1980

Films from 1980

The Blue Lagoon

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Originally published: Sept. 2, 1980

Every year, it seems, a movie is released that should never have been made.

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Last year, it was The Amityville Horror; the year before, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This year, it’s Columbia’s remake of The Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is totally useless. The plot (what little there is) muddles along at a pitifully slow pace. Too much time is spent on Wild Kingdom-like scenery. We see chirping birds, slithering snakes, swimming squids, and turned-on turtles. Basically what you might see on the television show.

The Blue Lagoon ends up about one-and-a-quarter hours too long. It moves along fairly well at the very beginning and at the very end, but in between, the story pokes along unmercifully.

Though the plot touches on some philosophical views of religion, it simply mentions them with no attempt made to explore them.

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Smokey and the Bandit II

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Originally published: Sept. 2, 1980

Movie sequels (or remakes of old movies) are swiftly joining death and taxes as an inevitable and not always pleasant) part of American life. The latest entry in the sequel sweepstakes is Smokey and the Bandit II (or The Sheriff Strikes Back), starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason, and Dom DeLuise.

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Smokey and the Bandit II

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SATB II picks up about year after Smokey and Bandit. Bandit (Reynolds) has been driven to drink by the break-up with Frog (Field), who has gone back to Texas to marry son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. The old team is brought back together when Snowman (Jerry Reed) is offered $400,000 to transport a pregnant elephant from Miami to Dallas in four days.

The film is pretty familiar Burt Reynolds’ fare, i.e. lots of car chases, gorgeous girls, and good one-liners. Reynolds, Field, and Reed work together well as always, and DeLuise is an excellent addition to the troupe. Gleason isn’t quite as high-handed in his role of Sheriff Justice in this film but makes up for it somewhat by playing a triple role (Justice and his brothers, Reginald of the Mounties and Gaylord of the Texas Highway Patrol).

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Blood Simple

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I first saw Blood Simple, not at the theater, but on a 27-inch color TV from a VHS tape that I’d rented. After watching Raising Arizona, I wanted to check out Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film (and back then, that was the way to do it).

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Blood Simple

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At first, it’s a textbook film-noir plot: A Texas bar owner (Dan Hedaya) hires a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill his wife (Frances McDormand) and the bartender (John Getz) she’s been stepping out with. But, it’s not as simple as that, of course.

I understood the term “blood-simple,” as used by the Continental Op in Dashiell Hammett’s fix-up novel Red Harvest, to mean a craziness, not necessarily limited to one person, where they think that killing is the easiest way to get what they want, without thinking of the ramifications to themselves or anyone else.

Toss in the fact that it’s not easy to kill someone as you think, and that you may not be seeing the whole picture, and it makes “blood-simple” much more complex.

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Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie

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Originally published: Sept. 5, 1980

Univeral’s Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie proves that in the 1980s the outrageous 1960s humor still exists, somewhere, and is still funny.

Neither Richard “Cheech” Marin nor Tommy Chong has outgrown the “head” image; instead they have adapted it to the ’80s.

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Cheech and Chong's Next Movie

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The Cheech and Chong of the early ’70s was a parody of the hippies. Today, they portray an anachronism of two people out of place in this day and age.

A holdover from the hippy era is Cheech and Chong’s fixation on filth. With the media blaring bath and soap (“Keep yourself clean with—”; you know the type) commercials few of us even consider keeping used underclothes in the refrigerator so they won’t spoil.

The movie consists of sketches linked by a semblance of a plot. But instead of being boring, the film hits you with one comedy gag after another — Bang! Bang! Bang! It’s one of the few movies with almost no plot that is worth seeing.

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