Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Dir. by Steve Barron

Starring Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas and Josh Pais

[content warning: Yellow Peril, sexism]

Plot:

While investigating a series of mysterious crimes, TV news reporter April O’Neil is saved from a mugging by the Ninja Turtles, a group of four anthropomorphic reptiles trained in ninjitsu by their rat master, Splinter. When Splinter is kidnapped by the forces of the Foot clan of ninjas, who are behind the crime wave, the Turtles take refuge with O’Neil. The five of them, plus masked vigilante Casey Jones, must locate the Foot’s secret hideout, rescue Splinter, and put an end to the criminal empire.

Nostalgia:

I was a huge fan of the animated Ninja Turtles series (and the arcade game – the less said about the original NES game, the better), so of course I saw this in theaters as soon as my parents would take me. It ended up being the last movie I saw in America before we moved to the U.K., about two weeks later. I had one of those storybooks with the cassette tape that came with it, and I would listen to it on repeat while going to bed for like the first six months we were in England.

Review:

If you didn’t grow up in the United States in the late 1980s, you might not realize what a huge deal the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. The characters had been created as a parody of Frank Miller’s dark and gritty take on Daredevil in the mid-80s, but hadn’t really taken off until a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon debuted in 1987. It toned down a lot of the comic’s rough edges to be more kid-friendly, and was one of the biggest hits of its time, running for 10 seasons and almost 200 episodes. It also, of course, sold many an action figure, lunchbox, breakfast cereal and video game.

It was a foregone conclusion that they’d attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise with a movie release. However, they made the odd (in retrospect) decisions to A) do a movie about anthropomorphic animals in live-action, in the pre-CG era, and B ) to make it an adaptation of the original comic books, ignoring most of what had made the cartoon so popular in the first place. In fact, the first of these proved to be so problematic that virtually no movie studio wanted to touch it with a ten-foot-pole, even with the guaranteed fanbase from the cartoon. Eventually, the Henson Company stepped in, with Jim Henson seeing it as a personal challenge to create something that would look good on-screen. He not only succeeded, but ended up creating the foundation upon which all future animatronic characters would be based. 

So we have a low-budget movie that ignored most of what made its content popular, with untested and experimental special effects, being released by an independent studio (New Line) that was known mostly for art house movies and cheap B-horror. Why, then, was it such a massive hit, and is still a beloved nostalgia film for so many people?

For me, I think it’s the very fact that it wasn’t the cartoon version of the Turtles. I don’t think the Turtles as portrayed on the show would have worked in live-action. The show is really silly, and very much operates on cartoon logic They kept some of the more distinctive elements of the show (Mikey’s immaturity, the colored headbands, “Cowabunga”) but otherwise tried to ground as much of the movie in reality as six-foot-tall turtles named after Renaissance artists would allow. No aliens, no mutating goons, no mad scientists, no Turtle battle wagons. Just a modern-day Fagin who takes in angry young men (I don’t think we see any female Foot members, though I may be wrong) and turns them into a personal army. Twenty-five years later and Shredder would have had a Youtube channel and a Twitter account.

Since when have five anthro animals been living in my apartment?
I need to clean more.

The fights in the movie are also very appropriate for the ages of both the protagonists and their Foot clan opponents, all of whom would be in their teens or early twenties. The movie begins with the Turtles’ first real mission, so they’re all still quite new at the hero thing and haven’t ever really been in a live fight with people who intend to hurt them before. And the Foot “ninjas” can’t have had more than a year or two of training themselves, given their age and the recency of the crime wave. It helps to make the awkward fighting of the Turtles (whose actors had limited movement and sight because of the costumes) more sensible, and also explains away a lot of the sillier bits of the fights (the dunking in a fish tank, the nunchuck contest, etc): they’re ALL immature and trying to show off. 

Now, one thing I don’t really buy as an adult is the relationship between April and Casey Jones. He’s kind of an asshole to her for most of the movie, breaking her firing to her in maybe the worst way possible, and running off a whole string of potential condescending and sexist nicknames for her, asking her to choose one. Sure, he saves her life, and helps her and the Turtles out when they’re hiding at her farm. But I can’t see how they go from screaming at each other and slamming doors (one of the Turtles even compares it to Moonlighting) to kissing by the end of the film.

There’s also a current of Yellow Peril inherent to a lot of the scenes involving Shredder and his second-in-command, Tatsu. They’re the only actual Japanese people in the movie (Splinter, despite being a Japanese rat, is voiced by, of all people, Kevin Clash), and neither have any redeeming features at all. Tatsu nearly beats one of his own students to death (and does kill him in the script) for letting the Turtles escape, and Shredder is literally covered in knives. April O’Neil even makes a fairly racist joke when first encountering the Foot ninjas, asking whether they were sent by Sony to collect on late TV payments. However, it’s not a huge focal point of the movie (both Shredder and Tatsu probably have a grand total of fifteen minutes of screen time between the two), and it definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. But it’s certainly something I noticed a lot more now than I did back then. 

TMNT is definitely a flawed film. It doesn’t actually have that much to do with the franchise that people were expecting; the animatronics, though groundbreaking, definitely didn’t help the staging of the action at all; and there’s some dubious romance and racial aspects that distract from the whole. However, it’s probably the best movie possible given the budget and the state of Hollywood special effects at the time. It’s quite telling that Michael Bay-produced reboot, for all of the might of 2010s CG and blockbuster budget, couldn’t actually improve on the Turtles from 1990. I don’t know if the movie would hold any appeal at all for someone who didn’t grow up with it, but for those who did it’s a nice nostalgia bomb to revisit from time to time.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-The Foot clan member who shows the new recruit Danny around their very-late-80s hangout, with video games, skateboard ramps, and bootleg cigarettes, is none other than Sam Rockwell! I had absolutely no idea he was in this, but managed to recognize him immediately this time around.

-The joke about Casey Jones using a signed Jose Canseco baseball bat as a weapon plays a lot differently now than did back then, given his association with the steroids scandal.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Dir. by Kevin Reynolds

Starring Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman

[content warning: Crusades, religious persecution, witchcraft]

Plot:

Robin of Locksley, a Crusader imprisoned in Jerusalem, escapes with the help of the Moorish prisoner Azeem. Returning to England, he finds that the Sheriff of Nottingham has branded his father a devil-worshipper and seized his lands. Banding together with a group of forest outlaws, he and Azeem set out on a campaign to thwart the Sheriff’s attempt to stage a coup and overthrow King Richard.

Nostalgia:

When I was eight years old, my father was transferred from America to the U.K. for business. It was in the middle of the school year, so instead of immediately enrolling me in the British school system my parents held me out of school until the next school year began. We spent six months exploring Britain instead, including stops at Nottingham and the actual Sherwood Forest. That also happened to be the year that I read The Hobbit for the first time, and the two combined to firmly cement my love of fantasy literature for life. The next year, while we were still living north of London, this movie came out in theaters. It was the right movie at the right time. It might not be the best cinematic version of Robin Hood, but it’s definitely the one that I’ve seen the most times.

Review:

The cinematic history of Robin Hood is a long and peculiar tale. It seems that every 10-15 years there’s a new version of the story that comes along, with pretensions of being the “definitive” Robin Hood. Personally, I think that ship sailed back in the 1930s with the Errol Flynn version, as that movie helped define the look and feel of all subsequent Robin Hood retellings. However, each generation definitely puts its own spin on things, from the 1970s furry version to the 2010 Ridley Scott movie that kills off King Richard in the first ten minutes.

The 1991 Kevin Costner version was very distinctly a movie made for the tail-end of the 1980s action movie boom. It’s got explosions, horse chases, and the villain from Die Hard. Robin Hood even gets flung over the walls of a castle with a catapult! Kevin Costner seems to attempt an English accent for about twenty minutes, before just giving it up and playing it as an American. The movie was a ginormous financial success, becoming the second-highest grossing film that year at the world-wide box office, but a lot of critics had disdain for it. It got nominated for two Razzies, and it’s been fashionable to hate on the movie ever since, like a forest-bound Waterworld (which coincidentally had both the same lead actor and director as this).

I'm pretty sure 1100s-era black powder isn't going to do THAT

I personally think that the hate for this movie is extremely misplaced. I’m of the opinion that it’s the best cinematic Robin Hood movie made in the last forty-five years, and probably the best fantasy movie of the early 90s. And yes, I just called Prince of Thieves a fantasy. This version of the Sheriff has a fortune-telling, Satan-worshipping witch as an advisor, whose role is even more significant in the extended cut of the movie that I watched for this review. Her presence, and the fact that the England of Prince of Thieves resembles Westeros more than it does the actual 12th century England, puts the movie squarely in the fantasy camp for me.

A large portion (perhaps even the majority) of my love for this movie can be laid at the feet of two actors. The first is Alan Rickman as the Sheriff. This may be the most over-the-top villain performance ever committed to celluloid, and I unabashedly love every second that he’s in the frame. Rickman is clearly having the time of his life playing the villain, and this movie, coming so soon after Die Hard, is probably what earned him his reputation as one of the best villain performers of his generation. He steals the movie in the same way that Jack Nicholson’s Joker did to the first Batman movie, which is probably why the next major Robin Hood movie after this one downplayed the Sheriff role so much that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that the character was in the movie.

No scenery left unchewed

The other actor is Morgan Freeman, playing the new addition to the Merry Men, the Moor Azeem. This wasn’t the first Robin Hood adaptation to feature a Muslim character in the ensemble. The British TV show Robin of Sherwood featured a Saracen named Nasir a good five years earlier. But Freeman’s performance left so much of an impression that it’s hard to imagine a new Robin Hood production that doesn’t include the character, especially for American audiences that may not have been as familiar with the origins of the Robin Hood legend. While Jamie Foxx may be playing Little John in the new adaptation coming out later this year, his appearance is clearly modelled after Freeman’s in Prince of Thieves. 

I think it is especially significant that not only does Freeman play a black Muslim, two minority groups that until this point had been woefully underrepresented in Robin Hood films (and in the case of PoC, in fantasy films in general), but that he is also perhaps the most positively-portrayed member of the Merry Men. This is even more interesting in contrast to the movie’s take on Friar Tuck, and the interactions between the two men that make up a significant side plot in the movie. Tuck’s always been portrayed as a bit of a bon vivant: a great lover of food and drink, sort of a “boisterous bruiser” type. Prince of Thieves' Tuck, as portrayed by Michael McShane, goes a little bit farther than that, however. He is first introduced singing a ribald drinking song while he gorges himself on wine. When he meets Robin Hood, he latches on to Robin’s leg and begins to chew upon it, forcing the remaining men of Robin’s band to pry the inebriated cleric off him. He is rude, unshaven, and slovenly at all times, and is pretty much an altogether poor example of a clergyman.

Yet, his position as a member of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church gives him an air of moral superiority which colors his judgment. He cannot see the positive traits of Azeem, his humility and spirituality. He can only see that he is a Muslim, whom the Pope has declared to be the sworn enemies of Christianity. Tuck blindly assumes that a heathen that does not follow God in the same fashion as a Christian could not possess knowledge that a Christian does not, despite the fact that the Muslim civilization of the twelfth century was the most technologically advanced of the time. He cannot see past this us-versus-them mentality, saying that “You know nothing of our God”, even though, as Azeem points out, Muslims and Christians both worship the Jewish God. This is why Tuck initially refuses to allow Azeem to attempt to save the life of Little John’s wife. Azeem’s success in performing the surgery brings about a marked change in Tuck’s attitude towards the Moor. He is now humbled before his Muslim counterpart, stating “I may be Godly, but I know now that I am not worldly.” As a final gesture of contrition and reconciliation for his prior behavior, he offers to share his precious beer with Azeem. Of course, Azeem must decline, as he holds to the Muslim prescription against alcohol. However, the two men become friends from this point on, and even team up together for the infiltration of Nottingham at the end of the movie. 

Okay, is it obvious yet that I wrote about this movie for my Master’s thesis? Sure, the movie does some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things wrong (just ask anyone who’s at all familiar with the geography of Great Britain to explain how Hadrian’s Wall is within walking distance of Nottingham). But it also does a whole lot right, and really shouldn’t be written off as so many people seem to have done in the last couple of decades.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-In case anyone’s wondering, my thesis was about how Hollywood had portrayed Arabs and Muslims historically, and how that portrayal was affected by 9/11.

-Seriously, it’s not just any old wall that they’re walking along. They used Sycamore Gap, only probably the single most famous section of the Wall, and maybe the most-photographed single tree in the U.K.

-The music for this movie, by the late Michael Kamen, is truly amazing. It’s one of the best movie scores of the 90s in my opinion. And the Bryan Adams song, cheesy though it may be, is also my mother’s favorite song. So I can’t really complain about that either.

Maverick

Maverick (1994)
Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Alfred Molina and James Garner

[content warning: Wild West tropes involving Native Americans, racial stereotyping, sexism and Mel Gibson]

Plot:

Bret Maverick, a professional gambler in the late 1800s, finds himself $3000 short of the entrance fee for an elite poker tournament with a $500,000 cash prize (about $12 million in today’s dollars). To obtain it, he engages in a series of comic misadventures, accompanied by a female con artist and an exasperated lawman.

Nostalgia:

Unlike a lot of Baby Boomer-aged American parents, my father was never particularly into Westerns while I was growing up. I never saw most of the classics of the genre, and had to seek them out on VHS and DVD when I was older. This was one of the few exceptions to that. I don’t recall seeing it in theaters, but it was one that we’d bring along on trips on VHS (we used to haul around a small tube TV in the minivan for road trips).

Review:

I was very interested to see how this particular one would hold up, as I haven’t seen it since before Mel Gibson’s infamous drunk driving arrest. It’s also a Wild West comedy from twenty years ago, which opens it up to all sorts of potential tropes that have not aged particularly well in the intervening decades. Fortunately, other than a couple of quibbles I found that I really didn’t have all that much to complain about.

It helps that the movie clearly doesn’t take itself all that seriously. The television show that it was based on had comedic overtones from the start, but here they wisely turned the movie remake into a full-blown comedy. A lot of clichéd Western tropes get repeatedly upended and subverted, from Maverick paying off a gang in advance to throw a fistfight to make him look better, to the Native American war band that speaks fluent English but makes a big threatening show (with Maverick’s help) just to troll his traveling companions. 

It was actually this last group that I was most worried about, as Westerns involving Native Americans have aged probably the worst out of all of them. It turns out that this might actually be the smartest part of the movie. Chief Joseph’s tribe is portrayed very positively, while avoiding a lot of the “noble savage” or “mystical Native American” tropes common at the time (see: Dances With Wolves). No, all of the war paint and drums are explicitly because they are being paid by a wealthy European to provide an “authentic” Western experience based on dime novels. Joseph is actually quite cynical about the whole thing, but is willing to take the Duke’s money anyway as it will benefit the tribe. He and Maverick eventually use the Duke’s desire for clichéd tropes against him to secure Maverick’s entrance fee, conning him into a fake “Injun hunt” so that he can fulfill his cowboy fantasies, and then blackmailing him with threatened jail time over the “murder.” It acknowledges the existence of these tropes, while simultaneously turning them back on those who would insist on them.

Now, as I said earlier, I did indeed have some problems. Most of them have to do with two characters: Jodie Foster’s Annabelle and Alfred Molina’s villain Angel. Or, rather, the way Maverick treats both of those characters. Through her actions, Annabelle is shown to be both an exceptional con artist and an expert gambler. She gets the better of Maverick on multiple occasions, is cool under pressure, and seems to be quite taken with him. Maverick, however, spends a good half of the movie mocking her skills and trolling her at every opportunity, and I couldn’t help but think of Mel Gibson’s off-screen behavior while watching it. He even asks her to clean his clothes for him, because “surely you must know how.” Likewise, the character of Angel, who is identified as a Spaniard in dialogue but is coded as Mexican throughout the movie, is introduced as smelling of “refried beans.” He is portrayed in the worst light of any of the characters in the movie – even more so than his boss, Commodore Duvall, the actual main villain of the movie.

Overall, I did end up enjoying the movie quite a bit on this rewatch, way more than I had been expecting to. I found it to be a generally entertaining comedy, with a lot of con artist movie elements thrown in for good measure. If you can stomach Mel Gibson (and I know there are some who can’t), it might be worth a spin or two.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-At least this movie manages to avoid any noticeable brownface. Chief Joseph is played by actual Canadian First Nations actor Graham Greene, and although Alfred Molina is British he is the son of a Spanish immigrant, which matches the character’s stated nationality from the movie.

-There are also a LOT of cameos in this movie. Most notably, Danny Glover robs the bank where Maverick is attempting to get a loan repaid to him. Gibson seems to recognize him, and the Lethal Weapon music plays as he leaves the bank.

-I remember the climactic poker tournament as being the finale of the movie, maybe the last 15 minutes or so. I was quite surprised to find that it actually starts just over halfway through, and takes up a good third of the film.

Nate and Hayes

Nate and Hayes (1983)
Dir. by Ferdinand Fairfax

Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O’Keefe and Max Phipps

[content warning: slavery, human sacrifice, racial stereotyping]

Plot:

Nate Williamson, a Christian missionary, is traveling with his fiancée Sophie to his new post in the South Pacific. When the mission is attacked by slavers and Sophie kidnapped, Nate teams up with the ship captain who ferried them to the island, a disreputable pirate named Bully Hayes, in order to rescue her.

Nostalgia:

I have absolutely zero recollection of the first time that I saw this movie. I’m assuming it was something my parents rented, as it’s a little too obscure for the basic cable I was watching at the time (we didn’t have HBO or anything until I was in high school). However, I do know that we bought our VHS copy of it from the local video store, Video Junction, when they went out of business in 1998. A good number of the lesser-known films from this project came from that particular sale. It was unavailable on DVD for ages, so I probably hadn’t seen it in almost 20 years before this viewing.

Review:

As discussed a couple time so far on this project, the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of those watershed events in the history of cinema. Like Star Wars before it and Die Hard later in the decade, it seemed like every production company in Hollywood suddenly had its own swashbuckling adventure movie in production. For Nate and Hayes, they tried a different time period than a lot of the other Raiders clones. It’s a pirate movie, but pirates of the South Seas in the 1870s rather than the more familiar Caribbean pirates.

Speaking of which, while this movie fails at being an Indiana Jones ripoff, it actually manages to play like a Pirates of the Caribbean ripoff instead, albeit one that came out twenty years before the movie it’s copying. It’s got almost the exact same plot structure: a naïve young man has to team up with an older, more worldly pirate to rescue his loved one from the pirate’s sworn rival. The young man is initially hostile to pirates, but after several adventures with his impromptu mentor, including a visit to a rowdy pirate port, ends up becoming one himself. At the end, the pirate is captured by the authorities, but is rescued from his execution by the young man, now very much a swashbuckler himself. 

Now, that’s not to say that it’s a good pirate movie, either. Sure, the movie definitely has its moments. Tommy Lee Jones is actually pretty fun as Bully Hayes, but he and his rival (played by Max Phipps) seem to be the only ones not just going through the motions in a movie that has surprisingly little actual swashbuckling in it. The best sequences are the bookends at the beginning and end of the movie. The former is the sequence that’s most clearly taken from Raiders, as Bully and his crew trek into the middle the jungle before attempting to sell guns to the island’s natives. The deal goes south, and Bully and company end up having to run for their lives, including a scene on a collapsing rope bridge that actually beat Temple of Doom to it by a year. The ending, of course, is the aforementioned escape from hanging, with Nate disguised as the reverend administering last rites, and his wife Sophie as a pistol-packing nun.

The rest of the movie largely consists of a lot of banter and misunderstanding between Nate and Hayes that the writers obviously intended to be funny, but which mostly falls pretty flat. There’s a subplot involving the German attempt to build a base for its new ironclad vessels that is a lot smaller than I remember, and ends a lot more perfunctorily. The South Pacific location also opens the movie up to a major source of criticism that the first Indiana Jones movie mostly sidesteps: the portrayal of its non-white characters. Even the most clearly “good” character, the missionary Nate, still has a very patronizing attitude towards the indigenous people he encounters, who are portrayed as children in need of instruction (one even refers to the elderly heads of the mission as “Big Man God and Momma Jesus Christ”). 

The villainous tribes fair even worse. The female leader of the group that Hayes attempts to sell guns to is treacherous and greedy, and gleefully shoots one of her own people to test out the rifles. And the king of the island that the Germans are attempting to buy (by offering severed and shrunken heads) rebuffs their attempts until they offer him Sophie for use as a human sacrifice. At one point, Nate is allowed a righteous speech against slavery, but Hayes stops him with an equivalent of “now’s not the time”, and the subject is never broached again, despite the multiple people other than Sophie that were abducted and sold by the villain Pease. It doesn’t help knowing that the real Bully Hayes whom Jones’s character was based on actually was the human trafficking blackbirder that the movie character denies being. 

This movie has a small cult following, and it’s one that I remember enjoying back in the 90s. While I definitely found it to have its moments, I couldn’t help but notice all of the significant flaws this time around. It definitely doesn’t help the narrative of pirate movies being box office poison pre-Pirates, as the movie totally bombed when it was released. The setting is pretty unique for a pirate movie, however, and if they could punch up some of the action and negative stereotypes it could make for an interesting remake at some point.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-Nate and Hayes was released as Savage Islands everywhere but the US, in case any non-American readers are confused by the title.

-The movie was actually filmed on location, and was one of the first New Zealand-produced movies to get released in the United States, well before the breakout of NZ cinema in the 90s with The Piano and Heavenly Creatures.

-Seriously, Tommy Lee Jones with a beard and full head of hair just seems wrong to me. I’m so used to his later career roles as the grizzled veteran that seeing him young is just a little incongruous to me. It’s like Patrick Stewart with a wig on, or Wilford Brimley without his mustache. 

Bloodsport

Bloodsport (1986)
Dir. by Newt Arnold

Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Donald Gibb and Bolo Yeung

[content warning: racist portrayals, sexual assault]

Plot:

Captain Frank Dux goes AWOL from the U.S. Army to represent his ailing martial arts instructor at the Kumite, an invitation-only underground fighting tournament held in Hong Kong.

Nostalgia:

I remember hearing about this movie several times before I eventually saw it. I know I didn’t actually watch it until after I started taking Tae Kwon Do, so probably some time in early high school would be my guess. Yet again, it’s one of our many VHS tapes that didn’t make the transition to DVD, though I have seen it a handful of times in the last decade or so.

Review:

For a brief moment there, it looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme was going to be the next big action star. He was an actual full-contact karate and kickboxing competitor, so he had the martial arts chops to pull off the moves on screen, and for some reason wooden, European-accented actors were all the rage for action movies during the 80s (see: Arnold, Christopher Lambert, Dolph Lundgren, etc). This low-budget Cannon movie would be his big breakout role, and he’d go on to a whole string of low- to mid-budget action movies in the 1990s, until he just suddenly disappeared after Universal Soldier: The Return in 1999.

I’ll admit to actually having a bit of a soft spot for his movies, especially cheesy yet enjoyable crap from the mid-90s like Timecop and Sudden Impact. This, however, might be his best performance from an action standpoint. He was still close enough to his fighting days to be in amazing physical condition, and it shows in the moves that he’s able to pull off on-camera (when he does the splits with his feet suspended on chairs in one scene, that’s not a camera trick. Another character even remarks “That hurts me just looking at it”). While he would learn to relax and be better in the dialogue scenes as his career went on, here they’re all kind of hard to watch. However, most of the scenes outside of the Kumite are pretty much filler, and it doesn’t really distract from what you’re here to see.

Honestly, I'm going to have to agree with Jackson on this one

Speaking of filler and the plot, this movie is basically just an extremely clichéd fighting tournament movie, the sort that any martial arts movie fan has seen a hundred times. It’s tempting to compare the movie to Enter the Dragon, but the Bruce Lee movie actually has a more complex plot than Bloodsport. There’s no undercover mission, or evil supervillain, or revenge angle to the plot (well, not initially, anyway). It’s just “man enters tournament, man’s bosses try to stop the tournament.”

No, the closest comparisons I have to this movie are actually two properties that came after, and in fact were inspired by, Bloodsport: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. It’s got the secret, invitation-only tournament, the international cast of fighters with widely differing styles, and the villain who really likes killing people mid-fight. Those styles, in my opinion, are what elevate this movie above all of the other low-budget tournament movies I’ve seen. It’s not just all kung fu, or karate, or judo, but a mix of styles from all over the world, which keeps the fights fresh and interesting to watch. However, this does open the movie up to some criticism for the portrayals of the fighters, most especially the token African and Middle Eastern competitors. Hossein, the Arab fighter, is played by a clearly non-Arab actor, and is introduced making unwanted advances on the love interest for the movie. And the African fighter, who is never named, is shown jumping around in trees in the training montage and hops around like a monkey in the ring. For all I know it’s an actual style (it’s not capoeira – that I can recognize), but it looks pretty racist to me on first glance.

The relationship between Dux and the reporter, Janice Kent, is also a prime example of time having definitely moved on in the thirty years since the movie was made. Dux meets her at the same time as Hossein does, and “rescues” her by effectively wagering her in a (rigged) contest of skill with Hossein. Yes, Hossein gets his ass kicked by Dux in the tournament the next day, and Kent proves to be more than capable of getting herself into the no-press-allowed Kumite audience by herself. However, I don’t think that a sexual relationship with someone who’d actually been betting someone over who’d be allowed to take you up to his hotel room 24 hours earlier would fly in a modern movie.

The movie’s very, very 80s, with jokes about 8-bit arcade games and many montages (seriously, there’s like two 3+ minute montages separated from each other by barely a minute). But if you can get past that and the pretty bad dialogue and acting, there’s actually a lot of good martial arts action in this one. It’s fairly easy to see how JCVD’s action movie career got started after this.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-Another reason a lot of people think of Enter the Dragon: <i>Bloodsport</i>'s villain, Chon Li, is played by the same actor who played Han’s large, memorable henchman from the Bruce Lee movie.

-Yes, the younger of the two Army agents trying to apprehend Dux is an extremely young Forest Whitaker, only a year removed from his breakout role in Good Morning Vietnam.

-This movie bills itself as a true story, based on the exploits of the real Frank Dux. Dux is indeed a real ex-Army officer and martial artist, but he’s also a well-known teller of tall tales and none of his claims about the Kumite can be verified at all. Therefore, it’s wise to assume that the events of Bloodsport are pretty much entirely bullshit.

-I'm aware that Donald Trump once said that this is his favorite movie. Yes, it's about an American beating up foreigners. But it's also specifically about an American immigrant, something that I think he failed to notice. And anyway, why would I concern myself about his taste in movies?

Flight of the Navigator

Flight of the Navigator (1986)
Dir. by Randal Kleiser

Starring Joey Cramer, Howard Hesseman and Paul Reubens (credited as “Paul Mall”)

Plot:

12-year-old David Freeman hits his head in 1978 and wakes up in 1986, having not aged a day. Confronted by a family that thinks he’s dead and a strange world he doesn’t know, he learns that he was abducted by an alien drone, which needs the star charts inserted in his head to complete its mission and return home.

Nostalgia:

I have absolutely no idea when I first watched this. I’d guess on the Disney Channel, considering it was distributed by Disney in the States, but I remember it mainly for the taped-off-TV version we had. I watched it a lot as a pre-teen, but I don’t know if I’ve seen it since before I was in high school. Still remember a lot of scenes from it, though.

Review:

What a wonderful, charming movie. I remembered the basic plot outline, a bunch of individual scenes, and that Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman) was the voice of the alien. What I didn’t remember is how good the movie was.

As the titular navigator, Joey Cramer does an amazing job capturing not only the E.T.-esque wonder of a child befriending an alien, but also the genuine confusion and fear of one who’s been displaced in time, forced to engage with a world he doesn’t recognize and family that might as well be strangers. That first scene where he comes home to find that an elderly couple is now living in his house, with him frantically running through the rooms, is one of the most realistic acting jobs by a child actor I’ve ever seen. He very convincingly runs through the gamut of emotions, from surprise, to disbelief, to mock-amusement at the practical joke he assumes is being played on him, to finally breaking down in the bathroom and sobbing for his parents.

Now that's a set

I’m also glad that Paul Reubens didn’t grate on me nearly as much as I feared he would. I remember him as being in most of the movie, but in reality his recognizable voice work doesn’t begin until over two-thirds through the movie, when Davey and the robotic pilot Max have a mind-meld to transfer the star charts back to the probe. It’s only then that Reubens begins his Pee Wee-style line delivery, as Max starts to act like a particularly obnoxious teenager for about twenty minutes. Before this, Reubens had affected an almost Spock-like delivery of his lines, and I must confess that I definitely enjoyed this version of Max better. However, I was able to tolerate the other Max, as it really wasn’t in that much of the film and had frequent cut-aways to Davey’s family or the NASA goons.

Speaking of which, I found it a little odd that NASA would be the “evil government agency” of choice for this movie. They seem to have much more in the way of resources than they should have, especially the sort of field agents that you’d expect from the FBI or CIA. Yes, NASA would probably be the ones to investigate a crashed alien ship in the 1980s, but I doubt that they’d be holding a family hostage in their own home or scrambling intercept jets on their own authority. It’s not the most egregious error I’ve ever seen, however, especially for a family film, so I’ll let it slide.

Finally, the effects really do hold up overall. The shape-shifting drone ship was done with CGI, and it actually still looks good today, an especially impressive feat given the rudimentary state of mid-80s computer graphics. This was only two years after The Last Starfighter, whose effects don’t really hold up at all to a modern eye. Also impressive were the menagerie of alien creatures being cared for by Max. They were all created practically as puppets, and range from disgustingly cute to just plain disgusting. About the only effect that didn’t still look great were the steps to interior of the ship. The door is supposed to melt, flow down and form into floating steps, but the rotoscope animation they used for the effect looks noticeably out of place with the rest of the quality effects (and way worse than I remember it looking).

I think that this movie has kind of been forgotten in the annals of great kids’ movies. It’s got a really wonderful central performance, imaginative effects, and a great sense of adventure. I could definitely see a modern remake of it being successful – the Jim Henson Company has been trying to get one going with the showrunner of Lucifer as writer. I’d like to see that.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts:

-Honestly, this might be the longest I’ve gone without seeing a movie for this project that still held up on rewatch. I really enjoyed this one, y’all.

-Surprise actor #247 for this project: an extremely young Sarah Jessica Parker, fresh off her starring role in Square Pegs, as the NASA intern that befriends Davey and helps him escape with the ship.

-Star Trek Actor Watch: Davey’s dad is played by Cliff DeYoung, who was in a first-season episode of DS9 (“Vortex”, where he played a con-man alien with potential knowledge of Odo’s species). Since he was in so much makeup for the role, I didn’t recognize him at all, but the name sounded familiar in the credits and I looked him up.

The 'Burbs

The ‘Burbs (1989)
Dir. by Joe Dante

Starring Tom Hanks, Carrie Fisher and Bruce Dern

[content warning: immigrant peril, paranoia, serial killers, and a rapidly-moving gif]

Plot:

When an elderly resident of his neighborhood disappears overnight, mild-mannered suburbanite Ray Peterson becomes convinced that his eccentric new neighbors are actually serial killers, and will stop at nothing to prove his suspicions.

Nostalgia:

This one is yet another cable and video store rarity that I watched quite a bit when I was in middle school. Like many of the movies that I’ve done for this project, we never actually owned a copy on either VHS or DVD, and I haven’t had a chance to watch it since the 1990s.

Review:

Man, I watched a lot of really dark movies when I was younger, didn’t I? This one might be even darker of a movie than Cloak & Dagger, despite being billed as a comedy. Heck, it even has a dream sequence that involves Satan worship and human sacrifice – in a PG movie!

That the movie was directed by Joe Dante, of Gremlins fame, isn’t very surprising in retrospect. It has that movie’s same blend of over-the-top slapstick humor and borderline-nihilistic commentary on suburban life. Unlike in Gremlins, which was a horror-comedy, this movie was clearly envisaged as a comedy first and foremost, and the darkness sits uneasily besides the laughs. And don’t get me wrong: I still found good portions of the movie to be funny, even alongside the darkness. But the two are much less expertly blended than in Dante’s previous works, and the movie suffers tonally as a result. There are wildly slapstick moments, such as when the camera zooms in and out rapidly in the style of a cartoon on Hanks’s Peterson and his neighbor/co-conspirator as they find what they assume is a human femur, juxtaposed with scenes detailing the disintegration of Peterson’s marriage as he becomes more and more obsessed.

There’s also a very lengthy scene which descends into some really awkward cringe comedy, a style that I barely tolerate at the best of times and has actively made me leave the theater for a few minutes out of discomfort in the past. Basically, the wives of the conspiracy theorists convince their husbands to knock on the creepy neighbors’ door with cookies and invite themselves in for a chat. What follows is five minutes of uncomfortable silence and awkward questions, culumating in Bruce Dern’s character Rumsfield flat-out accusing the Klopeks of murder to their face. I didn’t end up muting the movie or fast-forwarding, but it was a close thing.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this rewatch. I actually found a lot of the humor to be still quite funny, and managed to catch several jokes now that I’d never understood in the 90s (most notably an extended homage to the cinematography of the climactic gunfight in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, only with a poodle as one of the combatants). But I did see the seams much more on this rewatch than I ever had before.

Nowhere was this more notable than the ending of the movie, which has a major problem that undercuts the movie’s own message, which has only gotten worse with today’s current political and social climate involving immigrants. Though the narrative never actually identifies them as such, the Klopeks’ names and accents codes them as Eastern European immigrants, on a street otherwise comprised entirely of stereotypical white Midwesterners. The movie is very quick to Other them, with their unkempt yard, odd behavior and unwillingness to engage with their fellow suburbanites. Even before the elderly neighbor disappears, Peterson and his friends are clearly scared and suspicious of them.

At the end of the movie, after Peterson’s meddling has resulted in the destruct of the Klopeks’ house from a gas main explosion, it is revealed that Dr. Klopek is a well-known, respected pathologist, and that the elderly neighbor was taken to the hospital during the middle of the night by his family and is in fact still alive. Peterson has a very public crisis of conscious, berating all of his neighbors for letting their suspicion and mistrust of somebody different run wild, before attacking his own former best friend and being taken away in an ambulance.

If the movie had ended there, it would have had a perfectly fine resolution in my opinion. However, the movie has to add one final twist to the proceedings: sure, Peterson was wrong about the murder of his neighbor, but he was right about the Klopeks being serial killers. Dr. Klopek assumes that Peterson had found the evidence before the house blew up, and attempts to murder him on the way to the hospital. Peterson manages to fight him off as his gurney goes careening down the middle of the street, and the Klopeks are arrested when the trunk of their car is revealed to contain dozens of skeletons.

This has the effect of completely undercutting and undoing everything about Peterson’s earlier speech. As the movie ends, it appears that not only were all of his suspicions and paranoia justified, but that he’s going to get away with multiple counts of trespassing, breaking and entering and property destruction without any consequences to himself or his co-conspirators. I remembered the ending from the last time I’d watched it, of course, but I hadn’t remembered Peterson’s big speech. The thing is, everything he says is completely right. The movie just discards it for a shock and an action climax.

So yes, this movie was still fairly funny, but has some significant problems, especially with the ending, that have just gotten more apparent in the last twenty years. I didn’t find it flat-out offensive, but I was definitely giving it the side-eye quite a bit.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C+/B-, depending on how generous I’m feeling about the ending.

Stray Thoughts:

-Originally, the ending was actually going to be even darker. Apparently, Dr. Klopek was originally supposed to kill Peterson in the ambulance and get away with it.

-The street used for this movie would later become the Wisteria Lane neighborhood in Desperate Housewives.

-I managed to go the entire movie without ever once thinking about Rear Window, which is I guess a credit to the screenwriter. “Rear Window, but as a comedy” is actually a pretty good elevator pitch for this movie.