Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1983 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 1983 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 1983 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 April 15th, 1983, and we’re off to see Liquid Sky and Lone Wolf McQuade!
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.
Liquid Sky
You know what aliens love? Heroin. You know what they love even more than heroin? Sex.
I just told you the very loose plot of Liquid Sky. Aliens come to Earth to harvest the endorphins from people taking heroin, but learn that the ones released by orgasams are even more powerful.
Luckily they stumble upon Margaret (Anne Carlisle) who is incapable of having an orgasm, meaning she lives, and happens to have a lot of sex, which means she unwittingly brings them a lot of victims. It takes her a bit to understand everyone she has sex with dies, but then she moves from potentially using it as a weapon to trying to save her girlfriend from dying.
The film is noted for its embrace of the New Wave movement, and there’s no doubt that, fashion-wise that is here. What isn’t here is the music and instead, you end up with incessantly droning synthizer music that becomes nails-on-a-chalkboard levels of annoying.
Everything I could find about Liquid Sky tells me it’s a ‘cult classic.’ As someone who loves many off-the-wall films, I had never heard of this film until it came up on my list of films I needed to watch. And, honestly, I get it and how it will appeal to some folks, but it definitely was not for me.
Lone Wolf McQuade
The are times when I am going down the list of what I need to watch next that illicits an audible groan from me. This happens any time I see Chuck Norris’ name.
Even in my youth I couldn’t figure out why everyone was crazy over him. His films were always simplistic, the endings obvious, and the acting subpar. There was nothing worth bringing people back to him time after time.
In this case, Chuck plays a Texas Ranger – no, not THAT Texas Ranger – and he ends up entangled with some gun runners. A woman falls for him… she dies… he almost shows an emotion… he wins. I’ve noticed women in his movies tend to die a lot. This is the second film in a row from him, the previous being Forced Vengeance, where that happened.
Lone Wolf McQuade looks and feels like a TV pilot, and is just an utterly forgettable movie like so many of his films.
1983 Movie Reviews will return on April 22, 2023 with The Deadly Spawn and Losin’ It!
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