Q: “You were working in a special niche of your own in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders and Southern Comfort — lean, elegiac films which, I’m guessing, benefited from modest budgets and expectations, as well as low producer interference.”

A: “Yes, that niche no longer exists. The middle ground has largely fallen out of the studio system.”

Patrick McGilligan interviewing Walter Hill for Film International in September 1996

The Long Riders (1980)
Directed by Walter Hill
Written by Bill Bryden and Steven Phillip Smith and Stacy Keach & James Keach
Produced by Tim Zinneman
99 minutes

If crowd pleasers like Tombstone are pop music renditions of the Old West, The Long Riders is like vintage bluegrass. With the well earned authenticity of a musician jamming for the pure love of his craft, the first western directed by Walter Hill is a master class in how atmosphere, pacing and performance can elevate a B-movie programmer into something greater than a plot synopsis might indicate. In Missouri after the Civil War, hard put and desperate men looking to make a living under the heel of Reconstruction rob a bank. Led by the steely Jesse James (James Keach) and his brother Frank James (Stacy Keach), the gang includes the deadly Cole Younger (David Carradine), dapper Jim Younger (Keith Carradine) and dorky Bob Younger (Robert Carradine). Along for the job is Clell Miller (Randy Quaid) who’s as dependable as his brother Ed (Dennis Quaid) is unreliable.

The bandits return home to contemplate settling down. Jesse marries his sweetheart (Savannah Smith) while Jim courts a redhead (Amy Stryker) engaged to the no count Ed Miller. Cole Younger hesitates to make an honest woman out of Belle Shirley (Pamela Reed) and the vivacious whore settles in Texas, where she marries hotheaded Sam Starr (James Remar) and takes the name Belle Starr. The success of the James-Younger gang against trains of the Union Pacific Railroad puts them in the crosshairs of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose agents draw the wrath of the entire region when they gun down a 15-year-old Younger and firebomb the home of Jesse James’ mother (Fran Ryan). The gang meet their Waterloo in Northfield, Minnesota, forcing Jesse to recruit the oily Ford brothers Bob (Nicholas Guest) and Charlie (Christopher Guest). Their betrayal earns the Fords a spot in history alongside Jesse James.

Stacy Keach and his brother James Keach were cast as Wilbur and Orville Wright for a public television drama that aired in 1971. They kidded that after playing the Wright brothers, their next project together should focus on “the wrong brothers”. Taking their joke seriously, the Keaches arrived on outlaws Frank & Jesse James and spent nine years struggling to get The Long Riders into production, with playwright Bill Bryden, screenwriter Steven Phillip Smith and the Keaches writing scripts. The actor brothers had David, Keith & Robert Carradine set to join them as the Youngers, Randy & Dennis Quaid as the Millers and Beau & Jeff Bridges as the treacherous Fords. Cast in Hurricane, James Keach met producer Tim Zinneman, who saw a movie there and helped attach Walter Hill as director. Guitarist Ry Cooder would be entrusted by Hill to compose and arrange the music, beginning a collaboration that would span two decades.

In spite of its casting scheme, the real star of The Long Riders is Ry Cooder, who utilizes Civil War ballads and rapturous bluegrass to provide texture to the tough, contentious world of Jesse James. It’s a place where strangers become friends by sharing that they served under the Stars and Bars and conversely, playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” can get a guitar player shot. The Long Riders makes little effort to document who James was and the film is so much better off for it. The loosely sewn narrative tested audiences at the time, yet the approach fits the material seamlessly: defeated but dangerous men drifting through the postwar South. Highlights include David Carradine and James Remar locked in an epic knife duel, while the scenes between Carradine and Pamela Reed crackle with wit and sexual energy. As action films go, this is one that genuinely loves women.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 5,017 users: 70% for The Long Riders

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“I finally realized that the only way I was going to get my career jump-started was if I created my own project and then held onto it tenaciously, like an abalone, until somebody would put up the money for it. So I conceived a project that had the imagery I could create cost-effectively with my experience in visual effects. It had some of that imagery but not so much that the budget was proportionately large, because I knew no one would trust me with a large budget.” James Cameron interviewed by Robert J. Emery for The Directors: Take One

The Terminator (1984)
Directed by James Cameron
Written by James Cameron with Gale Ann Hurd
Produced by Gale Ann Hurd
107 minutes

By now, anyone with ears should have heard of The Terminator, a down and dirty science fiction action thriller about Adam and Eve on the run from a killer cyborg played by the future governor of California. A surprise box office hit that was championed by enough critics to qualify as a success on every level, few at the time may have realized how extraordinary it was that this movie ever got made, while those studying the DIY production techniques today might miss what a great movie it is. In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they triggered against mankind to wage what has turned into a losing war against the survivors. In a last desperate act, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent to Los Angeles of the year 1984.

Also traveling back in time naked as the day he was born is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). After the Terminator visits an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller), it begins assassinating every “Sarah Connor” in greater Los Angeles. The next Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she’s in danger and calls police from a nightclub. The steady Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until LAPD can get to her, but the Terminator displays no regard for witnesses as it attacks. Reese rescues Sarah and explains that the Terminator has targeted the young waitress to eliminate her unborn son, who’s destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a rational explanation for her ordeal. Their theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station.

While on the payroll of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, James Cameron was promoted out of the fx department with battlefield speed. When his first gig as director — Piranha II: The Spawning — ended badly for all interested parties, Cameron had to create a project for himself. Mixing low cost locations with a sci-fi element that favored special effects, Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote most of a screenplay. A former production manager at New World named Gale Ann Hurd helped polish the script, which Cameron sold to her for one dollar in a pact that he’d direct it. Hurd spent two years struggling to raise money for that, finally cajoling Hemdale Film Corporation to finance Terminator and Orion Pictures to distribute it. Shot with a single camera, the picture caught critics and the industry by shock when it opened #1 at the U.S. box office.

The Terminator is the ultimate B-movie. Like the relentless killing machine that became the best known role of the Austrian Oak’s career, Cameron locks in on his target audience and in terms of artistry and intensity, keeps coming. Over-delivering became standard operating procedure for Cameron but in a departure from his big budget action movies, the violence here is as uncompromising as it is audacious, with police officers and even women mowed down or blown apart by gunfire. What lifts The Terminator out of the grindhouse and into the Library of Congress (where it was preserved in 2008) is its foreboding of how dependent we’ve truly become on machines and where we’re headed if we surrender our humanity completely. Unfolding over a 24-hour time frame, the cast is well picked for the nonstop physicality of the story, while the electronic score by Brad Fiedel strikes a powerful doomsday vibe.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 685,301 users: 81% for The Terminator

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The studio wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark, clearly that’s what they wanted. They wanted a movie like that. ‘Can’t you just do that?’ They didn’t ever actually say that to me, but I know that’s what they wanted. ‘Xerox it.’ But I had other ideas and I thought it would have been interesting at least from my point of view, maybe nobody else’s, but to make the white lead … You know in the Tarzan films, Tarzan is white and he always saves the natives. ‘Oh, thank you, Tarzan.’ It’s just ridiculous. I was like, ‘What about if your white lead is a complete fool?’” John Carpenter interviewed by Eric Vespe, aka Quint, for Ain’t It Cool News, June 2011

Big Trouble In Little China (1986)
Directed by John Carpenter
Adaptation by W.D. Richter, written by Gary Goldman & David Z. Weinstein
Produced by Larry Franco
99 minutes

A gumbo of wildly divergent film genres handpicked from around the globe (head cook John Carpenter described his dish as “an action adventure comedy kung fu ghost story monster movie”), Big Trouble In Little China hasn’t lost its manic flavoring over the years. A generation of martial arts fantasies may not owe their existence to this production per se, but in a testament to its timeless élan, Big Trouble could be re-released and with the exception of Kurt Russell’s mullet, feel brand new. Blowhard trucker Jack Burton (Russell) rolls his rig into San Francisco on a dark and stormy night. Jack cleans the floor with Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) over a game of fan-tan and refusing to let his friend out of sight until he pays up, gives Wang a ride to the airport, where his green-eyed fiancee Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) is arriving from China.

When Miao Yin is abducted by a gang called the Lords of Death, Jack and Wang pursue the punks back to Chinatown, where they step into a brawl between the Chang Sing and their enemies, the Wing Kong. Exploding into the turf war are three supernatural warriors, Thunder (Carter Wong), Rain (Peter Kwong) and Lightning (James Pax), and their master, a 2,000 year old phantom named Lo Pan (James Wong). Jack and Wang escape and are clued by pesky attorney Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) that Miao Yin is being held by the Lords of Death in a brothel. Before they can spring her, the three storms whisk Miao Yin into an underground city, where Lo Pan must wed a girl with green eyes to lift his curse of the undead. Out of his element as he encounters booby traps, beasts and ancient sorcery, Jack unleashes as much destruction as heroics aiding Wang and the Chang Sing in the rescue of Miao Yin.

Big Trouble In Little China was the title of a spec script by Gary Goldman & David Z. Weinstein. Set in the Old West, its concoction of cowboys and sorcerers sold producer Paul Monash, until he opted to move the story into the present. When the scribes refused, W.D. Richter was put on the payroll. The script doctor kept the legend of Lo Pan and dumped almost everything else. A USC classmate of Richter’s named John Carpenter had been developing an adaptation of Erich van Lustbader’s bestseller The Ninja and when the project fell through, accepted an offer from 20th Century Fox to direct Big Trouble. The film went into production at the same time as Eddie Murphy’s new comedy The Golden Child, which also mixed wise cracking and Chinese mysticism. To compete, Carpenter felt he needed a star like Clint Eastwood, but Fox approved Carpenter’s regular leading man Kurt Russell for the role of Jack Burton.

Aside from dismal box office returns, the distinction Big Trouble In Little China holds over The Golden Child is the mythology; even the hero’s truck has a backstory. Among the many elements in its composition, the rarest is the rapid fire repartee that brings to mind Bringing Up Baby and qualifies Big Trouble as the first of its kind: a screwball martial arts comedy. While its fight choreography has been eclipsed by the way action movies are prepared today, Kurt Russell’s redneck bluster and his commitment to playing the fool from start to finish are a laugh riot. Instead of settling for spectacle, the script goes the extra mile, building a universe before mercilessly dismantling it. In a credit to casting director Joanna Merlin and stunt coordinator Kenny Endoso, every actor from Kim Cattrall down to the stuntmen seem in sync with the film’s whimsical goofiness.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 120,473 users: 78% for Big Trouble In Little China

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“We sent Barry Bernardi, who was our location manager, who also served as our associate producer, on a sort of all-expense paid trip across the country looking for the worst city in America. He stopped off at various places and they were much too clean and unworkable. He eventually called us up from St. Louis. There had been a recent fire, which had destroyed about 20% of the downtown area. Block after block was burned-out rubble. In some places there was absolutely nothing, so that you could see three or four blocks away these brownstone buildings in the distance.” Debra Hill interviewed by Michael Beeler for Cinefantastique, September 1996

Escape From New York (1981)
Directed by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle
Produced by Larry Franco, Debra Hill
99 minutes

Juggling dire predictions for the United States as the nation dragged itself out of the 1970s and the creative freneticism of filmmakers in complete rapture with their medium is Debra Hill‘s production of a John Carpenter film, Escape From New York. One of the most enduring B-movies ever made, this low budget cirque du soleil stretched its budget and its vision to the limits, delivering a show quite unlike any action picture, sci-fi movie or western had up to that point in time, or for that matter, since. In the near future of 1997, soaring crime has resulted in modifications to the city of that never sleeps: Manhattan is now the country’s one maximum security prison. Waterways and bridges are mined. Paramilitary units and a containment wall surround the island, where the only rule is that once you go in, you don’t come out.

When Air Force One is hijacked and the president (Donald Pleasance) is jettisoned en route to a summit, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) opts for a one-man rescue by convict Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), nihilist with attitude who “volunteers” when he discovers tiny charges have been injected into his arteries. Given 24 hours to return the president, Plissken lands a glider atop the World Trade Center and with the clock ticking, navigates a Big Apple now the domain of deadly gangs and the worlds they’ve created. Plissken is rescued from cannibals by a cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) who reunites the gunslinger with his compadre Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), who occupies the Public Library solving problems for The Duke (Isaac Hayes), feared leader of the gang that runs New York and have taken the president.

Intrigued by the potential for NYC as an urban jungle after he sat through Death Wish in 1974, USC Film School grad John Carpenter wrote a strange, violent and apocalyptic script no studio wanted to touch titled Escape From New York. Six years later, Carpenter and his producer Debra Hill dusted it off to fulfill the second of a two-picture deal with Avco Embassy Pictures, bringing in a college buddy named Nick Castle to inject some irreverence into the nonstop action. Carpenter dreamed of Clint Eastwood playing Snake Plissken, while his financiers lobbied hard for Charles Bronson. Going against type, a child actor all grown up named Kurt Russell was cast, while the urban decay the filmmakers were desperately searching for was found in St. Louis, where a fire in 1977 had reduced 20% of downtown to ruins.

While the geopolitical landscape of Escape From New York remained purely speculative, Carpenter’s prophecy of rising gang activity and rioting actually came to pass, at least on the West Coast, where a deliriously overcooked 1996 sequel, Escape From L.A., was set. The joys of the original are the character actors who are as solid in front of the camera as the poor and hungry crew is behind them. In addition to Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau and Tom Atkins bring an understated nobility to their respective roles as gun moll and deputy warden. Carpenter composed a crackerjack musical score synthesized by Alan Howarth, while Dean Cundey utilized newly developed Panavision lenses to light exterior shots with remarkable depth. A classic western at its heart, the film’s “fuck you” attitude toward authority seems to embody the best punk rock music bombarding airwaves at the time.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 65,662 users: 72% for Escape From New York

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The most typical — and difficult — question people ask me is ‘What is Buckaroo Banzai about?’ If I could answer that in a single interview, I wouldn’t have spent two years making the film. I didn’t want to make a straight, genre film, and deliberately chose Buckaroo Banzai because it defied all the labels.” W.D. Richter interviewed by John L. Flynn for Sci-Fi Universe, 1995

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension (1984)
Directed by W.D. Richter
Written by Earl Mac Rauch
Produced by Neil Canton, W.D. Richter
103 minutes

Like a scrawny pup rescued from a ditch and taken home in the rain, whatever condition you find The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension diminishes over time as this crossbred mutt of science fiction, comedy and superhero myth grows into a beloved member of the family. Ghettoized as a “spoof” and sometimes misconstrued as camp, part of the genre busting film’s immense charm is how effortlessly it exists as its own beast without ribbing other movies, or putting itself down. A franchise that never was, it leaped from the imagination of Earl Mac Rauch, a University of Texas School of Law dropout who was selling finance contracts for mobile homes in the early 1970s when a review for his novel Arkansas Adios caught the eye of screenwriter W.D. Richter, a fellow Dartmouth College alum.

Rauch regaled Richter and his wife Susan with the adventures of a hero named Buckaroo Bandy. The Richters were tickled enough to commission a script for $1,500. Over the next several years, Rauch abandoned as many ideas as he dreamed up; one that the Richters begged him to keep was the hero’s new name: Buckaroo Banzai. Meanwhile, Richter adapted Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dracula and Brubaker, earning an Academy Award nomination for the latter. With the prestige to now direct, Richter wanted to make Buckaroo Banzai. He found an ally in David Begelman — then head of MGM — who departed the studio to form Sherwood Productions. Envisioning Buckaroo Banzai as his Indiana Jones, Begelman took the project with him. The producer had a distribution deal with Fox, but the studio was so bewildered by the finished product that they dumped it into theaters in late summer.

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) — neurosurgeon, samurai, hero in comic books — sheds his OR scrubs to test pilot a Jetcar capable of supersonic speed. With a device called the “oscillation overthruster”, the Jetcar successfully travels through solid matter and crosses the 8th dimension. Watching from the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane is Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), a particle physicist who crashed the 8th dimension but was possessed by Lord John Whorfin, an evil Red Lectroid exiled from Planet 10 for sedition. Whorfin joins Red Lectroids John O’Connor (Vincent Schiavelli), John Gomez (Dan Hedaya) and John Bigboote (Christopher Lloyd) in a plot that threatens to annihilate Earth. The only thing in their way are Buckaroo and his inner circle of engineers who moonlight as musicians in a rock band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

A punk rock superhero compared to Spiderman or Batman, Buckaroo Banzai is Renaissance Man. His powers are pure invention and the crackerjack team he assembles to fight evil. Played with casual confidence by Weller, the man isn’t interesting so much as his orbit — a surgeon (Jeff Goldblum) with a cowboy fetish, a spirited blonde (Ellen Barkin) who’s a dead ringer for Buckaroo’s late wife, reptilian aliens who refer to Earthlings as “monkey boys” and good aliens who in their human form resemble Rastafarians for no reason. Unabashed in its goofiness, the mythology at play is so rich and so extensive that cast and crew seem to relax and enjoy the ride. The only downer is the wave of multimedia — sequels, TV series, books — that never materialized. Michael Boddicker composed the giddy electronic score, punching up the best end credits sequence yet devised for a film.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 15,473 users: 68% for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

Q: “Why exactly did Paramount bury it?”
A: “Well, I think the real question is, why was it even made?”
Nick Schager interviewing Lou Adler for IFC News, September 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1982)
Directed by Lou Adler
Written by Nancy Dowd (as Rob Morton)
Produced by Joe Roth
87 minutes

For those who always wanted to find a time capsule buried in their backyard, or possibly stashed beneath the floorboard of their home, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains comes closer to capturing that sense of handcrafted wonder, impeccable historical detail and genuine surprise than just about any movie of the 1980s. Like a tin bin containing dime store knick knacks and faded newspaper clippings, this eclectic hybrid of music drama and chick empowerment vehicle lacks anything in the way of lavish production value. Much of its speedy 87 minutes feels duct taped together from different script drafts, reshoots and test screenings, but strangely, nothing could feel more true to the film’s punk rock aesthetic than a film with the sound of a worn out amp resold at a Pittsburgh pawn shop.

Diane Lane — 15 years young when shooting commenced in March 1980 — plays Corinne “Third Degree” Burns, an orphaned teen stuck with sister “Dee Peleted” (Marin Kanter) and cousin “Dizzy Heights” (Laura Dern) in their Pennsylvania steel town. Corrine catches British punk band The Looters as they pass through and implores their irascible lead singer Billy (Ray Winstone) for an audition. The Stains get their break from a Jamaican tour manager (Barry Ford), who hopes the girls distract Billy from exterminating the headliner, a one-hit rock relic from the ’70s named Lou Corpse (Fee Waybill). Corrine makes up for zero musical ability with a fuck you attitude, provocative hair/makeup and a feminist point of view, declaring “We’re The Stains and we don’t put out!” TV exposure swells the band’s disaffected female fanbase, but ignoring Billy’s advice, Corrine makes all the wrong decisions for the very first time.

After the success of Slap Shot in 1977, Paramount Pictures offered screenwriter Nancy Dowd a two-script deal. Dowd wanted to write about girls in a steel town who liberate themselves through punk rock. Introducing her to that scene was Caroline Coon, an artist who’d briefly managed The Clash; the studio would retain Coon as creative consultant and costume designer for what Dowd had titled All Washed Up. To direct, Paramount offered the project to Lou Adler, a record producer who’d worked with The Mamas & The Papas and Carole King and hit pay dirt at the picture show in 1978 with Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke. Dowd would later strip her name from the credits — citing sexual harassment on the set in Vancouver — but what doomed the film was a calamitous test screening in Denver. Now titled Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, it became a staple on USA Network’s zombie schedule in the late ’80s but wasn’t available on home video until 2008, when Rhino Entertainment distributed the DVD.

Whether by strict design or happy accident — Dowd received an Academy Award for co-writing Coming Home, while Adler never directed again — Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains taps into an agitated rhythm, buzzing the two bit dives of the Rust Belt with bumblebee’s pace and never losing its sting. In addition to performances by Diane Lane and Laura Dern that feel both surly and vulnerable, the sublime cast is led by a cherub faced Ray Winstone. Former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook (who together wrote three songs for the soundtrack) comprise an all-star punk band in The Looters, along with Paul Simonon from The Clash on bass. Playing tour manager, Barry Ford brings both diversity and a sense of truth to the story, which neither advocates coloring inside the lines or ripping up the paper purely for anarchy’s sake.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 1,325 users: 64% for Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“Talking about it was so important to that film. I think some people could despise it. If you don’t like the story or what it’s saying, then you just end up hating everything. It’s not a movie for everybody. Some people really dug it. Others thought it was disgusting and sick. And, of course, it is but it has two sides. You have to have the contrasts. Films should have power. The power of good and the power of darkness, so you can get some thrills and shake things up a bit. If you back off from that stuff, you’re shooting right down into lukewarm junk.” David Lynch interviewed by Chris Rodley for Lynch on Lynch

Blue Velvet (1986)
Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Produced by Fred Caruso
120 minutes

Taken at face value, Blue Velvet is the most primal tribute to Alfred Hitchcock to be conjured by another director outside of Alfred Hitchcock. Shadow of a Doubt found diabolism under the eaves in a small town, Rear Window warned voyeurs against peeping through the blinds of their neighbors and Blue Velvet hands out literature with a similar message, complete with a portrait of evil more unsettling than Psycho. If David Lynch had been satisfied making a thriller about other thrillers, his fourth motion picture would have still been one of the decade’s most powerful. Kyle MacLachlan (in his second film role after debuting as The Chosen One in Lynch’s unwieldily adaptation of Dune) plays Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student who returns to his “woodsy” hometown of Lumberton after his father suffers a terrifying stroke.

Strolling home, Jeffrey discovers a human ear in a field. The police detective on the case stays mum on who belongs to the ear, but his teenaged daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) is game to let Jeffrey in on what she’s heard through the walls, specifically, the name of a singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey’s thirst for “knowledge and experience” leads him to Dorothy’s apartment on the dark side of town. He’s forced to take cover in a closet and see what should have been left unseen: an amyl nitrate inhaling psychopath named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped Dorothy’s son and husband, clipping off her spouse’s ear to keep the songstress dependent on him. Jeffrey is repulsed by and attracted to his subject and it takes more than a hell ride with Frank and his crew for him to put Dorothy Vallens out of mind.

David Lynch grew up in Spokane and began noodling on Blue Velvet as early as 1973, starting with Bobby Vinton’s haunting version of the melody, some suburban mise-en-scène and Lynch’s obsession with sneaking into a girl’s room at night, where a mystery might be revealed while he watched her. The script frightened Warner Bros. and perplexed Lynch, specifically, how it should end. He accepted an offer to adapt and direct Dune for Dino De Laurentiis and though the results didn’t live up to expectations, De Laurentiis rolled the dice on Lynch again and his gamble paid off. The National Society of Film Critics voted Blue Velvet the Best Picture of 1986, but with Children of a Lesser God, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Mission, Platoon and A Room with a View vying for Best Picture, Blue Velvet was left in the dark at the Oscars.

With the eerie steadiness of a planchette being nudged across a ouija board, the mastery of Blue Velvet is how it drifts away from safety and discovers perversity lurking under what passes for normal in the suburbs. In terms of visual composition, this is watercolor come to life. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes immerses the film in electric blues, verdant greens and nightmare black. Even with extras who look like they were stolen from a circus, there’s not a bad performance in the picture; Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper have never been stronger, with Hopper cracking the screen with white trash intensity. In the daylight scenes, Lynch lets his infectious sense of humor come out to play. After dark, he forces viewers to question the foundation of evil. Angelo Badalamenti composed the lush orchestral score.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 67,823 users: 88% for Blue Velvet

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.” John Carpenter interviewed for Terror Takes Shape in 2002 on The Thing: Collector’s Edition [DVD]

The Thing (1982)
Directed by John Carpenter
Screenplay by Bill Lancaster, based on the short story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
Produced by David Foster, Lawrence Turman
109 minutes

Look up the word “doom” in the Encyclopedia Britannica and you won’t find mention of John Carpenter‘s The Thing, but a wave of barometric pressure hangs over this masterpiece of science fiction horror. Beyond the doom its characters are infected with, this remake of the 1951 classic The Thing From Another World was damned by waves of nausea, hostility and derision upon its release. It faltered at the box office, altered the career of its director and alerted studios there was a toll to pay for bankrolling movies that weren’t nice, like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was nice. Developed by Universal Studios, The Thing was a dream car of sorts for Carpenter, who’d directed one mean, lean low budget machine after another and was offered the keys to adapt one of his favorite movies for a mass audience.

Elegant in its simplicity and overwhelming in its foreboding, The Thing takes place on an American research station isolated in Antarctica. A Norwegian chopper appears on the horizon and a sniper fires at a Siberian husky racing across the ice. When one of the Americans is wounded, the station manager Garry (Donald Moffat) returns fire, killing the Norwegians. To investigate, pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) and physician Doc Copper (Richard Dysart) helicopter to the Norwegian camp. They encounter a last stand from hell and even more startling, something contorted in a burn pile outside. Biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley), dog handler Clark (Richard Masur), mechanic Childs (Keith David) and the nine other Americans don’t know what to make of the specimen at first, but quickly learn it isn’t dead yet.

Even more so than the 1950s monster movie he was a fan of, Carpenter was fascinated by themes creeping through the original John W. Campbell Jr. short story, published by Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938: A hostile alien is awakened and reveals a tenacity to assume the shape and memory of anything it devours, generating rampant paranoia among the men over who is still human and who isn’t. A screenplay by Bill Lancaster ran with these ideas and to visualize them, a 20-year-old makeup effects prodigy named Rob Bottin was entrusted with delivery. Bottin hit on the concept that The Thing wasn’t one monster, but could transform into any lifeform in the universe it had imitated, with gut wrenching effect. Critics and audiences initially felt that the film had gone too far in that regard.

The irony is that Carpenter could have scaled back the violence he was heavily censured for at the time, but with unremittingly stark chords and a pulsating doomsday pace, The Thing is just a dark fucking movie, one that audiences weren’t prepared for at the time. The Thing refuses to favor good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what’s disturbing about it, as well what makes it great. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone all feel perfectly in synch. That the special effects hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without him, the movie would not be the nightmare it turned out to be. As for Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 113,449 users: 80% for The Thing

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“For me, it’s still, emotionally, falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.” Ivor Powell interviewed in 2007 for Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.

Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Produced by Michael Deeley
117 minutes

One of the most massive electric train sets ever constructed, Blade Runner doesn’t address logic or emotional depth as much as it lays down magnetic track and sails a bullet train over them. Arduously drafted, painstakingly constructed and overwhelming in scale as well as detail, it’s a marvel of science fiction engineering all right, yet climaxes with such insight into the nature of humanity that a poet dipping his toes in a pond might even give it up for the movie. With a tumultuous production history chronicled by a 3-hour documentary (Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner) and book (Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul M. Sammon), the film’s genesis was a creative storm by author Philip K. Dick, who capped a prodigious decade with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968.

Ten years later, struggling screenwriter Hampton Fancher was urged by a friend to consider the book as something he might make some money off of. Fancher optioned the film rights and found particular empathy for Dick’s vision of overpopulation and ecological malaise. His untitled adaptation was strong enough to ultimately attract producer Michael Deeley, whose choice to direct was Ridley Scott, a U.K. commercial stylist then mixing the sound for his second feature film: Alien. Scott had sensed the seismic industry shift toward sci-fi following the public reception of Star Wars and when he was unable to decipher an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, agreed to board what was then being called Dangerous Days. Fancher didn’t care for that title and jacked one from William S. Burroughs that he preferred: Blade Runner.

In a dark narrative that screenwriter David Peoples was hired to punch into a shooting script, Los Angeles of the year 2019 is drenched in industrial pollution and overrun by those too sickly or poor to relocate to an off world colony. The Tyrell Corp has created the Replicant, a being identical to a human, superior in strength and at least equal in intelligence. Retired cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned to hunt down four Replicants who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown. Deckard visits Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), who shows off his secretary Rachael (Sean Young), a Replicant implanted with memories so vivid she believes herself to be human. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks out Deckard in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the fugitive Replicants — combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), laborer Leon (Brion James), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) — seek reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Dumping a wallop of psychic despair on audiences and losing critics in a labyrinth of wayward plot, Blade Runner was salvaged through midnight screenings and one of the first ever “director’s cuts” that in 1992 permitted Ridley Scott to smooth over miscues he made a decade earlier. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them still seem as clumsy as they ever were, but the film dances with questions about what it means to be human and where we might be headed if we stop troubling ourselves with that question. Deliberate and dangerously close to paralyzing the viewer with sensory overload, Scott’s eye for detail and his design virtuoso are stamped in every shot, while the nighthawk cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, electronic score by Vangelis and spellbinding visual effects work are a triumph in mood over matter.

Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer” average among 288,583 users: 89% for Blade Runner

Metacritic “Metascore” average among leading critics: N/A

What do you say?

“The companies, the majors, were afraid of it. They felt that it’s a downer, that the main character is going to be not very likable. And they also were suspicious about the genre, because they kept saying that the murder mystery plot isn’t very strong, which they were right about! They really wanted a murder mystery. Finally they said yes. Then they regretted it, I’m sure. And now they are glad.” — Ivan Passer interviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum in New York, July 1981

Cutter’s Way (1981)
Directed by Ivan Passer
Screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, based on the novel Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg
Produced by Paul R. Gurian
105 minutes

Coloring outside the lines of its literary source material as much as a movie adaptation needs to, Cutter’s Way is a damn near perfect picture of character, atmosphere and idiosyncrasy. This is a rare film that feels like it leapt to screen from the Smith Corona of a 20th century novelist without any artificial sweeteners; you can smell the cigarette smoke dangling in the air. Firmly in the Han Solo stage of his career, Jeff Bridges stars as Richard Bone, a fop who divides his time between boinking housewives, pimping sailboats in Santa Barbara and shirking responsibility at large. His best friends are a one-eyed, one-legged, one-man wrecking ball named Alex Cutter (John Heard) and his wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), whose sultry bloom is beginning to peel behind alcohol and her marriage to Cutter, a Vietnam vet.

Returning from a session with his latest paramour (Nina van Pallandt), Bone abandons his piece of shit Austin Healey in an alley. There, he encounters a man dumping a woman’s body in a trash can. When Bone tries to intercede, he’s nearly run over. Selling his alibi to the police, Bone is introduced to Valerie Duran (Ann Dusenberry), the spunky sister of the murder victim who asks Bone to help her nab the killer. He prefers to celebrate Old Spanish Days with Cutter and Mo, but while watching a parade, identifies the killer as J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott), an oil company tycoon who owns Santa Barbara. Refusing to suffer the indignity of another fat cat buying his way out of a crime, Cutter hatches a scheme to nail Cord. Bone resists getting involved until his fatalistic friend leaves him no choice.

No fan of the mystery genre per se, Newton Thornburg published his fourth novel Cutter and Bone in 1976 to raves and respectable enough sales for Paul R. Gurian to option the film rights. Screenwriter Jeffrey Alan Fiskin was hired to adapt a screenplay and the project was set up at EMI, where it may have been hoped that The Deer Hunter had wet the public’s appetite for Vietnam themed movies. Director Robert Mulligan was attached and Dustin Hoffman pursued to play Alex Cutter. When Hoffman dissipated, Mulligan moved on. Gurian ultimately turned to Ivan Passer, a Czech filmmaker whose 1965 debut feature Intimate Lighting may have impressed the producer with its nonjudgmental look at human nature. When Jeff Bridges agreed to play Bone, United Artists stepped in to bankroll the quirky, character driven lark.

Management upheaval at United Artists during the fiasco of Heaven’s Gate (in addition to contemptible reviews in the New York Times and New Yorker) prompted the studio to orphan Cutter and Bone in March 1981 after one week in limited release. A flurry of ecstatic reviews and film festival awards forced UA to reconsider and six months later, the film was rereleased under a new title: Cutter’s Way. It remained enough of a marketing enigma to stay off VHS until 1991 and DVD until 2001. Meandering and moody, Cutter’s Way doesn’t have the payoffs of a popcorn thriller. As a sensual rendering of three souls, their environment and their personal aberrations, the film is exhilarating. Cast and performed to perfection, cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lit the picture like some dingy beer hall of dream while Jack Nitzsche composed the bewitching musical score.