It Came From the 80s – A Random Horror Listicle (Part 2)

Fright Night (1985)

We are now into much better-known territory.  At least for the first one.

The Plot: horror movie geek Charlie Brewster, thinks that a real-life vampire has moved in next door to him.  Everyone thinks he’s nuts, including the has-been Hammer-Horror actor turned Monster-Chiller-Horror-Theater UHF TV host, Peter Vincent (the perfect name by the way).  Peter Vincent is hired by Charlie to hunt the Vampire Next Door.  

Peter thinks it will be much easier just to prove that Jerry Dandrige is not a vampire at all but then to his horror, he manages to accidentally prove the opposite.  Things escalate from there. 

The effects were good for their day and truthfully still hold up pretty well, properly lit practical effects shots feel more intimate. The tone was a balanced mix of scares and laughs. It had some memorable scenes.  There were stakes involved. Charlie’s best friend Ed is taken and turned. And kind of willingly at that, the dread vampire Jerry promises him that no one will ever be able to bully him again. Ed gets a Hammer Films-style crucifix brand to the forehead. When Peter Vincent finally becomes a genuine vampire hunter at Ed’s expense, it’s kind of sad and moving.

Charlie’s girlfriend is captured and is starting to turn into a Bride. Charlie a Peter have a showdown in the vampire’s lair. It was all good stuff. All of the characters including the vampires had character.

Buffy owes a lot to Fright Night.

This is one of the films that pretty much everyone mentions when you talk about 1980s horror.  At $24 million it didn’t have a monster box-office return but it was good enough to spawn a sequel.

Fright Night II (1987)

 The problem is that most sequels aren’t really sequels at all.  Properly speaking a sequel needs to be the next part of the story in sequence. Act I is followed by Act II and Act II by Act III. Star Wars the OG Trilogy is the perfect example of this.   However, if the entire story was told in the first movie then the only thing you can do for the sequel is to create a beat-for-beat remake of the first movie. Classic example: Ghostbusters 2.

Despite the fact that the story of Fright Night was finished in the first movie, the makers of Fright Night 2 didn’t make a beat-for-beat remake but instead inverted the plot of the first film while building on that story’s premise, creating a Second Act.

The plot: after two years of therapy Charlie Brewster is now convinced that the whole thing had been in his head.  He is now the skeptic that has to be convinced and Peter Vincent is the believer who is trying to convince him that the Thing Under The Bed is real.  

The girlfriend is frankly quite a bit hotter and is much more engaging as a character than the first one. (Traci Lin, or Traci Lind, or Tracy Lind-Tavi; changing her name for each movie didn’t help her career any.)  At first, you think she’s going to be vampire chow but after reading Dracula, fights off one of them with wild roses (nobody ever remembers that part of the book). She becomes proactive in trying to save Charlie.

The setting is more interesting as well since Charlie is now in college and relationships are more grown up.  The plot is intricate and better constructed.

They also inverted the Dracula mythos as well.  The vampire is now a woman and her husband/slaves(?) are men (or at least two men and an insect-powered flesh golem (Brian Thompson, who also should have had a better career than he did). Charlie is now filling the role of Mina Harker, the victim who is slowly being turned into a vampire. Regine the Vampire Queen was Jerry Dandrige’s sister and she means to extract prolonged revenge on Charlie after she turns him into a vampire.

On the whole, it is simply a better film than the original.

Sadly, Columbia Pictures decided to sell it as part of a package deal to Live Entertainment (now part of Lions Gate). Joe Menedez the CEO of Live had no faith in it, slashed the post-production budget, and sent it out on the Dollar Movie circuit to a whopping 128 theaters. It had no advertising budget at all. The first that anybody heard of it was when it showed up at Blockbuster.

The thing is Roddy McDowell really loved the Peter Vincent character, and Now Comics had launched a series based on movies that was selling fairly well, occasionally hitting the top ten list. There was clearly a little blood left in that stone.

Roddy McDowell and producer Tom Holland decided they had just enough ammo to make pitch for continuing the franchise with a third movie. They landed a meeting with Live’s CEO, who was hostile and insulting for the entire meeting. As they left, Roddy McDowell told a nodding Tom Holland that Joe Menendez was undoubtedly the most unpleasant human being he’d ever met in his life.

Joe’s sons, Erik and Lyle Menedez apparently agreed wholeheartedly and murdered their father (and mother) that very night!

News of the murder broke the next morning but without any announced suspects. McDowell called Holland and said, “Well I didn’t kill him. Did you?”

Fright Night 2 is now so obscure it’s available on YouTube. Give yourself a Halloween treat and try it.

Return of the Living Dead (1985)

This film started life as a direct sequel to Night of the Living Dead. George Romero and John Russo co-penned a script. When the two parted ways, Romero had rights to the universe they’d created and Russo owned the trademark The Living Dead”

Night of the Living Dead is explicitly presented as a fictional work in the film, while presenting its own story as a spiritual successor to the original. As such it comes with some tonal baggage (which the film was true to, I have to give it that.) It knew what it wanted to be and it succeeded at it. However, it doesn’t really feel like an eighties horror movie. Although,it is remembered as one because of all the punk stuff.

Punk started in the mid-seventies but by 1985 it had begun morphing into grunge. So Punkers were becoming dated. There were a few still ride-or-die punks around but there was no real energy behind it by then.

Return of the Living Dead did add one other significant thing to the zombie genre, “BRAAAAAAINNSSS“.  Zombies wanted to eat pretty much everything before then.  Still a decent enough movie, and it does come with some good gags.  The screaming manager still makes me laugh.  The zombie gross-out effects remain effective and as I said it significantly added to the myth of the genre.  

Return of the Living Dead had striking imagery which seared its way into quite a few Generation X memories. The Tar-Man zombie. Linnea Quigley dancing nude in a graveyard. The cadaver with half her body missing is being interrogated.

They ended with an anti-nuclear war message (as was the style at the time). The joke’s on them, everybody who watches it agrees that the military did the right thing. They knew what they were up against and cauterizing the source of infection was the only hope of containing it.

My problem with it is the same problem I have with all zombie films. The Boomer nihilism is all-pervading. I hate the fatalism, you knew from the start they were all going to die. I loathe that in any kind of horror movie.

Evil Dead 2 (1987)

When you mention the film Evil Dead, this is the one people start automatically thinking of, and not the original.

Evil Dead 2 is essentially a remake (although NOT beat for beat) of Evil Dead (1981).

The cabin they had shot the first one in had mysteriously burned down, (because it was a rickety old fire hazard of a cabin to begin with), so they built a new one on a field-expedient sound stage in a gym in North Carolina.  I think this significantly added to the atmosphere of the entire project.

By now you will have noticed that I included no slasher movies in my list at all and I’m not going to.  The victims in those films always ran, screamed, tripped, and fell, then followed that up with begging for their lives.  I loathed them on general principle.

Ash always fought back.  No matter how completely hopeless the situation, Ash took whatever he could find and fought back.  For that matter so did most everyone around him.  Now everyone around him died but there was a will to win.  Also if you didn’t fight you were likely to be raped by a tree so go ahead and fight, it was really the path of least resistance.

There are a lot of things that make this an Eighties movie.  The big hair look had arrived.  The vacu-form MSU tee shirt on the doomed girlfriend. The music score.  The necklace from Corey’s Jewel Box (which gets you big laughs in Michigan when people find out about it.) And the ’73 Olds Delta 88.  In 1981 when the first movie was made it was just a crappy old car, by the time this movie came out, it was almost but never quite going to be a classic automobile.  Making it perfect for Ash. And then there was the ultimate Eighties line, “Groovy!”  No one on Earth had uttered that word since before the Love Boat set sail. I almost literally fell on the floor laughing when I first heard it, it was that funny. But only in 1987.

The first movie was a drive-in classic but had no humor at all.  This second one did, although less than most people seem to remember it having.  It’s just that the humor was so campy and unexpected when it arrived.

Maybe that is the real appeal of the Eighties Horror movie.  Campy without Sucky.  And Evil Dead 2 was certainly that.

The Lost Boys (1987)

You’ve been waiting for this one, haven’t you?

Alright, then.

Nothing screams Like OmaGawd, Totally Tubular Eighties horror like the Lost Boys.  Unlike Return of the Living Dead, this one was actually in touch with the zeitgeist of Generation X.  It had a feel for what the Punk scene was quickly evolving into. It had characters instead of caricatures. Well. Maybe that is pushing the hyperbole a bit but the bottom line was these guys felt like Gen Xers and not like some shadow puppets created by Boomers to let Boomers sneer at or lecture us.  There was a trust of the Greatest Generation present as well as a distrust of the Worst Generation, (which was revealed when it turned out Max was actually the Head Vampire.

It had its low points to be sure.  The Coreys were both in it for a start but so were Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Jaime Gertz.  The cast was very strong in this movie.

The mythology it created was on the silly side.  You can be a half-vampire and be recovered if you kill the head vampire before you feed for the first time.  A trope that is now in common use today but rare enough for the time to get a pass.

And while it was almost more comedy than horror, the scares were there.  “…the critical consensus was, ‘Flawed but eminently watchable.'”

I don’t usually agree with “critical consensus” on general principles but I do with this one.

Tremors (1990)

Now before you jump in my shit for the year of its release think about two things.  One, it was released in January of 1990 which is where the studios dump the stuff that was supposed to be a summer release but they decided wouldn’t make enough money.  Which means that Tremors was supposed to be in the summer of 1989.  So that wasn’t its fault, damn it.

And two, have you ever thought of Tremors as being something other than an Eighties Movie?  Of course, you haven’t, it’s got Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward in it.

I suppose there is some question as to whether or not it is actually a horror movie and I get that.  But the answer to that one is, yes.  Although it was more in the tradition of the Beast of Yucca Flats school of sci-fi horror.

Tremors couldn’t be made today without screwing it up totally.  It was the kind of film that took its time in building the menace of the “Graboids”.  It starts slowly, with suggestions of the monsters that lurk beneath the sand, and works its way up from there.  the first death was due to natural circumstances, given that’s natural to be dead when you choose to die of exposure rather than be eaten by a monster.  Although that wasn’t known at the time it’s a great start.

Val and Earl make for a great mix as an odd couple of best friends.  The population of Perfection is a good little micro-society of 1980s America.

I think what I loved about this film the most is that no one ever quit.  They kept trying no matter what.  My favorite scene is probably yours if you are a regular at this Blog.

That was it for Eighties Horror movies. They were fun while they lasted.

Okay, I’m done here.

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