Tag Archives: 1983

Capsules

CAPSULE: ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1983)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Yuen Biao, Adam Cheung, Damian Lau, Mang Hoi, Moon Lee, , Sammo Hung

PLOT: In the midst of a civil war, soldier Dik Ming-kei (Yuen Biao) is threatened by generals who want him to follow contradictory orders, and whose solution is to sentence him to death. He deserts and falls in with Master Ding Yan (Adam Cheung) who saves him from supernatural forces. Dik wants to be Ding’s pupil, but Ding isn’t interested; an attack by the Blood Devil and his disciples brings in Master Hsiou You (Damian Lau) and his acolyte Yi Chen (Mang Hoi), but Hsiou doesn’t like Ding and can’t work with him to defeat the Blood Devil. Therefore, Dik and Yi team up after both Masters are poisoned by the Blood Devil and Ding succumbs to the Dark Forces.

Still from Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)

COMMENTS: 2001: A Space Odyssey lit the fuse for cosmic films where special effects took center stage. Star Wars was the inevitable explosion of the trend. The 80s were a time when technology supported genre-based projects, doing what couldn’t be done before, supported by young directors and technicians who were hungry to show their stuff. That’s why some now consider it to be a golden age of genre film. That spirit wasn’t just limited to films made in the West, as Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain shows.

Calling Zu the “Star Wars of Chinese cinema” is dead on. Tsui Hark may not be George Lucas (thankfully), but he was a film-school brat like Lucas and had previous feature experience: Zu was Hark’s fifth feature, Star Wars Lucas’ third. Both took material that they loved from their childhoods and upgraded/synthesized it for a contemporary audience: Lucas from “Flash Gordon” and other serials, Hark from historical fantasy (“Legend of the Swordsmen of the Mountains of Shu“) and Chinese action films. Hark also imported special effects people from America to assist the production, names familiar to effects geeks who grew up on those post-Star Wars films: Robert Blalack (Altered States, Robocop), VCE Film’s Peter Kuran (Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer), Chris Casady (Airplane!, The Empire Strikes Back). (All of them also worked on the original Star Wars.) Like Star Wars, Zu kicked off a huge change in the local film industry. It practically was the flash point for the fertile late phase of the Hong Kong New Wave.

Unless you were a major fan of kung-fu films, often watching 5th generation VHS dubs, most audiences in the U.S. got introduced to this kind of material via Big Trouble in Little China—and most audiences at the time weren’t ready for that. As good as China is, compared to Zu, it’s methadone vs. pure uncut, mainlined heroin. Watching Zu 40 years after it came onto the scene was exhausting—but in a good way. It’s almost non-stop set piece after set-piece, but it does take time to breathe. And while Star Wars only offers brainless entertainment, Zu gives the viewer plenty to chew over along with all the eye-candy action. At the start, Dik is either threatened by those in authority or is dismissed by those who have the power to help and refuse to. It’s when the establishment figures fail that Dik and his allies step up and take control to defeat the evil: “woke” way before woke became a thing.

Eureka Video issued a Region B Blu-ray of Zu in 2020. This year, Shout! Factory brings out a Region A release that ports over quite a bit from the Eureka release and adds some new features. Returning is the 2K restoration with a commentary on selected scenes from Tony Rayns. There’s also the alternate “Export Cut,” Zu: Time Warrior. This English-dubbed version adds a framing story set in Hong Kong that sets things up as a variation of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; it’s notable mainly as a reminder of garish 80s sweater fashions. Also ported are interviews with actors Yuen Biao, Moon Lee and Mang Hoi from 2002, and an hour long interview with Hark from 2020.

New to the Shout Factory package is a feature length commentary by Gilbert Po and Sean Tierney (a fun listen), two featurettes with academics Victor Fan and Lin Feng, and an interview with Peter Kuran, visual effects consultant.

 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shedding the veil of heightened reality to get to the weird, nutty centre underneath serves this martial arts fantasy incredibly well. The madcap silliness of each new character and scenario is liberally slathered with tongue-in-cheek humour that is executed as rapid-fire as the narrative itself.”–Daryl Bär, Battle Royale with Cheese [Eureka Blu-ray]

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: AND THE SHIP SAILS ON (1983)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Barbara Jefford

PLOT: Loaded with distinguished guests, a transatlantic luxury liner sets off at the dawn of WWI to bury the ashes of a deceased opera diva on the island where she was born.

Still from And the Ships Sails On (1983)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It may not be top-tier Fellini, but middle-tier Fellini still sails past most of the competition—at least, when the director sticks to his odder impulses and remembers to pack a pachyderm in his hold.

COMMENTS: As befits the film’s 1914 setting, And the Ship Sails On starts out as a silent film, showing a crowd of onlookers watching celebrities arriving to board a luxury liner, complete with slapstick pratfalls for the amusement of the children. The only soundtrack is the quiet whirring of a projector. Then, sparse background noises slowly creep into the sound mix, followed by the introduction of a piano score and sparse formal dialogue. The black and white fades into color, and in about ten minutes we move from what could have been vintage newsreel footage into a full-fledged late Fellini movie.

Besides the revered ashes of incomparable soprano Edmea Tetua, various musical dignitaries and well-wishers board the funeral ship, including Ildebranda, a diva whose insecurities are exposed by the praise lavished on a deceased woman whose fame she will never attain; and a trio of elderly choirmasters; an English aristocrat and his insatiable wife; a portly, baby-faced Prussian Grand Duke and his scheming retinue; a homosexual; a mysterious young beauty; a rhinoceros; and a dozen-plus others. They are all introduced and commented on by Orlando, a journalist who’s documenting the voyage and who often speaks directly to the audience. Later on, rafts of Serbian refugees fleeing the onset of World War I will board to swell the onboard throng. Along the way, the passengers will play a wineglass symphonetta, stage an impromptu vocal competition in the boiler room, attend a seance, and (temporarily) face down an Austro-Hungarian battleship (or, at least, a Hasbro model of a warship).

The Fellini film And the Ship Sails On most resembles is Amarcord, in its choice to focus on a community instead of a central character and on a collection of vignettes instead of a single story. Unlike the classic of the previous decade, this one is not anchored by the director’s nostalgia and love for his subject. The destination is fixed—the passengers will eventually end up spreading Edmea Tetua’s ashes into the Mediterranean—but seldom has a journey seemed so aimless; it’s a road trip movie without a road. It may be Fellini’s last “great” movie, and at the very least his last epic; but in many ways, it feels like the work of a young artist, playing promiscuously with different styles and ideas like he’s just trying things out, still figuring out what works. Sets and psychologies both change from realistic and detailed to artificial caricatures, and Fellini drops in postmodern distancing bits, like a character who remarks, “How marvelous! It looks fake!” while gazing at an obvious matte sunset. Maybe the maestro is just being playful as old age approaches; this is a movie whose takeaway point, after all, is praise for the salubrious properties of rhino milk.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best moments ‘And the Ship Sails On’ floats serenely above the realities of ordinary movies – not to deny the validity of those realities but to expand the imagination.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: OVERDRAWN AT THE MEMORY BANK (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Douglas Williams

FEATURING: Raúl Juliá, Linda Griffiths, Donald Moore, Maury Chaykin

PLOT: Computer technician and cinephile Aram Fingal gets a forced vacation from his body as punishment for poor productivity; when the conglomerate loses his body, they transfer his mind to the mainframe, where Fingal wages war within the company in an effort to be restored.

Still from overdrawn at the memory bank (1983)

COMMENTS: The impulse to make Overdrawn at the Memory Bank was borne out of a good idea. At the dawn of the 80s, someone at PBS noticed the revolution in science fiction entertainment that had exploded upon the scene in the wake of Star Wars, and saw a lane for the public broadcaster in adapting some of the more literary works of the genre. The first attempt, a low-budget, high-concept take on Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, was an unexpected success. Thus emboldened, producers turned their attention to a John Varley short story about an office drone who finds himself trapped inside the mainframe of a supercomputer. And that is where all the good vibes surrounding this project ran out.

The film that resulted, captured on video and exemplifying the 80s in all its chroma-key glory, was a notorious bomb, remembered today primarily because of its appearance in an episode of “.” That’s unfortunate, because while the production is undeniably poor, the idea at its center is still intriguing.

The basic story feels like a more optimistic riff on a theme of , with his ongoing interest in unknowable reality and the helplessness of the individual against colossal and uncaring forces. In addition, the burgeoning revolution in personal computers (which had  been named by Time Magazine as “Machine of the Year” only months before) was making the yet-unlabeled landscape of cyberspace into a more accessible backdrop for storytelling. Like the previous year’s Tron (with which Overdrawn’s plot is surprisingly similar), this is an early attempt to see the inside of a computer as a stage for intense drama.

It is here that this film’s producers run up against the gulf between aspiration and resources, which is in this case immense. The most successful science fiction manages to make the unreal seem real. Overdrawn comes nowhere close to clearing that hurdle. We’re barely two minutes in before the video toaster credits and synth-heavy score kick in, bringing a vibe that is just so very, very 80s. What follows is a parade of scenes set amidst re-dressed modern architecture, pages and pages of technobabble-laced dialogue, and multiple examples of green-screen special effects that seem to have come directly from the Action News Weather Desk. The production is SO much more ambitious than the abilities of the filmmakers can support, and it ends up coming across like some sort of fan film from another place and time.

The movie does have an ace up its sleeve, though: star Raúl Juliá. A famously talented actor, he’s a game performer and pulls off a much better Humphrey Bogart impression than a Shakespearean actor from San Juan has any right to accomplish. But his presence ends up working against the project. Every opportunity to help him fit in better is bypassed. Did his name have to be the decidedly Eastern European “Aram Fingal”? Might the actress playing his mother not have looked quite so Scandinavian? Could he have been a passionate fan of Zorro or Rudolph Valentino, rather than try and make him fill the shoes of Rick Blaine? (The attempt to replicate the setting of Casablanca—one of the most beloved films in the history of cinema—only accentuates the production’s shortcomings.) On the other hand, it’s possible that Bogie himself could not have pulled off an internal monologue delivered over stock footage of a baboon. But Juliá was clearly not the guy to overcome that particular hurdle.

Most of what makes Overdrawn at the Memory Bank odd is the spectacle of seeing such lofty concepts presented in such a lo-fi manner. But while it’s an amusing sight, it renders any attempt to take in the story on its own terms utterly impossible. What was inspired seems silly and what already looked dated is now ridiculous. This account is closed for insufficient funds.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Those who complain about how bad the effects are, or how they have a hard time sorting out all the complexities of the plot, or how little sense this or that element makes, are missing the point here:  this film should not exist.  It’s strange, it has far too many ideas, it’s complicated, it actually adapts a story by a real science fiction writer, it’s way too ambitious for the money they had, and for goodness sake, it’s a science fiction film on PBS! No one would ever have made something like this. And yet they did…  Anything this strange deserves to be seen.” – Mark Cole, Rivets on the Poster

(This movie was nominated for review by “Michael,” who argued “The movie is terrible, but is also so weird and unique as to be entertaining.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)  

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE HUNGER (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Tony Scott

FEATURING: , Susan Sarandon, David Bowie

PLOT: When her lover of many centuries begins rapidly aging, vampiress Miriam Blaylock seduces a gerontologist to revive him.

COMMENTS: Catherine Deneuve. Susan Sarandon. Ann Magnuson. David Bowie. When your movie features some of the most attractive people around, it can’t help but look beautiful. Tony Scott’s directorial debut is a beautifully shot Eurotrash-style drama whose only parallel to his smash-hit sophomore effort is, perhaps, that it has some flying things: in The Hunger, there is what I dubbed “the Dove Room”, teeming with white birds; in Top Gun, there are some flying machines (and a character named after a bird). There the similarities just about stop—but not entirely. Though Scott’s oeuvre would lean heavily toward action-thriller after he was harvested by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, a romantic sappiness pulsates through his first two films.

The advertising featuring David Bowie is a bit misleading, seeing as his character dies (well, mostly) by the halfway mark. This is really the story of Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve, gloriously vague in a European kind of way), a vampire who originated at least as far back as ancient Egyptian times. Her man-squeeze John (Bowie, young and sexy, until he very quickly isn’t) seems to have lost the knack for eternal youth—a fate suffered by Miriam’s innumerable lovers beforehand. However, their final hedonistic days of early ’80s New York City party-fun-time do slow down enough to allow them to make the acquaintance of Doctor Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon, doing a wonderful job as the smoky-sexy scientist), whose research may relate to the sudden trouble suffered by hapless John.

The Hunger starts in a nightclub, with the camera focused on a goth singer and his band performing behind a caged stage. Intercut with his exorbitantly vampiric lyricising are shots of Miriam and John picking up some gothed-out groupies and draining them dry. The pastiche of club life excess, luxury car excess, and sanguino-sexual excess nicely sets the mood, and acts as an early filter for the audience. If this is not what you want to be watching for the next eighty minutes, then The Hunger is not the movie for you. What follows is a semi-tragic romance, rapid aging in a doctor’s office, and some softcore lesbian sex (if you’re into that sort of thing). Ultimately, Scott’s movie reveals that perhaps the greatest hunger is a hunger for companionship…

This is all very flip, but it’s hard not to be that way when discussing something as cheesy and stylishly overwrought as The Hunger, whose stylized nonsense and hyper-vampire-sexuality predates Interview with a Vampire by about a decade. (On film, anyway: apparently that bit of fluff-core had been in development since the early ’80s.) The only truly impressive element to be found is the make-up work on David Bowie; by the time you see John Blaylock morph from 30-something Bowie into just-about-decomposing Bowie, you’ll understand why Dick Smith’s credited with “make-up Illusions.” Otherwise, this film merely demands you grab some of the butteriest popcorn and reddest wine you can find and marvel at its wet dreaminess.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Dreamily photographed by Stephen Goldblatt and cryptically edited together by Pamela Power, nothing in The Hunger makes sense… like in that ludicrous advertisement for Britney Spears’s Curious perfume, sexual desire simply provokes postmodern psychotropic episodes.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)