July 1981 features a savage Blake Edwards satire, the introduction of Snake Plissken, Dudley Moore's iconic Arthur and De Palma's best movie

Plus the single best movie about American punk ever made and the world's horniest Tarzan

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…

JULY

The Wonderland Murders, which later inspired scenes in Boogie Nights as well as a feature film starring Val Kilmer as John Holmes, took place on the night of July 1st, shocking the city with a crime that involved porn and drugs and guns and money.
Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court and, one entire day later, she was confirmed by the Senate in a 99-0 vote.
The Jacksons kicked off a 36-city tour, already feeling tensions as a family.

And finally, way out at the edge of explored space, Voyager 2 encountered Saturn, just as the baseball strike concluded here on Earth.

I felt like a different human being as July of 1981 got underway.

It’s hard to overstate just how seismic an event Raiders of the Lost Ark was. That film felt like it unlocked so much for me, and the absolutely hog-wild ending, even though the film was rated PG, seemed to indicate to my parents that I was ready for more adult films on the regular. Still, what do you do with a kid who asks to see both S.O.B. and The Fox and the Hound in the theater?

This was a month when I failed most of my attempts at seeing adult fare with two notable exceptions. I was a raving fan of the Pink Panther films at this point, and I read everything I could find about S.O.B. I was determined to talk someone into taking me to see it, but I came up goose-eggs. It just wasn’t something I could convince anyone to see. No one was interested in the poster or the premise or the promise of seeing Julie Andrews topless. My neighbor across the street pretty much worshipped Mary Poppins, and any mention of this film made him visibly furious, and he would call the film S.H.I.T. when I brought it up try to needle him. Likewise, my parents made a hardline call on the Bo Derek version of Tarzan the Ape Man. They knew exactly why I was interested, and as a result, my intense curiosity was only partially satisfied later in the year by the layout in September’s issue of Playboy.

I have to confess that it is crazy to me to think of how interested I already was in women and sexuality by this point. As a 53-year-old person, I think of 11 as impossibly young. When you’re 11, though, you are already starting to want to understand adult experience. Or at least, I was hungry for that kind of information, and this was the year I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp and it was the year I started winning the war on seeing R-rated movies in theaters and it was the year I started getting interested in Playboy, which was very much a cultural barometer at that point. I’m not going to pretend my interest was motivated by the articles in the magazine. I was a kid starting to get curious about sex, and Playboy was a monthly catalog of naked ladies. It’s not surprising or shocking that I knew exactly where my father’s Playboys were kept and it seems inevitable that after looking at them enough times to have burned the actual pictorials onto my retinas, I would eventually try reading the rest of the magazine. At this point, the Playboy interview was still a deep-dive read every month, and you would get some of the most unfiltered looks at who people were from those interviews. My local library also had Playboy on its shelves, something which seems in hindsight kind of wild. I spent a lot of time at the library in those days, and I would read archives of magazines like Mad and Playboy and National Lampoon, magazines I wasn’t allowed to actually own. Which makes sense because I was freakin’ 11 years old.

When Playboy went all in to support a film, it was normally because the film featured an abundance of nudity. Whatever other cultural merit it might have would be coincidental, and on occasion, they would get wildly excited about something like the new Fellini picture or Cat People, something that had more going on than just bare boobs. It wasn’t surprising that Tarzan was on their radar. Bo Derek was a huge instant icon thanks to the release of “10” and the industry that popped up around her in the wake of that film’s success. July of ’81 is very much the month that is the direct result of that movie’s blockbuster status. It bought Blake Edwards the right to make his most personal film ever, a movie that might as well have been called Biting The Hand That Feeds, and both Dudley Moore and Bo Derek made their big follow-up films in starring roles. It’s safe to say the three of them had wildly different levels of success with these new projects, and we’ll get into all of that in the reviews below.

I was still learning what my parents would or wouldn’t tolerate from an R-rated film in the theater with me, and I made some mistakes. Maybe the most notable one involved the 3D exploitation Western Comin’ At Ya!!, which I absolutely had to see. A 3D Western? How were my parents not rabid about this? It sounded so exciting to me. I thought I would appeal to my father, who loved Westerns for the most part, but he dismissed it precisely because of the 3D aspect of it. My parents were teens in the ’50s, so they lived through the first big 3D craze, and my dad had no interest in going through it a second time. He has held firm to this opinion through each successive reintroduction of 3D as a theatrical gimmick. I managed to talk my mom into taking me instead, and we went on a Saturday afternoon. We managed to make it through about fifteen minutes of movie, right up to the first violent sexual assault, and my mom was up and ushering me out the door. Her first impulse was just to go home because she was furious at the film we walked out of, but I managed to talk her into going into the other screen at that theater to watch Arthur instead. That ended up being a great screening, and by the time we left, she had pretty much forgotten about the film that infuriated her just a few hours earlier.

I had better luck with Escape From New York, which my dad seemed to enjoy far more than I expected he would. Halloween had traumatized me when I was taken to see it, and John Carpenter’s name was not the most popular in my house as a result. Something about the trailer for Escape worked for my dad, though, and when I showed him the newspaper ad, told him the premise and then said the three magic words, he announced that he and I would be going to see the film. Those magic words? “Lee Van Cleef.” I had a great time with the movie, but it’s safe to say that no one else in my peer group saw it and no one in our Chattanooga neighborhood saw it, either. I learned this conclusively that Halloween, when I dressed up like Snake Plissken for trick or treating, and every house I went to led to the exact same conversation.

“Trick or treat!”
“Oh, boy, you look great. Let me guess. Are you Indiana Jones?”
“… no. I’m Snake Plissken.”
“That’s great! What is that?”
“He’s from Escape from New York.”
“Oh, that’s great. What is that?”

I made it through about an hour of that before I went home and modified my costume with a hat and a bullwhip, losing the eyepatch, and leaning into the worst half-hearted Indiana Jones costume possible, defeated by the sheer indifference everyone showed to this movie I loved so much.

When I took my parents to a movie they disliked intensely, they had no problem letting me know. I convinced them that Under the Rainbow was going to be a blast, and somehow, despite their own eyes and the poster for the film, they took me to see it. They seemed so disappointed as we walked out of the theater… not in the movie, but in me and my overall judgment. To be fair, my mother was maybe the biggest Love at First Bite fan of all time and she could not have been any more excited for the release of Zorro the Gay Blade. She was the one whose judgment we were all calling into question as the closing credits of that one rolled. When a movie worked, though, there was no better feeling, and there were two films that month that united us in our reactions. My parents were big Rocky fans, and we were there opening weekend for Victory. My parents were also big fans of soccer in general, and during the late ‘70s first wave of America’s embrace of the sport, I played soccer every season and my parents took me to a number of professional games for the Tampa Bay Rowdies, which was a truly raucous event every single time. Victory felt like the perfect intersection of those interests with a smattering of The Great Escape, a movie my dad had showed me repeatedly on television by that point.

Even better was our screening of Blow Out. My mother was always vocal about her biggest film crushes, and John Travolta had a spot right at the top of that list. My parents were big fans of the film version of Carrie, and I was able to sell them on the idea of a new thriller that had some of the same cast, the same director, and Travolta at the center of it. I had no idea what I was getting into, but I knew that one of the critics I most admired at the time, Pauline Kael, was absolutely smitten with De Palma, and that made me curious. The film flattened me, and the ending, one of my favorite broken-hearted endings of that entire era of broken-hearted movies, left my parents gobsmacked. Listening to them discuss it on the way home and piping in with my own takes was one of my favorite movie memories of the summer, and it began my own fascination with De Palma’s work.