Tag Archives: 1982

SLASHER MONTH: Mongrel (1982)

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Robert A. Burns was the art director* of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Don’t Go Near the Park and The Howling, all movies that feature grimy and cluttered near-chattel houses filled with carnage. Just think of Eddie Quist’s apartment or the home of the Sawyer family. Burns’ artistic eye made all that happen and this is the one and only film he’d direct** (he also wrote the script).

This film takes place inside a Texas boardinghouse that has the spirit of S.F. Brownrigg hanging heavy over the place. When one of the tenants decides to tease the dog that lives in the basement, he ends up getting bit and the dog is put down. This upsets the quiet editor named Jerry (Terry Evans) who tries to keep his life orderly but keeps getting beaten on by nearly every scumbag that lives in this fleabag rattrap. His only good connections are Sharon, who he shares books with, and the latest renter, a handsome man named Ken. He’s attracted to both of them for different reasons, but it seems like Ken is the one who has his heart. However, Jerry isn’t fully human — more on that in a bit — and even the slightest attention from people sends him spiraling out of control. It doesn’t help that every single other person in this movie is vile, with the worst being Woody (a young Mitch Pileggi).

Jerry was also connected to that dog who died after Toad, one of the more insipid residents, teased its owner Ian about it until the dog gets loose. Jerry also had a major incident where a dog attacked him as a child, so he loses it and Woody guns the mutt down. Our protagonist starts to take on the characteristics of the dog — is he possessed by it? Does he see that he needs its feral nature to augment his shy demeanor? — which gets even worse when a prank goes wrong.

The men are jealous that Ken has just come in and ended up getting the girl of their dreams. So they send him a note that Sharon is waiting for him in bed. He runs to her room, strips and discovers the body of the dead dog dressed in lingerie. Shocked, he falls backward and is electrocuted.

This sends Jerry beyond the edge, his ideal man and the third and perhaps most crucial part of his mental menage a trois relationship deceased, he succumbs to the call of the wild and begins killing everyone one by one, his voice replaced by the raspy, growling sounds of the werewolf (while remaining totally human).

If you’re not excited yet, how about the fact that Aldo Ray runs this whole place?

Thanks to Ryan Clark, I can also discuss that this movie features a Deep Throat pinball machine that was custom made by Burns. This message board had the maker of the Rondo and Bob discussing owning the machine, which also shows up in Future Kill. 

This is a slasher by the end — albeit most of the kills coming off camera, but it has plenty of stalking — but almost seems like a stage play concerning the plight of the human condition within this Texas boardinghouse. It takes a long time to get to where it wants to go, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Quite the contrary, it’s a strange piece of filmmaking that would easily find a home in the Vinegar Syndrome re-release catalog.

*Burns also worked on Re-Animator, Mausoleum, Tourist Trap, Play Dead and plenty more movies. It’s astounding how many movies he worked on are held in such high regard by me. He was also a noted genealogist and the world’s foremost expert on Rondo Hatton. Sadly, he killed himself after finding out he had cancer.

**Burns also made an early found footage movie called Scream Test that remains unreleased.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Is that VHS artwork familiar? It should be, if you’re a metal head from the ’80s. It also served as the cover for the Arista Records debut of Ronnie James Dio’s cousin, David Feinstein, who was in The Elves/The Electric Elves with Dio.

SLASHER MONTH: The Forest (1982)

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The Forest is unlike any other slasher you’ve ever seen. Sure, it has murders in the woods, campers and stalking scenes. But it gets weirder than almost any other slasher would dare, pushing itself to the edge of absurdity while subverting anything you’d expect.

The killer — John — is played by Gary Kent, a stuntman whose work extends from his debut in Battle Flame through the films of Al Adamson and Roger Corman, emerging as the inspiration for Cliff Booth in Once…Upon A Time In Hollywood and the subject of the documentary Danger God. He’s not just a killer in this. He’s not just a cannibal. He’s a killer cannibal haunted by the wife and children that he murdered in a fit of rage.

Two couples — Steve and Sharon plus Charlie and Teddi — have decided to go into the woods for a vacation. The girls meet the ghosts the first evening, as they first meet the kids and then are confronted by their mother. If a ghost can be insane, hers definitely is.

When they were all still alive, the woman slept around on her husband to the point that he killed her, took off for the woods with his kids and watched them commit suicide, which was finally made him lose his mind and became the hermit human flesheater we meet in this film, the kind of maniac who’d feed a man his girlfriend.

The craziest thing about this movie is that Sharon ends up being the real hero — not just a final girl — and the two men are shown to be, at best, victims and at worst, total morons. Only she is capable, strong and able to survive, perhaps because she has connected to the dead children of the killer.

Even stranger, she was played by Tomi Barrett, who was the wife of Kent.

Shot in 13 days, this movie doesn’t get mentioned enough. Don Jones, the writer and director, would also Who Killed Cock Robin?, The Love Butcher, Schoolgirls In Chains and Sweater Girls — all quality films.

You can watch this on YouTube.

SLASHER MONTH: Girls Nite Out (1982)

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First off, the fact that one of the posters for this film rips off Night School‘s art makes me love it before I’ve even seen one second of footage.

Second, when I did watch it, it so shamelessly takes from other slashers that you’d very nearly be convinced that it was made in Italy.

Originally released as The Scaremaker, this was shot over the weekend at New Jersey’s Upsala College. That means that most of the scenes were shot in two takes or less.

After Dickie Cavanaugh kills his girlfriend in a jealous rage, gets committed and then hangs himself, all hell breaks loose. The men trying to bury him are killed and the school’s all-night scavenger hunt could not come at a worse time. Yes, I had no idea that when your college basketball team wins the big game that everyone has to engage in just such a contest.

There’s a killer on the loose wearing the school’s bear costume, using serrated knives as if they were bear claws. There are lots of POV shots as if you’re being attacked by the bear and I always enjoy being the participant in a bear battle.

For a movie made on a shoestring, they got some big names. Hal Holbrook is on hand! Julia Montgomery from Revenge of the Nerds and Stewardess School (yes, she’s a star in my world)! Lauren-Marie Taylor (Vickie from the second Friday the 13th)! Page Mosely (who is something of a scream queen, with appearances in Open House, Edge of the Axe and this movie)! And most importantly Rutanya Alda, who makes this film all hers in the last few minutes, despite the fact that this movie rips off Mrs. Vorhees’ motivation, as all lower level slashers must. I love Rutanya, who claims that she still hasn’t been paid her $5,000 fee for this movie.She should get way more than that, as the close is literally made so much better because of her commitment to more than one role.

If you’ve seen the trailers or poster for this, you may wonder, “Where are the girls in the artwork? Who is this girl in the trailer?” You are right to question these things, as the sales material was made reverse-Corman, in that it was created years after the film was complete.

La Noche del Ejecutor (1992)

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Dr. Hugo Arranz (Paul Naschy!) celebrates his fiftieth anniversary with his wife and daughter before he finds himself cosplaying as Paul Kersey from Death Wish after they are both assaulted and killed while his tongue is cut from his mouth.

He survives. And he learns to work out. No, really.

Within minutes of running time, Hugo has emerged as a force of death, ready to wipe out everyone in his path. Despite this being shot in 1989, it didn’t get released until some time between 1992 and 1999. And to tell the truth, it may as well have been made in 1974.

This is one of the few times you’ll hear Naschy’s real voice in a film and the only time you’ll see him battle a final boss in an S&M mask. So there’s that, right? Right!

Monkey Grip (1982)

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“Songs about sadomasochism and masturbation can’t be on the radio. The children! Protect the children!”
— the battle cry of the PMRC’s  membership

Courtesy of the Divinyls’ MTV’s patronage—and the conservative right’s “outrage” over the songs “Pleasure and Pain” from their second album, What a Life! (1983), and “I Touch Myself” from their fourth album, Divinyls (1991)—Sydney, Australia’s doppelganger to Akron, Ohio-by-way-of-London the Pretenders (with a little AC/DC raunch and punky Blondie in the woofers), rose up the U.S. charts.

There’s nothing quite like a little Tipper Gore-mock controversy to inject a floundering career. . . .

I remember my ex-Operations Director, with her endless stream of inane memos and made-up-week-by-week-as-you-go-along “station policies” that she’d spring on us; she loved her “write-ups” and warnings. The memo I especially remember—in the context of this film review—is the one advising us that, while it’s a “real toe-tapper” (Her words, I kid you not. Who works in radio and vocabulary-holsters “toe tapper”?), “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls will not be added to our rotation. Forget the fact we were an alt-rock station that specialized in indie-artists and unsigned locals in the midst of a grunge wave and if a mainstream Madonna-lite copy was put into rotation, it would have be accidently-on-purpose scratched-beyond-airplay or “misfiled” into the 40-pound hallway receptacle—then buried under more trash. “Toe tapper,” indeed. But, once again, I digress. . . .

Watch the trailer.

Anywhoo . . . we say “floundering” because, unlike MTV turning around the then floundering career of Duran Duran (with those bane-of-my-existence Sonny Crockett-on-a-yacht videos), the audience response (due to MTV’s low rotation) to the Divinyl’s debut American single-video “Boys in Town”—was indifference. (That song, in addition to “Elsie” and “Only Lonely” from the soundtrack, were reissued on their international debut, Desperate.) But the late Christina Amphlett had black bangs (!), looked cute on the album cover, and she’d swing a neon-bluelight mic-stand like no other. And the song was like a chick-fronted version of AC/DC; even Blondie-heavy (before that band started meandering with disco-rap hybrids and faux-reggae tunes like a pre-Crash Test Dummies annoyance). So I bought the album. It was a hell of a lot better than Men at Work. And that Men Without Hats cacophony. Oh, wait. They’re from Canada. Never mind.

And if you’re creating a Divinyls-list for the .mp3 files: don’t forget their (minor) hit cover of the Syndicate of Sounds’ ‘60s garage classic “Hey Little Girl” (changed to boy, natch) on their third Chrysalis album, 1988’s Temperamental (which my old station did play, because it fit the format). And it if all sounds like Blondie, that’s because that band’s producer, Mike Chapman (Suzi Q), is behind the boards. And if you hear of a dash of Madonna erotica in the grooves, that’s because “I Touch Myself” was written by the team of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who wrote “Like a Virgin.”

Ack! Get back to the movie!

Anyway, before the bogusversy and before MTV, there was Christina Amphlett’s AACTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Monkey Grip (and she never acted again). Amphlett got her part by way of the Divinyls’ rise on the Melbourne local scene—and the film called for a band whose female lead singer is the gal-pal for the film’s domestically-troubled lead character. And instead of casting actors in a lip-sync faux-band, the producers cast a real band—in a rock flick doppelganger to Nina Hagen’s Cha-Cha and Nena’s Hangin’ Out (and, in a male perspective: Michael Hutchence of INXS co-starring in the punk chronicle Dogs in Space)—the Divinyls.

Based on the best-selling Australian cult novel by Helen Graham and fueled by a six-song EP soundtrack by the Divinyls, the story follows Nora, a single-mother in her thirties scratching out a living on the outskirts of Melbourne’s alternative music scene-business. In addition to struggling to raise her thirteen year-old daughter, she has to deal with her own mental and physical abuse at the hands of her heroin-addicted lover, Javo, a mostly-unemployed theatre actor. As result of the financial and domestic instability, she squats in a number of households with other single parents in Melbourne’s local art community (the suburbs of Calton and Fitzroy; think of New York’s Greenwich Village and Los Angeles’ Silver Lake communities) of musicians, actors, and writers. Nora, as with her likeminded contemporaries, refuses to play by the rules of conventionality, torn by their competing desires for freedom and stability that’s exacerbated by their artistic endeavors.

There’s no freebie online rips. But we found this 10-minute clip of scenes to sample and a VOD stream on Vimeo. You can learn more about the influential novel behind the film with its extensive Wikipage.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Starstruck (1982)

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Journalist Stephen Maclean was raised by his mother as she worked in a Melbourne pub and had an early career as a child actor. He wanted to make an Australian musical and ended up working with Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, the 1994 version of Little Women) and production designer Brian Thomson (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment).

Despite being rated NRC (Not Recommended for Children) in its native Australia, the Jo Kennedy song “Body and Soul” (written by Tim Finn of Split Enz) went to #5 on the Australian charts.

Jackie Mullens (Kennedy) dreams of being a star while working in her mother’s pub. Her young cousin Angus fancies himself her manager, so he gets her in front of The Wombats, a local band, and gets them on the road to appearing on The Wow! Show. That said, he promises that Jackie will walk a tight rope nude to get on, which ends up getting her sent to jail for the day.

Despite dating guitarist Robbie, she soon falls for the show’s host and works on changing her sound to be more commercial. It fails, just as her deadbeat dad comes home and steals what little money her family has left.

Starstruck comes at an interesting time in the Australian movie industry, as three musicals — also including The Pirate Movie and The Return of Captain Invincible — were made between 1982 and 1983.

While this movie pretty much disappeared upon release in the U.S., it had a rental and cable audience that has kept it alive. If you’d like to join that cult, you can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Big Meat Eater (1982)

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What is it about science fiction/horror musicals and why we love those so? The more cult — beyond Rocky Horror, there’s Shock Treatment, Voyage of the Rock Aliens and The Apple — the better, right?

Allow me to present Canada’s 1982 entry to the strange symphony, Big Meat Eater.

Director Chris Windsor co-wrote, co-edited and co-wrote the soundtrack along with producer Laurence Keane (who would go on to make Samuel Lount with the third member of the writing team, Phil Savath; Savath also wrote Fast Company for David Cronenberg and the Jello Biafra sci-fi’er Terminal City Ricochet) while in film school. It’s the story of Abdullah (played by Clarence “Bull” Miller, who was a Kansas City blues shouter so loud he didn’t need a microphone; racial tensions led him to travel the world and finally settle in Edmonton), a butcher (which has to be a pro wrestling reference) who kills the mayor of town and stashes the body at his new job, working for Bob the Butcher, who lives by the motto “Pleased to meet you, meat to please you.”

That would all be strange enough if there weren’t aliens floating above town, obsessed by the large deposits of Bolonium beneath the butcher shop, reanimating the dead mayor to do their bidding. Meanwhile, everyone sings, dalmatians get turned into spotted beef and mutations abound. Oh yeah, and Bob has invented a new language for the town’s future-forward theme park.

What a magical time 1982 was, when a film like this could come out and find just the right people in the right video store to send the right wavelength to. Sure, we can find things easily now, but we can’t get as invested, right?

There was a sequel planned, Teenage Mounties from Outer Space, that never happened. We’re all the poorer for this.

You can download this on Gumroad and visit the official site and Facebook page for more information and to order the blu ray. We take a deeper look at the career of Phil Savath with our “Drive-In Friday” featurette.

Desire, the Vampire (1982)

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When you see the name John Llewellyn Moxey on the credits of a movie, you know you’re getting into something awesome. Just look at The House That Would Not Die, A Taste of Evil, The Night Stalker, Nightmare In Badham County, Deadly Deception and, well, just about everything he did. I didn’t even mention The City of the Dead and Psycho-Circus!

Originally called I, Desire and airing November 15, 1982 on ABC, who knew this little vampire film would be amongst the best ones I’d find for our vampire week? There’s a great cast — David Naughton from An American Werewolf In London makes for a fine lead, as well as Brad Dourif as a priest, Barbara Stock as the bewitching vampire, Dorian Harewood (he was in Sudden Death!) as a cop, Marilyn Jones as Naughton’s fiancee and even an appearance from Not Necessarily The News‘ Anne Bloom (or Frosty Kimelman in that long-lost HBO program).  Oh yeah — and Marc Silver, who was the guitarist in Ivan and the Terribles, the ill-fated band in Motel Hell.

There are some great twists and turns in this one, as well as an incredible vampiric apartment at the end that I wish that I could live in. I’ll assume it’s just a studio set so that I don’t get sad that I can never go back in time and see it for myself.

You can watch this on YouTube and feel the same way.

Drive-In Friday: Brett Piper Night

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New Hampshire’s Brett Piper is a self-made screenwriter, director, and special effects artist who shoots most of his films in Pennsylvania, most notably in the western and northwestern counties of Cambria and Tioga County. He’s also a self-professed purveyor of “schlock” who eschews modern CGI for “old school” special effects, such as matte paintings, miniatures, and stop-motion animation.

And we, the staff of B&S About Movies, love Piper for it: For if Piper had been around during the regional era of Drive-in exploitation, we’d be warmed by the crackle of a speaker hanging on our car window. We’d rent every one of his VHS ditties from the ‘80s home video shelves, warmed by the cathode ray tube’s glow.

Piper’s resume is extensive, there’s a lot to watch: he’s directed 18 films, wrote 19, and created special effects for 22 films—for his own films as well as the films of his frequent brothers-in-arms collaborator, Mark Polonia (Empire of the Apes).

So if you’re nostalgic for the works of Ray Harryhausen, but burnt out on repeat viewings of that stop-motion master’s works; if you’re burnt out on today’s green-motion tracking and After Effects computer-animated extravaganzas; if you want aliens cast well-made masks and full-body suits and actors emoting alongside in-camera effects, then the films of Brett Piper are just what the VOD streaming doctor ordered.

Movie 1: Queen Crab (2015)

We’ll start off our Friday Brett Piper festival with my favorite of his films: one with best character development, acting, and special effects—and one that we have not yet reviewed at B&S About Movies. While there’s a soupçon of Ray Harryhausen in the crab pot (ugh, sorry!), this is a full-on Bert I. Gordon homage to his (very loose) 1976 H.G Wells adaptation of Food of the Gods (with an honorable mention to the Robert Lansing-starring Island Claw from 1980).

What causes the crab to go “gigantic”? A little girl brings home Pee-wee, a baby pet crab from the lake behind her house—and feeds it grapes infused with her daddy-scientist’s plant growth hormone. After her parents die in a freak lab explosion and she’s adopted by her uncle-sheriff, Melissa grows up into a tough-as-nails teenager, aka Queen Crab, who serves as protector to Pee-wee and her clan of babies—complete with a psychic link. Shotguns n’ rednecks, tanks n’ planes (well, one of each) ensues as the misunderstood crustacean who, like King Kong before her, didn’t ask for any of this sci-fi ruckus.

And speaking of misunderstood: There’s poor little Melissa, stuck in the middle of the sticks of Crabbe County with no friends and parents that constantly bicker and ignore her. She’s practically a latchkey kid with only a crab as her friend. So, do we root for the crab? Damn straight. Kick ass, Pee-wee, for Melissa is Queen in this neck of the Pennsylvanian countryside.

You can watch Queen Crab free-with-ads on TubiTv.

Movie 2: Muckman (2009)

When a TV producer’s (Piper acting-mainstay, ‘80s metal drummer-cum-actor Steve Diasparra; also of Amityville Death House, Amityville Exorcism, and Amityville Island*) career disintegrates on live TV when his report on a legendary backwoods demon haunting Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek Gorge is exposed as a fraud, he’s hell bent on redemption. When he convinces a cable TV mogul to back his quest, Mickey O’Hara heads back into the swamps with a sexy TV personality. Only, this time, there’s no need to “fake it” as the gooey, tentacled Muckman shows up—and he’s not only got the love jones for film crew member Billie Mulligan, Mucky’s brought along a tentacle sidekick of the Queen Crab variety.

Just a good ‘ol fashioned, campy monster romp from the analog days of old.

You can watch this as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTV.

The snack bar is open . . . Intermission!

Thank you, Vinegar Syndrome for honoring the works of Brett Piper!
Now back to the show!

Movie 3: Outpost Earth (2019)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Bert I. Gordon produced a Ray Harryhausen-directed mockbuster of Independence Day? Well, wonder no more with Brett Piper’s most recent, eighteenth and best-produced film of his resume. And, bonus: we also get a throwback to all of our beloved ‘80s Italian apocalypse flicks** in the bargin!

Blake is the resident Trash-cum-Parsifal (known your ‘80s apoc heroes!) who teams with Kay, a radiant, supermodel bow-hunter, to help a crusty elder scientist discover the key to save the Earth from the invading alien hoards and their otherworldly “hunting dogs” in the form of giant, stout lizards.

A fun, something fresh and new watch filled with the nostalgia that we love in our films.

You can watch Outpost Earth as a with-ads-stream on You Tube.

Movie 4: Mysterious Planet (1982)

We confessed our perpetual love for this debut feature film from Brett Piper during our two-week December Star Wars blowout*ˣ in commemoration of the release of Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker.

Pipers’s Star Wars-inspired take-off of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island—by way of Ray Harryhausen’s classic 1961 film of the same name—concerns a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” band of mercenaries crash landing on an uncharted planet after a space battle. Adopting a jungle girl into their fold, they battle prehistoric snails and dragons as they make their way into a final showdown with the planet’s ancient ruler: a super-intelligent computer ˣ*.

You can watch Mysterious Planet on You Tube.

The bottom line: Brett Piper overflows with that same Tommy Wiseau-heart (The Room) and John Howard-tenacity (Spine) as he gives us a special, endearing quality with his films that’s absent from most—if not all—major studio offerings.

So strap on the popcorn bucket and ice up the Dr. Pepper and Doc Brown back to the Drive-In ‘70s with one of the greats of the retro-cinema. Keep ’em coming, Brett. We love ’em!

Yeah, we have since reviewed Brett’s works Raiders of the Living Dead (1986) and Arachnia (2003), as well as his effects work in Shark Encounters of the Third Kind (2020).

* We went nuts on Amityville and all of its sequels, rip-offs, and sidequels, etc. back in February with our “Exploring: Amityville” featurette. Uh, Sam? You’re the resident Amityville authority in this neck of Allegheny County. Time to get crackin’ on the newest, latest entry in the series: Amityville Island . . . and Amityville Hex, Witches of Amityville Academy, Amityville 1974, and Amityville Vibrator.

** Be sure to join us for our two-part September blowout as we explored the Italian and Philippine apocalypse of the ‘80s with our “Atomic Dust Bin” featurettes.

*ˣ Join us for our two-part Star Wars “Exploring: Before Stars Wars” and “Exploring: After Star Wars” featurettes overflowing with links to reviews of the films that inspired and were inspired by Star Wars.

ˣ* Sentient computers? Don’t forget to visit with four of sci-fi’s most-infamous artificial brains with our “Drive-In Friday: Computers Taking Over the World” featurette that posted on July 17th.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Cat People (1982)

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Producer Milton Subotsky — all hail Amicus! — bought the rights to Cat People from RKO and began developing a remake, with the rights going to Universal eventually. Roger Vadim was going to be the director with Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark — all hail Children Shouldn’t Play With Death Things — working on several versions of the script.

Paul Schrader ended up making this, making a movie that is way more sexual — man, understatement of the year — than the film that inspired it.

Irena (Nastassja Kinski) and Paul (Malcolm McDowell) Gallier have been separated since their parents died. He’s now involved in a church in New Orleans and lives with his housekeeper Female (Ruby Dee), but has gone missing.

Of course, panther attacks start happening — look out Lynn Lowry (I Drink Your Blood, The Crazies) — and zoologists Oliver Yates (John Heard), Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) and Joe Creigh (Ed Begley Jr.) are on the case. They capture the panther, who Irena finds herself attracted to. If you think that this is the end of the animal and human sexual attraction in this film, well, stay tuned.

Joe ends up getting mauled by the panther, which disappears just as Paul reappears to make a Flowers In the Attic move on his sister. Oh yeah — that’s when we find out that his basement is filled with the remains of people, so everyone thinks the big cat belongs to him.

Oh man — where do we go now? We find out that in the mythology of this movie, any time one of these catpeople do the horizontal mambo with a human they turn into a cat and can only become human again by killing another person. Mama and papa Gallies were siblings because werecats are ancestrally incestuous and — oh yeah — only aardvarking between two catpeople doesn’t cause a transformation. So Paul tries to get with his sister again, just in time for Oliver to save her and her to shoot her brother.

This movie ends in perhaps the most insane way possible. Irena begs to be with her kind, so Paul ties her up and dips the stinger in the honey, as it were, until she transforms back into a panther, at which point he donates her to the zoo.

Holy cow, movies were absolutely insane in 1982. Wow and the soundtrack! Bowie and Giorgio Moroder? You can not get more absolutely 80’s than that. Oh yeah — and another RKO movie was remade in 1982. The Thing. Both failed at the box office, but only one is remembered quite so fondly.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory.