September 1981 sees the year's Best Picture winner make a run for it

Lots of big swings in this very ambitious line-up

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…

SEPTEMBER

Judge Wapner called The People’s Court to session for the very first time.

Entertainment Tonight also made its television premiere.

Simon and Garfunkel reunited for a concert in Central Park.

And the US Senate Judiciary Committee approved Sandra Day O’Connor by unanimous vote, and on the 25th, she was sworn in as the first woman justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

September was never a great movie month for me when I was school-age, and 1981 was kind of a dead zone for me. At eleven, I was struggling to give a shit about school compared to movies, and my parents were getting frustrated. Looking at the schedule now, there were only two films released this month that I remember seeing theatrically, and one of them was not in September, but months later once it started to pick up steam as an awards season standout.

Makes sense, though. I was starting to get more into home video, for one thing. By this point, my parents were involved in helping out with one of the very first video stores I ever saw. We were in Chattanooga, and my parents were close friends with a guy named Larry. He had the idea to start a sort of movie co-op, where you would pay a monthly fee, and that monthly fee would allow you to keep out either two, three, or five movies at a time for as long as you wanted. No late fees. Just one flat rate, and if you wanted to drive back every day, you could take out an insane number of movies every month. It was a great deal, especially considering how few movies there were overall. Larry had a catalog he got directly from the distributors that showed every title available, and if you wanted to see something he didn’t have yet, you could request it and he’d buy a copy to add to the collection. It’s still one of my favorite set-ups for any store I ever rented from, and it helped that Larry would have movies delivered to our house since he didn’t have anyone home during the day. We’d open the boxes and process the tapes at the house, putting on stickers and bar codes and helping him catalog things. Since my parents both worked, that meant I had a lot of time alone with tons of movies that I wasn’t necessarily supposed to be watching, and I was starting to expand my horizons at a rapid clip.

Our next-door neighbors were also friends with Larry, and they were the earliest pirates I knew. They copied everything. They used tapes that they set for six or eight hour speed and they would put as many movies as possible onto each tape. A lot of the films I saw for the first time, I saw because I borrowed one movie from them and then watched everything else on the tape whether I was supposed to or not. I got very good at figuring out how to ask for a tape I wanted if I didn’t want my parents to pay attention to the R-rated titles that were included, and they would frequently borrow tapes to add to their collection from our house before they even made it to the store shelves.

There was one movie this month that I considered “important,” and it’s funny to me now to look back at these manias that would seize me before a film would come out. I’d read something and I would get this picture of the film in my head and I’d be absolutely impossible to deal with until I could actually lay eyes on the thing. I’d explain myself to my parents, and I think they were often swayed by the fact that I had an argument at all, not because my arguments made sense or were persuasive. I think they had no idea what to make of me. For example, I was absolutely frantic to see Continental Divide because Steven Spielberg was a producer, the guy who wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark wrote it, and John Belushi was the star. That all sounded great to me, and I shrugged off the tepid reviews the movie garnered before it came out. After all, John Belushi was great on Saturday Night Live and in The Blues Brothers and Animal House and this was going to be a romantic comedy where he was the main guy. So much of what I loved about Empire and Raiders was the fast-paced banter between the romantic leads, and everyone said in all of the press for this film that this was the script that convinced Spielberg and Lucas that he was the man for those jobs.

I was easily swayed by hype, and I read Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone and whatever else I could get my hands on, either at home or at the library, and any articles about movies were copied on the library’s copier and taken home to be added to my giant stack of articles and photos and whatever else I’d come across during my reading. As a result, I started paying attention to the rapturous reviews that accompanied one of this month’s limited releases, and even before the Oscar nominations were announced, I managed to talk my parents and my grandmother into going to see Chariots of Fire. And while all of this makes me sound like I was mature for my age, there were plenty of times I just plain bounced off of a movie because I was the wrong age to appreciate it. I thought the unavoidable Vangelis soundtrack for Chariots was amazing, but the movie baffled me.

That doesn’t mean I was unaware of anything else that came out. I was watching Siskel & Ebert religiously by this point, and they sang the virtues of Pixote and Cutter’s Way. Mommy Dearest was kind of unavoidable because of the controversy around the film’s accuracy, but something about the film’s hyper-camp sensibilities was a turn-off to me at that age. I was certainly interested in seeing So Fine thanks to all the posters and trailers featuring the see-through jeans, but there was no way my parents were going to take me, and after they saw it, they made it clear that it was off-limits to me.

In a month like this, I would read my Starlogs and my Fangorias and I’d make lists of things that were coming soon, things I was desperate to see. So even if September was fairly thin, I was already revved up for Halloween II and Time Bandits and Heartbeeps. And while I ended up bored by Continental Divide, I was convinced that Belushi’s next time at-bat was going to be the return to form that would prove he was a movie star. After all, in the trailer we saw in the theater before Continental Divide, he was co-starring with Dan Aykroyd in what appeared to be a broad dark comedy.

But we’ll get to the weird heartbreak of Neighbors soon enough. For now, let’s jump right in for the first two weekends of the month. There’s really only one good film in the whole bunch, and in some ways, this feels like the absolute low point of the release schedule for the year.

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SEPTEMBER 4

Slaughter in San Francisco
Chuck Norris, Sylvia Chang, Don Wong, Wang Tsun, Robert Jones, Dan Ivan, Chun Erh, Bob Talbert, Robert J. Hercuth, James Econmonides, Chuck Boyd
cinematography by David Bailes
music by Joseph Curtis
screenplay by William Lowe
produced by Wei Lo
directed by William Lowe
Rated R
1 hr 27 mins

A disgraced cop goes to war with a San Francisco crime boss when his best friend is killed.

Lo Wei is a huge figure in the history of Hong Kong film. He directed more than 60 films and starred in over twice that many. He was a pivotal figure in the early careers of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. I would argue he made several movies that were very good or even great.

Slaughter in San Francisco, also known as Yellow-Face Tiger, is not one of those.

Reading that synopsis and looking at that poster above, it’s natural to assume Chuck Norris plays the cop. Not true. This time out, he’s the crime boss, and that’s because the film was originally shot in 1974. It played overseas at that point, but it never really had an American release until after Norris started to catch on. His character is named Slaughter, so the film got retitled and Norris became the primary element on the posters. I get it. That’s how the exploitation industry works. That’s not the movie, though.

Don Wong, also known as Wong Tao, is the real lead of the film, and he’s affable enough. In general, the fighting in the film is fine, and there’s a fair amount of it. The film was trimmed to just under 90 minutes for its 1981 release, and while I don’t think the longer 102-minute version is a masterpiece, it works better as a movie, and it doesn’t even introduce Chuck Norris until almost an hour into the movie. He’s a solid villain, and his big fight at the end with Wong is the film’s highlight. It’s a pretty slow burn getting there, though, and the film is surprisingly inept in basic storytelling terms. There’s so much set-up that by the time the film starts supposedly paying off everything, it’s hard to care.

There is some nice widescreen photography in the recent Eureka Entertainment release of the film, but aside from completists, I can’t imagine needing to add this one to your collection. It has also been released as Karate Cop, and it’s one of those movies that was radically recut depending on who had the rights and what they were doing with it, so if you do feel the burning urge to see this, try to track down the best possible version of it.