80s News Today

It was a Friday, the kind of gray, late-February afternoon where the winter is tired of being winter but spring hasn’t yet found its courage. February 27, 1987. A day like any other for the folks in Westin Hills, maybe, but for the rest of us—the ones who spent our pocket change on popcorn and terror—it was the day the Boogeyman finally got a face. Or at least, a history. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors didn’t just slouch into theaters; it kicked the door down. We’d seen Freddy before, sure. We knew the sweater, the hat, the glove that looked like it had been forged in the basement of some hellish hardware store. But Dream Warriors was different. It was the moment Wes Craven came back to his creation and whispered, "Let’s show them why he’s really mean." See, horror is a funny thing. It works best in the dark, but if you want it to truly haunt a man, you have to give the monster a soul—even if that soul is as black as a coal chute. This movie did the heavy liftin...

February 18, 1989. The kind of winter day that feels like a gray woolen blanket soaked in cold slush. Down at the local Video King—sandwiched between a fading laundromat and a pizza joint that smelled of scorched oregano—a new kind of terror arrived in a purple box. LJN's logo stared out from the front, that cartoonish red scar across the title, promising something forbidden. Friday the 13th . Not the movies, not really—those were for the drive-in, for the back row where you could pretend the screams were someone else's. This was for the living room, for the gray glow of the television at three in the afternoon when your parents were still at work and the house felt too big and too empty. Now, you might scoff. A video game? How much terror can a bunch of pixels really inflict? Believe you me, dear reader, if you were a kid back then, huddled in the glow of a cathode ray tube, the terror was real. It was the kind of creeping dread that starts in your stomach and crawls up your t...

The date was February 15, 1980, and the air over the Pacific was thick with the stench of cheap exhaust and impending doom. We were hovering on the edge of a new decade, clutching our tattered Carter-era souls, when a low-budget Australian nightmare called Mad Max tore through the celluloid curtain and ran over our collective consciousness like a runaway semi-truck. George Miller—a doctor, for God's sake!—had unleashed a savage, high-octane fever dream onto American screens. This wasn't the polished, plastic Hollywood garbage the studios had been pumping into the vents. This was pure, unadulterated motor-oil madness. The premise? Simple enough for a barbiturate addict to follow: A leather-clad road cop named Max Rockatansky—played by a young, wild-eyed Mel Gibson—trying to maintain "The Law" in a world that had clearly sold its soul for a gallon of high-test premium. It was a landscape of scorched earth and screaming metal, populated by a gang of degenerate bikers wh...

February 8, 1980. Mark it down, folks, because that was the day the Silver Screen coughed up something truly, utterly, and gloriously American onto the unsuspecting public. Forget your grimacing anti-heroes, your tormented auteurs, your foreign-film gloom! This was something else entirely, a cinematic confection as bright and unapologetically earnest as a freshly starched shirt on a Sunday morning. We’re talking about Hero at Large , a motion picture that landed in theaters with the subtle grace of a bowling ball dropped from a skyscraper. And who, you might ask, was at the very epicenter of this particular cultural collision? None other than the gangly, grinning, rubber-faced maestro of physical comedy himself: John Ritter! Yes, that John Ritter, the man who, for the better part of a decade, had been tumbling and pratfalling and generally making a delightful spectacle of himself as Jack Tripper on "Three’s Company." This wasn't some Method-acting, inner-demon-wrestling p...

It is an observational fact that most things simply do not happen in New Zealand. This is because New Zealand is primarily occupied with being green, being vertical, and being roughly twelve thousand miles away from anyone who might complain about the noise. A pair of islands that had drifted so far south they appeared to have been lost in the post, and then decided to stay lost on purpose. The inhabitants, a hardy breed of people who had learned to call sheep their closest relatives and rain their national anthem, had for many years produced films in much the same way they produced wine: in small quantities, with great earnestness, and frequently to the bemusement of everyone else. However, on February 6, 1981, something happened. And it happened with a yellow Mini and a spectacular lack of regard for the police. Goodbye Pork Pie was released to a public that had, until that point, largely assumed that "cinema" was a sophisticated export involving British people in drawing r...

Good Lord, people! Do you remember the sheer, unadulterated buzz? The hum of the VCR! The pristine, plastic clamshell case, hot off the factory floor, promising glory! Yes, on February 5, 1987, the very air itself crackled with a new, distinctly American energy. It was the day Top Gun , that shimmering, testosterone-fueled ode to speed, swagger, and the sheer, intoxicating power of the United States Navy, landed not in theaters, but right in your suburban living room. And it wasn’t just any landing. Oh no, my friends, this was no gentle taxi to the gate. This was a MACH 2 POWER DIVE into the very heart of how we consumed, how we owned, our cinematic dreams. This was a WATERSHED MOMENT so seismic it reshaped the very topography of Hollywood’s profit margins, sending shockwaves through every mom-and-pop video store from Bethesda to Burbank! Before this fateful day, buying a movie on VHS was an act of almost monastic devotion. These were not impulse buys, these were investments. A single ...

DUNMURRY, NORTHERN IRELAND — JANUARY 21, 1981 And there it was! The Thing Itself! Not merely a car, no, but a shimmering, unpainted slab of Tomorrow, squinting through the Belfast drizzle like a terrestrial UFO. Out of the hangar-sized gestation crates of the DeLorean Motor Company, the first production DMC-12—VIN 500—was whelped into the gray light of a Tuesday morning. Can you feel the sheen? Can you smell the ozone and the hubris? John Zachary DeLorean—the man with the silver-streaked pompadour and the jawline of a Roman consul—had done it. He had defected from the mahogany-paneled cathedrals of General Motors to build his own altar to the Great American Ego. He didn’t want just another "automobile." He wanted a Social Statement. He wanted a brushed-stainless-steel exoskeleton that screamed: "I have arrived, and I am traveling at the speed of the future!" John Z. himself, with his impeccably coiffed hair and movie-star looks, must have surveyed it with the pride ...

January 14, 1981! Mark it, folks— today's the day Walt Disney's enchanted empire, that sprawling fantasia of castles and critters, makes its first audacious foray into home video releases for the everyday Joe and Jane to buy, not just rent. No more begging the video store clerk for a weekend loaner; now you can own the magic, slap it into your hulking VCR beast, and rewind Old Yeller's heart-tug tears until the tape squeals for mercy (or unravels out and jams up your machine)! Can you see them? The suburban legions, the station-wagon commuters, the beige-polyester titans of the cul-de-sac—they are descending upon the electronics boutiques with a new, frantic glint in their eyes! They aren’t looking for Zenith consoles or those clacking Teletype machines. No! They are after the TAPE. The Magnetic Ribbon of Dreams! For years, the high priests at Disney kept their treasures locked in a literal vault, dolefully releasing them to theaters once every seven years like some druidic...

December 23, 1988. On this most peculiar of pre-festive evening, Hollywood, in its infinite perversion, decided to present America with a cinematic gift. A gift unwrapped not with a joyous tear, but with a visceral shriek: Hellbound: Hellraiser II . Now, one might reasonably inquire, why? Why, when the spirit of the season was ostensibly about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men (and perhaps a mildly intoxicating eggnog), would anyone choose to delve into the exquisitely tormented psyche of Cenobites, those interdimensional arbiters of pain and pleasure? The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere between the inscrutable whims of movie executives and a collective, subconscious urge to verify if indeed, there could be anything worse than arguing with Aunt Buffy over the last slice of fruitcake. The original Hellraiser , you see, had been a delightful little piece of visceral philosophy, posing the rather pertinent question: "What if the ultimate S&M party required a particularly i...

December 19, 1986. In the mall cineplex, the air was thick with the smell of butter-drenched popcorn and the looming dread of the Reagan era’s shiny, plastic patriotism. Then the lights died, the screen flickered to life, and suddenly we weren't in a cinema anymore. We were in the Green Inferno. We were in the mud. We were in the absolute, gibbering madness of Vietnam. Oliver Stone—a man who actually crawled through the tall grass with a rifle in his hand and the smell of cordite in his lungs—decided to drop a napalm canister right on the doorstep of the American Dream. He gave us Platoon . This wasn't Top Gun . There were no gleaming white teeth or volleyball montages here. No, man. This was a high-octane descent into the soul of a generation that got chewed up and spat out by the military-industrial complex. It was a war between two fathers: Barnes, the scarred, psychotic god of death, and Elias, the pot-smoking, Christ-like ghost of a conscience that never had a chance. Char...

There’s a kind of terrible, heavy silence in old places, isn’t there? A waiting. You can feel it in the foundations of an ancient house, or maybe down in the root cellar, where the air hangs thick and cold, smelling of damp earth and things that should stay buried. It’s the silence of history holding its breath. The movie they called The Keep , which sneaked into theaters on a blustery Friday back in '83, December 16th to be precise, understood that feeling in its bones, even if the folks in Hollywood—those well-meaning idiots in the cheap suits—didn't quite know what to do with the beast they'd bought. Folks bundled up against the cold, shuffled in with their popcorn and sodas, expecting maybe another war picture or a straightforward scare. What they got was something else entirely. Something that burrowed under the skin and stayed there. The story starts simple enough, the way the best nightmares do. A detachment of German soldiers, weary from the endless grind of war, ro...

It's epic! It's divisive! It's controversial! And it's also the definitive and superior film adaptation of the novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Yes, I'm talking about David Lynch's Dune , which opened in theaters on December 14, 1984. The later reboots simply don't hold a glowglobe to Lynch's lavish treatment of one of the greatest works in Western literature. You see, Dune is the rare genre novel that achieves escape velocity from the mere science fiction orbit to legitimate comparison with Great Expectations or The Great Gatsby . A true desert island book, it can be reread endlessly. And not simply because Herbert creates a universe the reader is sucked into, but because his writing is so damn good. I will occasionally pick up my copy - a mass market paperback released with the 1984 flick - and, some time later, regain consciousness to realize I'm already 100 pages into the story once again. It's that good. So, theoretically, I should be one of t...

Miami. The word hangs in the humid air like the promise of a particularly potent Cuban cigar. A place where the American Dream hadn't just arrived; it had hot-wired a speed boat and was doing donuts in the intercoastal waterway. And into this glittering, grimy tableau of excess and ambition, right on the precipice of Christmas consumerism, arrived a cinematic detonation: Scarface , opening nationwide on December 9, 1983. BAM! A visual and auditory assault that immediately separated the squares from those who understood that style is a moral imperative. Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone—those enfants terribles of cinema—had taken the relatively quaint, black-and-white 1930s gangster archetype and injected it with enough pure, unadulterated flesh, flash, and fury to make Howard Hawks spin in his grave, likely shouting for a proper tailor. It wasn't just a movie; it was a manifesto wrapped in a white linen suit, slightly tailored at the waist, worn by a man with the eyes of a shark ...

It is a widely known, though rarely acknowledged, fact that the most perplexing force in the universe is not the infinite stretch of space, nor the baffling nature of black holes, but the sheer, unadulterated audacity of a sequel. Specifically, the sequel to a film so deeply philosophical, so profoundly slow-moving, that entire university departments have dedicated decades to simply deciphering which end of the monochrome monolith was up. And so it was that on this day, December 7, 1984, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a new chapter in human misunderstanding: 2010: The Year We Make Contact . This film, directed by Peter Hyams, attempted the seemingly impossible: explaining the inscrutable. The original 2001: A Space Odyssey left humanity floating in a bath of cosmic ambiguity, which is precisely where many feel it belonged. It was a film that whispered profound questions to the void. 2010 chose instead to shout the answers with a reasonable degree of urgency. The central thesis of 20...

It is a little-known fact that the Earth was very nearly destroyed on December 5, 1980. The instrument of this near-apocalypse was a motion picture called Flash Gordon , directed by a man named Mike Hodges who, one suspects, had been locked in a screening room with too many Saturday-morning serials and an industrial quantity of gin. The result was released upon an unsuspecting planet exactly forty-five years ago today, and the universe has never quite recovered. Picture the scene. Somewhere in the trackless depths of space, the rogue planet Mongo is being steered – by hand, apparently, because Emperor Ming the Merciless has strong opinions about power steering – directly toward Earth. Ming, played by Max von Sydow with the sort of gravitas normally reserved for reading the shipping forecast during an alien invasion, has decided that Earth is simply too cheerful and must be punished. His solution is to hurl hot hail, cold hail, tidal waves, and the occasional bit of erratic wind at us u...

What is it about those cheap cardboard and plastic glasses that can supercharge a mere movie sequel into a phenomenon for the ages? Yes, my friend, I'm talking about those 3-D glasses. Not the fancy ones of today that you have to drop in a box after the movie. I'm talking about the real deal, the OG, with the blue lens and the red lens. Every couple of decades, Hollywood gets a bad case of global amnesia that it can make 3-D movies, and then reintroduces the fad anew. So it did in 80s, and that time around, it was the third installment of a film franchise that would be gifted the three-dimensional treatment. The schlock 3-D trifecta was begun by Friday the 13th Part III and Jaws 3-D, and completed on November 18, 1983, with the release of Amityville 3-D. The house was back, the windows were eyes again, and this time the tagline screamed, "Warning: In this movie, you are the victim." An all-too-knowing professor in the movie says, "The only thing remotely inter...

It is a little-known fact, buried somewhere between the invention of the cassette tape and the controversial decision to put pineapple on pizza, that on the sixteenth of November in the year 1984, the human race was quietly issued a cinematic memo informing it that, in the event of a comet passing perilously close to Earth and turning ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of the population into either dust or zombies, the last remnants of civilization would be two Valley Girl sisters and a trucker. The film in question was Night of the Comet , written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. It is nothing less than one of the quintessential 80s films, one that future generations and offworld guests will be shown, should they express a curiosity to truly understand what life was like in the 1980s. It shares cinematic DNA with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension - which opened earlier the same year - but presents a far more cinéma vérité approach in its depiction of the...

Los Angeles - November 14, 1983: Twenty-three hand-picked souls have been summoned to the Crest Theater on Westwood Boulevard, a modest little palace usually reserved for sneak previews of pictures nobody will remember by breakfast. Tonight, though, the marquee is dark. No title. No stars. Just a velvet rope, two security men built like Michelin Men in Brioni, and the low throb of anticipation that feels like the bass line to something unholy. Inside, the chosen glide down the aisle in a hush that is almost ecclesiastical: Fred Astaire in a navy blazer sharp enough to shave with, looking like a man who has seen the future and is mildly amused; Jane Fonda, fresh from a workout that cost more than most people’s rent, her cheekbones still humming from the Nautilus; Diana Ross in silver lamé that catches the projector beam and throws it back like a disco ball in heaven; Eddie Murphy, twenty-two years old and already owning the room simply by refusing to sit still; Marlon Brando, mountainou...

Some knockoffs just don't know when to quit. November 11, 1988, provided just such a case in point, with the release of a second Iron Eagle movie, the inventively titled Iron Eagle II . The poor man's Top Gun got a sequel thirty-six years before 80s icons Maverick and Iceman. Que pantalones! Iron Eagle II tries to up the stakes by forcing American and Soviet fighter pilots onto a secret team, led by the returning Lou Gossett, Jr. The team is deployed to Israel for a covert mission to take out a nuclear weapons compound in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. It sounds like a fever dream Nick Fuentes would have after eating too many Portillo's hot dogs late at night. Speaking of hot dogs, the aerial manuevers seen in the film were performed by actual Israeli Air Force pilots, and were the one redeeming aspect of the film cited by film critics who otherwise blasted the flick. Top Gun was known for its bazillion-selling soundtrack, a groundbreaking disc that established a new t...

The Blair Witch Project may be the most financially successful horror movie filmed in Maryland, but it's not the only one. November 7, 1980 saw the nationwide release of The Boogey Man , most of which was filmed in Southern Maryland. Many film critics dismissed it at the time because it arrived among a cacophony of Halloween knockoffs at the dawn of the 80s. And while Hollywood's burgeoning interest in the slasher genre certainly helped the movie get made and distributed widely, The Boogey Man took a much more novel approach than another lumbering stabber stalking teenagers. The choice of title was probably the biggest mistake, as it suggested exactly such a tired scenario, and was literally one of the descriptives applied to Michael Myers in the John Carpenter vehicle that started the whole damn thing in 1978. Because the true villain in The Boogey Man isn't a man at all. It's a mirror. A mirror that's seen things. And when that mirror is shattered twenty years l...