Tag Archives: 1988

Dead Heat featured

Dead Heat (1988)

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As genre crossovers go, Dead Heat is about as bold and as ridiculous as they come.

By the late 1980s, buddy cop movies were ten to the penny, and for the most part you knew exactly what to expect. Of course, this was a large part of their charm. Movie’s such as the Shane Black penned Lethal Weapon would take the sub-genre to new and still unchallenged heights, a formula that was aped to varying degrees by movies with various production values. This was a genre that gave us Riggs and Murtaugh, Double Team’s Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman and Samurai Cop’s Marshall and Washington, which should provide a microcosm of the scope in quality we’re dealing with […]

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This Month In . . . 1988 (March)

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Storming the box office charts for March was Mike Nichols’ comedy-drama Biloxi Blues. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical play by Neil Simon, the movie would star Ferris Bueller’s Matthew Broderick as a young army recruit attending boot camp during the Second World War.

Broderick would create the role of Eugene on Broadway, a character with three goals in life: to become a writer, lose his virginity and fall in love. It would also explore bigotry and racial segregation […]

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Return of the Living Dead Featured

Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

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You can’t keep the dead down for good.

In 1985, writer Dan O’Bannon put an interesting spin on the zombie genre with The Return of the Living Dead. Mixing humour with horror and adding a dash of punk to the film’s style and soundtrack, Return satirized the films of George A. Romero by insinuating that Night of the Living Dead was based on true events. It also proved to be a capable zombie picture in its own right […]

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A Fish Called Wanda Featured

The Proud and the Pompous: Flying the Flag For A Fish Called Wanda

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A Fish Called Wanda may be a largely British production, but it is an American who ultimately steals the show.

This is ironic when you consider the competitive nature of the movie’s characters as a gang of zany caricatures go to great lengths to snatch some swag from under each others’ noses. This is British pomposity vs American showmanship, the inescapably prudish vs the bold and the brazen. The fact that most of these characters would not exist anywhere in the world doesn’t matter. The formula thrives on absurd stereotypes, and it works quite wonderfully […]

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