25 Years Ago This Month: March 1989

As always I start with what I've seen...

Three of the great filmmakers of the 70s and 80s (Woody Allen; Francis Ford Coppola; Martin Scorsese) collaborated on the omnibus film New York Stories which encompasses three short vignettes. The first and best is "Life Lessons" (Scorsese) starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette about an artist living with his former lover, whose sexual escapades with other men fuel jealousy and a spark of creativity. Coppola's segment is "Life Without Zoe," a sort of fantasy about a girl living in a luxury hotel. "Oedipus Wrecks" is Allen's contribution, about a New York lawyer (played by Allen) haunted by his overbearing mother, who appears in the New York skyline to tell the whole city about her son's personal problems.

I reviewed it last year after taking a second look many years removed, but the cult classic Heathers was released a quarter century ago.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter Movie Review

I knew that Corey Feldman was in this one, but as I watched it for this October series I discovered I had never seen it. I was dumbfounded because I honestly believed I'd seen them all.

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

You might think that by the time a horror series gets to its third sequel it could have little to no redeeming value. The thing is, after Friday the 13^th Part III, the series had almost nowhere to go but up. Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter is by far the best in the series up to that point. That’s merely a comment on the film’s technical merits and story, but not the horror elements which remain feeble and not frightening.

The Lost Boys Movie Review: 25 Years Ago This Month

Before Anne Rice’s gothic horror novel based on young vampires was immortalized in a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and long before pre-adolescents became obsessed with the Twilight series of books and films, there was The Lost Boys, one of the first films to deal with teenaged vampires in a dramatic way. Once Bitten and Fright Night were both comedies released two years earlier. Director Joel Schumacher made The Lost Boys in the middle of a stint of making several films focused on young people. I consider it his best period as a director.

25 Years Ago This Month: July 1987

As the summer of '87 rolled on there were teen comedies, big budget science fiction, the fourth installment in a successful summer film franchise, a comic book movie sequel, and a James Bond action extravaganza. Of course this could be the description of this summer's films, or last summer's, or next summer's even. It seems Hollywood studios haven't really adjusted their release formula in the last quarter century.

4th of July weekend was not yet the summer juggernaut that it became in the mid-90s. The big releases were the Fantastic Voyage-like Innerspace starring Martin Short as a mild-mannered grocery store clerk who accidentally gets a tiny spaceship carrying a miniaturized Dennis Quaid injected into his body; and Adventures in Babysitting, with Elisabeth Shue looking after a pre-adolescent girl and her high school aged brother as they take an unauthorized trip into downtown Chicago for high jinks and illicit adventure. In a certain way this was the first movie about Thor.