David Lynch and Mel Brooks team up for the best film in a very busy October 1980

Plus Robert Duvall gets a second chance and Chris Reeve time-travels for love

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…

OCTOBER

Larry Holmes managed to TKO Muhammad Ali in the 11th round of a title fight.
Thundarr The Barbarian premiered on Saturday morning TV.
The very first use of home banking by computer took place in Knoxville, TN.

And John Lennon released his terrific single, “(Just Like) Starting Over” in the UK.

I had an uneasy relationship with horror when I was ten years old.

I was fascinated by it, drawn to it, and totally and utterly terrified of it. One of the ways I coped with my fear was by buying and reading Fangoria, and by now, I’ve hinted at the difficulty of keeping Fangoria in the house. If my father found an issue, he would destroy it. Not just throw it out, but shred it so there was no chance I could retrieve it. At the time, neither of us could understand the other’s perspective. For me, Fangoria was a way to indulge my fascination without actually watching every one of the films. I could read about them, digest them at a remove, and I would try to understand how the illusions that disturbed me so greatly were created. I look back at the issues that I was reading at the time, and it seems even more apparent why we both felt so strongly.

I vividly remember this run of issues #7, #8, and #9 and their coverage of the movies that we’ve been talking about since mid-summer 1980. Issue #7 featured The Shining on the cover, #8 was Zombie, and #9 was Motel Hell. While I’d argue that the Motel Hell cover is the most immediately confrontational, it was issue #7 that started the war over Fangoria in my house in the first place. I bought the magazine because of The Shining, which I managed to see in a theater. As soon as you open the issue, though, right after the letters column, there’s a three-page piece on William Lustig’s Maniac, and there’s a photo of the infamous shotgun-blast-at-point-blank effect from the end of the film. I have never forgotten the feeling of seeing that image for the first time, and I still get nervous at the mere mention of that movie as a result. Maniac immediately felt dirty and dangerous and like something more extreme than I even understood existed up to that point. Now, the images are part of a piece about Tom Savini and how he designed and executed those effects, but that’s not what you see at first when you look at the images. I read and re-read that article and eventually demystified Maniac enough that I could watch it and just see it as a movie, even though it was several years after I saw those images for the first time. That was invaluable. My father, though, just saw what looked like a porno spread, devoted to violence instead of sex. He actually didn’t have much of a reaction when I was caught with a Playboy at around the same age. That was more of a “Hey, you shouldn’t have this.” Fangoria caused a visceral reaction in him, and he wasn’t interested in getting past that or exploring it. He couldn’t understand why there was any entertainment in that, and I couldn’t explain it to him yet.

In a month like October of 1980, I wanted to indulge that interest as much as possible, and there were two experiences that I had that absolutely scratched that itch. First, we managed to get my friend’s older brother to take us to see Fade To Black, which I’m not sure I’d describe now as a straight-up horror film. It was certainly sold as one, though, and there was something about the “film-nerd-goes-bad” pitch that I found irresistible. Second, I became completely obsessed with The Elephant Man, which definitely is not a horror film, but which worked on me as a full-body experience in a way that only horror films had before that. I had to buy a book about the real John Merrick and look at pictures of him and try to understand what his life had been like. I had to see the film twice because I wanted to pull apart the impact that it had on me. This was really the age when I started to try to get inside the magic trick, and part of that was because of the enormous power movies had over me at that point.

The biggest movies of the month in my house were Private Benjamin, which my parents evidently went crazy for and which I campaigned to see (unsuccessfully until the film’s video debut), and The Great Santini, which has one of the most confusing releases of any of the films this month. We’ll get into it in the piece below, but it was a film that had been building a critical head of steam for a while by the time I got to see it, and it’s one of the earliest cases I can remember of critics convincing me that I absolutely had to see something as soon as I could. There was a movie we saw this month that made no impression on anyone in the family until it showed up on home video and my younger sister (she would have been five this year) decided to watch it every single day after school for months. I eventually came to loathe that movie, but that first theatrical viewing, it just seemed like innocuous fluff.

That movie? Oh, God! Book II.