Flashback 1981 - FLASH! CLASH! SLASH!

A selection of pages from British movie magazines of 1981. 

The highlight of 1980's Christmas holidays was easily Dino De Laurentiis' Flash Gordon, which didn't need much advertising with Queen's theme song riding high in the charts.

Photoplay, January

The above advert pinpoints when Flash Gordon opened in London and then around the country. The superb artwork is by Renato Casaro. (Film On Paper interview Renato Casaro).

Photoplay, January

Flash Gordon was played by Sam Jones, then almost completely unknown. These magazines had to remind us that he'd had a brief role in Blake Edwards' 10, playing Bo Derek's boyfriend.

Film Review, January

Unusually, Film Review ran an offer on original Flash Gordon film posters - UK quads for only 95p each! I've not seen official cinema posters being officially sold like this before or since! Yes, I've still got one.

Photoplay, January

The Stuntman was fun, with Peter O' Toole playing a crazed movie director (who he based on David Lean!). This article points out it was delayed in getting released, having been shot in 1978. It appeared in cinemas later in the year.

Photoplay, January

Director Richard Rush (kneeling), Peter O'Toole and Steve Railsback making The Stuntman.

Film Review, January

A tribute to Steve McQueen who'd passed away in November, 1980. In Britain, we'd only just seen his last film The Hunter.

To kick off a busy summer, here comes Superman... II. The newspapers were buzzing about how Richard Donner, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman had left the production when they discovered they'd made two films, while only being paid for one. Well, that was the story. The producers had performed a similar trick with The Three/Four Musketeers. Having lost the director, Richard Lester completed this second film, Susannah York replaced Marlon Brando as Superman's parental guidance, and Gene Hackman's scenes were very obviously finished with a body double (who mostly kept his back to the camera). Despite all this, the film was hugely successful and an enjoyable crowd-pleaser with just the right amount of humour. Years later, Richard Donner released his own Director's Cut on DVD, notably less humorous than Richard Lester's approach.

Films and Filming, April

While General Zod is the most memorable character in the film, Terence Stamp's face isn't even shown in the artwork (just the back of his head!) and he doesn't get a 'supporting cast' photo either.

Film Review, May

British film had a great boost from Chariots of Fire, again given free publicity from the hit single from Vangelis' soundtrack. The story of olympic runners didn't inspire me into the cinema though. Ben Cross (top left) emerged as the star of the film, but his career soon descended into US horror movies. His 'opponent' Ian Charleson (top right) later starred in Dario Argento's Opera (1987) but died far too young, soon afterwards.

Film Review, May

A far more interesting British film appeared at the same time. The Long Good Friday is the twisty tale of ambitious London gangsters. It also nailed the political mood of a country about to embrace Thatcherist consumerism. It established Bob Hoskins as a star and, for a while, Helen Mirren.

Film Review, May

Robin Williams' first starring role. I went to see Robert Altman's Popeye because Mork and Mindy was funny. Before buying my ticket, I was unaware that this was a musical, and also an origin story where Popeye took his sweet time becoming Popeye. Shelley Duvall appeared a great deal happier in this than she had in the previous year's The Shining.

Film Review, May

Here's a great double-page spread of Disney's Herbie Goes Bananas and... David Cronenberg's Scanners! No, it wasn't a double-bill.

Film Review, May

David Cronenberg continued with his run of graphic 'body horror' movies. Because of Scanners' science-fiction element, and a lack of violence featuring guns or knives, the moments of explosive gore bypassed any censor cuts. Videodrome wouldn't be so lucky...

Film Review, June

Weird paste-up poster with a lousy tagline. Posters were losing their touch. Especially in underselling a gutsy action-packed thriller like Nighthawks. With Rutger Hauer as a baddy, just before Blade Runner.

Film Review, June

Halloween and Friday the 13th had initiated the decade of the slasher. Tobe Hooper joined in with the weirdly bloodless The Funhouse, here supported by My Bloody Valentine, which wasn't bloody because much of the gore had been censored. Only the recent DVD special edition restored the scenes we'd first seen in the pages of Fangoria.

Film Review, July

Another Canadian horror classic (again with the bloodiest bits removed), Happy Birthday To Me is now more enjoyable as a whodunnit.

Film Review, July

The clear winner at the box office - Friday continued to thirteen. I remember seeing this on the afternoon of July 29th that year, in order to escape the blanket media coverage of Charles and Diana's wedding.

Film Review, July

Another summer, another Roger Moore Bond movie. There were far fewer gadgets in For Your Eyes Only as Bond came down to Earth (after Moonraker) for a tough, stunt-heavy, spy adventure.

Sword and sorcery films were a parallel genre to compete or cash in with the fantasy adventure of Star Wars mania. 

Film Review, August

Even Clash of the Titans' Bubo the clockwork owl had a whiff of R2-D2. It was Ray Harryhausen's final feature film.

Film Review, August

John Boorman's Excalibur had an interesting cast, but reminded me too much of Monty Python and The Holy Grail without the laughs. Well it still got a few laughs.

Film Review, August

Another Muppet movie - they became regular events for a few years.

Film Review, August

Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam's dark fairy tale, featured a couple of Python cameos, like his first solo film Jabberwocky. But here he'd imagined a spectacular time-travelling story and the special effects to visualise them, culminating in Good literally fighting Evil. Like The Long Good Friday, this was produced by Handmade Films.

Film Review, August

Another big summer movie was of course Raiders of the Lost Ark, though the poster art looked pretty drab in black and white. The many action set pieces and supernatural climax took me completely by surprise - I thought the poster completely undersold it!

Film Review, August

In the seventies, Ken Russell had a great run of making interesting new films almost yearly. But there was a gap after Valentino for a couple of years while he made Altered States, followed by an even longer gap before his controversial Crimes of Passion. In 1981, I was happy to see my first, first-run Ken Russell movie in the cinema. The bonus being that it was science fiction,with special effects by make-up maestro Dick Smith. The climax of the film may now only be familiar for inspiring the pop video for A-ha's 'Take On Me'!

Film Review, October

The film confirmed William Hurt as a star, and co-star Blair Brown is also still working, appearing recently as a regular cast member in J.J. Abrams' TV series Fringe. Both actors had to endure unusual and arduous full-body make-ups for the film. Much more about Altered States here.

Film Review, October

The Omen movie series was first announced as four films, but wound up as a trilogy (Omen IV was a TV movie). The best things about The Final Conflict are Sam Neill as the adult Damien and Jerry Goldsmith's grandiose soundtrack

Film Review, October

A busy summer continued with another from John Carpenter's run of cult classics. Kurt Russell had already starred before for Carpenter, in Elvis - The Movie!

Film Review, October

Michael Mann's first film Thief hit the UK with the title changed to Violent Streets. 

Films Illustrated, November

Another masterful Brian De Palma horror-edged thriller, his third with Nancy Allen. 

Films Illustrated, November

George Romero took a break from zombies with Knightriders, originally planned as knights on horseback rather than on motorbikes. I don't remember this getting a very wide release in the UK though.

Cinema, Winter Special

Cinema! A new magazine that lasted most of the following year (but infuriatingly displays no dates anywhere). The low quality pulpy paper, apart from a few splashy colour pages, weren't as attractive as the reviews and articles from many of the Starburst regulars. the first front cover (above) features hot property William Hurt in Body Heat.

Cinema, Winter Special

Rare photo of Harrison Ford and his sons Ben and Willard. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark had already confirmed his star status.

Films Illustrated, December

For patrons of the sci-fi superstores of Forbidden Planet, there's plenty of history in this advert from the end of 1981. It mentions that Forbidden Planet began in London in 1978, then opened the New York store early in 1981. Then, in London, it splits into two shops - one for comics and books, the other for movie magazines and memorabilia. After this, it moved round the corner to New Oxford Street, before settling at its present site on Shaftesbury Avenue.

See more magazine flashbacks - here's 1980 - Apocalypse Now and The Empire Strikes Back... The other Flashbacks are linked in the sidebar at right.

FRANKENWEENIE (1984) - Tim Burton's original short

While I enjoyed the new, re-animated Frankenweenie in many ways, the original live-action short film remains one of Tim Burton's very best.

Just under half an hour long is all it takes for a compact retelling of Universal's classic Frankenstein (1931), staged in a slightly surreal corner of suburban California. Victor loves his pet dog Sparky, but after it's accidentally killed, the only thing that can lift the young boy out of his depression, is the possibility that he can bring his dog back from the dead...

At the time, Tim Burton had made something a little too weird for Disney to handle. It was certainly out of step with the studio's image at the time - they didn't even have a 'spooky Halloween' attitude to horror yet. So it snuck out as a support feature and disappeared from sight only until Tim Burton had left Disney and then had hits with Batman and Edward Scissorhands. Only then did Frankenweenie emerge from Disney's vaults to appear on home video (see the VHS cover above). I've heard this was slightly censored, but I've not yet done a comparison viewing.

Frankenweenie then appeared more proudly as an extra feature on laserdisc, DVD and blu-ray releases of A Nightmare Before Christmas, when Disney finally 'got' Burton and embraced a slightly darker side. I'm glad it's always been available, but without being displayed as part of the cover art, it's never really gained it's own identity. So much so, that the 2012 feature-length animated version looks like a new idea, rather than an expanded remake.

Even if you've seen the new film, the original short is certainly worth a visit. The ending is very different and live-action has far more emotional impact. The humour is more adult, with in-jokes about Hitchcock, and a super subversion of a famous scene from In Cold Blood. The characters are almost all changed. It's the same core story, but set in an alternate, Edward Scissorhands universe.

Considering this Frankenweenie was made before any of Burton's feature films, it's already consistent with the design and themes of his next several films. There's a shot of Sparky running off down the street that prefigures Edward Scissorhands, a wooden tower that echoes Batman's belfry climax, electric Christmas decoration reindeer anticipate A Nightmare Before Christmas, and there's a familiar-looking giant Felix cathead before they appeared as a motif in Batman Returns...

A young Barret Oliver milks far more tears for the death of his dog, and of course it's more icky to see a real youngster run off to the pet cemetery to dig him up again. Frankenweenie was released the same year as Oliver's most famous film The NeverEnding Story.

His mum and dad are played by Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern. Duvall had just had a great run with The Shining, Robert Altman's Popeye and a cameo in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. Stern had recently done Diner and Blue Thunder, but was still years away from major recognition for Home Alone. The pair play the comedy suitably straight, setting the tone of normality before their son's mad science disrupts the neighbourhood.

Delightfully, it's Paul Bartel who plays the pivotal role as the science teacher, introducing Victor to the rejuvenating powers of electricity. At the time, he was making a string of cameos in other people's productions, but usually non-mainstream movies (Piranha, White Dog, Chopping Mall). Perhaps his films as a director are better known - Bartel was between Eating Raoul and Lust In The Dust. Though Death Race 2000 will always be his greatest film.

Bizarrely, the spoilt, Barbie-obsessed girl next door, a kid-who-doesn't-understand-weirder-kids, is played by young Sofia Coppola! Credited under her stage name 'Domino', she was only thirteen at the time.

The only thing I will say against the Frankenweenie short, is that the music is lacking. If only he'd found Danny Elfman a little earlier, this desperately needs him!

I think the new version overdoes the references to Universal's Frankenstein, with characters looking like Dwight Frye and Boris Karloff. But it's wonderful to see model animation, in gorgeous black-and-white, and tons more b-movie monster homages.

From WOODSTOCK to WOLFEN - the director Michael Wadleigh

A recent screening of WOLFEN (1981), introduced by the director

Wolfen is an extraordinary film that shouldn't have been sold as a werewolf whodunnit. Caught inbetween the releases of The Howling and An American Werewolf in London in 1981, I guess it was easier to go with the flow than attempt to ready audiences for a thoughtful, high-quality thriller.

Thirty years ago, it wasn't the horror film that I was expecting, but the performances and locations stuck with me, and warranted many revisits. Now came a chance to see it again on 35mm film. 

The Cigarette Burns event, at North London's Phoenix Cinema on May 3rd, gave us the opportunity with a very special bonus, the director was there to introduce the screening, watch it with us and answer questions afterwards. Though he was polite about sticking to the event's of talking about Wolfen, we were also keen to hear him talk about his previous, more famous document, Woodstock.

Wadleigh looked as if he'd just arrived from the Woodstock festival. But talking about Wolfen, made in the early 80s, convinced us that he'd remained as passionate about this very different project, injecting a consistent worldview into it. But he's also very aware of what audiences expect from a bloody, good thriller! 

Before the film rolled, he gave us some key insights. The decimated neighbourhood of the South Bronx was one of several key New York locations he wanted to show, illustrating the chasm between rich and poor neighbourhoods.

The opening scene of the windmill in Battery Park was much more than just a visual device, but a symbol of the early Dutch settlers, some of the European immigrants that cleared out the area's Native Americans. Some of the pioneers ended up as owners of multinational corporations, their headquarters standing only a few blocks away in Manhattan's financial district. These pertinent locations provide cinematic visuals, layers of subtext and a spectacular document of a recent time that now looks very different.

Wadleigh picked the cast of Wolfen based on their theatre experience, as opposed to any filmography. Luckily, Finney had both. Hardly bankable at the time but he was just starting a short roll in Hollywood.

I'd no idea that they'd filmed real corpses in the autopsy scene. The attendant talking to a corpse really worked there, and that's how he worked. One of several examples of the director using real people as themselves throughout the film. It was also realistic for the bodies to be laid out naked, without sheets over them.

The use of the gliding portable Steadicam camera mount in many scenes, worked exceptionally well. Inventor Garrett Brown was operating it and felt that he'd best achieved a point-of-view shot with his work on the film. It was certainly a fresh and thrilling experience to watch when it was first released, pulling you down to the Wolfen's rapid, roaming, low perspective. Whereas his work in The Shining was a detached 'eye of God', here he made the camera act like a beast, ducking around corners and hiding until it was safe to emerge.

We settled in for the screening, the atmosphere primed by Wadleigh's large dog also settling in the front row. The print was in good shape, which was good for us, but a bad sign that it hadn't been watched very much!

I've already talked about the story of Wolfen here, after watching it on DVD four years ago. But seeing any film in a cinema is an opportunity to concentrate on the story and drink in all the visual detail without any distraction. I finally followed the whole story, rather than waiting for the next piece of action, particularly the arc of the police investigation and its awkward interjection at the climax.

Because a powerful millionaire (and potential presidential candidate) has been murdered, the investigation is of the highest level possible. We see the use of illegal, experimental, scientific monitoring of suspects' interrogations, like invisible lie-detectors. The investigation has access to omnipresent surveillance, and an overriding control of the flow of news to the media, as well as a paranoia about it being a terrorist attack. With references to recent 'explosions' (I'm not sure what incidents they mean), it's all a reminder that terrorist attacks were nothing new thirty years ago.

After the screening, despite being well after 1am, Wadleigh indulged us in a lengthy Q and A session hosted by Josh, Mr Cigarette Burns himself, who'd had a long day and his mind blown by an earlier dinner with Wadleigh and his partner.

I was amazed that his Woodstock-era convictions were as strong as ever. Wadleigh is still figuring out he can save the planet from ecological doom. A positive, can-do, approach to a huge complex problem, fuelled by the foresight of what the endgame could be. As he put it, the planet ending like in a bad disaster movie.

He talked a little about making the documentary movie of Woodstock and how, even in 1969, the organisers had to resist corporate sponsorship wanting to exploit the event. He also applauded the current organisers of Glastonbury from resisting similar temptation. I'd no idea that Wadleigh now lives in England.

He admitted that he'd put many of his ideas into Wolfen, discarding much of Whitley Strieber's book, for which he later personally apologised to the author. But hearing where he's always been coming from made the links between the Woodstock and Wolfen worldviews stronger. Watching Woodstock beforehand helps solve Wolfen's mysteries.

While the high-tech system investigates, Finney's renegade character arrives at the truth. helped by several other individuals with wild ideas and counter-culture attitudes, like those played by Gregory Hines (Running Scared, Eve of Destruction) and Tom Noonan (Manhunter, The Monster Squad).

I was dismayed to hear that the iconic church at the centre of the desolate Bronx landscape was in fact a huge outdoor set, one of the largest ever built at that time. We also heard about the amazing scene where Albert Finney and Edward James Olmos clamber about on top of a Manhattan bridge without any safety wires. He applauded Finney's professionalism at agreeing to do it. Especially tough because it was very windy that day...

We were told how the original soundtrack composer had been replaced by James Horner, who already sounded like he was warming up to scoring Aliens, but that was a great decision that works for the film.

Also, Wolfen was recut for its release, shortened without the director's input. While it had been financed as a major film, even hoped to be an Oscar-winning 'message' project, the studio had lost confidence and releasing it under the werewolf angle. Such as a standard horror movie poster of a wolf with fangs dripping blood...

The DVD release has lost a further scene where Tom Waits sings in a tiny dive bar. Wadleigh said that he was also already friends with Edward James Olmos, who he'd seen perform as lead singer (with his rock band 'Pacific', the biggest thing on the West coast!).

After Wolfen, Wadleigh continued to play the Hollywood game for many years, with three more of his original scripts very nearly getting made. Instead, he's made more documentaries about the Woodstock era.

He was under no illusions that movies could make a huge difference in people's opinions, and regarded them basically as entertainment. Now, in an attempt to save the planet from climatic disaster, he runs lecture tours, talking to and with scientists, the people who have the data about what's happening to the climate, about how they might better persuade us all of the course of action that could save the planet.

Wadleigh's energy and motivation made me miss the optimism and problem-solving practicality of the hippy generation. So few people talk like this, it was inspirational to hear him.

So it was disappointing that more people hadn't come to see this and to meet him. He described Wolfen as a forgotten film, which is tough to hear about something I rate, but it appears he was very right!

Seeing this and The Keep screenings, have reminded me how much more I prefer the experience of film on 35mm, as well as the atmosphere of a midnight movie... at midnight.

Catch the latest screenings of films on film, at Cigarette Burns website, Facebook page or Twitter feed.

Great collection of Wolfen posters and promotional photos, here on The Wrong Side Of The Art.

My previous, illustrated preview of Wolfen is here.

Next up, I watch Woodstock for the first time...