The 1980s – Page 5 – Ash Clifton, Writer

When Will Hollywood Rediscover the Great B-Movie Action Flick?

The great B-Movie director Roger Corman has died. As a kind of tribute, I’m reposting an essay I wrote some years ago on my old blog. Enjoy!

Ever since I turned forty, I find myself going to see fewer and fewer movies. It’s only natural, I suppose. The less time you have left, the less time you want to spend in a darkened theater, lost in flights of fancy. And so, what little I know of recent film releases comes to me second-hand, either through friends or online reviews or through the film trailers that I see when I do occasionally go to a movie. Even from this limited perspective, I can glean a few obvious facts about movies these days: 1.) they are all rated PG-13 and 2.) they are all about the end-of-the-world and 3.) they all rely heavily on digital effects.

These three qualities go together, of course, for reasons that are based more in economics than anything else. The digital effects are required to attract a modern audience raised on video games and violent TV. And because these CGI effects tend to be horrifically expensive, the movies must be rated PG-13 in order to gather as large are a customer base as possible. Finally, the reliance on end-of-the-world plots come naturally, mainly because the plot-lines that justify these breathtaking explosions, airships, monsters, and laser guns usually involve some kind Biblical-style, science-fiction-themed catastrophe.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

When “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” came out in 1983, I was a junior in high school. Being a bit of a music snob, not to mention a budding wannabe intellectual, I was pretty well versed in the New Wave music of the era, bands like the Talking Heads and Gary Numan and Devo, not to mention the more avant guard stylings of The Police. (Synchronicity came out that year, and if it’s not a New Wave song, I don’t know what is.)

But, like everyone else, I was totally unprepared for “Sweet Dreams”. It wasn’t just the disconcerting, off-kilter, literally ass-backwards beat of the song. It was Annie Lennox’s soaring, operatic delivery of those out-there, nakedly perverse lyrics (“some of them want to abuse you; some of them want to be abused”). Most of all, it was the music video, which came spilling out of TVs everywhere and didn’t stop for about six months.

Looking back on it now in our absurdly trans-phobic era, it’s hard to imagine how utterly trans the video was. Transexual. Transgressive. Trans-everything. The sight of the beautiful Annie Lennox decked out in a (tailored) man’s suit, with her orange hair and vaguely Hitlerian mannerism, was like an A-Bomb going off in the brain of middle America. It might have all been too much, except for one thing: It’s a hell of a good song.

Rock on.

Perfect Films: “The Dead Zone”

Author’s Note: One of my favorite films, The Dead Zone, is free to stream on Amazon Prime right now. I thought I would take the opportunity to repost my tribute to the film, which I originally published on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.

When I was a student at the University of Florida in the late 1980s, I took writing classes under the great novelist Harry Crews. Harry was almost as famous for being a wild man as he was for being a writer, but by the time I knew him he had quit drinking and was leading a simple, almost monastic life of writing and teaching. Like many recovering alcoholics, he had lost many of his old friends, and he was also divorced, so he was alone a lot.