A very weird April 1980 gets started with Robbie Benson and a monkey
Plus a long-delayed Brooke Shields film finally sneaks onto screens
The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.
Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…
APRIL 1980
Wayne Gretzky became the first person to score 50 goals in one season as a teenager.
Post-It Notes were released for the first time.
The US decided to boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow.
In Detroit, a young broadcaster named Howard Stern went on the air for the first time.
And Jimmy Carter broke off all conversation with Iran as the hostage crisis continued even as a US military attempt to rescue the hostages failed and left 8 dead.
The school year always seemed like a mixed bag in terms of release dates when I was young, and at the dawn of the ‘80s, there didn’t seem to be any particular effort on the part of the studios to program movies that would be right for me on spring break. This was the decade where the teenager became the demographic-of-choice for the studios, of course, but it hadn’t kicked into overdrive yet at this point.
What I ended up seeing that year on vacation was The Private Eyes, a creaky Tim Conway/Don Knotts comedy, and a Robbie Benson movie in which he has a madcap adventure with a monkey. It’s safe to say it was a huge disappointment of a spring break.
It didn’t help that they canceled one of the movies I wanted to see, and this may have been the moment I first became aware of the vagaries of release dates. Watcher in the Woods was a horror film, but it was also a Disney horror film, and that was an argument I knew I could win. By this point, I was reading film reviews and film news whenever and wherever I could, so when I read that Watcher in the Woods was being pulled after only ten days in New York theaters, that seemed incredible to me. Pulled? You can do that? You can just change your mind and un-release a movie if people don’t like it? Weren’t there plenty of films people don’t like? Why weren’t they pulled? What made this film so bad? It blew me away, and it made me feel like I had to see it as soon as possible.
My main frustration came when I was blocked on every front in my attempts to see Where The Buffalo Roam. I was aware of Hunter S. Thompson in a vague “that person is famous” kind of way, but I had no idea who he actually was. I didn’t care. All I knew was Bill Murray was playing him and Bill Murray was amazing on Saturday Night Live and in Meatballs so this film was going to be amazing. I just knew it.
Small wonder that I ran into such profound resistance: Thompson was a major counter-culture figure, someone who thumbed his nose openly at all conventions of authority. My dad did not dig subversive humor or radical counter-culture, and the idea of me seeing an R-rated movie about this Nixon-hating counter-culture drug worshipping icon was a 100% no-go. If I could make my case, I could sometimes see R-rated films, but I didn’t know enough about Thompson or his work to win this fight at this point.
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