Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1984 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. Imagine a world where This is Spinal Tap and Repo Man hit theaters on the same day. That is the world of 1984.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly three dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1984 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversaries. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory.
This time around it’s July 20, 1984, and we’re off to see Blastfighter, The Corsican Brothers, Meatballs II, and Purple Rain.
Blastfighter
Blastfighter may be one of the oddest setups to a revenge film I’ve ever seen, and when you dig into its history it starts to make sense.
Jake “Tiger” Sharp (Michael Sopkiw) begins the film by getting out of prison after years – in a Members Only jacket – for a revenge killing. Now he’s out he wants to get the man who was behind everything, and… promptly goes home to his small town and ends up trying to take down an animal poaching ring run by his childhood best friend.
Blastfighter was originally going to be a post-apocalyptic sequel to Warriors of the Year 2072. Sales of a film with the name “Blastfighter” were made, but then a legal issue cropped up, and the script was locked up legally. A new movie had to be put together keeping the name, and what we got was a racist revenge film.
This movie is not good on any level, yet I somehow found myself charmed by it. It almost felt like a high school production, where the plucky kids go, “We’re going to put on a show!” and then they do. And afterwards, you have that uncomfortable conversation where you don’t want to crush their spirit.
Blastfighter… the high school play of movies.
Cheech & Chong’s The Corsican Brothers
Cheech and Chong finally did a film other than their usual druggie act. And The Corsican Brothers was the result of that, and boy do we see why that was a bad idea.
Luis (Cheech Marin) and Lucian (Tommy Chong) are twin brothers, but while they share a mother, they have different fathers. Through a sequence of events, they become orphans and are raised by peasants, are then separated and come back together as adults.
The film tries many times to illicit laughs, but the only thing that comes close to doing so is the fact that the brothers feel each other’s pain while they feel nothing as it happens to them. It’s worth one or two chuckles, but other than that, the premise wears thin quickly.
For a “comedy,” it is excruciatingly boring. While it’s understandable the comedic team wanted to stretch their wings beyond years of marijuana jokes, the fact they picked this as their vehicle is puzzling at best.
This film definitely marked a turning point in their careers, with Marin striking out on his own in a lot more acting roles.
It’s just sad that such a historic comedy duo went out, at least for a time, on this note.
Meatballs II
With the lineup of films I had already watched for this day, Meatballs II was just about the finishing punch of a heavyweight title fight.
The film follows a rivalry between Camp Sasquatch and military-based Camp Patton over who will control the lake between them. Normal summer camp hijinks ensue, teenagers try to have sex, people play pranks on one another.
Oh, and an alien arrives via UFO to attend as well and gets taken in by one of the cabins.
You know, all of the usual stuff.
For a comedy, I don’t think I laughed once. It was puerile at best, with no original thoughts to be had. How this film even got made is beyond me.
Purple Rain
(This review was originally published in 2019 when I first got this idea for the project. I watched the film again in 2024, and portions of the review have been updated.)
Oof.
Can that be the whole review? No? Alright, fine. I’ll write more words.
I was super excited when I saw Purple Rain was next up on the list. It has probably been 20 years or more since I’ve seen it, and I love Prince, so this was going to be awesome. I remember when this came out that everyone praised it, thought his acting was amazing, the soundtrack was killer, and so on.
Part of all this is correct.
There is no denying the soundtrack is amazing. And Prince’s performance as “The Kid” is truly worthy of praise. I would even say Morris Day’s performance was surprising.
Everything else about this movie is awful. Just simply awful.
Character motivations are threadbare and boiled down to enormously broad strokes. And that is made even more painful when people simply can’t act. Prince cast friends and longtime associates in this movie without a care in the world about whether they could deliver a line, and most of them can’t.
And then comes the treatment of women, namely Appolonia. I get that it was a story of violence begets violence, and he was raised in an abusive home, but his anger, violence, and controlling nature toward Appolonia is just inexcusable. You don’t so much want to watch their relationship as take her to a shelter and get her away from The Kid.
Viewing it this many years later, it turns out it would have been much better off as a concert film and just ignored trying to tell any sort of story because all you ended up with is a dark, unpleasant cesspool of unlikeable characters.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on August 3 with Grandview U.S.A., Joy of Sex, and The Philadelphia Experiment!
