Tag Archives: 1983

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KEEP (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Mann

FEATURING: Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: A Nazi regiment unwisely establishes a base inside the keep of a Romanian castle where an otherworldly beast has been imprisoned for the safety of humanity.

Still from The Keep (1983)

COMMENTS: Wanting to cleanse my palette after my last encounter with Nazis, I figured it would be fun to watch them get slaughtered by a supernatural force even more evil than themselves. What I forgot to reckon with was Michael Mann, a man who walks eagerly into grey spaces. To be clear, dead Nazis haven’t lost their appeal. It’s just that no one comes out of The Keep smelling like a rose. 

Mann has always been interested in the bad things that decent people do in defense of some greater good, usually accompanied by moody visuals and moodier music. In that sense, The Keep fits right into his CV. We’ve got pure bad guys in the form of a Nazi platoon that sets up camp in a Carpathian castle, but the forces aligned against them are a disparate bunch: Molasar, an ancient demon trapped behind silver crosses and a talisman; the amazingly named Glaeken Trismegestus, a kind of knight-errant tasked with ensuring Molasar never emerges from this dark prison; and Dr. Cuza, a Jewish academic sprung from a concentration camp to help the Nazis translate ancient languages, who decides that freeing Molasar will save his people. So our bad guys are plenty bad, but the enemy of our enemy might not be our friend.

The stage is set for a real philosophical showdown, but  Paramount was looking for a horror-thriller, and when the production went way over budget, the studio declined to provide additional funds. To complicate things further, the visual effects supervisor died two weeks into post-production, leaving behind no instruction and no means of accomplishing the effects-heavy finale Mann intended. Finally, Mann turned in a cut nearly three and a half hours long, promptly getting himself thrown off the project. The studio hacked off about ninety minutes and, following a terrible preview, applied classic Hollywood logic and shaved off another thirty. The final product is, predictably, disjointed and open-ended, with characters appearing and disappearing randomly, a significantly truncated romance, and the entire thing wrapping up in a flurry of anticlimax. (Amusingly, an entire battalion of Nazis is wiped out while we’re watching their commander in another room.) It’s hard to argue that a horror film the length of The Godfather Part II is a good idea, but the shortened version is sorely lacking in some of the most critical areas, such as suspense, or clear linear progression.

The elements that work best in The Keep are the ones that go gleefully beyond the pale. Electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream provide a wonderfully anachronistic score that works despite itself. The production design by John Box and the art direction of Alan Tomkins and Herbert Westbrook are suitably evocative and foreboding. And best of all, the acting is top-notch baroque insanity. Byrne is relentlessly nasty in classic Nazi fashion, positioned opposite the war-weary pragmatism that Prochnow brings over undiluted from Das Boot (1981). McKellen uses the full power of his stage-acting experience, bellowing in a bizarre American accent (reportedly at Mann’s instigation) that eventually becomes a John Huston impression. Watson makes no impression at all. And then, in the role of the enigmatic stranger who is engaged in a millennia-old battle against evil, there’s affable everyman Scott Glenn. He’s horribly miscast, but somehow he gets far entirely on the basis of the asynchrony. The story may not make sense, but at least everyone goes for it.

The best thing that The Keep has going for it is its spectacle, and that suffers from being visibly undercut, far from the poetic grandeur its auteur intended. It’s hard to say if the film Mann had in mind–a blend of arty philosophy and purple grandiosity –would have worked. But it’s clear from what remains that it would have lacked for neither.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Keep is a weird movie and I mean that in the best possible way. On the negative end of the spectrum, there are too many characters and the film is often muddled and slow-moving. However, if you stick with it, you will be rewarded with some rather fine monster-mashing and other assorted general nonsense.” Mitch Lovell, The Video Vacuum

(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HANSEL AND GRETEL (1983)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton

FEATURING: Michael Yama, Alison Hong, Andy Lee, Jim Ishida

PLOT: A young brother and sister lost in the woods find sanctuary in a candy-covered house deep in the forest, but the witchy proprietor proves equally dangerous.

Still from Hansel and Gretel (1983)

COMMENTS: Several years ago, the 366 Weird Movies staff joined forces to debate the relative weirdness of the oeuvre of one Timothy Walter Burton. If one of his kooky gothic fairy tales might be inducted into the canon that had thus far eluded him, then perhaps one of us could make a compelling case for the film most worthy of the honor. (It should come as no surprise: Alfred Eaker’s pick won the day.) But in all that talk, not one of us even mentioned the very first live-action film ever crafted under Burton’s watchful eye. This turns out to be a significant oversight, because this small-scale retelling of a classic fairy tale is a true oddball by just about any yardstick. 

One reason “Hansel and Gretel” escaped our critical eye is because the film hardly had any eyes on it at all. It debuted on Halloween night in 1983, airing in the 10:30 p.m. slot on the Disney Channel as part of a special double feature hosted by Vincent Price, paired with Burton’s short animation “Vincent.” After being hidden in this near-invisible time slot, it was then buried even deeper, consigned to the Disney vault to never be seen again, eventually becoming the subject of rumors and doubt as to whether it was even real. Only when it resurfaced as part of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2009 were true believers rewarded with proof of its strange existence.

So now we have it—and while the story itself is pretty faithful to the version of the tale made famous by the Brothers Grimm (it’s number 327A on the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folklore), a handful of adjustments and adornments make Burton’s retelling unusual. For one thing, the director hired an all-Asian cast, an affectation which is progressive from a cultural-diversity standpoint but suggests a greater purpose that isn’t really explicated in the text. There’s also a stark emptiness to the set, with minimal decor and a hollow sound that suggests a vast soundstage mic’d up with a single boom. Where there is decor, however, it’s very Burton-esque, with toys that appear to have escaped from his animations and curlicue mountains straight out of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The confectionary house of the witch is especially bizarre, with walls and chairs that spurt colorful liquids when touched, and beds with cream-filled comforters that sprout hideous hands in the middle of the night.

Two performances are so eccentric that they make the case for weirdness all by themselves. Michael Yama’s dual-drag turn as both the wicked stepmother and the wicked witch leaves nothing on the table. (Any suggestion that they are one and the same character will only be met with vehement agreement.) Seriously, it’s the kind of performance that might make the contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” tell him to take it down a notch. His stepmother is strictly bitchy, complaining about everything in an angry-Paul-Lynde cadence, greedily devouring hideous-looking food, and punishing the children just because she can. But it’s as the witch that he can really let his freak flag fly, with a candy-cane nose, an arsenal of sweet weapons, and a devilish affect that recalls Looney Tunes’ Witch Hazel. The other notably strange performance is Bam Bam, a misshapen, toothy gingerbread creature (puppeteered by future Pixar scribe Joe Ranft) who sings a parody of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” in an effort to persuade Hansel to eat him.

Hansel and Gretel suffers from a split tonal personality: the hideousness of the villains and Burton’s fondness for grotesque stylings, countered by good-natured innocence in the form of the blandly decent children and especially by Johnny Costa’s score, which feels exactly like his most famous work, the soothing tinkly piano stylings that underscored nearly three decades of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” As a fairy tale adaptation, it’s just okay. It works far better as a historical curiosity, a piece of juvenilia that Burton had to get past in order to realize his vision on a bigger scale. But it’s instructive to see his technique before the edges started to get sanded away, when skill and budget were the only things limiting his creativity. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I understand why Disney canned this thing after one airing. It’s not even so much that it’s too scary, but it’s just weird. Everything after Hansel and Gretel enter the witch’s house is just one strange creative decision after another… I have no clue if Burton wasn’t given enough money to work with, or was under the influence of some very strong hallucinogens, but this is truly bizarre and unprofessional. It’s easily the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet.”–Collin, Movie Match-Up

(This movie was nominated for review by Ari Srabstein, who dubbed it “a very strange and fascinating film in my opinion and truly unique.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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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Recommended

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.)