Tag Archives: 1984

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Darkest Before Dawn: The Best Horror Trailers of the 80’s

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Question: What do you miss most about those halcyon home video days?

Cover art is something that stands out – it made that oh so joyous experience of choosing your rental all the more joyous. Choice is the second thing that springs to mind. Sometimes you would arrive home on a Saturday evening and be thoroughly disappointed with a movie that promised so much and delivered so little. But that was part of the fun, particularly when you unearthed the kind of gem that you couldn’t wait to rent again […]

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Retro Gaming Archives – Winter/Spring 1984

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1984 was a tough year for video gaming releases.

For many of us it was just another year and the words “video”, “game” and “crash” were never uttered consecutively. There was still a plethora of Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision consoles and games available in toy stores across the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. The advent of home computer gaming was as mainstream as it had ever been […]

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This Month in . . . 1984 (January)

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Traditionally, January is a slow month at the Box Office, and 1984 was no different following a busy festive period which included Clint Eastwood’s fourth outing as Dirty Harry and Brian De Palma’s seething gangster epic Scarface. January 13th would see the release of Hot Dog . . . The Movie,  a racy, teenage comedy lost in the overabundance of Porky’s clones which saturated the mid-1980’s.

The movie would star An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton […]

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Killing Kris Kringle: Silent Night, Deadly Night and Censorship Hysteria

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Some movies are a victim of their time.

Whatever one may think of Charles E. Sellier’s exploitative festive slasher Silent Night Deadly Night, one thing is for certain: it has found a rather prominent place in horror movie history.

Back in the winter of 1984, the movie was pulled from theatres a week after its release due to widespread protests regarding an advertising campaign which depicted jolly old Saint Nick as a bloodthirsty killer. Incredulously, those ads ran on prime time television, which led to an almost medieval outrage from PTA members who had left their children watching Little House on the Prairie, only to […]

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Rise of the Machine: The Genesis of James Cameron’s The Terminator

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Conan the Barbarian may have catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger onto the Hollywood mainstream, but it was James Cameron’s sci-fi classic The Terminator that would make him a household name.

Ironically, Arnie initially read for the part of Kyle Reese, and it took some persuasion from James Cameron to convince him that the role of the T-800 was better suited. Arnie was still riding high after box office success as the heroic Conan, so it was something of a risk for Cameron to challenge his […]

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Never Sleep Again: Elm Street and the Dawn of Krueger

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From the moment Charles Bernstein’s seething synthesizer sinks to the pit of your stomach, you know you’re in for something quite special.

What we see onscreen is different somehow. It is dank and grungy and saturated with a sense of palpable terror. We hear heavy-breathing, more perverse than your standard stalk-and-slash drivel. Instead of following some unseen POV presence, we step into the shoes of a young girl and wander as she does, falling deeper into the bowels of a wretched boiler room as the cackles grow and a teasing shadow haunts the periphery of our imagination […]

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Kung-Fu Master (Arcade)

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Kung-Fu Master was my first lesson in corporate ambition. This game was hard; nigh-on impossible for any coin-loaded juvenile with a pixelated glare.

I must have been five years old when I first laid eyes on it, and King Kong couldn’t have dragged me away. Remember, this was the 80s, and Kung-Fu Master was quite the novelty, a complex and fluid […]

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