Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1982 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1982 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1982 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s October 22, 1982, and we’re off to see First Blood, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and The Sender!
Quick side note: Since we launched this series this year, we’ve discovered that Vintage Video Podcast is doing the exact same project with two differences: First, it’s audio (naturally), and second, they are doing every major film. We’ve listened to numerous episodes and it’s fun checking off their thoughts against my own. Check them out over at Vintage Video Podcast.
First Blood
Every so often I watch a movie and immediately think, “This feels like it’s missing some scenes.” All movies have cut scenes, but sometimes it’s downright noticeable. I remember watching The Professional when it first came out and thinking, “There has to be something like a 30-minute chunk missing.”
Guess what… there was a 30-minute chunk missing in the U.S.
First Blood clocks in at 93-minutes, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing some info. Turns out the original cut was close to 3.5-hours. Knowing that, I can at least forgive some of the missing moments.
That being said, I will applaud the performances in First Blood endlessly, but I still feel like the script just missed some beats. I can accept Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy) was small-minded, but there were opportunities for him to say to Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) why he didn’t trust him. Be it in the car at the beginning, in the jail cell, or over the radio. There was time to expand these characters and make them feel more real that just never came to be.
All that aside, the performances of Stallone, Dennehy, and Richard Crenna as Colonel Trautman all deserve praise. I fully bought these performers in their roles, and loved every minute they were on screen. The script is beyond implausible, it cheats them from some even better moments, but it’s still an interesting film to watch. Just try to push everything that came after it out of your mind as you view it.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
A funny thing happened on the way to Halloween III: Season of the Witch: John Carpenter and crew forgot to tell the general public they viewed the series as an anthology. After two entries with Michael Myers, we thought this was his series to carry, but, alas, that wasn’t the plan. Imagine everyone’s surprise when we saw this film about masks that melt your face and make bugs come out of you.
The basic premise of the film is that the people who run the Silver Shamrock novelty company are going to bring back pagan rituals via their masks. Each mask has an electronic chip on it powered by a tiny fragment of a Stonehenge rock that, once a certain commercial plays, will activate. This will kill whoever is wearing the mask, and the bugs that come out of the body will kill anyone that is close by.
The commercial is set to play on Halloween night at a certain time, and all the masks will activate at once.
You have to love a horror movie that the concept of time zones can defeat. Because after the East coast goes through this, is anyone in other time zones going to wear the mask and watch the commercial? Will the commercial even air?
We must also ignore that Silver Shamrock is building perfect human duplicate androids. And we have to ignore that, for some reason, on Halloween night, they are still making more of the masks because we’re sure they’ll be big sellers on Nov. 1st. And we have to ignore… look, the entire movie makes zero sense.
All that said, I must admit to enjoying it a bit more on the most recent watch. It is a nonsense film, but there is something oddly charming in its nonsense. If it hadn’t had the “Halloween” name attached to it, I don’t think it would have gotten nearly as much hate as it does, and it would just be a harmless, schlocky horror film.
… where time zones still defeat the plot.
The Sender
The Sender is a perfectly fine film you almost immediately forget. From almost the second I turned it off to write this review, I kept having to go, “Wait… what happened?”
A young man keeps trying to kill himself, but no one knows why. As the film moves along it’s revealed he is a telepath and his mother was trying to kill him due to his power. Slowly the doctors at the mental hospital he ended up in come to believe in his powers, they try to turn them off via surgery, it doesn’t work, he gets his memories back etc etc.
I wouldn’t call the movie cookie-cutter, but perhaps uninspired. There were little bits of so many other movies and stories jumbled in here that I just couldn’t find anything that felt truly original. The directing was ho-hum, the performances were serviceable and nothing more, the directing just felt lackluster.
The Sender is a movie that exists, and I will probably never think about it again.
1982 Movie Reviews will return on Oct. 29 with Q!
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