It’s the year that I turned 12 and the year that the internet was born, at least in a purely technical sense. The first mobile phone call was also made and there was a huge ‘video game crash’ which triggered the end of Atari and was partly caused by the rise in home computing (this is the same crash that, legendarily, saw  thousands of ET game cartridges buried in a New Mexico desert). Ironically the first Nintendo console also went on sale this year. In less technical news, the final episode of M*A*S*H was aired in February, garnering a massive audience of 121 million. The space shuttle Challenger launched on its first mission in April and Michael Jackson debuted the Moonwalk at a Motown celebration, causing the audience to lose their shit. If you can think of any other year that more clearly paved the way for what would follow then: answers on a postcard.

We’re in a rare place where I’ve seen all of the IMDB top ten for this year (although only four of those viewings were at the cinema) and many of the Global Top Ten entries (several of which have, once again, not stood the test of time). Outside of the top tier, 1983 proved a surprisingly rich year—I have a number of favourite movies from this year that sit between 11 and 50 on the IMDB list. Which means this might be a longer post than normal, so let’s cut the chatter!

Star Wars: Episode VI Return of The Jedi

“Is Darth Vader my father?” That’s the question we all wanted answered. Nowadays we simply accept that the revelation happens in the previous movie (The Empire Strikes Back). Consequently it seems even more unreal that we all had to wait three years back then to find out the truth. I was on holiday in Florida when this movie came out and scored a small format comic book adaptation of the movie. The most fascinating part of that book was the scene in which Darth Vader finally removes his helmet (again, something that also happened in the previous movie). In the comic adaptation they cleverly avoided showing Vader’s actual face so there was still a compelling reason to go to the cinema.

This is a film that was fun when it first came out, then started to feel a bit worn, a bit frivolous in comparison to its predecessor. More recently, while it’s definitely not my favourite Star Wars movie, I will forever keep coming back to it for the final showdown between Luke and his father. There’s something genuinely well crafted about the conflict, none of the twists and turns come out of nowhere, they’re all earned by the script, and Vader’s final turn to the light remains one of the keystones of the saga. The conflict you can see him enduring as the Emperor finally decides to kill Luke and his eventual sacrifice provide a truly satisfying culmination to the trilogy.

Sadly Lucas somewhat ruined the moment with his incessant fiddling, taking away Vader’s silent conflict and overlaying a pointless “No!” in the most recent edition. Like Luke’s newly added scream in Empire as he plunges down the vent in cloud city it’s a trivial change that completely steals the dramatic weight from the moment.

Superman III

And talking of stealing dramatic weight, what a disaster this one is! I actually enjoyed it a lot at the time. I was 12 and didn’t know any better. Over the last couple of decades it’s become a bit of a punchline between a friend and I—a symbol of the very worst that cinema has to offer. Amusingly, the last time I watched this movie was when that same friend and I met up and “Superman III” was the obvious answer to “What shall we watch?” 

For a long time the part of this movie that struck me most was Richard Pryor’s character amassing a fortune by diverting the tiny amounts that get rounded off when payments are transferred into his own account. Small enough amounts to be missed; enough of them to make one rich. I’m sure it’s something that would never work in the real world but it seemed a neat trick at the time. I also quite enjoyed Robert Vaughn as the villain, being a minor fan of The Man From UNCLE at the time. This was also the movie that had the distracting green suit (used because the traditional blue suit didn’t work with the bluescreen required to make the flying effects work, and somehow the producers didn’t know how to do exactly whatever they’d done in the first two movies). Maybe it was my age, but back then we seemed far more accepting of flaws and quirks like this—it was simply a moment where you had to use a bit more imagination, in this case enough to see a blue suit instead of a green one. It’s ironic that one of the most egregiously terrible special effects of more recent years was also a Superman one. Possibly one so notorious that I don’t need to spell out what it was …? Smile for the camera!

Twilight Zone: The Movie

In 1983 I was continuing to get into movie novelisations as a means of consuming movies that I couldn’t always get to see—or simply ones that weren’t out yet. The novelisation for The Twilight Zone: The Movie is one I remember reading while on holiday in the USA (the same holiday I bought the The Return Of The Jedi comic book). I was familiar with the show but mostly by reputation (remember no bluray, streaming or constant repeats back in those days) so the novelisation of the movie was my first real exposure to the Twilight Zone universe. 

I did not, for whatever reason, get to see the movie while on holiday so I had to get my mother to take me later in the year, back in the UK. That’s where I learned that the novelisation wasn’t the complete novelisation. It didn’t include the terrifying prologue with Dan Aykroyd (which you should check out if you haven’t seen it) so I was thoroughly traumatised by that experience. The rest of the film was pretty entertaining, but it was the final segment (the remake of Nightmare At 30,000 Feet that grabbed me the most). It was fun, it was terrifying, it was inexplicable—all the things a good movie version of The Twilight Zone should be.

It was much later that I learned about the behind the scenes tragedy—how Vic Morrow and two child actors had been killed on set when a stunt with a helicopter went horribly wrong. Recently I listened to an episode of the What Went Wrong podcast that went into detail about the making of the film. It’s very much worth a listen, but I certainly came away from it wondering how John Landis was ever allowed behind a camera again after this one.

Never Say Never Again

I went to see Never Say Never Again at the cinema—taken by my mother and her partner. At the time I had no idea it was an unofficial Bond entry and enjoyed it as much as any other Bond movie. I particularly enjoyed Rowan Atkinson as the bumbling secret agent. When I commented on this my mother’s partner told me how he was “hamming it up” which was the first time I had heard that expression. I was puzzled—did it mean he was good, or bad in the role?

Watching it again in later years I appreciated much more the alternative world that this Bond took place in, a slightly grimier and grittier version which seemed a bit more on the money than where the movies had gone. I also thought the idea of bringing Bond out of retirement was a clever, meta, touch which made it easier to accept an older Connery while reintroducing him to audiences. 

The movie itself is okay and, honestly, far less interesting than all the behind the scenes drama around who owns which rights. I suppose it could have been fun if we’d ended up with two separate Bond franchises, but as I understand the situation the only opportunity was to keep remaking Thunderball which would have gotten a bit tedious in short order.

Christine

I read the novel of this during my early teens and definitely caught the film at some point not too long after that. I watched it more recently as part of my as-yet-unfinished Stephen King reread (you can read my thoughts from that exercise here). I do find John Carpenter a very hit and miss director but he has made a few of my favourite films. Other times he can be quite workmanlike and almost invisible behind the camera—which probably doesn’t do him credit, and reflects the fact that directors don’t always get to cherry-pick their projects.

Carpenter was originally lined up to direct Firestarter (see next year), but was ditched when The Thing failed at the box office. Frankly it was Firestarter’s loss, but I’m still surprised to see Christine in the IMDB top ten for the year as it’s by no means a remarkable movie. It’s got some great shots in it, and Carpenter definitely does the job of making an automobile scary but it’s routine fare otherwise.

Trading Places

I watched this on TV the first time I saw it and, yes, let’s right away admit that Jamie Lee Curtis’s breasts were a major highlight for a teenaged male who had grown up watching her in horror movies. Looking back it’s an odd choice, that scene; almost a distraction. Reading the IMDB trivia suggests that Curtis’s willingness to go topless was a major deciding factor in her casting; at the time she was hoping to break out of the scream queen image she had acquired. I guess, as gross as that is, there’s still a little bit of agency and empowerment in there (Curtis, after all, did go on to have a pretty great career outside of horror movies).

There is, of course, plenty more to remember about this movie: it’s not one of the seminal comedy movies of the eighties for nothing. This was most likely my introduction to Eddie Murphy and perhaps, even, Dan Aykroyd. While they’re not quite Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, they do a good job of playing their character’s contrasts against each other. At the time I particularly liked the twist that the bet was for one dollar—a meaningless sum to almost all of the protagonists. It’s about the journey, not the goal.

Scarface

I should like this more, but I don’t. Not really. It got talked about a lot when I was at school but I don’t think I saw it until I was at university. This was around the time that movies were finally starting to get released in widescreen format for home video and I had a friend who was very excited to, at last, see Scarface in widescreen as he was convinced there were certain scenes that had been cropped to shield delicate audiences from some of the gore.

In the end it turned out to be more of a dramatic framing choice but at least I got to see the movie as intended. I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen it once but there are a multitude of scenes that are seared in my memory. It’s that sort of movie—very visceral—which is probably why people talk about it so much.

Videodrome

I caught up with Videodrome in my late teens. I don’t recall being especially aware of it around its release—certainly not in the way I was familiar with Scanners. I’ve only watched it twice and it’s been on my rewatch list for a long long time (I bought a blu-ray release a year or two ago and it’s still in the wrapping). I think it’s one of those movies that I admire but find quite unsettling, particularly the final shot (no spoilers here). This is Cronenberg through and through—even his most commercial movie, The Fly, is deeply unsettling to those who haven’t already taken a minor in body horror. 

Of course Cronenberg was years ahead of this time with this one: a story about the corrupting effects of video could easily be talking about video nasties, reality TV, or even the problems of Youtube today. He would revisit a similar theme some years later with Existenz, which is also on my rewatch list. And has been for some time.

Sudden Impact

A few years back I resolved to watch all of the Dirty Harry movies. I loved the first two, had seen the third one with my dad, but felt I needed to finish the series. It was possibly a mistake. The first two are still classics. The third one felt a little bit off and this one didn’t feel like a Dirty Harry movie at all.

Of course, this one is immortalised due to the “make my day” line but there is very little else in it that proves memorable. I suspect if it hadn’t been a Dirty Harry movie it would have been all but forgotten. Or am I being unfair?

The Mostly Forgotten

Let’s add a temporary new section to the blog to cover the films that I’ve definitely seen but don’t really remember.

The Outsiders

Before The Breakfast Club, there was The Outsiders: the film that a generation of teens held up as their banner movie. While it’s still admired, its time was somewhat short-lived. It’s a fairly old-fashioned movie (but also see Rumblefish lower down) arriving at the dawn of the eighties where the rules of movie-making were being rewritten. Had it been made in the seventies it would probably have been held up as a classic of its time; instead it feels strangely out of time. A James Dean movie made when people were starting to forget who Dean even was, and when the stars of the seventies were seeing their relevance shrivel away like a balloon from last night’s party.

I have only seen this a few times, and most of those were group screenings in my long-distant youth. I have held vague intentions of revisiting it but there have always been better Coppola movies, better teen movies, better eighties movies to spend my time with. Perhaps the most compelling thing about this movie today is the cast. Coppola certainly had an eye for stars in the making and this is an early outing for some of the biggest stars of the decade and an ensemble that most studios would have died for just a year or two later.

WarGames

I saw this at the cinema! And I remember almost nothing about it!

My Dad and I saw the trailer on TV and thought it looked hilarious: a kid accidentally starting world war three with his computer. How could it not be awesome? I guess it was kinda forgettable in the end, and it’s not one of the many movies that I’ve felt that my kids must see either. I know there’s still quite a bit of love for it out there. I guess it’s interesting that it’s cut from the same cloth as Tron and The Last Starfighter in some ways—being really good at computers (or computer games) can land you in all sorts of trouble, but can also make you the hero of the day. This is quite a pivot from computer nerds being the punchline in movies and perhaps, in a similar vein to Cronenberg, demonstrates a recognition that things were changing; that the way we consume, create and absorb media was about to change in a big, big way. Of course, the more cynical interpretation is that the suits saw that people in general were spending more money on computers and computer games than before and that maybe there was some money to be made from that.

Octopussy

It’s the one where Roger Moore dresses as a clown. And has perhaps the most ridiculous, sleazy, pun-tastic title of them all. Do you remember anything about it other than that? I certainly don’t. I did see this at the cinema. So that’s something.

Risky Business

I saw this on TV. I was pretty sure it was part of the Moviedrome series, but it doesn’t appear to have screened under that banner so it must have been a boring, regular screening of the movie. I remember it landing quite well with me—being, at the time, a teen still working on the vague prospects for my future and whether or not those would involve Rebecca de Mornay (naturally, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle would fix those aspirations for me). Like The Outsiders, I’ve always had ideas of revisiting this one but it’s never seemed like an essential teen movie, or an essential eighties movie to me. From what I recall it’s a perfectly good movie—perhaps, even, with a bit more substance than its reputation might suggest—but it came at that time just before the eighties movie had been defined, and just before John Hughes reset all ideas of what teen movies could be.

The Actually Unseen

Of the Actually Unseen, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Flashdance are the slightly more inexplicable ones. Flashdance was huge at the time, but I guess as a preteen I wasn’t really into dancing. The film may be iconic but it’s not really acclaimed enough for me to think I should catch up with it one day. I’m not sure how I’ve missed National Lampoon’s Vacation but it’s not like I can watch every dumb comedy that ever got made. No matter how much I might want to.

I think I might have seen Terms of Endearment but let’s pretend that I haven’t? Staying Alive does sound like a fascinating failure: a sequel to Saturday Night Fever directed by Sylvester Stallone—how could it go wrong? Meanwhile, Mr. Mom may be better than its title suggests (and it does at least offer Michael Keaton) but it’s firmly on my Not To Watch list.

Others of Note

So this section might run a bit long. It seems that 1983 was a particularly rich year and several of my most fondly remembered films from the year didn’t even make it into the top ten which means we’ll have to dwell a little in this section of the blog.

Perhaps the most noteworthy film of this year for me is The Big Chill. I saw this first in my late teens and became instantly obsessed with it. There were a couple of initial hooks: the incredible soundtrack, and a young, goofy Jeff Goldblum. However, the dialogue was the real sell. I watched this again very recently and still loved it. For some reason I’d forgotten it was an eighties movie. It plays very much like a seventies movie—even the casting seems peak late seventies—but in a strange way this movie about a group of adults reflecting on how they’ve perhaps betrayed the ideals of their youth really paved the way for the classic eighties teen movie. It’s not for nothing that The Breakfast Club (or was it St Elmo’s Fire?) is often referred to as The Little Chill.

Also out this year was Rumblefish, which I was introduced to by a friend, and for my money was the better movie about the struggles of youth that Coppola delivered this year (he also delivered The Outsiders). Black and white photography, a score by Stewart Copeland, heavily stylised; it’s like nothing else. Matt Dillon gives one of his best performances as the tortured Rusty James while Mickey Rourke is perfect as his more criminally inclined brother.

Another film I enjoyed a lot when I was a growing teen was The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel). I had been reading a lot of Stephen King in my teens so would often check out the movies. This one was, in many ways, the least showy of them all—very understated for Cronenberg, in fact—but I love a story that ends up being a bit timey-wimey and the way it resolves Johnny trying to prevent his vision of an insane President (Martin Sheen, not Donald Trump) from wreaking nuclear destruction coming true is perfect. You also can’t. Not. Love a movie. With Christopher. Walken. Leading the cast.

Let’s not forget we also got another Stephen King aptation—Cujo—this year. I watched it recently and you can read my notes here so no need to repeat my thoughts here.

Local Hero was one of the more acclaimed British movies of the year (we didn’t make that many movies, so it’s not like there was a lot of competition, but we were still shedding the era of sex comedies and cheap TV series tie-ins, so a good British movie was still worth shouting about). Earlier this year it occurred to me that I had never seen Local Hero and I really should. It’s an interesting piece, very light on actual plot and more about the experience its American lead has while visiting a remote Scottish fishing village for work (the evil corporation he works for, which turns out not to be that evil, wants to demolish the village to support an oil drilling project). It’s an oddity, for sure, but one of the most charming movies you will likely ever see—I can imagine Richard Curtis watching this and taking copious notes. It’s also noteworthy for featuring Denis Lawson, best known as Wedge from the original Star Wars movies, in a leading(ish) role.

Let’s whip through a few other genre titles from the year. Krull was another of those movies where I read the novelization and then went to the cinema to see the movie—there’s still some love out here for this imaginative fantasy piece but I enjoyed the novelization more. The Hunger was based on a novel, which I had read either because it was a vampire tale or because it was a well-regarded horror novel. I caught up with the movie around my mid-teens and quite enjoyed it (especially the Bauhaus-fuelled opening). It’s funny now to note that it’s directed by Tony Scott—it’s quite arty and very much an outlier to the rest of his work.

I never saw Something Wicked This Way Comes at the cinema and I didn’t catch up with it on video either. It had built a reputation as one of the scariest movies Disney had ever made and, perhaps because of that, never got released on home video (or, if it did, it was a very short-lived release). I do remember the poster extremely well—it must have had quite an impact on me when it was up at the local cinema—and I was quite surprised to find that Jonathan Pryce, who I have generally associated with nerdy roles ever since Brazil—was the bearded villain. I finally caught the movie a few years ago (I stumbled across a HD quality download—fairly rare at the time—and grabbed it … of course now you can find it on Disney+). It was pretty good, and Pryce was largely convincing as the supernatural villain. It would definitely be good to watch it again.

UK Top Ten

1. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of The Jedi
2. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
3. Octopussy
4. Gandhi
5. An Officer And A Gentleman
6. Never Say Never Again
7. Superman III
8. Tootsie
9. National Lampoon’s Vacation
10. The Dark Crystal

The Dark Crystal, captured in my previous blog, should really be listed as a 1983 movie—even in the USA it was released in December 1982. The UK got it in February the following year. Similarly Gandhi was released (in the UK) in December 1982. I’ve never seen Gandhi. I’m sure it’s as good as they say, but a three-hour Oscar bait movie is not my idea of a fun time. I did catch up with The Dark Crystal some years back and enjoyed it well enough but I’m not sure I’d class it as essential viewing.

Next time: Possibly the greatest year in cinema ever …?