October 1981 is the busiest month we've covered so far, and the weirdest, as well

The first sequel to Carpenter's HALLOWEEN is just one of many highlights

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released theatrically 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

The Meadowlands Arena opened in New Jersey, which technically counts as the founding of the First Official Church Of Springsteen.

Aspartame artificial sweetener was approved for usage by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The US debt hit $1 trillion for the first time.

And in Oakland, California, cheerleader Krazy George Henderson led the crowd in what is reported to be the very first crowd wave of all time.

This is going to be a weird month to publish.

The first weekend is easy enough. Five movies. The second weekend of the month features 12 releases, though, and the weekend after that? Only three. So clearly I’m going to have to figure out how to break those up a little more rationally. That could easily be three issues with fifteen movies. The last two weekends, we’ve got seven films and then four. So as you can see, October’s one of the most jam-packed release schedules we’ve seen since this newsletter began.

Why October 1981, though? How did so many movies end up packed into one release window? And where was I as all of this was going down?

Considering how many movies came out this month, I saw almost none of them theatrically because there was almost nothing aimed at young audiences. We saw Looker in the theater, and even that took some serious negotiation with my parents. I look at this list of releases now and it’s hard to believe how much variety there is. There were just so many choices, and especially for horror fans, it must have felt like you were spoiled for choice.

Normally I’m able to find some biographical hook to hang each month on, but my primary memory of October 1981 was watching Siskel & Ebert lose their minds over My Dinner with Andre and then trying to convince my parents that we actually wanted to go see a movie about two NY intellectuals having dinner and talking for two hours. I was unable to make it sound palatable, and it took me a few years to finally track the movie down on VHS.

There were movies I wanted to see this month, and there were novelizations I picked up at the bookstore. I can’t begin to explain what 11-year-old me made of the Tattoo tie-in, but I wisely chose not to discuss that one with my parents. I’m not sure I would have had the vocabulary to articulate my reaction. Like I said, I was 11. I was an ambitious viewer already by this point, but there were certainly times I overreached.

More than anything, I’m reminded that during the school year, it was harder for me to talk my parents into movies. It was definitely more of an ask, and I was a chaotic student, so I didn’t have a lot of leverage. If there was something I felt like I had to see and I knew my parents wouldn’t go for it, I would turn to the older siblings of my friends. There were several kids in the neighborhood who had brothers or sisters who were more than happy to take us to see something forbidden as long as (A) we bought their tickets and (B) we never gave up who took us, even if we got busted.

To my credit, we never did give any of them up, even when I would get nightmares from seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see and my parents would get angry at me. This month, the most forbidden of forbidden goods was Halloween II. After all, the first Halloween had been a huge problem in my house. I saw a clip from the film on Sneak Previews, the original show that Siskel & Ebert did on PBS, and that single clip gave me nightmares. Then a babysitter took me to see the full film and that gave me crazy out-of-control nightmares and made it difficult for me to walk in my suburban neighborhood after dark for several years. Of course, none of that made Halloween II any less attractive to me, and we talked an older sister into taking three of us to see the film during a sleepover with her younger brother. We saw it at a drive-in on a double-bill with Dead & Buried, and that is still one of my favorite drive-in experiences of all time.

So why did I hit the wall so hard the first time I tried to write up this month? Simple. I was scared. It’s a daunting task. I want to do justice to the big films that came out this month for sure. Before we get to that, though, we’ve got a lot of really bad films to get through, so let’s kick things off with a giant-sized slice of Cannon cheese…

---

OCTOBER 2

Enter The Ninja
Franco Nero, Susan George, Shô Kosugi, Christopher George, Alex Courtney, Will Hare, Zachi Noy, Constantine Gregory, Dale Ishimoto, Joonee Gamboa, Leo Martinez, Ken Metcalfe, Subas Herrero, Ala Amiel, Douglas Ivan, Bob Jones, Jack Turner, Derek Webster, Konrad Waalkes, Jim Gaines, Don Gordon Bell, Isolde Winter, Lucy Bush
cinematography by David Gurfinkel
music by W. Michael Lewis and Laurin Rinder
screenplay by Dick Desmond
story by Dick Desmond
based on a story by Mike Stone
produced by Judd Bernard and Yoram Globus
directed by Menahem Golan
Rated R
1 hr 39 mins

When a ninja visiting his old friend in the Philippines intervenes with a businessman who’s harrassing him, the businessman brings in a ninja of his own.

Is this quietly one of the most influential movies of the entire decade?

There’s a case that could be made, definitely. When Menahem Golan decided to make the first American movie about ninjitsu sometime during 1980, he was reacting to the explosion of martial-arts films that happened internationally after the death of Bruce Lee in the ‘70s. He wasn’t looking to revolutionize anything. He was just reacting. There were any number of sub-genres that took off under the umbrella of martial arts, and at this point, it may seem like ninjas were always a huge part of that. But in late 1979, there was nothing out there. Seriously. Mike Stone was a karate champion who had the idea to write a film about ninjas, and he put together a treatment called Dance of Death that ended up on Golan’s desk. His original idea was that he would play the lead, the White Ninja, and he suggested his close friend and martial arts teacher, Sho Kosugi, to play the film’s villain. While he was given a story credit and he worked on the stunt team, specifically as the hero’s fight double, it was clear very early that he was not going to be the star of the movie. Still, the suggestion of Kosugi left an enormous and lasting mark on exploitation cinema, so let’s pour one out for Mike Stone, right?

Cannon started putting together the picture, and it happened fast. So fast that they started to freak out because they didn’t have a lead, and then Golan met with Franco Nero by happenstance during the Manila Film Festival. Nero was an international star thanks to Django, and he had been a presence in plenty of big Hollywood pictures like Camelot and Force 10 from Navarone. He was worth serious money on the international pre-sales market, and so it didn’t really matter that he had zero martial arts training or that the script wasn’t written for a man with a thick Italian accent. He was enough for Cannon to be able to raise their money, which allowed them to use Kosugi, and that worked out in ways they couldn’t have imagined at first.

Kosugi was trained as a martial artist from the age of five, and his personal mythology includes study as a child with a mysterious hermit who instructed him in the secrets of ninjitsu even as he learned more mainstream martial arts from more conventional instructors. Kosugi’s ninja master disappeared just before he reached adulthood, leaving Kosugi as one of the few people alive to have been given this kind of formal ninjitsu training. He became the All-Japan karate champion at 18, determined to bring his knowledge to the world stage. True? False? Who gives a shit. It’s a great story and he poured all of his energy into helping design the action for Enter the Ninja, knowing it was a huge opportunity. He’d been in a few films during the ‘70s, and he helped stage the action scenes in several small low-budget films, but he’d never really had a chance to be the center of attention. Kosugi doubled for many of the bad guys in the film in addition to playing Hasegawa, the film’s primary villain who is eventually revealed to be a rival who trained alongside Cole (Franco Nero) when they were young. One of the reasons there were so many immediate ripoffs of this film was because they realized ninjas are all wrapped in black, making them incredible easy to double with stuntmen, and to re-use the same stuntmen over and over.

If you watched martial arts films in the ‘80s, you saw a lot of white dudes doing karate and a whoooooooooole lotta ninjas, and both of those things can be traced to this film, which is about a white dude doing karate who fights a whoooooooole lotta ninjas. Golan and Globus moved quickly as filmmakers and they would go all in on whatever they were doing. As a result, this isn’t like they were dabbling in the ninja genre. They created it through sheer shock and awe, and the way the film opens is pretty much a straight-up statement of intent. Over a black background, you just watch Sho Kosugi, dressed all in black, demonstrate different weapons and fighting poses, one after another. He even uses nunchucks because Golan insisted, knowing that Bruce Lee had made them cool. They were never used by ninjas in reality, but that one decision has turned that into canon for pretty much everything else that followed. Then, just as the final credit comes up, a white guy, dressed all in white, comes sailing in and kicks Kosugi so hard he leaves the frame.

Who the fuck is this White Ninja, right? I mean, that first guy was just ripping it up for three straight minutes and then BLAMMO, here comes this new guy. He must be the best! The film cuts to some remote location where the White Ninja (Nero) runs around and kills a whole ton of dudes for about five minutes. We don’t know why. We don’t know where they are. And we don’t care. There are Red Ninjas who work for the Black Ninja, and White Ninja takes them all out before he faces off against the Black Ninja. He has to escape using a waterfall, and you’d think that would be the whole opening sequence. Nope. He goes to a small village where he kills some more Red Ninjas, then fights the Black Ninja again and eventually “kills” an old man who is watching. Turns out the old man is actually the Master Ninja, and this is the final test for Cole, the White Ninja, who is about to graduate ninja school. When you see the film, watch how violent this entire opening is. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe the entire thing was a simulation for Cole’s benefit even thought we see him kills dozens of his classmates. Everyone seems cool with this except for Hasegawa (Kosugi), the Black Ninja, who thinks it’s bullshit that they’re teaching all their cool ninja stuff to a white guy. Cole couldn’t care less and peaces out to go visit his buddy Frank (Alex Courtney) in the Philippines, where Frank is married to Mary Ann, played by exploitation royalty Susan George.

Cole gets caught up in Frank’s problems running a coconut farm, which is a really weird thing to write when you’re describing a ninja movie. There are local thugs who are strong-arming all of the farmers in the area, including Frank, and Cole decides to get involved, stepping in when the thugs rough up Pee Wee, Frank’s foreman. None of the other workers want to stay because they’re scared, so Cole starts to fight his way up the chain of command to Venarius, played by Christopher George, who is having so much fun that Golan and Globus should have charged him money instead of paying him. Venarius is a real king-sized piece of shit, and George couldn’t be happier about it. Dude’s got a swimming pool in his office. Points for style, right? Venarius wants to drill for oil on Frank’s land, leading to a series of confrontations including one where Cole rips a hook hand off of a henchman played by the wacky fat guy from the Lemon Popsicle movies. For at least half the movie, Franco Nero lays waste to a lot of guys, but the title seems like a real bait-and-switch. He’s fighting, but he’s in no way a ninja. That changes when Venarius hires Hasegawa, who still hates Cole, and the rest of the movie is a series of scenes that eventually leads to Cole confronting Hasegawa, ninja to ninja. There are a whole lot of dead bodies before that, including Frank and pretty much every single employee Venarius hired, and then Cole takes out Venarius in a moment that should have won Christopher George the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the next five years running.

The final battle between ninjas is worth the wait, and while I think this movie is cheese, start to finish, I think it is exquisite cheese, start to finish. It never makes a lick of sense, and when Franco Nero breaks the fourth wall at the end of the film with a wink, they’re letting you know that it doesn’t matter in the slightest. This movie just wants to entertain you and it was incredibly important for Cannon, which was just kicking off a new four-movie distribution deal with MGM. This was a sizable hit, and the ripples from the film’s impact are still being felt in American and international genre films today.

Paternity
Burt Reynolds, Beverly D’Angelo, Norman Fell, Paul Dooley, Lauren Hutton, Juantia Moore, Peter Billingsley, Jacqueline Brookes, Linda Gillen, Mike Kellin, Victoria Young, Elsa Raven, Carola Locatell, Kay Armen, Murphy Dunne, Toni Kalem, Kathy Bendett, MacIntyre Dixon, Alfie Wise, Tony DiBenedetto, Dick Wieand, Eugene Troobnick, Ken Magee, Elaine Giftos, Sydney Daniels, Hector Troy, Roger Etienne, Susanna Dalton, Jason Delgado, Aaron Jessup, Frank Bongiorno, Frank Hamilton, James Harder, Irena Ferris, Lee Ann Duffield, Brad Trumbull, John Gilgreen, Jeff Lawrence, Robin Blake, Paula Holland, Linda Grayson, Buddy Micucci, Joe Hamer, Bob Maroff, Kevin Rigney, Natalie Priest, Jane Cecil
cinematography by Bobby Byrne
music by David Shire
screenplay by Charlie Peters
produced by Lawence Gordon and Hank Moonjean
directed by David Steinberg
Rated PG
1 hr 34 mins

A rich asshole wants a son without any emotional or parental responsibility and hires a young waitress to carry the baby for him.

That sound you just heard was Burt Reynolds hitting the wall.

This is not the end of his career. There is good work after this and actual hit movies after this. But this might be one of the smarmiest, emptiest, most insufferable films that Reynolds ever made, and considering how big a star he was at this moment, one has to assume he was a big part of the decision-making process that led to this landing right in the middle of one of the biggest commercial runs of his career. If you look at Starting Over and Rough Cut, they both feel like him intentionally trying to become a new Cary Grant, a romantic comedy star who can carry grown-up films with a light, witty edge. Smokey and the Bandit II and The Cannonball Run both feel like Reynolds retreating to the relative safety of the shitkicker comedy, where he was untouchable at this point. Paternity could be read as another bite at the light romantic comedy apple, but that would require it to be romantic. Or funny. Or good.

Watching Reynolds wrestle with his onscreen persona is a good way of tracking the conversation that was happening about the modern American man at that point. When he shows up in Deliverance or White Lightning or The Longest Yard, the thing people are reacting to is a brash, arrogant macho energy. He will gleefully beat holy hell out of you, fuck your girlfriend, drink all your beer, and then buy you breakfast in the morning. It is an energy that served him well, and his attempts to step outside that (most notoriously, perhaps, in 1975’s At Long Last Love) were frequently and immediately punished by the viewing publish and the critics. But sensitivity was increasingly in vogue as the ‘70s wore on and the conversation changed, and Starting Over feels like a major reset for him as a human being. There is a warmth and a vulnerability that he’s never shown before, and the script by James L. Brooks was a big part of that. Brooks was writing about a cultural shift he observed and using Reynolds was a way of subverting everything he previously represented. The guy who stars in Smokey & The Bandit or Hooper is unapologetic swagger with just a wee li’l bit of a self-knowing wink. In Starting Over, he’s far more relatable, playing a normal man trying to rebuild his life after a divorce as he has to figure out what dating even looks like for someone his age. I think there’s something obvious about the next step in his image shift involving Burt Reynolds and children. This is a few years after Dustin Hoffman scores one of his biggest career wins with Kramer vs Kramer, and there are a number of films made as a result that feel like they’re chasing that same energy. This one is also wrestling with Reynolds as a movie star, and because it’s more concerned with his image than with an actual character, it doesn’t work.

In Paternity, Reynolds is basically playing Reynolds as the film opens. He’s great at posting numbers, but he just skims across the surface of his relationships, sleeping with a different woman almost every night. For the most facile reason possible (he shoots hoops with a kid for a few minutes), he decides to have a son, and he sets out to do exactly that. There’s no thought of what kind of life changes might be in order to create the right environment to have a son, or a child, or a wife, but rather just this one idea. Time to make a son. So he jumps right to the idea of a surrogate mother, and “comedy” ensues as he tries to interview applicants and eventually settles on a singer/songwriter named Maggie who works at a diner. Maggie’s played by Beverly D’Angelo, coming off her remarkable work as Patsy Cline in Coal Miner’s Daughter, and I think she’s great in the film. She’s in a better movie than Reynolds is, though, and part of the irritation is that Maggie’s so obviously someone worth a full and whole-hearted commitment that we spend the movie irritated with Buddy (a perfectly childish name for Reynolds’ character) instead of enjoying what we’re watching. Of course the point of the film is that he’s going to eventually realize how great she is and he’s going to fall in love with her, but he pretty much waits the entire movie to get there, and it just makes him seem like a dope. There are plenty of good actors working hard to make this thing work, like Lauren Hutton, Norman Fell, and Paul Dooley, but to no avail. This is Burt’s show, start to finish, and he’s an off-putting dolt here.

Like many movie stars, Reynolds is at his best when he knows exactly why audiences love him and he either leans into that or finds some smart way to play against it. Paternity is all of his worst tendencies turned up as loud as they go, but without any charm to balance things out. I blame David Steinberg’s leaden direction more than the Charlie Peters screenplay, because it feels like Burt was calling the shots here and playing things loose. Steinberg doesn’t seem to know how to shape his scenes at all. Bits just start and stop and there’s nothing about it that would suggest any of this is in service to character or theme. It’s just deadly low energy shtick, and you can’t spell that without “s-h-i-t.” Burt was mystified by the muted reaction to the film (it still managed to make a wee bit of money), which suggests that he was not always a very good judge of his own charisma.