There are a few decades in film history that have been as scrutinized as the 1980s, but to really understand the decade and its movies, it's going to take a couple of someone's who were there for it the first time around. Drew McQueenie and Scott Weinberg are ready to review every major film of the decade, one month at a time. The look at what worked then, what endoers now, and how it felt to be there when it all went down. Turn back to calendar with us. It's the 80s all over. The air kicked off of the milestone, and Wilson Good was sworn in as Philadelphia's first black mayor. Pop culture started to look a lot more 80s. Night court debuted on NBC Van Halen released their single biggest album 1984. Madonna appeared on American Bandstand to sing Holiday.

John Lennon's posthumous single, Nobody Told Me, climbed the charts in America while shameless hippies Paul and Lennon McCartney were arrested in Barbados for possession of marijuana. Therapeutic pillars, where's the beat? Plenty appeared in a very first commercial in America lost its damn full mind for her, speaking of commercials. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.

And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1980. Apple released in McIntosh personal computer tied to the single greatest commercial in television history directed by the legendary Ridley Scott. And finally, in a decision that had a huge impact on both young Drew McQueenie and young Scott Weinberg, the Supreme Court ruled that home VCRs were allowed to take TV programs without any violation of federal copyright law, allowing the movie or duty commenced in January of 1984. Hi, everybody, I'm Drew McQueenie, and welcome to the fifth season of 80s all over where I am joined as always by my co-host, Scott Weinberg. Scott, what's up, man? All right. You know, you're so excited that we're done 1983. You just, and I hate to warn our listeners that although 1984 is a fantastic year, in many ways, I'm here to tell you that January 1984 with a few shining exceptions, not a very good month, true. What? Say didn't need to make a very small mistake. We got a music video, Michael Jackson music video directors inverted here. Steve Baron directed Billie Jean. Bob Drolley was the guy who directed Beatit and we will get to Bob Drolley's feature directing maybe a little later in the decade.

Steve Barron did not get around to it

to the 90s, so we'll talk about him some other time. Sorry about that guys. I just got my Michael Jackson director, Switt. Many boner on the boner. Steve Barron, a director movie that comes out next year or this year, Electric Dreams. That's right Steve I'm and we will talk about Steve Barron's film which is a very 1984 movie but Scott

Let's kick off this year with a movie that feels like the 80s really have gotten underway. You know that one of our patron saints of this podcast, one of our inspirations, one of our 80s icons, is of course Eddie Deezin. Wow. Wow. So, I say to you, we love Eddie Deezin in

small parts in Greece in 1941 and what would it be like if Eddie Deezin had a starring role in a film and we almost find out in the un-fucking watchable Surf 2.

Surf 2 takes off where airplane crashed.

As the surf wars continue to ravage the mines and bodies of innocent youths in their fight for a better tomorrow. I saw it on VHS probably late 80s, did not get it. It's one of these allegedly madcap comedies and the joke, it's supposed to be a joke, is that there is no surf. One, it's, it's just surf too. That's a joke. And it feels to me like the movie that every trauma film is also trying to be. And I wouldn't say that it's good. It's certainly not boring. It reminds me of sort of the aesthetic of class of 1984 in some ways. It's not like real punk rock, because when we'll get to films later in the stature that I think, hell, we'll get to a film in just a couple of months here that I think defines punk rock for the 80s, the real thing. This is sort of what people saw punk rock as, which is dress ugly and then run around and be horrible to people. Then there's the science experiment thing in it where Eddie Deesons the bad guy. Eddie Deesons is a mad scientist who makes a poison soda that turns surfers into zombies. And I thought it might have struck a chord with you because it seems to be cast with a lot of then working LA comedians. It tries so hard and it's always doing something. And most of the time what it's doing is ugly and kind of dumb. And that's the problem is I think in trying to be outrageous, I feel like this is people who aren't particularly outrageous or crazy making an outrageous and crazy film. Yeah, it's ostensibly a satire or spoof of teen sex comedies, but it just plays like a really broad teen sex comedy. I don't really see much satire. It has some decent music and a very early Eric Stoltz appearance, but with all deference in respect to patron saint Eddie Deason, I must give surf to a thumbs down. I know where I was going with that. I don't know Yeah, me and the intro I see though man. I was ready. I was ready for you to bring it all home there I am but the weird thing is like this is something that back probably when I was 18 or 19 I would probably put on one of my lists of like the worst films ever made I was dreading revisiting this and It did not disappoint. It's terrible. It's terrible, but it's harmlessly terrible. If I saw this on up all night, I would have been like, all right, and then never thought about it again. It would have been one of those. And it feels like that's what it was designed for. It was trying to be the crazy party movie. And it's just, it's not that crazy. You know what else is not crazy Drew?

Would that be the John Cassavetes and a kid movie Marvin and Ty from the director of Evil Speak? The knife away Just get away put it in there Get it in your pocket get that in your pocket Suddenly, the most unwanted boy in the world and a man without any direction

are like father and son. Maybe I'm your guardian angel, Ty. Maybe he was. And the only thing that could possibly come between them is a real father. Who the hell are you anyway? What business is it of yours? I can't even know, it just got easy more.

I don't know if you don't want it.

Love it.

Love it to me. Thank you for letting me know. Okay, so here's, I'm gonna play a quick scene for you. It's John Cassavetes and he's at home with Jenna Rollins and the conversation goes like this. My dear wife, let me ask you something. ask you something. She says, yes, my dear husband, go ahead and says, you made Gloria, you know,

that film where it was you and a kid? Well, it's not a question. Nope. You got an Oscar nomination for that, right? I did. Do you think I could do that? Of course, just find a kid. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Here we come. Because it is so Gloria in the basic bones where it's a prickly person who doesn't really necessarily belong with a kid, but who is probably better for that kid in many ways than the people that were responsible. It's shameless and the way it feels like it's, I'm gonna do that too, but it's also not good at all. It's very artificial. It seems like people are just going through the motions. Billy D. Williams is not bad as the kids dad. I don't really get the relationship there. They don't really flesh that out very well. The kid is suicidal and that's not fun. They get to the old Yeller ending, which is particularly upsetting. It wants to get you in the heart. It wants to earn those beats. And Cassavelli's, I'm fascinated by him as an actor because so much of what he did he took for money to make his films. And in his films his work is always interesting and fascinating and groundbreaking in a lot of ways. I find his work in other people's movies sometimes awful and it's weird. It's like Olivier. He's clearly a very talented gifted actor who sometimes was dreadful. This is going to be a deep cut but I think of John Casabetti's as a not funny Joseph Bologna. Okay. Like Joseph Bologna is kind of, you know, middle of the road, you know, every man, but he's funny. John Casab, he's just like a boring next-door neighbor guy.

There's nothing really interesting about him.

And I was, for some reason, I had in my head that this movie had some kind of a pedigree that maybe it was an altman film or somebody good wrote it. No, I was wrong. I was thinking of a different blank and blank movie. This is just dull. I don't know how it played theaters. It's really not good.

Let's move on to an unexpectedly good film

that I had never even heard of, true.

And I have a feeling that you like this film as well.

Let's move on to an unexpectedly good film that I had never even heard of, true, and I have a feeling that you like this film as well. Let's talk about deep in the heart, aka handgun. You can't possibly begin to understand history down here unless you know something about cult revolvers. How come you come to know so much? Can't you visit law school? I collect antique guns. Are you trying to kill someone out here today? Remember what I told you? Don't ever point it. It's an anything you don't want to kill. She plans it like a military exercise. Handgun. The story of an attack at gunpoint. Which backfires. What are the things that we do now is we go through the series more putting this together is you know We track movies down and first we track down clearly the big easy ones the ones that we either have here or that are very easy Yeah, Drew. I'm sorry the big easy is 19. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I mean I see what you did there.

But you know, there's certain films that, yeah, they're just here on the shelves already. There are films that didn't take a lot of work to track down. And this was one that I didn't think we were gonna find. And then I was really curious what your reaction was, it was gonna be because never heard of it, had no idea what it was. I put it on one night and I found myself captivated by it. It is a strange movie and you often say that as if a like almost a backhand compliment or a knock, but it's strange in the most interesting way. It's a British director doing a small town Texas America, not all that convincingly at the start, but Karen Young, it's her debut, and she plays a woman who is assaulted and then goes on the journey to owning a gun. Just from the premise, I expected it to be kind of like a less exploitative, less interesting, like Miss 45. And it has threads of that, but it's much more interested in the minutiae of small town America, the gun culture, the several extended sequences in gun stores and shooting ranges that you think are almost pro-gun, but then the film goes on and it tips the other way and back and forth in some really interesting ways. It's a tough genre and I've written about the fact that I find the use of rape as a motivator in exploitation films, both excessive and it's a really weak thing to hang your movie on. And it's very, very difficult for me to justify giving you a good review to a movie that is built around rape as a central device. It's really a lot of things that like when a movie commits those acts, you've now crossed a certain line and you are now a certain type of film. What's really interesting about this is that it plays that line. When it gets to that scene, the actual rape scene is one of the most of setting an interesting I've ever seen because it's not about the physical end of the violence. It is very much about coercion and about power. This movie's got to be called handgun. Deep in the heart does nothing for this film title-wise. It's handgun is the appropriate title because in that scene it's all about the fact that he has a handgun. And as he says to her, this means you don't have any choices to make tonight. You're absolved responsibility. You don't have any decisions to make. You can literally relax now because none of this is your choice for the rest of the evening. That's an insane, unreal sequence. It's really quietly upsetting, harrowing because suddenly the coercion and the threat and everything else feels very different than in dozen movies where it's just this ratchet it up sort of noisy violence that you've seen a thousand times and that is exploitative and it's more about the nudity. This is really isn't about any of that. It is about her. It's about her dealing with this guy. It's about her being assaulted. It's about her deciding whether or not she wants to defend herself with the very weapon that terrorized her. And that's the thing. It's very much about gun culture. That scene where she goes to buy her handgun is handled almost like who is America, like a Sasha Baron Cohen segment because for a couple of minutes it plays like an actual documentary like they went. I feel like they shot it at a gun shop. It doesn't feel like they used actors. It feels like Tony Garnett, the guy who directed this, who came from a commercial background. It feels to me like he went and he said, I want her to buy a gun from you. Sell her a gun. And it was that simple as far as direction. The really sad thing about this movie is Karen Young, she went on to a career, but it was mostly a girlfriend or wife for supporting supporting supporting actress career. If people had seen this movie, I think that might have changed because I think she's so good in this. The movie never had a shot because Warner Brothers bought it and killed it because of sudden impact. This movie died so that sudden impact, Warner's giant rape revenge action Clint Eastwood movie could dominate the December box office. This movie was owned by Warner Brothers. The reason you don't know about it is because Warner doesn't know they own it. Warner has no idea this exists. They bought it to eat it and digest it and never let you see it. So yeah, I feel like this is a movie that would play right now in the Me Too era, like a brand new film. I think it's hyper modern in a lot of ways. The way it's directed and the sensibility of the director brings to it, it is more progressive in a lot of ways than films that we may right now. And I can only imagine that he was both fascinated and horrified by American gun culture and is really baffled by it. So that is a look at American gun culture from the POE of an outsider. We're going to shift now to a film that is a New Zealand comedy revered by New Zealanders, according to the New Zealanders I reached out to, and virtually unknown to everyone else, directed by Jeff Murphy. This is a movie called Goodby Port Pie. It's a different type of vehicle, but I would call this the Kiwi breaking away. It kind of has that youth, and we have a vehicle, and the freedom to to go somewhere with our friends and that freedom sometimes leads to dumb and stupid decisions and sometimes wonderful things. And it's just a young people on a road trip movie and it's damn good. It's sugarland expressed with lower stakes. It's not like this guy really has any great crusade that he's on. He just kind of takes off with a car that he shouldn't have taken off with and it sets off this chain of events when he picks up another dude and they kind of then egg each other on. And the middle aged guy has just had his girlfriend leave him. And now he's just sort of aimless. And this young guy comes along at the right moment. And they just kind of raise a little hell. And that's all the comedy there is to Goofy road trip movie and it is distinctly New Zealand culture. And you realize that in 1981 New

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