests him while holding him in his arms and throws out the bones onto the ground.  Dar himself is only saved by the arrival of his eagle, an animal that the bat-things worship.  No explanation for them is ever given, and I for one don’t care.  They’re the most memorable thing about the movie.

Seriously, WTF?

Also, ferrets are cute.  Especially ferrets that rescue our hero from quicksand and lead rampaging spike-studded killers on chases through evil temples (you know it’s evil because it’s got a giant Styrofoam skull blocking the exit passage).  Can we have a movie just about them?

Nostalgia: A

Re-Watch: C- 

Stray thoughts

-I ragged on the movie for its sexism and gratuitous female nudity, and it’s criticism that is well-deserved.  However, almost all of the major male characters go around bare-chested with loincloths, so it’s not like they’re fully armored and the women are from a Boris Vallejo painting.  And Marc Singer IS ripped in the movie.  There’s like a two minute sequence of him flexing and swinging his sword on a mountain-top that I distinctly remembered before my re-watch.

-The director apparently wanted to cast Demi Moore as Kiri, but the producers overruled him. 

-Some of the production design and cinematography decisions are really bizarre.  For example, Dar’s childhood village is entirely build on tall posts, with the buildings themselves suspended twenty feet in the air.  They’re not in a swamp or right next to a river or anything that I recall, so I can’t really see any reason for this.

-Dar’s tiger, Ruh, was painted black because the director had originally wanted a black leopard but couldn’t get a good camera-trained one.  I’ve read unconfirmed reports that the dye used was toxic and gave the tiger involved fatal cancer.  The animal handler was fired halfway through production, but that really doesn’t make up for it if that’s true.

-The score, especially the main theme, is actually quite good, and is way above the movie’s pay grade.  I wonder why I’ve never really heard it in fantasy score compilations or anything.

*Technically, this was based off of a 1950s Andre Norton novel, but literally the only things they kept were the concept of a man who talks to animals, and the species makeup of his animal team.  The film’s DNA very much belongs in the 1930s.

Adventures in Babysitting

 

Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

Dir. by Chris Columbus (His first movie)

Starring Elisabeth Shue, Keith Coogan, Anthony Rapp and Maia Brewton

[content warning: brief discussion of sexism and homophobic humor]

Plot:

A high school senior is stuck babysitting on a Friday night after getting dumped by her boyfriend.  When her best friend calls her for help, stranded at the downtown Chicago bus terminal, she drags her three babysitees along for the ride.  Things get quickly out of hand, with the quartet encountering mobsters, gang fights, and impromptu blues concerts, among other trials.

Nostalgia:

 I’m almost positive that I haven’t seen this movie since the 1990s.  However, I watched it enough that I remember multiple scenes quite clearly, if not how they got themselves into those situations. 

Re-Watch:

 If there is a movie for which the phrase “wacky hijinks ensue” fits better…well, it’s probably Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  But that movie and this one would make a good double feature, as they’re both cut out of the same cloth.  In each, a group of teens irresponsibly takes a parent’s car into downtown Chicago for a series of episodic shenanigans, before racing said parents back home so that they won’t know they’ve been gone. 

However, there’s definitely a reason that Ferris Bueller is widely acknowledged as a classic 80s movie, and Adventures in Babysitting, if it’s remembered at all, is known primarily for starting the careers of Elizabeth Shue and director Chris Columbus, of early Harry Potter movie fame.  While the former shows all of the fun things that unaccompanied teens can get up to in Chicago, AiB definitely chooses to focus on how scary and intense it can be to be stranded in the big city, especially in the days before cell phones.  Pretty much everything that could imaginably happen to a group of white middle-class kids from the suburbs happens over the course of one evening, with so much piled on that it starts to cause adventure fatigue.

It doesn’t help that the person that they are ostensibly supposed to be rescuing, whose main defining trait seems to be that she’s visually impaired without her glasses, is very much the comic relief of the movie.  Her initial scene at the station is actually quite fraught with peril: she’s already seen multiple fights and a naked person on the concourse, and a man in a trenchcoat flashes a gun at her while she’s on the pay phone (remember pay phones?).  However, every time we cut back to her she becomes the victim of another humiliating joke at her expense.  It’s all too silly to be believable, like a bad SNL sketch of an inner-city bus station.  Now, for all I know that’s an accurate depiction of what such stations were like in the 80s.  I just know that it rang false for me.

A lot of the other humor is also fairly casually sexist.  There’s a running gag throughout the movie that Shue’s character (who’s still a teen, mind you) resembles that month’s Playboy Playmate. An issue stolen from mobsters is actually, believe it or not, the main MacGuffin that the kids are being chased for, so it keeps coming up over and over.  Brad, the older brother of the girl that Shue’s babysitting, has an obvious, unrequited crush on her. And his best friend, who tags along for the ride, is sex-obsessed to the point that Brad has to stop him from committing a sexual assault on a sleeping girl – in a throwaway gag.  There’s also a small current of homophobia as well.  Brad makes fun of his sister because her hero, Marvel’s Thor, looks too “gay”, though at least that scene does have a good payoff to it.  One only wonders what he’d make of Chris Hemsworth.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I hated this movie or anything.  I actually enjoyed good parts of it, though I’ll admit that I’d kind of tuned it out a bit by the end.  A scene set in a blues club, in which they try to hide from the mobsters but end up on-stage during open mic night instead and are forced to sing, is very memorable and quite entertaining.  However, I couldn’t help but think of the possible racial connotations to a group of white kids being forced to sing by an all-black crowd that clearly expected to humiliate them.  Then again, at least this movie remembers that there are non-white people in Chicago, something that Ferris Bueller pretty much fails at.

This movie was very much a mixed bag.  Considering that the plot was literally them careening from one disaster to another, it probably could have had about fifteen minutes trimmed out without much difficulty.  However, the acting is good overall, especially from Shue and the little girl in her care, played by Maia Brewton as a budding superhero nerd who’s clearly loving every minute of the danger that they’re in.  You can probably draw a direct line from her to Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, another movie that Columbus would direct only a couple of years later.  It might be worth a Netflix spin, fast forwarding through some of the cringier bits, but I probably wouldn’t shell out for the Blu-Ray on this one.

Nostalgia: vaguely B-ish

Rewatch: C 

Stray Thoughts: 

I’m going to start using this section for bullet-pointed ideas and observations that don’t fit in the full review.

*Holy Crap Moment #1 – Brad’s horny teen friend is played by none other than Mike Cohen himself (and Star Trek: Discovery cast member) Anthony Rapp.  I literally had no idea.

*Holy Crap Moment #2 – In one of the scenes I remembered the most, they have to get their car back from a mechanic who bears a very strong resemblance to Sara’s hero, Thor.  I remember her fan-girling all over the very confused mechanic, but I didn’t recall that he was actually played by a young Vincent D’Onofrio!

*The opening credits, with Shue dancing and lip-synching to the Crystals’ “And Then He Kissed Me,” is very memorable, and another of the scenes that I’d remembered quite vividly.  I know that this song has actually been used to open quite a few movies, but this had to have been first time I’d seen it used like that.

*Another “before he was famous” star, Bradley Whitford, plays Shue’s sleazy, soon-to-be ex-boyfriend.  Has that guy ever played a character who wasn’t an asshole?

Innerspace

 

Innerspace (1987)

Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan and Martin Short

Plot:

 An experiment in miniaturization is interrupted by a gang of corporate raiders attempting to steal the technology.  One scientist escapes, and ends up injecting the test pilot, intended for a rabbit, into the body of a grocery store clerk.  The pilot is able to establish communications with him, and together they have to retrieve the technology from the thieves so that he can be re-enlarged before his oxygen runs out.

Nostalgia:

I could’ve sworn I’d seen this only a couple of years ago.  However, my movie-watching spreadsheet (which I’ve been keeping since 2008) says that I haven’t watched it in that timespan.  It’s not one that I’d watched a whole lot as a kid, but it’s one I was familiar enough with to remember a lot of the plot beats, and some of the bigger scenes.

Re-Watch:

Okay, this is more like it.  Unlike The Last Starfighter and Short Circuit, the previous two films I’ve reviewed for this project, Innerspace really holds up as an entertaining movie in its own right separate from the nostalgia.  The plot moves quickly, the performances are great across the board, and the effects are stupendous – not just by the standards of the 1980s, but I’d say even now.  But more on that later.

Like Short Circuit, this movie is meant to be an action comedy.  Despite the former film featuring a robot as a central character, I’d actually say this movie reads as more “sci-fi”.  Besides the miniaturized pilot, played by Dennis Quaid as a mild “likeable asshole” who is, in fact, quite likeable, there’s a hitman with a prosthetic arm that doubles as a gun and a blowtorch, and a microwave device that Quaid uses to blow up a TV (Quaid’s disgusted “I’m inside a guy who likes game shows” got me to laugh out loud).  The comedy is mostly centered on Martin Short as the clerk, who gives off a Gene Wilder vibe as the neurotic, hypochondriac, supremely lacking in self-confidence man that Quaid gets stuck inside.  His reactions and physical humor had me laughing out loud more than I have while watching a movie alone in quite a while.  Especially so in a bravura sequence of physical comedy in which Quaid uses muscle stimulation to transform Short’s face into the other sublimely silly character from the movie, the fantastic Robert Picardo’s “Cowboy”.

Just one of the many facial gyrations Short goes through

Now, it’s fairly obvious that Picardo is supposed to be playing a vaguely Middle Eastern character, from the accent, the fact that he’s reading a magazine printed in Arabic, and the casual script references to his selling secrets in the Persian Gulf.  However, his character is dressed as an incredibly ridiculous, stereotypical Texan (this being the era of <i>Dallas</i>), and the movie never goes into anything specific about his background.  I had a much easier time accepting his character than Fisher Stevens’s in <i>Short Circuit</i>. It helps that Picardo is also a gifted comedian, and he practically steals the show every moment he’s on-screen.

The Ewings called.  They want their wardrobe back.

Speaking of stealing the show, this movie is packed full of wonderful character actors playing small parts, a large number of which have subsequently appeared on Star Trek shows.  Besides the aforementioned Picardo, William Schallert (Short’s doctor), Henry Gibson (his boss), Andrea Martin (the lady whom he talks to in the waiting room), Kenneth Tobey (the man who observes Short talking to “himself” in the restroom), and Dick Miller (the cabbie who picks up Quaid’s girlfriend) had all appeared in DS9 episodes (Martin actually played Quark’s mother Ishka, and I recognized her without the Ferengi makeup).  The lady from Short’s dream sequence was also played by Kathleen Freeman, whom I remember from her memorable cameo as the stern nun from the Blues Brothers movies, the first of which will hopefully be a future review.

Besides the comedy, which I definitely remembered, there’s also a lot more action in the movie than I had recalled.  There’s a car vs. bicycle chase at the beginning that works better than it has a right to, several fistfights, and a sequence in the middle, involving Short hanging off the back of a truck door while the vehicle was moving, that reminded me of stuff I’ve seen in Jackie Chan movies.  I’m sure that a lot of it was done with a stunt double, but the part that had him balancing precariously on the edge of a convertible’s windshield as it’s driving definitely looked like he’d done it himself.

Which brings me back around, finally, to the movie’s effects.  This film won that year’s Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and it’s easy to see why.  The sequences with Quaid inside Short’s body look outstanding.  The film was clearly influenced by Fantastic Voyage, and the effects crews took full advantage of the opportunity to reimagine what the inside of the body would look like up close.  Everything was done practically, and I really can’t imagine it looking much better even with the addition of CG.

So yeah, this one’s definitely a keeper.  The only thing that truly dates this movie is a five minute sequence in a nightclub that just screams mid-late 80s, down to the Madonna inspired wardrobes and Wang Chung music.  It deserves to be better known than it is, and is one to check out if you’re interested in seeing Martin Short at the peak of his game, a really young Meg Ryan, and some gorgeous model, miniature and composite work.

Nostalgia: B

Rewatch: A-

Short Circuit

Short Circuit (1986)

Dir. by John Badham

Starring Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens and Austin Pendleton

Plot:

An experimental military robot gains sapience when it is struck by lightning after a demonstration.  Escaping from its creators’ compound, it befriends a food truck owner, who begins to teach it what it means to be alive.  However, the military isn’t about to let a heavily-armed robot just wander around, so the company’s private security and its two programmers mount a mission to locate and retrieve it…or destroy it if they can’t.

Review:

[Content warning: racism, brownface]

This is another childhood favorite that I haven’t seen since we watched it at Sci-Fi House in college* about fifteen years ago.  It’s one that we’d taped off of TV, and was probably my second favorite movie at age 10 (the Goonies would have been my first).  Despite the sci-fi sounding premise, it’s very much a comedy, albeit a fairly light one.  There’s a lot of slapstick humor involving the robot – three other robots literally get reprogrammed to run a Three Stooges routine at one point – as well as fish-out-of-water comedy involving both Number Five and the two programmers sent to find him.

Speaking of which, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way up front.  Fisher Stevens, who is very, very white, plays an Indian man in brownface for the entire movie.  Complete with an extremely exaggerated cartoonish accent.  It’s pretty cringeworthy, and would never have gotten past the drawing board in 2017.  Whitewashing is one thing, but actual brownface? 

NO

Fisher Stevens himself claims that when he was cast the character was written as white, and they asked if he could “do Indian” after the fact.  If true (and I’m not sure that I buy that), the late change might have been the saving grace of the character, as there’s not much in the way of specific Indian stereotype humor in the film.  The character <i>really</i> shouldn’t work, especially with thirty years of racial casting hindsight, but I kinda found myself enjoying Stevens’s performance despite myself. Yes, he reads as a stereotype, but much more of a stereotype of the “sex-obsessed computer nerd” than of anything specifically ethnic.  Even his constant malapropisms with the English language seem, to me at least, as more of a mildly fun quirk of this person specifically, rather than some sort of ethnic joke.  However, the fact still remains that one of the main characters of the movie is very clearly a white man in brownface, being played for laughs, and I can completely understand how that would be a dealbreaker.

What didn’t hold up for me this time around was Steve Guttenberg, the theoretical lead actor in the movie.  The script identifies him as a socially awkward robotics genius who sleeps in his lab and hasn’t even driven himself home in five years.  Guttenberg, however, is totally miscast as that sort of character.  He’s way too affable and charming, and really doesn’t come off as socially awkward at all. 

No, the real lead of the movie is the robot, Number Five (voiced by Tim Blaney).  It’s pretty apparent that like 80% of the budget went to creating Number Five, and it’s money that’s really well spent.  Other than a couple of obvious bluescreen shots, Number Five looks stupendous, and is totally believable as an actual military robot.  His design is clearly influenced by E.T.’s – he’s even mistaken for an alien when he first encounters Stephanie – and he’s just as clearly a major influence on Pixar’s Wall-E.  In fact, “E.T., but starring Wall-E” would be a pretty accurate elevator pitch for this movie.

Another thing I noticed this time around, that completely went over my head as a kid, is how many of the jokes are decidedly more adult than anything I’d have expected from a PG movie, even a mid-80s one.  Fisher Stevens is actually quite graphic in some of his sex-related dialog, Number Five walks in on Stephanie while she’s in the bathtub and makes what could be described as a lewd comment, and the elderly couple that’s pulled over by the security force worries about the bag of weed in the glove box.  While there’s only one curse word, it’s used pretty effectively (I laughed, at least), and there’s also a scene where Guttenberg’s Crosby has a robotic hand flip off Fisher Stevens.  I also didn’t read the guy that Stephanie chases off with the baseball bat as explicitly an abusive ex until this viewing, which makes his comeuppance at the end that much better, though I wished she could have participated in it a bit more than she did. 

Overall, I’d say that, brownface aside, the movie holds up pretty well.  The masterful animatronics work plays a big part in that, and there’s actually a fair bit that’s ahead of its time in a way (a food truck in Portland, OR; an Indian programmer at a time when Japan, not India, was seen as the big tech threat to American jobs).  It certainly holds up better than <i>The Last Starfighter</i>.  If you can get past the really unfortunate decisions regarding Fisher Stevens’s character, I’d say it’s worth a look if you are in the mood for a sci-fi comedy.

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: B-/B, depending on how much you can tolerate Fisher Stevens

*Since I’ve brought that up twice now, I guess I should explain.  Carleton College, where I got my Bachelor’s degree, abolished its Greek system decades ago. However, it retained the off-campus houses that once held the various frats, and instead rents them out to student organizations on a yearly basis, provided that they run public activities to promote their mission statement.  The Carleton Science Fiction Alliance has had the same house, Benton, since the 1990s.  It houses ten people, has a large library of genre books and DVDs, and runs regular showings of TV shows and movies every week of the term.  While I never lived there myself, I spent about 80% of my free time there.

The Last Starfighter

The Last Starfighter (1984)

Dir. by Nick Castle

Starring Lance Guest, Robert Preston, Dan O’Herlihy and Catherine Marie Stewart

The Plot:

Alex Rogan, a teenager in Middle-O-Nowhere, California, spends the summer after graduating high school doing odd jobs around the trailer park where he lives, and playing way too much of an arcade game called Starfighter.  Little does he know that the video game is actually a recruitment tool for the real interplanetary Star League, which is about to come under attack by the forces of Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

Review:

So, this was one of my favorite movies growing up.  I probably watched it more between the ages of eight and thirteen than I did Star Wars (thirteen specifically because that’s when the Star Wars Trilogy was rereleased as a VHS box set, and I got it for Christmas).  Which is kinda fitting, as I think this is the best of all of the Star Wars ripoffs that came out in the wake of that movie’s total domination of the box office.  The fact that it also featured that other great 80s obsession, arcade games, was just an added bonus.  However, I don’t believe that I’ve seen it since we watched it at Sci-Fi House in college, a good 13+ years ago. It wasn’t available on DVD for a really long time, and it just got put in a box with the other old VHS tapes and forgotten about.

Which is actually kind of a shame, because for the most part it’s still pretty fun.  Granted, the premise is totally ridiculous.  “Hey kid, you got the high score on a video game, so we’re going to give you the keys to a heavily armed starship with zero additional training!  Have fun!”  A video game which, by the way, has been sitting completely unsupervised outside a trailer park for who knows how long.  Alex was shown to have a knowledge of wiring and electricity early in the film.  Who knows what sort of mods he’s been putting in that thing?

Anyway, the movie’s big claim to fame is that it was the first movie to have the majority of its effects be done through the then-new use of CGI.  Tron had introduced general audiences to the concept a few years earlier, but most of that movie was still done practically, with models and in-camera effects.  The Last Starfighter, on the other hand, dove into the still-nascent medium with both feet. As a child, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t consciously know the difference in effects styles, and didn’t realize that some things weren’t practical effects. I was interested to see how well they’d hold up to a more practiced eye.

I can report that they both held up really well and not well at all.  For modern audiences without any knowledge of the history of effects, they look really, really bad.  Like Russian bootleg ripoff DVD bad.  However, by 1984 standards, they’re at the cutting edge of what was available, and several individual shots still hold up quite well.  It helps that a lot of them are in space on a dark background.  The practical effects that they do have are a mixed bag.  Some of the aliens look right out of a Halloween mask shop, while the makeup job on O’Herlihy’s Grig is quite excellent.  There’s also a flying car that looks like a cross between a DeLorean and my Pontiac Vibe, a year before Back to the Future.

Other than the effects, the movie was, as mentioned earlier, pretty much a direct Star Wars ripoff, down to the white-haired, bearded guy explaining what’s going on to a group of pilots using big screens.  The trailer park scenes, filmed somewhere in the vicinity of Soledad Canyon, recall the canyons of Tatooine, and Alex has the exact same initial conflict as Luke Skywalker: a late-teens kid, stuck in the middle of nowhere, who desperately wants to leave town to go to school but is held back by family and circumstances.

The movie is saved, however, by Robert Preston, here in full Harold Hill mode as Centauri, the alien con man who recruits Alex.  Now, I’m positive that I had no idea who Robert Preston was, or that he was riffing off of his Music Man character, when I was watching this movie as a kid.  But I do now, and I actually think I like him more now because of it.  He seems to be the only one in on the joke of the movie, and helps it to keep from getting bogged down in space opera seriousness.  I also loved the relationship between Alex’s kid brother and the replicant brought in to replace Alex while he’s in space.  I’d have loved a spinoff with that robot, Mork & Mindy-style. 

Overall, it’s not a great movie.  The dialogue is pretty bad, and some of the plotting strains credulity, even before they get into space.  But there’s some solid performances, effects that were amazing for the time and are still interesting as an artifact of film history, and the score is quite good, reminding me of a lot of the Kirk-era Star Trek movie scores. 

Nostalgia: A

Rewatch: C+

About Me

So, who am I, and why should you care about what I think about old movies?

Well, I'm a 36-year-old career librarian from Michigan, and a life-long cinephile.  Before getting my Library Science degree, I considered film school for a long time, and my thesis for my first Master's degree was on the intersection of film and politics.  I've never written about film, or really anything professionally. I did once sit on a film discussion panel with John Scalzi, though, and managed to come up with sci-fi movies he hadn't heard of, so that has to count for something.

When not writing about movies from my childhood, I spend most of my non-work or commute time reading fantasy novels, managing a ridiculous number of fantasy football and baseball teams, and feeding a crippling World of Warcraft addiction.

So, why "Pythos"? Back when I started playing the aforementioned World of Warcraft, I named all of my characters after party members from the college Dungeons and Dragons game I ran.  My rogue, Pythos, was named after my roommate's character, and he became my WoW raiding "main."  I have over 300 DAYS of cumulative playing time on Pythos, and I got so used to other people calling me that in text and voice chat that it stuck as an online handle.