May 1980 features Kubrick's take on horror and the best STAR WARS film of all time
Plus Martin Sheen and Dennis Quaid in some oddball obscurities
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…
MAY 1980
The NBA delivered a major upset when Larry Bird was voted rookie of the year over Magic Johnson.
At the Cannes Film Festival, both All That Jazz and Kagemusha won the Palme d’Or.
Mt. St. Helen’s kept erupting while Love Canal, NY was evacuated,
and in the biggest disaster of all, Peter Criss quit the band Kiss.
There are certain moments from this decade that happened to me in movie theaters that left deep, permanent marks, and it’s not often two of them were in the same month.
Even before these two events, it was a good month of moviegoing for me. School was wrapping up for the year and I was counting down to my tenth birthday. May is always a big movie month for me. That’s when the first Star Wars came out, and it was the start of the still-new summer movie season. It always felt like a party they were throwing just for me.
Just to show you how frequently Disney sent classics back to theaters, not even a month after Lady and the Tramp was in theaters, we had the chance to see the practically-perfect-in-every-way Mary Poppins, a chance my parents happily took. We also made a beeline to Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown, as safe a brand as there was at that point. My younger sister was five years younger than me, so anything we went to as a family had to be suitable for a very young viewer, something I found frustrating on a regular basis. I was starting to get interested in the difference between grown-up movies and movies for kids, and I felt like once I hit double digits, I should have been able to watch films for adults.
I remember how hard it was to talk them into The Nude Bomb, and once we finally went, everyone was disappointed by how innocuous it was in different ways. The film was hugely important to me, and not because of the promised nudity, but because it featured a prolonged sequence on the Universal studio backlot tour. I didn’t care if the film was good or not; it was just amazing to me to get that glimpse of the tour and to see what the back lot looked like. It was much easier to talk my parents into talking me to see The Gong Show Movie, something we all regretted later.
The big moments that month were as big as any I’d had so far, and it’s interesting how each of the experiences marked me. My parents were well aware of Friday the 13th for some reason, and they were adamant that I was not going to get a chance to see it. My friend’s older brother saw it and recounted the entire film to us in explicit detail, inventing kill scenes that weren’t in the film and describing something so insane and pornographic that it is small wonder parents were afraid of it.
We had to travel that month for some reason, and while we were on the road, I saw the paperback for The Shining everywhere we went. It was the yellow movie tie-in edition, and it creeped me out deeply. One of the stops in our travel, my parents left us with an older teenage girl, the daughter of someone else who was there at the same conference or business trip or whatever it was. She was given money for food for us, and the adults went out for a full evening. The older girl knew full well what she wanted to do, and as soon as the adults were gone, we made a beeline for the theater that was across from the hotel.
I was not ready for the experience of The Shining in a movie theater. The soundtrack alone felt like an assault. But the entire thing was just so overwhelming, and at the same time, it was so interesting that I wanted to see it again immediately, hoping it might somehow rob the film of some of its power. I managed to keep the secret about having seen the film for a grand total of seven hours, spilling the beans at breakfast as I told my parents how amazing the movie was.
The film haunted me. For years, there were images and scenes that made regular appearances in my nightmare rotation, and yet I loved it immediately. There was something about how strange and alien the entire thing felt that appealed to me deeply, even if I couldn’t find the words for it at that time.
Meanwhile, I found plenty of words for The Empire Strikes Back. That’s all I talked about, and that’s pretty much all I cared about. Sure, I went to see some other movies that month, but that’s only because The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t open yet. The five or six days before the film actually opened, I was insane. I was pretty much out of my mind with anticipation, a new experience for me. I’d never seen a sequel to something that was so important to me, and it felt impossible that there was going to be more Star Wars. This was the start of me hunting down movie magazines, looking for every new still, desperate for information about the film. I bought the paperback version of the comic book adaptation, and I bought the Donald Glut novelization as well. And toys? Lord. There were so many toys, and for each one I did buy, there were at least five I couldn’t afford.
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