Tag Archives: 1986

The Color of Money featured

For the Love of the Con: Fast Eddie and The Color of Money

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For the most part, The Color of Money doesn’t feel like a Scorsese film.

That may sound like negative criticism, but I actually like this movie a great deal. Instead, what I mean is that this seems like an anomalous entry in the director’s rich and varied canon. His thumbprint is visible, but it doesn’t seem to carry his DNA. For one thing, it is a relatively conventional movie when the vast majority of his career has been anything but. These are characters that you invest in, that you remember fondly, but they don’t have the intensity or pzazz of those featured in his other marquee titles […]

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Avenging Force (1986)

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Dudikoff and James are back in tandem, proving without a shadow of a doubt that they are the very cream of the Cannon crop.

Forget Seagal, Van Damme and . . . well, not Stallone and Schwarzenegger, but for me Dudikoff and James come in at a close third. Any action movie aficionado worth their salt is aware of the iconic duo’s legacy, and for those who aren’t they are the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover of the B-movie scene, starring in such high-kicking classics as the American Ninja series […]

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Night Of The Creeps (1986)

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How my childhood would have fared without Fred Dekker-penned genre classics such as Night of The Creeps is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain: it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as colourful.

Night of The Creeps starts in a spaceship and detours to 1950’s America where an axe-wielding killer is terrorising rock ‘n’ roll kids. Subsequently, the viewer is hurtled, via an alien parasite and monochrome axe murder, to the bad pop eighties of a college campus full of frat packers, where shortly after a pledge prank gone awry weird stuff begins to happen and folks begin to die […]

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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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Chopping Mall (1986)

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Long before Amazon and Facebook turned us all into hermits, shopping malls were our cultural epicentre.

Each weekend teenagers would flock in their legions, hanging out at their favourite arcades or fast food restaurants and marvelling at the colourful array of consumer products that were not yet accessible at the click of a touchpad. Inevitably, these monuments to consumerism became schoolyards away from home, and in an era when Reagan proclaimed that ‘all great change in America begins at the dinner table,’ ghetto blasters and bubblegum could only lead to all out rebellion, right? […]

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Eliminators (1986)

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For the most part, Eliminators is like Star Wars on an A-Team budget, but the comparisons don’t stop there.

Produced by low budget sci-fi maestro Charles Band, the movie is a savvy exercise in cultural marketing which taps into a plethora of 80s hits and features the kind of characters which probably would have resulted in a successful toy range were its financial aspirations just a tad higher […]

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Breeders (1986)

Breeders (1986)

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Breeders is like one of those old monster movies with a giant erection.

Another in a long line of exploitation flicks given the bluray treatment, it is the story of a giant fly who sets about raping a cast of airheaded delectables with the intention of expanding its species. Able to take the form of any human it comes into contact with, it seeks out virgin victims and impregnates […]

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Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

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Back in 1982, Tobe Hooper directed Poltergeist, a movie that was written and produced by Stephen Spielberg, and in all honesty it may as well have been him behind the camera. Everything about that movie screamed Spielberg, from its familial tone and grandiose set pieces to its high profile marketing strategy and tantilsing teaser poster. The grisly touch of Hooper – a wonderful director in his own right – was nowhere to be found.

Predictably, the movie was an unbridled smash […]

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Cherry-Flavoured Pez: Stand By Me and the End of Innocence

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It is perhaps ironic that one of the most nostalgic movies of the 1980s acquires its sense of sentimentality from an entirely different era. Based on Stephen King’s short story The Body, Stand by Me is an intoxicating ode to the 1950s, with a tragic underbelly that belies the myth of what on the surface might be considered simpler times […]

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