April 1980 starts with Robbie Benson and a monkey and ends with Bill Murray gone gonzo

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.

Starting a campaign to get to see a film was a risky proposition for me because when it backfired, it put a film on their radar that might otherwise not have been. In this case, my efforts led my parents to read about the film, which led to them putting out the word to all of my grandparents and aunts and uncles who I normally went to when trying to sneak something over on my parents. Absolutely not. Verboten. I found myself stonewalled, too young to find any way around their decision.

But I did see ffolkes because it starred James Bond. So there was that, I guess.

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APRIL 4

Die Laughing
Robby Benson, Linda Grovenor, Charles Durning, Elsa Lanchester, Bud Cort, Rita Taggart, Marty Zagon, Larry Hankin, Sam Krachmalnick, Michael David Lee, Peter Coyote, Charles Fleischer, Charles Harwood, Melanie Henderson, Carel Struycken, Chuck Dorsett, Morgan Upton, Christopher Pray, John Bracci, James Cranna, Joe Bellan, John Tim Burrus, Maurice Argent, Rhoda Gemignani, Nick Outin, Roger Johnson, John E. Tidwell, Cynthia Brian, Regina Waldon, Scott DeVenney, O-Lan Jones
cinematography by David Myers
music by Robby Benson and Craig Safan
screenplay by Scott Parker
story by Scott Parker and Jerry Segal
produced by Robby Benson and Mark Canton
directed by Jeff Werner
Rated PG
1 hr 48 mins

A cab driver picks up the wrong fare and ends up on the run, suspected of murder, and babysitting a monkey who knows nuclear secrets.

Robby Benson is one of the weirdest of the teen idols from the ‘70s, a talented kid who strikes me as a slightly dreamier version of a young Jerry Lewis. Benson had already made almost a dozen movies by this point and he was starting to take control of his image. He wanted to be a singer, and he produced this film, making sure his character was in a band and there would be room for him to perform several full-length songs amidst the “comic mayhem.” I use quotes around that phrase because the mayhem in question is fairly mild-mannered, and I’m not sure I would actually call this film funny.

image courtesy of Warner Bros

I’ve seen this film twice and I still couldn’t tell you what “nuclear secrets” the monkey knows or how it works when they play music and the monkey reacts. None of it makes any sense. It’s all just an excuse to have people chase Benson around and to have a misunderstanding about what he did or didn’t do. Benson is frantic and he certainly seems like he’s giving it everything he’s got, but he is wildly unfunny. Linda Grovenor fares better as Amy, the younger sister of the girl who Pinsky (Benson) thinks he’s dating. Bud Cort plays the bad guy at the center of the very dumb conspiracy, and he’s fine. With a script like this, though, nobody was going to be able to do much.