'80s Roulette: RHINESTONE

Sylvester Stallone, this is your nightmare

I have every single movie released in the United States in the 1980s on a hard drive and once a week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

I’m glad to have moved this to Sundays now. I think it’ll work much better here. On Fridays, I have to focus my attention on The Hip Pocket, my new podcast which you can find over at Formerly Dangerous. Once that’s done, then I can fire up the Plex server, open my ‘80s library, and hit shuffle.

The thing about playing Russian Roulette is that, once in a while, you’re going to blow your brains out, and today’s that day. I watched this one when we covered it for ‘80s All Over, and now I’ve watched it again. I think that’s quite enough of that, thank you very much. But just because it’s a bad movie doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. So let’s jump right into it…

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JUNE 22, 1984

Rhinestone
Sylvester Stallone, Dolly Parton, Richard Farnsworth, Ron Liebman, Tim Thomerson, Steve Peck, Penny Santon, Russell Buchanan, Ritch Brinkley, Jerry Potter, Jesse Welles, Phil Rubenstein, Thomas Ikeda, Christal Kim, Arline Miyazaki, Tony Munafo, Don Hanmer, Dean Smith, David Cobb, Speck Rhodes, Guy Fitch, Stan Yale, Robert Cook, Cindy Perlman, Robert Martini, Michael Adams, Don Munson, Bobbie La Salle, Jordan Myers, Bill Dearth, JuLee Erdahl, Robin D. Alder, Shelley Pogoda, Laura Kingsley, Rod Ball, Troy Evans, Tony Compton, Gary Compton, Dean Wein, Adrienne Hampton, Lonna Montrose, Don Keller, Ross St. Phillip, Jill Gordon, Douglas Buttleman, Leslie Morris, Stan Wells, Chip Heller, Larry Weiss, Sandy Policare, Paul ‘Mousie’ Garner, Joseph Sheppard, Dair Morris, Gene Norman Wells, Sterling Roblee, Dean Webber, James Silverman, Bill Owens, John Owens, Lester Owens, Louis Owens, Don Warden, Del Wood, Mark Anderson, Floyd Parton, Randy Parton, Dale Puckett, Dwight Puckett, Mike Baird, John Bidasio, Richard Dennison, John Goux, Joey Scarbury, Leland Sklar
cinematography by Timothy Galfas
music by Dolly Parton
screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson and Sylvester Stallone
story by Phil Alden Robinson
produced by Howard Smith and Marvin Worth
directed by Bob Clark
Rated PG
1 hr 51 mins

A singer/songwriter makes a bet with a bar owner that she can turn anyone into a great country singer in two weeks.

Bob Clark had nine lives as a filmmaker.

Every time he had a hit, it felt like it would be easy to put him in a box and have him do the same thing over and over. I’ll be honest… I have always thought of him as a Canadian filmmaker, but he was born and raised in the US. He’s from New Orleans. So much of his early career is Canadian, though, because he figured out a way to game the tax system, and he did things the right way. He started very small with the micro-budget Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and then made the also-small-but-interesting Deathdream before finally breaking through with Black Christmas, a genuine big fat hit that is also quietly one of the most influential films of the ‘70s and ‘80s. He could have been a huge name in Canadian horror if he’d decided to just work in that genre, but instead, he made a Bo Svenson/Robert Culp crime thriller called Breaking Point and then followed that up with Murder by Decree, another big hit, but yet another whole different kind of movie. It’s a Sherlock Holmes movie where they’re chasing Jack the Ripper, and it’s a ton of fun. It was shot on location in London, but most of the money in the film was, once again, Canadian. It feels like the kind of film that could have turned him into the big classy high concept guy, like a Nicholas Meyer, but again, Clark made a left turn for his next film, Tribute, a big movie star movie with Jack Lemmon serving up entire platters of ham, earning Lemmon an Academy Award nomination for his trouble. You make all of those movies in a row, what’s your next movie?

Porky’s, obviously. And Porky’s II, just to really make the point.