Spring of 1985 was a dark time for video games.
The Nintendo Entertainment System was still 6 months from seeing the light of day in the United States. Atari mania and Pac-Man fever felt like ages ago thanks to the shift away from home console gaming towards computer gaming. But arcades were still active as THE place to play games that could still wow and astonish gamers hungry for the next big thing […]
April was a month packed with frat pack comedy, but the box office would throw up some memorable sleepers as we approached the busy summer season.
One of those was tongue-in-cheek horror compendium Cat’s Eye. Based on short stories by a red hot Stephen King, the film would throw up a mixed bag backed by a plethora of notable stars including E.T.’s Drew Barrymore as a cutesy infant confronting a troublesome demon in ‘The General’ […]
In 1954, Toho Studios released Gojira.
Directed by Ishiro Honda, the film explores the dangers of nuclear weaponry through the unstoppable force that is Godzilla: a giant, prehistoric creature who rampaged across Tokyo before succumbing to a device as dangerous to humanity as he is. Two years later, the movie was released in America, re-edited and re-titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters, where it also proved a success. Godzilla was popular in America […]
Back to the Future is about change, about fate and destiny and the possibility of a second chance.
Those sentiments may smack of mawkish wish-fulfilment, and Robert Zemeckis’ cultural phenomenon is nothing if not idealistic, but there are ways to promote such romanticisms without descending into the sickly slush of blueprint Hollywood, and in December of 1985 Back to the Future showed us just how creative you can be […]
The first week of December would see a limited theatrical release for Golan-Globus thriller Runaway Train. Based on a screenplay by innovative Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, the movie is also notable for the debuts of Heat’s Danny Trejo and Tommy “Tiny” Lister, who would become a professional wrestler for a brief time in the late 1980’s after starring alongside Hulk Hogan in infamous WWF stinker No Holds Barred (1989). So badly received was the World Wrestling Federation’s first foray into the movie business that CEO Vince McMahon . . .
The best stories are often the most simple. They just seem to flow, and are usually character driven.
“I started to kick around the idea about how hilarious it would be if a horror movie fan thought that a vampire was living next door to him,’ director Tom Holland said of cult vampire comedy Fright Night. It took Holland just three weeks to write the screenplay, and he admits to laughing the whole way through […]
Home video gaming in the 1980’s was ultimately defined by two consoles, the Atari Video Computer System (2600) and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Sure, there were many other popular, well received, and well made consoles during that time, but it ultimately came down to two. The Atari era defined the first half of the decade and the NES defined the latter half. There was one game in particular that catapulted the NES into the stratosphere […]
In the mid-1980’s, Michael Dudikoff shot to fame as Cannon’s most unlikely stealth assassin.
For many martial arts fans, this was somewhat baffling. Not only did he lack basic martial arts training, he looked more like a teenage pin-up than a warrior trained in the Orient’s deadliest art form, and compared to co-star Steve James, his physique was somewhat wimpy, making him the antithesis of pumped-up 80s action stars like Schwarzenegger and Stallone […]
Michael Dudikoff wasn’t much of a ninja – come to think of it, he wasn’t much of an actor either – but for a brief period during the mid-1980’s he became a hero to kids the world over, and he owes it all to American Ninja.
For me, American Ninja is the defining movie of the oft-memorable Cannon Group, a distribution company that churned out ultra-violent schlock by the bucket load […]
It took producers a whole year to renege on Friday the 13th’s promise that part IV would indeed be the final chapter, and the $22,000,000 it raked in – more than ten times its allocated budget – tells you exactly why.
Jason was far too big a draw to put to bed in 1984, and you have to believe that the studio was aware of this; in all likelihood, Jason’s demise was nothing more than a cynical marketing gimmick […]
