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 Oct. 19, 1984, and we’re off to see American Dreamer, Body Double, Firstborn, Give My Regards to Broad Street, Paris, Texas, The Terminator, and Terror in the Aisles.
American Dreamer
I’m sorry, but how did we end up with two films in 1984 centered around women involved with romance novels getting involved in some wild adventure? First, it was Romancing the Stone, and now it’s American Dreamer.
Cathy Palmer (JoBeth Williams) enters a writing contest based on her favorite female detective, Rebecca Ryan. When she ends up winning, and gets the prize of a trip to Paris, her husband (James Staley) says she can’t go, but she does anyway. Once there, she gets hit by a car and wakes up believing herself to be the character of Rebecca Ryan and gets embroiled in a mystery of her own. After she ends up falling for the creator of the character (Tom Conti), and getting her memory back, she ends up leaving her husband for him in a fairly dramatic fashion and the two become co-authors.
I’m really becoming curious what is up with this trend I’m seeing in 80s movies where people just up and leave their spouses on a spur of the moment. This one wasn’t quite as bad as Until September, but it still ranks up there. No one ever wants to talk or try to repair their relationships, it’s just, “Nope, we’re done here.”
American Dreamer wants to be a comedy, and never really gets there. The concept was fine, but the execution was most definitely lacking.
Body Double
I warned you last week we were entering the sexy thriller period of the 80s, and this is the addition for this week, and it is, quite frankly, horrible.
Jake Scully (Craid Wasson) is a down-on-his-luck actor who ends up discovering his girlfriend is cheating on him. He’s need of somewhere to live and lucks into a situation that not only offers him a magnificent home for a few weeks, but it comes with a benefit of being able to watch a woman in a neighboring house do a seductive dance every night at the same time. Scully becomes infatuated with the woman, but soon discovers there is much more not only to her, but the house he has been offered to watch. By the time the movie ends, a few bodies have piled up, and you wonder about Scully’s mental health.
It’s clear Brian De Palma was trying to channel some of Alfred Hitchcock’s films – most notably Rear Window and Vertigo – and bring the noir thriller into the modern age. The problem is that De Palma lacked the empathetic gene of those stories. In this case Scully comes off as a real scuzz. From tracking Gloria (Deborah Shelton) when she goes to the mall – and throughout the rest of the day – to retrieving her discarded panties from a trash bin, you just find him creepy as opposed to someone you are rooting for. Then, as he makes his way on to a porn set for a portion of the mystery by pretending to be Holly’s (Melanie Griffith) scene partner and has sex with her, you really just want to be done with this character.
No matter what De Palma was going for here, he missed the mark and made you feel not like a voyeur in your own right. While filmmakers have done this effectively many times over, here it isn’t so much that you are brought into the action as you are forced into watching it. None of it is pleasant to see, and there are many points where if one is given an option they would choose to walk away.
You know where he was going with this, it just wasn’t a trip worth making.
Firstborn
Sometimes, a film is filled with promise, but then it wastes it all in the last moment.
Jake Livingston (Christopher Collet) lives with his mom, Wenday (Teri Garr), and younger brother Brian (Corey Haim), following his parent’s divorce from two years ago. While Wendy is still in love with her ex-husband, but he has moved on, and now she has decided she should do the same. Enter Sam (Peter Weller), a nice enough guy who the boys seem to take to, but not everything is as it seems as Sam begins to display some troubling behaviors that are spilling over to Wendy.
Throughout the film, Jake is shown as having issues standing up to people, especially an English teacher. Once he finally finds that courage, he carries it over to get Sam away from his family, but that’s when the film takes a very odd turn.
Up to this point the film had been a family drama, and while what Sam was up to was destructive to everyone involved, the film turns into a full-on action film for the final act. From physical fights to a vehicle chase, it’s as if an entirely different movie is playing where the end of the one you were watching should be.
It’s an odd choice and ends up leaving you with a fairly unsatisfying conclusion because the film is just so confused as to what it was trying to be.
Give My Regards to Broad Street
What if you filmed a multi-part music video and then went, “Wait, should we have a plot?”
Paul McCartney is stuck in traffic – which is later revealed led to him falling asleep and dreaming the rest of the movie – when he suddenly finds himself not only driving a hi-tech hot rod, but getting embroiled in a fiasco to save his record company. The tapes of his latest album have disappeared, and if not found by midnight he will lose his company.
Seems like a good time to record a lot of music videos.
I honestly couldn’t begin to categorize this film. It’s just a garbled mess of ideas. You’ll go several songs deep with differently themed videos, and then it’s something akin to two lines of dialog, “Anyone find those master tapes yet? No? Oh well… time for another song then.”
The music, as one would suspect is great, but you can most definitely skip this movie, and hopefully forget it even exists.
Paris, Texas
Paris, Texas is a superb film that is, like so many other films of the decade, centered around a horrible person.
The film opens with a man we will learn is named Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering in the desert. Once he collapses in a rural convenience store, I.D. is found and his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell), and that is when we learn Travis has been missing for four years.
Over the course of the film, we learn he deserted his child Hunter (Hunter Carson) and he was taken in by Walt and his wife. As Travis regains his voice after a bout of selective mutism, as well as his memory, he decides to try to find Hunter’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski). What we learn about Travis in their eventual conversation will reframe much of the film for you and leave you wondering if perhaps Travis was better off wandering the desert.
The film is superbly shot and shows a real love affair for the landscapes that only the American Southwest can provide. The acting, for the most part, is natural to a point of making you wonder if you are as much intruding as you are watching. (Clearly, something Body Double could have learned from) It is a very intimate character piece while being filmed like an epic of Old West akin to the Westerns of the 1950s.
But, truly, the film comes down to one scene: The conversation between Travis and Jane. Kinski, up to this point, had really only been treated as an object of desire in films such as Cat People or The Hotel New Hampshire. Her ingenue looks play a critical role to the part of Jane, but Kinski’s acting against Stanton is simply sublime. The two of them dominate the screen in a two-hander that just has to be seen to comprehend.
While there is a lot to be said for Paris, Texas, it’s an immediate recommendation just for the Stanton/Kinski scene that will leave you emotionally exhausted.
The Terminator
When we sit down to watch these films for this series, we try very hard to put ourselves back in the mindset of that time. Was this a good movie for the time? How did it stack up against the other movies of the time? It shouldn’t always be judged by the standards of 2024.
That being said, it was hard to remove the baggage that comes with this one. The endless garbage sequels. The “ignore everything that came before, this is the true sequel!” schtick. “This will be the launch of a new trilogy!” and on and on and on. And when you sit down and rewatch The Terminator, it’s… fine. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s also really not that great either.
The story isn’t overly original (which was definitely proven by the years-long lawsuits that followed). The action is fine, but nothing spectacular. And James Cameron was definitely finding himself as a director, meaning there is some pretty amateur work in some of the scenes in this movie. And it makes you wonder how this spawned a fandom that crosses movies, television, comic books, toys, video games, and more.
And then, it finally dawned on me. Reese (Michel Biehn) shoots at a car, exploding its gas tank. We see the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) walk out of the flames and leap on the hood of the car. This isn’t a sci-fi film, it’s a horror film. You replace the unstoppable force of say Michael from the Halloween series, or Jason from the Friday the 13th films, and the T-800 is really nothing more than a replacement for them in a slasher film with some special effects.
At that point, I got it a bit more… and then I went back to being bored.
It’s a surprisingly short hour and 47 minutes, and it moves along briskly, but I think The Terminator is better off being locked up in the nostalgia vault of your mind than being consumed again.
Terror in the Aisles
If someone had ever told me there was a film equivalent of a clip show, I would have laughed at them. But, yet, here we are.
Terror in the Aisles takes a walk down memory lane of horror films released up to this point in 1984. Drawing clips from every decade imaginable, the film is “hosted” by Donald Pleasance and Nancy Allen as they walk you through why horror films are so compelling.
If I had been told this was made for Halloween Night on a major network in the 1980s I would have said, “Sure, makes sense.” But, no. This was made as a film and released in theaters, and somehow, it made money. It has to be one of the most puzzling things I’ve watched yet in this project, and I can’t suggest that it should be avoided in strong enough terms.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on Nov. 2 with Blame it on the Night, The Killing Fields, and Lovelines.
