Classic Movie Review: Airplane!

It’s been many years since I watched Airplane, that crazy comedy film from the ZAZ team of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker. They mastered the art of goofball parody comedy and made my youth more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Airplane was the one that started it all. It’s possible to point to John Landis and Kentucky Fried Movie, but that’s more akin to sketch comedy – a bunch of funny ideas loosely tossed together around a larger centerpiece parody of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. But as an outright genre parody, Airplane set the bar, a bar that unfortunately has been lowered as the years have gone on.

Horror Classic Review: Friday the 13th

I probably never saw the original movie until after I'd seen a few of the others for the simple fact that it was long before my time and it was not widely available on cable. Certain images from the film always stayed with me like Mrs. Voorhees in that awful sweater and her short blonde her and of course her decapitation at the end. I also always remembered that scare at the end when Alice is attacked on the lack by the boy Jason leaping out of the water. The series as a whole had a profound effect of fright on me throughout my childhood. Even as a teenager watching some of these films made me nervous to have to turn all the lights off and go to bed.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

People often forget that the killer in the original Friday the 13^th was not Jason, but his mother Mrs. Voorhees. Wes Craven’s self-aware horror film Scream even calls attention to this fact by having the killer use it as a little-known piece of trivia to taunt a victim. Jason is nothing more than a sad story of a boy drowning in a lake, the result of negligence on the part of his camp counselors. Probably what people don’t forget quite so easily is that Friday the 13^th is a not very competently made slasher film that is not all that scary to boot.

Terror Train Movie Review

The story goes that I was three years old when I saw this film and it gave me nightmares and a general inability to go to sleep on my own. I was permitted to watch it because my sister, nine years older than me, was into horror films and my eight year old brother just didn't believe these movies. No one expected I would be so affected by it. I had no memory of it growing up and I never watched it until I decided to include it for this series.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews

Terror Train is just one in a series of late 70s and early 80s slasher films attempting to capitalize on the popularity of the genre, especially after John Carpenter’s great Halloween. But Terror Train, directed by Roger Spittiswoode from an inane script by T. Y. Drake, contains none of the artistry of Halloween and instills almost none of the fear engendered by Michael Myers or the terror of the title. About the only thing it shares in common with its predecessor and inspiration is Jamie Lee Curtis as the shrieking star, a pure and virginal young woman whose chaste behavior is ostensibly what helps her survive. Both films tally up the body count of young people, but they are far less interesting or cinematic here.

Classic Movie Review: Raging Bull

Raging Bull is the full realization of the promise Martin Scorsese demonstrated with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. And to refer to those two seminal films as somehow less substantial than Raging Bull should automatically suggest its magnificent power.

This was the fourth of eight collaborations between Scorsese and Robert De Niro. I would say neither artist has topped himself since. It is Scorsese at his virtuoso best and for De Niro it is a complete performance, lacking nothing in terms of emotion and physicality. And I don’t say that simply because he first turned his body into that of a champion boxer and then gained 60 pounds to play the aging and overweight Jake La Motta, but because he leaves nothing on the table. This is full tilt De Niro. It’s the impulsiveness and rage of Johnny Boy and the fierce tenacity of the psychopathic Travis Bickle. Although we may occasionally get flashes of De Niro’s brilliance in some of his recent performances, nothing he’s done in at least twenty years has come close to what he brought to Raging Bull.