Kategoria: Disaster

#1642 King Kong Lives (1986)

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King Kong got a pretty ok reboot in the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake starring Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange and Charles Grodin, and ten years later King Kong Lives tried to pick up where the previous movie left by introducing a female counterpart for the colossal gorilla, but without the star power of the previous installation.

Well, almost. Linda Hamilton plays the female lead and John Ashton (of the Beverly Hills Cop fame) the army dude trying to blow up the big ape.

Movie fails to utilise neither one, and the apes themselves could be passable for late 80s, early 80s release, but by 1986 the audience had been already spoiled with the next wave of special FX and King Kong Lives absolutely can’t keep up in this race, and feels like a relic from the past with absolutely no value for the viewers of today.

80s-o-meter: 60%

Total: 28%

#1332 Of Unknown Origin (1983)

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The director George P. Cosmatos creates a new subgenre of rat thriller with Of Unknown Origin.

I was drawn to this Canadian-American movie shot in Montréal due to it featuring Peter Weller (of the later Robocop fame), as well as its ominous title. The movie never quite lives up to its premise, and turns into monotonous mouse and cat game where Weller gets fixated on getting rid of a rodent and ends up destroying both his house and him family along the way.

It is not very scary, not that much fun and gets pretty old pretty fast. The concept could have probably worked better as a 20-minute Simpsons episode instead.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 27%

#1088 Runaway Train (1985)

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Another movie I recall seeing right before starting this project, Runaway Train is a standout movie that has sticked with me to date.

What we have here is an extraordinary movie that combines prison escape, disaster movie, action and thriller in a truly unique way. Star of the show is the cold, harsh and ethereal setting resembling an alternative reality of a video game or an absorbing book that the director Andrey Konchalovskiy manages to forge here.

Similarly captivating are the performances of Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, former of which manages to create one of the most vile, savage and multi-layered delinquents even seen on film.

80s-o-meter: 65%

Total: 93%

#940 Halloween 2018: Warning Sign (1985)

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A surprisingly likeable piece of scifi horror, Warning Sign is a biohazard thriller made in the vein of The Andromeda Strain – a similar kind of viral outbreak movie that really resonated with me when I saw it as a kid. Had I seen Warning Sign back then, it’d surely ended up very near to the top of my favourite movies list.

But, 30 years haven’t been kind to the movie and it hasn’t aged that gracefully. And it doesn’t really help that the movie wasn’t ahead of its time, but already a bit outdated when released. Some of the casting ain’t spot on either with G.W. Bailey – whom I usually love to bits – ending up giving the movie some unintentional comedic tones as one of the doctors inside the military laboratory.

Still, I quite liked Warning Sign. The movie’s premise of scientists coming up a rage inducing virus works well and the elements mixed in from various zombie movies make the movie entertaining, even scary at times. If you can forgive the movie for being fluffy – to the extremes at times – Warning Sign makes for a decent, campy piece of cinema with a certain lovable underdog feel to it.

80s-o-meter: 72%

Total: 76%

#923 The Day After (1983)

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The Day After portrays a nuclear war between the two cold-war giants USA and Soviet Union, and the effects there after. The initial setup establishing a Kansas site of nuclear weapons works and the movie escalates in an interesting way to its nuclear holocaust peak, but the events after that – as horrid and graphic as they may seem – just feel much too staged and phoney.

Set design is pretty impressive for a made for TV movie and could’ve partially passed for an actual feature film. The same cannot be said about the special effects and the make-up where the lack of budget really shines through. There’s an impressive array of actors involved for a made for TV movie, but here they don’t really add up any additional value to the movie compared of going with some no name actors. The movie is also too long at 120 minutes of which a good 40 minutes could’ve been left in the cutting room floor to save us from many of the scenes that drag on for much too long.

The Day After is a movie made to touch and to shock, but its melodramatic, soap opera feel to it plain prevented me to get really emotionally involved in it. The grim and hopeless Testament, released the same year, portrays the devastating effects of a nuclear war in a more subtle but realistic and powerful way.

80s-o-meter: 78%

Total: 46%

#885 Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (1983)

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All the way from the movie Airport, continuing through Airport 1975, Airport ’77 and The Concorde, 70s was a decade of dodgy disaster movies that got rightfully ridiculed in the early 80s Airplane and in Airplane II: The Sequel, with the latter taking place in a commercial space shuttle. Given this background it’s hard to fathom what exactly went through the minds of the executive producers that green lighted Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land after the genre already done to death and even worse, ridiculed.

To add insult to the injury this movie, released in 1983, plays a lot like the Airport parodies, but with a lesser production quality and totally sans humour.

Starflight is a product of the past that offered very little mileage when it was released back in 1983, and much less today.

80s-o-meter: 42%

Total: 24%