Tag Archives: 1980s

Paris by night. Alex, 22, wants to become a filmmaker. He is fascinated by first times and his girlfriend, Florence, has just left him for his best friend, Thomas. First break-up, first attempted murder: Alex tries to strangle Thomas, but gives up and wanders the streets. That evening, Mireille, a girl from provincial France who has come up to Paris to make commercials, is left by her boyfriend. Alex witnesses this separation. These two tormented souls run into each other at a party….
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Denny has yet again been left by her thug boyfriend Chip. It seems as if she is doomed to be stuck with awful guys, this time she has to choose between nerdy Charles and the strange Kaz, who turns into a monster when sexually aroused.
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In 1925, Gabriela becomes cook, mistress, and then wife of Nacib, a bar owner in a small Brazilian coastal town runs by the local colonels. Nacib becomes tired of Gabriela’s uneducated ways, and annuls the marriage when he finds her in bed with his friend Tonico. The political ways of the town modernize slightly and Gabriela returns as Nacib’s mistress.
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Allen Bauer is rescued from drowning as a young boy off Cape Cod by a young mermaid. Years later, he returns to the same location, and once again manages to fall into the sea, and is rescued once more by the mermaid (Allen isn’t sure what he has seen and what he has imagined). Using maps from a sunken ship, the mermaid decides to search for Allen in New York City, sprouting legs when her tail dries. On finding Allen, they fall in love, but she has a secret, which will no longer be a secret if she gets her legs wet.
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Summer 1939 in the Provence, France: the 14 years old Julien has a crush on his cousin Julia, who lives together with his family in their small hotel. Unfortunately she ignores him, because she’s several years older. Then the hotel guest Charles enters the competition, a slimy twenty-something who lusts for the girl, despite the fact that he’s engaged.
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A mailman becomes obsessed with a pretty, young wife. He captures the woman, tortures her and keeps her in his basement dungeon where she becomes his private sex toy.
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Silly group of college science students go an dig around in an indian burial ground for artifacts. Unfortunately, one of them becomes possessed by the evil spirit of Black Claw so he must therefore slaughter all of his friends.
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A regular girl, Veronica, tries to survive the social jungle of high school by sticking with the three most popular girls at school who are all called Heather. As she meets a sociopath named JD, her life spirals into a continuous cycle of hate, unintentional murder and indifference, as she exacts revenge on her enemies, also known as her best friends.
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When lovable nerds Gilbert and Lewis embark on their freshman year at Adams College, little do they realize the perils that await them. They’re beset by taunting from the jocks of Alpha Beta fraternity, which only worsens when the jocks accidentally burn down their house and toss the freshmen out of the freshmen dorm. To make matters more problematic Lewis develops a crush on pretty Betty Childs, popular sorority sister and quarterback’s girlfriend. Joined by the aptly named Booger and the violin-playing Pointdexter, the nerds soon realize they must form their own fraternity in self-defence. Soon the tables are turned as the nerds employ high-tech warfare against the jocks…. but can they really win and make a difference?
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Snobbish and wealthy Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) is living a life of leisure with her husband, Grant (Edward Herrmann), when she falls off their yacht and suffers amnesia. Grant takes the opportunity to rid himself of the demanding Joanna – but Dean (Kurt Russell), a widowed carpenter with four kids who once worked for Joanna, arrives and claims she’s his wife. Joanna can’t remember her past identity, but has trouble believing that she was ever meant to be a working-class mother of four.
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TOKYO-GA, Spanish poster art, 1985, ©Gray City

Taking a breather from the Paris, Texas shooting, Wim Wenders hopped a plane, camera in hand, to look for the Tokyo enshrined by the late Yasujiro Ozu (whose work Wenders dubs “the sacred treasure of the cinema”). What he found instead, documented in this filmic journal, was an urbanized dislocation not far from the forlorn emptiness he coached out of German and American vistas. Whether abstracting businessmen teeing off atop skyscrapers or the rigorous, artisanal craft of building a wax sandwich display, Wenders scrambles for humanity seeping through neon and steel – a humanity linked, inevitably, to the old Japan of Ozu’s films (rebellious tykes, cherry blossoms, tranquil countrysides). A far less queasy piece of hero-worship than Lightning Over Water, the picture meditates not so much on Ozu the filmmaker than on Ozu the vanishing feeling, motifs and images reconsidered in a modernized Japan circa 1983 (the trains that fill the Japanese master’s pictures with notions of inexorable movement have now become bullet expresses, gliding with smooth, ominous impersonality). Elsewhere, Wenders bumps into Werner Herzog (who bitches about having to space-travel to find pure images nowadays), Chris Marker (whose Sans Soleil would make a superb double-bill with Tokyo-Ga) and two aged Ozu stalwarts, gracious, dignified leading man Chishu Ryu and anecdotal camera operator Yuuharu Atsuta. Wenders’ eulogy for a culture alienating its own roots is built, characteristically, upon cinema’s capacity for regenerative beauty, though his links to Ozu are, if anything, more tenuous than his affinity with Nicholas Ray – Ozu’s images distill life, Wenders’ etherealize it. Cinematography by Edward Lachman.
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After Leila, his boss’s daughter, is kidnapped by psychopathic plague victim Decker, chauffeur Chazz teams up with plague-infected mercenary Luger to penetrate the toxic & off-limits Plague Zone and bring her back alive.
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Mad scientist Professor Gangreen is cooking up the second coming of the Great Tomato Uprising, in which music converted tomatoes into human form to war against mankind. Pizza delivery man Chad Finletter must save the world and beautiful tomato-girl Tara.
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The family of widow Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) has long been plagued by shark attacks, and this unfortunate association continues when her son is the victim of a massive great white. In mourning, Ellen goes to visit her other son, Michael (Lance Guest), in the Bahamas, where she meets the charming Hoagie Newcombe (Michael Caine). As Ellen and Hoagie begin a relationship, a huge shark appears off the coast of the island, and Ellen’s trouble with the great whites begins again.
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A prison riot breaks out at the moment of a serial murderer’s execution by electrocution, and his fate becomes indeterminate when the prison is shut down. 18 months later, a team of filmmakers converge on the prison to film a women-in-prison exploitation flick, but find that a certain somebody is disrupting their shooting schedule…
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