Tag Archives: 1980

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Caddyshack (1980)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Caddyshack was on USA Up All Night on November 16 and 17, 1990 and October 12, 1991.

I ask you this: why did they keep making movies after Caddyshack? This is as perfect as film gets, quite literally a movie that you can drop into and out of at any time without damaging the timing or spirit of the film. It has never failed to lift my mood or improve my outlook on life. It is all that movies should endeavor to be.

It’s based on the memories of writer and co-star Brian Doyle-Murray, as he worked as a caddy at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois, alongside his brothers Bill and John. Director Harold Ramis had also worked as a caddy and even been hit in the genitals with a golf ball once, just like the film. Even better — that Baby Ruth candy bar in the pool came directly from Murray’s high school.

Is there a plot? Sure, Danny Noonan is supposedly the hero, and it’s all about how he wants to escape his huge family and attend college. But really, it’s the personalities that this movie is all about, like Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), the son of one of the club’s founders who has turned slack into zen. Then there’s, Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), who is perhaps the best bad guy ever in a comedy. Or newly rich construction boss Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) who is a buffoonish man out to annoy every , wealthy person in the club. And of course, there’s Carl Spackler, the groundskeeper who is at war with a gopher.

It’s also the only movie where Chase and Murray appear in a scene together. Famously brawling on the set of Saturday Night Live once, where Murray referred to Chase as “medium talent” before punching him — the best insult ever — they got along here and wrote a quick moment where Ty’s golf ball ends up in Spackler’s ramshackle hovel.

Murray’s dialogue in the film is completely unscripted, including his Cinderella scene. There, he was told only to act as if he were a child announcing his own imaginary golf moment. He was only on set for six days.

The constant improv really bothered Knight, an actor who prided himself on knowing his lines. Dangerfield never did the same take twice, so their continuous battling has its roots in reality. In fact, Rodney would never begin doing anything when Ramis yelled “Action!” Instead, he had to be told, “Rodney, do your bit.”

The original cut of this film was approximately 4.5 hours long, with Bill Murray’s Cinderella speech lasting around half an hour. No one was happy with the second cut, so the gopher was added at the last minute to give the movie some structure. It was shot on a soundstage, which is why the film stock in these scenes appears completely different.

Caddyshack was a commercial failure upon release and was widely disliked by critics. It’s gone on to show them all the error of their ways.

Sadly, writer Doug Kenney would never see this movie be embraced. At the press conference for this film, he drunkenly yelled at reporters, convinced it would be the end of his Hollywood career. A trip soon after to Hawaii with Chase lifted his spirits, but only for a brief time. He either slipped on a rock or jumped while there and was dead at 33, leaving behind work with the National Lampoon and the film Animal House, along with this one. You can learn more about Kenney in the movie A Futile and Stupid Gesture.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Cuba Crossing (1980)

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I don’t trust the media. I mean, tonight, my YouTube was all about how bad Cuba is and I kind of distrust it now.

Anyways, this is Kill Castro or Cuba Crossing, a 1980 movie in which Hud (Robert Vaughn) holds a grudge since the Bay of Pigs and wants to kill Castro. Using bar owner, boat captain Tony (Stuart Whitman), and funded by Mr. Bell (Raymond St. Jacques) and Rossellini (Michael V. Gazzo), this isn’t going to end well, because the money men just want to move drugs.

This is the kind of movie that has Robert Vaughn on a beach shouting, “Damn you, Kennedy!”  It’s also the kind of release that has many alternate titles, such as The Mercenaries, Key West Crossing, and Sweet Dirty Tony.

A drag queen sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Sybil Danning shows up, as does Woody Strode and Albert Salmi, man-eating turtles, a homoerotic wrestling match (spoiler: all wrestling is homoerotic), a shark attack, a fake Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” iguanas getting involved in a bar fight and, well, it’s way more boring than this paragraph would lead you to think. Oh yeah — Caren Kaye, who was the mom on the sitcom It’s Your Move and was the attractive mom in My Tutor, she’s in this. She seduces Stuart Whitman. Yes, it’s a man’s world.

IMDB BS ALERT: “Captain Tony’s Saloon is a real bar in Key West, FL, and was owned by the real Captain Tony, who was also mayor of Key West for a time. He appears in the film as a watcher on horseback in one of the scenes when “Tony” visits the Cuban coast.” Actually, it’s real and here’s the website.

Director Chuck Workman used to edit all the Oscar montages. How did he make such a messy movie? The script, maybe? It was written by Robin Swicord, who get this, went on to write the 1994 Little Women, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Practical Magic and Memoirs of a Geisha. That’s right — she wrote all of your wife’s favorite films. Producer and co-writer Peter Barton went on to Reading Rainbow and man, I’m out of facts.

Thanks to Through the Shattered Lens, I can share the long — and hilarious — opening titles with you:

“From 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs to today, the Government of the United States has been embroiled in a series of events which have continually led our nation to crisis after crisis and to the brink of war.

ASSIGNMENT — KILL CASTRO, a true story is one of the most confusing and frustrating historical events that might have led to a world power showdown.  It happened yesterday!  It happened today!  It can happen again!

Names of persons and places have been changed to protect the individuals who were called upon to aid their country and in doing so placed their lives in jeopardy.

“I WILL GIVE ALL FOR THE LOVE OF MY COUNTRY … RIGHT OR WRONG! — G.W. Bell, Chief of Caribbean Operations, Central Intelligence Agency”

This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free democratic society.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Children (1980)

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The best thing that I can say about this movie is that nearly every person in it is a horrible person. There are cops that don’t do their jobs well, expectant mothers that smoke and other parents that couldn’t care less if their kids have come home yet. Even the lovely people in this movie only exist to be snuffed out. This is the blackest of comedies and also the most nihilistic of films.

Jim and Slim, a couple of workers at the Ravensback chemical plant, decide to finish work early and head to the bar, neglecting the pressure gauge warnings and allowing a cloud of yellow toxic smoke to escape.

That yellow cloud finds its way to a school bus full of innocent children who are so well behaved that they even sing a song to compliment their bus driver. Suddenly, the bus passes through the yellow cloud, and the kids get turned into zombie-like monsters with black fingernails.

The townspeople only think the kids have disappeared, so they shut the town down and try to keep out any outsiders until things clear up. Boy, this town…there’s Billy the local sheriff, who is in over his head. There’s Harry, his deputy, who only seems to want to get it on with Suzie (and who can blame him, what else is there to do in a small town?). And then there’s Molly, who runs the general store and is also the police dispatcher, because that makes sense. She’s played by Shannon Bolin, a singer who was once known as The Lady with the Dark Blue Voice in the 1940s.

Even though this was made in 1980, it’s both woke and exploitative enough to give zombie Tommy two mommies. One of them, Dr. Joyce, is among the first to be burned alive by one of The Children. Not the last — as the kids all come home, they burn their parents and most of the town alive.

I guess John is our hero, and his wife, Cathy, is pregnant (and pats her stomach and says, “Sorry…” before smoking a cigarette), so he’s obviously worried about her. That’s when this movie shifts into one that totally lives up to today’s theme. Kids get killed left and right with impunity. Roasted in closets, zombified hands chopped off, shotgunned…it’s pretty much open season on children. And when The Children die, it sounds like a cat in heat.

After all that, John falls asleep and wakes up to deliver his wife’s baby. We get a peaceful scene of the many, many dead bodies with the children all lying there looking peaceful and not dismembered. That’s when John noticed that his newborn child had black fingernails.

Director Max Kalmanowicz only has one other credit, the weirdo sex comedy Dreams Come True, where “a young couple masters the supernatural art of astral projection which allows them to travel through dreams, explore their fantasies and make a whole lot of love.” Hopefully, nobody cuts off a ten-year-old’s hand in that movie.

Shout out to The Bloody Pit of Horror for the alternate posters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CBS LATE MOVIE: The Plutonium Incident (1980)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Plutonium Incident was on the CBS Late Movie on January 21, 1983.

If you see the German poster for this, you may think it’s an Italian post-apocalyptic movie. No, it’s not. It’s very much we have Silkwood and The China Syndrome at home.

Directed by Richard Michaels (who directed a movie I’m obsessed with finding, Death Is Not the End) and written by Thomas B. Allen and Darlene Young, this has Judith Longden (Janet Margolin) working at a plant in Oregon where she finds some shocking safety problems, but also finds time to hook up with Art Reeves (Bo Hopkins). Good for her. Anyways, she and Harry Skirvan (Joseph Campanella) try to inform the world about all of these issues, which leads to The Crazies suit-wearing maniacs busting into her house, tons of harassment and — spoiler — her death by the end of the movie.

Powers Boothe is Dick Hawkins, the boss, and man, more movies with evil Powers Boothe. I say that as a yinzer who watched him hold my hockey team hostage.

You can watch this at the Cave of Forgotten Films.

CBS LATE MOVIE: Once Upon a Spy (1980)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Once Upon a Spy was on the CBS Late Movie on January 22 and October 15, 1987 and March 8 and August 2, 1988.

Jack Chenault is a computer genius whom the government wants to be a spy. You and I recognize that he’s Ted Danson and that seems silly to make him James Bond. Maybe with the help of Agent Paige Tannehill (Mandy Pepperidge), he can defeat mad scientist Marcus Valorium (Christopher Lee never says no), who has a motorized wheelchair of death, complete with rocket launchers. He also has a shrinking ray.

Director Ivan Nagy may be best known for his association with Heidi Fleiss. Still, he also directed Mind Over Murder, Captain America II: Death Too Soon , and Skinner, which is a notable achievement. He later, after the scandal, moved on to make nearly adult films, including All Nude Athena, Trailer Trash Teri, Izzy Sleeze’s Casting Couch Cuties, Touch Me, and Wild Desire.

This was written by Jimmy Sangster, so it has that going for it.

There is a universe where Dansen is not known as Sam Malone, but as Jack Chenault.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CBS LATE MOVIE: The Idolmaker (1980)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Idolmaker was on the CBS Late Movie on January 31, 1986.

Based on the life of rock promoter/producer Bob Marcucci, whose discoveries included Frankie Avalon and Fabian and who served as a technical advisor for the production, this is the story of Vincent “Vinnie” Vacarri (Ray Sharkey), Gino “G.G.” Pilato (Joe Panoliano) and Tomaso “Tommy Dee” DeLorusso (Paul Land) as they navigate the world of music.

Vinnie ends up being the boss, running a record label through the times of payola and teen magazines, getting involved with an editor named Brenda (Tovah Feldshuh). As Tommy gets too big and starts ignoring his advice, he grooms Guido Bevaloqua (Peter Gallagher), a busboy at his family’s restaurant, into becoming Caesare, the kind of singer whose audiences run onstage and tear his clothes off. He begins dating a reporter, Ellen Fields (Maureen McCormick), but soon everyone abandons Vinnie, and he has to return to the pasta restaurant, singing at night in small clubs while the acts he helped make become stars.

Fabian Forte filed a lawsuit against the film, alleging defamation and invasion of privacy. He had been managed by Marcucci and could be seen as the character of Caesare. Fabian said that the film made him look like “a totally manufactured singer, a mere pretty face without any singing ability or acting talent.” This was settled out of court, with Fabian, his wife, and family receiving public apologies in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, as well as the full ownership of the film being transferred to Marcucci. If you watched it on the CBS Late Movie, you were giving Fabian money.

So if you didn’t get it:
Vincent ‘Vinnie’ Vacarri is Marcucci.

Tommy Dee is Frankie Avalon.

Guido Bevaloqua is based on Fabian.

Brenda Roberts is based on Marcucci’s real-life assistant, Rona Barrett.

Director — and co-writer with Edward Di Lorenzo — Taylor Hackford also directed The Devil’s Advocate, Dolores Claiborne, An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds, and the video for Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Boogeyman (1980)

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When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend, who wore her stockings on his face, make out. Their mother was so upset that she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn’t work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that’s only the first few minutes of this one!

Now we’re in the present, and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the film’s director, Ulli Lommel, and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle, and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna’s real-life brother) on a farm. Willy’s never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn’t talk and often steals knives.

Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter, and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.

And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that they must face their fears and return to their childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goes shithouse and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.

The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.

The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitating pitchforks, ripping off Lacey’s shirt and impaling young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You’ve taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying, too, right? In 1980, Jake decides to bring in a priest to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror’s control over her.

That’s when the best solution comes up — let’s just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son exiting a graveyard. Oh, no — a piece of the mirror is on her son’s shoe!

I was wondering where many of the plot points of this movie would go, and they often get lost, as if this were a foreign film. But it isn’t!  So, I did some research on the director, Ulli Lommel.

Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder’s surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director’s films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who was involved in his films, including Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.

Seriously — a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cutting her own throat with scissors, a child getting his neck broken, and a priest getting his face melted? The acting is horrible — but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people’s eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

Part of me wants to make fun of this movie. But another part of me wants to protect it from mean people who say things like it lacks attention to detail. Or the fact that none of its characters appear to be actual human beings. And the camera angles are more reminiscent of Dad not knowing how to use the video camera than art. But yet, I love this. I want to love it more, but I love what it can be more than what it is.

The Boogeyman was followed by two sequels that utilize footage — a lot of footage — from the original.

JUNESPLOITATION: Up the Academy (1980)

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June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is ‘80s Comedy!

In 1980, 8-year-old Sam was all in on MAD Magazine—every issue. It’s how I saw so many R-rated movies, as I couldn’t go to the theater but could read them as redone by Mort Drucker. Imagine my joy when the Usual Gang of Idiots decided to make a movie, just like those new kids, the National Lampoon.

A note: MAD has the humor of old school Jewish comedy, teaching me words like schmuck while the Lampoon was rich kids who went to an Ivy League school and did drugs. Also: Oversimplification can be funny.

Publisher William Gaines — yes, the same guy who did Tales from the Crypt — told The Comics Journal, “What happened is that we had a contract with Warner Brothers to put out a MAD movie. It’s like four years old now. They came up with a script that we didn’t like, and then they came up with a script using our scriptwriters that they didn’t like, but meanwhile they threw this script onto our desk … Although there were many things in it that I thought were offensive and should be removed, generally, I liked the script. And I thought, “Well, in addition to a MAD movie, there’s nothing wrong with having something like Lampoon did with Animal House.” Animal House was “Lampoon Presents” and really had nothing to do with the magazine; it was just using their name, and it was a good movie, and it was very successful, and it made Lampoon a lot of money. I guess. So we were going to do the same thing. “MAD Magazine Completely Disassociates Itself from Up the Academy“. But that was too long for them; they couldn’t think in that many words. They put the damn thing out without all the deletions they had promised to make, which means they’re liars. I’m talking about one of my sister companies [laughter] … And there we were connected with it, and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I paid Warner Bros. 30 grand to take MAD‘s name off for television. So, for $30,000, we got out of being associated with it on Home Box Office. It won’t say “MAD Magazine Presents,” and Alfred E. Neuman won’t be in it. And it was well worth $30,000.”

It is quite like many other sex comedies that came after the men of Delta House. Chooch (Ralph Macchio) is the youngest son of an organized crime family; El-Hashid “Hash” Amier Jr. (Tommy Citera) is the son of an oil sheik; Eisenhower “Ike” MacArthur (Wendell Brown) is the son of a faith healer who keeps marrying young wives and Hash keeps schtupping them (see, I did learn from MAD!). Oliver Holt (Hutch Parker) has a governor for a father and just wants to sleep with his girlfriend Candy (Stacy Nelkin, who is Ellie Grimbridge, and if you get that, welcome to the site), except his father doesn’t want a teen pregnancy getting in the way of his re-election.

Chooch wants to go straight, so enter new recruit, Rodney Ververgaert (Harry Teinowitz), who likes to make things explode.

They’re all being brutalized by Major Vaughn Liceman (Ron Leibman, the Emmy and Tony-winning actor who asked for his name to be removed from this movie; he was also married to Linda Lavin and Jessica Walter, which is pretty good when you think about it), your typical bad guy in a teen sex comedy.

Candy ends up getting sent to military school as well, so Liceman sets the couple up and takes pictures of them in the act while demanding that he gets to sleep with Candy to protect Oliver’s father’s election. There’s also a snobs vs. slobs soccer game, Tom Poston playing the most stereotypical mincing gay character ever, Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas as a coach, and the mind-blowing Barbara Bach, Lady Starke as Bliss, the teacher every boy in school wants.

Also, it’s not good. It’s aggressively bad.

Directed by Robert Downey Sr., who said it was “one of the worst fucking things in history,” and written by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, it was so bad that MAD skipped a letters column to present MAD Magazine Resents Throw Up the Academy, which called out Leibman taking his name off the movie, the fact that actors had to have been pubished by being in it and just two pages of the writers, artists and editors being so mad about the movie that they all quit.

Here’s just a sample of this hit piece:

“Once upon a time, there was a Publisher of a magazine. He was a happy man, publishing his magazine. But one day, he said, “Wouldn’t it be swell if they made a movie and my magazine sponsored it?! It would help sales! Isn’t that a wonderful idea?” All of his Yes-Men agreed that it was a wonderful idea, and so the smart people in Hollywood made a movie, and the magazine sponsored it. But did the Publisher live happily ever after? Not on your life! He overlooked one little thing while summoning images of millions of people rushing to see the movie and then rushing to newsstands to buy his magazine. The thing he overlooked was to find out if the movie was any good! Well? Was it? If you’ve seen it, you already know the answer to that question!”

I had never seen a magazine hype something and then apologize. It really was a big deal to my young brain.

It also has a terrifying real-life Alfred E. Newman, designed by Rick Baker. I can only compare this, as the end of the movie, to taking a painful shit and then wiping, only to find blood all over the toilet paper.

Yes, Rev. MacArthur, Ike’s dad, is played by King Coleman, the man who sang “(Do The) Mashed Potatoes.”

At least the soundtrack is good, filled with stuff like The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” and “Night Theme,” Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” and “X Offender,” The Kinks’ “Yes Sir, No Sir,” Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” David Johansen’s “Girls,” Nick Lowe’s “Heart of the City” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” There’s no reason to have that many great songs in a film this fecund.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Beyond Evil (1980)

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Architect Larry Andrews and his new wife, Barbara (horror movie super couple John Saxon and Linda Day George; if these two ever had a child, it would either be a demon or a gleaming golden angel), have moved to a small island off the coast of the Philippines. Del (former minor league baseball player Michael Dante; he’s also in The Farmer and was introduced to acting by John Wayne), Larry’s business partner, had promised them a brand new condo. Instead, they’re moving into Casa Fortuna, the haunted former home of Esteban and Alma Martín (Janice Lynde), who died after a fight started by Alma’s obsession with the occult.

Within what seems like minutes, next door neighbors and psychic surgery experts Dr. Solomon (David Opatoshu) and his wife Leia (Anna Marisse) warn Larry that Alma wants his young bride’s body for her own. At the same time, Barbara is luring Del into the home with promises of sex and then shoving him off the balcony.

You know what this movie needs? An exorcism. Well, it gets it.

Herb Freed is kind of a forgotten king. I mean, the dude made Haunts, Graduation Day and Tomboy, which are three other movies I watch all the time. He wrote the script with producer David Baughn and Paul Ross.

You can watch this on Tubi or order it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Sesso Perverso, Mondo Violento (1980)

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Bruno Mattei. Claudio Fragrasso. This was the sequel to Libidomania, or as the Italians called it, Sesso perverso. This was to be directed by Joe D’Amato and edited by Bruno, but he demanded that if he was forced to work on a mondo — so they say — he had to direct it. I imagine Joe just laughed and nodded, then went off and made ten movies in three days.

This time, the movie explores the world of adult films, but as you’d expect with a mondo, it’s all fake. Fake couples telling fake stories about their fake lives, then women eat ice cream in dirty ways, and the movie spends too much time exploring the deviant practice of homosexuality, which, come on, this is 1980, guys. It’s not even remotely deviant. Does it sell pictures any longer?

Speaking of mondo and fake, the end has reporters saving one of their own, a half-nude woman, from a woman who has already had a meal of her husband, who is now a rotten corpse covered by maggots because look, if we Italians love anything more than sex, violence and fake foreign footage, it’s either real animal violence or maggots. I’d rather have maggots, and then another native is castrated while the once captive reporter does a striptease.

Italian adult star Guia Lauri Filzi (who was uncredited and yet played a very memorable role in Emanuelle In America as the actress in the snuff film) and Maurizio Tanfani (Sex of the Witch, Mattei’s AD on The Other Hell) appear, and if you find the right version—look, 20 people or so have even cared about this on Letterboxd, so probably not—there are inserts.