Male call!

Hi everybody, my name is Drew McQueenie and welcome to a special bonus episode for our Patreon

supporters of 80's all over. I'm joined as always by Michael Hoast. Scott Weinberg, what's up Scott?

It's male bag number three and we're here to sing through some letters. Look, I'm going to sing more often. I'm inspired by the wonderful podcast personality, Elliot Kaelin, who on the flop house sings frequently and is funnier than me, but I am going to steal his stick and sing a song occasionally. We did our last mailbag a couple of weeks ago and or maybe a few more than a couple at this point. And we had more questions that we didn't even get to. So we wanted to go ahead and keep recording. Because as we said, we want you guys, the patrons, the people that support this show financially and who are there for us every month. We wanted you to all get your questions answered if it all possible. Yep. Plus the way we look at it is like if you were, I never did, but I know some people who did sent letters into Fangoria or your comic, favorite comic book or something when you were younger. And if you were to see it published, it was like a big deal. You like, whoa. And that's kind of what we want these to be is like,

we want to thank our patrons and our regular listeners. And we hope that they enjoy hearing their names tossed out on our goofy podcast. And you know, seriously, you guys ask us stuff that we would never otherwise discuss on the show. One of the questions that we were asked both on Twitter and V of the Patreon page came in one form from Michael Horigan who asked, I know you've talked about a few already, but are there any films coming up that you're dreading revisiting because you've enjoyed them when you were young? You're concerned how well they'll hold up as an older viewer, how acceptable the content is under modern societal norms versus 80s norms. This is a great question. both talk. Yeah, we both we both talked this at length, and I'm sure that you and I will both have a lot of now versus then discussions when it comes to Revenge of the Nerds, 16 Candles. There's a lot of films that have problematic themes and characters and stereotypes and cliches, and what we're're what we hope to do is is like Show the perspective of how things were in in the more tacky more socially permissive, I guess a more ignorant let's say more ignorant That then and hopefully how we've grown and have matured over the decades Yeah, I think that's really the thing that film does is it serves as a benchmark for where we were at a certain moment. I think pretending otherwise is ridiculous. I know people that believe that we should scrub whole movies out of existence and it's always weird to me. I don't really get that impulse. I get the impulse to set stuff into a historical context so that you have a sense of what you're looking at. You know, I Leonard Malton, when I was a kid, the books of his that I read were books that he wrote about Walt Disney Feature Animation or the Argon series or, you know, Silent Comedy. And I know the Argon series is seen through a modern filter, wildly problematic. I, it's really hard to watch the little rest calls and not have some pretty big problems with various things to pop up. However, there are part of Silent Film Comedy history. And I certainly don't think less of Leonard Maltin for having dedicated a scholarly chunk of his life to them. They were a part of his childhood growing up and he wanted to them into a historical and scholarly context. And I think a lot of what we do here is us taking the 80s, a decade that we lived through an experience and were programmed by to some degree and processing it now as adults and looking at what it did. And we're going to talk a lot about some of the archetypes that pop up over the course of the decade, including the privileged white asshole, the sort of smarmy, all-purpose comedy lead who can do no wrong and is allowed to do whatever he wants and burst into rooms and is disgusting and creepy and hits on every woman in grotesque ways. And it was beloved back then. It was absolutely lovable and cuddly and hilarious. And I recently watched the moonlighting pilot and I made it about a half an hour in before I was like, wow, this would never air today. She walks into that office and he begins sexually harassing her in legally actionable ways, pretty much non-stop from the beginning of that opening scene till she walks out of the office again. What's interesting is we can look at a film like 16 candles, which has the garage and disgusting long duck dog character. But there's also like if you're going to look at a film in a fair light, there's also a lot of insightful suite and really great stuff in 16 candles. It's not just a vial movie that deserves to be ignored. You know, like that's what makes it interesting is that there is a lot of depth and warmth in that movie, but there's also some cultural ignorance and problematic issues that we'll get to. And, you know, we're not looking to vilify a film that's 30 or 40 years old, but, you know, hopefully point out the advances we've made. I think comedy is probably going to be where we see the most of it. I think comedy changes the most dramatically because comedy like horror constantly pushes boundaries in terms of what is or is unacceptable or what you can or can't do or say. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of comedy that we run into throughout the 80s is where we have our real stumbling blocks in our moments moments of oh man. I used to love this. Yeah, we're just a movie that is otherwise perfectly fun and light and then all of a sudden in act three, here comes a disgusting Asian stereotype and it's on the screen for eight minutes and it can't help, but you know, taint your experience, you know, doesn't destroy the film as a whole, but you know, those moments happen a lot and hopefully as we journey forward through Miss Dalgeville, we won't have too many beloved films solid by this stuff. Yeah, I think that is absolutely fair.

So let's see, our next one here. Now Scott, do you even know what this is? Daniel Krauss asked, did you guys cover Demon lover Diary in 1980? I don't think you did, it's one of my favorite docs ever. Though I know it's tough to track down. Oh, I see, it's on YouTube now. You ever heard of this movie? I have not. and thank you for bringing up a movie I haven't heard of on my own podcast, The Shame. Well, and this is one I didn't know either.

And I went and I looked it up and it's evidently like an American movie. It's a documentary that was made by one very young indie filmmaker about a horror film being made by another very young indie filmmaker. And looking at them, they both went on to other work, largely low budget, marginal exploitation fair. But it looks interesting. I'm certainly going to go back and give it a try. I'd never heard of this. It sounds a little, the plot that you described sounds a little bit like a recent horror film called Found Footage 3D. But no, if we miss something like we want to know, you know, please let us know I'd much rather be corrected than ignorant. All right. What trend in 80s films do you hate the most and what trend would you like to see come back? This is Celtic Ray Film Works, ask this. One of the things that I'm most excited to revisit trend-wise as we go through these is the trend of movies where our American heroes fight side by side with the heroic Taliban against the evil Russians because there's about six or seven movies where the Taliban are the good guys and their trade is like these rowdy rebels who they're gonna hook up with America and it's gonna be awesome and it's just one of those cases of ooh, ooh, if you'd had a crystal ball, oh, Rambo might not have done that. That's an interesting trend. I hadn't thought of that. But yeah, my trends that I dislike are pretty obvious. We're soon approaching 1983 and 3D was temporarily rather prevalent and will detail in gory detail how ugly that was. At the time, I distinctly remember being bemused by the Teen Sex comedy, even as a teenager I knew most of them were bad films, but yet I greedily watched as many as I possibly could get my hands on and will cover most of those things. I do not wish for a return of low rent 3D and I do not wish for a return of leering TNA sex comedies. But one thing that I like in the 80s that I wouldn't mind seeing make some sort of a comeback and I don't know if there's much room for it in today's superhero laden landscape. But back in the day, we had Arnold, we had Sly, even Chuck Norris, we had Bruce Willis showed up a little bit late, even Clint Eastwood was an action icon. And it would be nice if we could get back to that where we have five or six different action icons.

I certainly don't mean all men.

We're like, you know, we have Jason Statham now, but do we have any contemporary action icons that were like the 80s? Drew. I think they're closest to the rock who is a cartoon that is self-made. And I think that's what Arnold and Sly and those guys were, you know, we talked about the fact when I was watching Rocky III recently,

I felt dirty watching how Sly was shooting Sly.

Like, really, he's really into himself. And I think in the 80s, we did. We had a couple of big icons that were cartoons. And there's always, I think there's always a space for that. It really depends on what projects there are out there for them. And, you know, you filmography of some of these guys, and really they're limited by the material, not by them. And then there's other guys who you could have given Chuck Norris every great script that ever existed, and he was never going to be more than Chuck Norris. Right. And I'm not saying I necessarily want a return of assembly line action generic junk,

but I like having a handful of action stars that are, you know, reliable who turn out a movie or two a year.

That was fun. Even though a lot of the, if you go back and look at them, a lot of their,

just their normal programmer B level movies are pretty dull. They're just not all that great.

One of the things that I would like to see a return from and it it really didn't start until, I think diehard is the moment where everything changed, and it's almost a reaction to what you're talking about was Slian Arnold and guys that were cartoon superheroes. I miss human beings in action movies. Human beings who can get fucked up and who can get hurt and who are terrified. And even in like Transformers, So the child of Booth, run around the edges of buildings and jumping off things and sliding around it. And physics don't seem to work for him. And he never really gets hurt and anything. And I think in every action film now, even if you're meant to be the standard guy character, you're doing super heroic stuff. And you're with standing super heroic abuse. You nailed one of my main problems with the transformer. The first two at least is that wouldn't it have been a clever screenwriting idea if these are giant robots and fighting one another? Wouldn't it be a funny thread throughout the movie if he's constantly getting hurt that he's the only like malleable or damageable factor in this entire battle. And he's like they're terrified of him getting crushed because he's their friend. But no, you're right. You know, the best thing about die hard is when you notice how much his feet are bleeding. That's not normal for a quote unquote action movie hero. That's what makes John McLean so damn cool is that you're, you know, you know deep down he's not going to die because you are watching an action film. But by making him a human being who bleeds and struggles and sweats and suffers, you raise the stakes. People now relate to him more. I'm always entertained when the hero of the movie catches a beating And I have a real soft spot for any movie where by the end of the film, our hero looks like a can of dog food, like just dumped out on a plate, just ruined by what he's gone through. I love that. Yeah. Okay. Superman is great in a Superman context. But, you know, if you're dealing with terrorists in a skyscraper, it's much more interesting. obviously to have a character who can bleed and be injured. I think that's very, and I would love to see a return to that. Are there any movies, Nicholas Masalella asks, are there any movies that you've covered so far that you think could have been great if it was recast or had a different director? Like, if only Betty Keaton and Nicholson had started for Bidden's

own instead of Reds. Wow. Okay. First of all, that's a business. I would see that. I assume that I assume Nicholson would play the hervay village ace role. If the Beatles were in be it Romania. Perhaps, perhaps, yes, that would be better. That's one of those, one of

those questions that's so tough because there are so many answers. I could probably pick one or two movies from each episode and say, you know, this is a, this is a great premise. You got the right, you don't have the right cast, you know, stuff like that. Drew, I think I think a great one where you had the right guy, but you have the wrong movie around him is, man, if somebody who literally approached it like, this is a, I'm gonna write that like a taxi driver had done fade to black with Dennis Christopher. Cause Dennis Christopher was a beast coming out of breaking away. And I worked with him a little bit on rehearsals for something and ended up not happening. But he just watching the way he builds character.

He's, you know, he's a theater actor. He's a guy with, you know, a real background in

method. And he, I would believe would really build interesting characters. Fade to black has

that potential to be that for horror films, taxi driver for horror films. A guy who is so

broken that this is

the only way he can relate to the world. Yeah, that's a great analysis. I think it's a flawed,

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