Blood Simple -- 1984 -- R

This debut for the Coen brothers who write and direct is an awesome thriller that takes four characters and keeps them guessing. They reveal to the audience everything that happens to each of them, and that superiority over the characters only heightens the drama watching the characters guess as to the intentions of the others. 

Basically, a husband is upset about his wife having an affar and leaving him, so he hires a private investigator to take care of the situation. Well, the investogatr double-crosses him, and the roller coaster starts from there as everything just goes horribly, horribly wrong. 

After watching it, I learned why it was such a classic. Definitely worth a viewing if you haven't yet seen it. The "R" rating is more for situational content than anything else. Minimal profanity, blood, or nudity, which is often the reason for the rating in a film like this.

A Nightmare on Elm Street -- 1984 -- R

I decided to watch this classic last night while I was working on something else, and having seen it several times, I probably won't be as objective or clueless as I am in many of my other reviews. I enjoy the random nature of this movie series quite a bit.

Nightmare involves a dream stalker able to kill his victims as they sleep. Quite a frightening prospect since that is when we're at our most defenseless. Nancy's friends start dropping off one by one to this guy, and the adults all think she's losing her mind as she pursues this guy in her dreams. 

This plot is quite intricate for a teen horror film involving not only the teens, but the parents play a huge role in the backstory and the creation of Freddy Krueger. Everything works together as a whole to make the story engaging.

Now, the film isn't perfect, but it does a good job of telling the story completely at the varied pace of a horror film. The characters are fleshed out decently enough to care, but not so well as to connect, a major shortcoming in this film. The focus is Nancy and how she relates to those around her, and she gets the meat of the development along with the second hand development of Krueger. 

One of the weaker points in the film is actually the amateur acting of the lead, Heather Langencamp. Though this was Johnny Depp's first film, his acting chops are clearly superior to Langencamp's, and it's obvious why one has a career still, and the other doesn't. She does a passable job as the movie continues onward, but her earlier scenes are just horrible.

Wes Craven did deliver qute the splatter fest with a host of disturbing effects throughout, along with some good, solid suspense. Though this does rank as an early project of Craven's, he knows what he's doing. 

The film does what it was meant to do, and that is deliver another coming of age tale against the backdrop of a horrific monster movie, while further solidifying the "rules" established by ts predecessors of Halloween and Friday the 13th, and so exalted in Craven's later picture Scream. Classic horror and a must watch for anyone into the genre.

Footloose -- 1984 -- PG

This film with Kevin Bacon has a far better soundtrack than storyline, though its simplistic story has some measure of uniqueness to it. It follows a boy from the city who is used to all the debauchery of the big city moving to a small town still reeling from a five year old event and all the laws passed to prevent it from recurring. The trouble is this event (involving the deaths of several teens) resulted in the outlawing of rock music and dancing, elements they believe lead to the activites that led to these deaths.

It becomes a face-off between the kid, who ends up representing the teens of the city, and the town's preacher, who represents the adults. Each side has their extremes and these are played out pretty well with some of the adults actually burning books and some of the kids openly condemning the boy's efforts.

One of the issues this film has is in its development. The kids are developed ok, and its possible a lot of this has to do with the amateurish acting by its young leads. They all act like sterotypical teens out to buck the system. This hardly creates an interesting or even sympathetic character. The show is regularly stolen by the preacher and his wife, who being played by actors of greater experience, put forth more depth than the script ever hoped to portray making their scenes far more interesting than the main storyline. in fact, they'd stolen the show so well that near the end, you could follow the preacher's dilemma even better than the kids and even felt for him more. The film even seemed to shift in his favor. This aspect is only a weakness in that the film was supposed to be about the teenagers.

The other part of this film that weakened it is its exceptional soundtrack. A lot of time was devoted on screen to its custom-written songs. So much so that it often detracted from the story so that the songs could complete.One of the special features touted that the songs tell a story. I'm sure they do, but it would be better if they told the story that was going on on screen. Unless Kevin Bacon and his conry he was teaching to dance were in a solid boy on boy relationship, "Let's Hear It For The Boy" is not the most appropriate song to accompany them.

"Holding Out For A Hero" was played under a tractor race, of all things, and I think I can understand this one a little bit, but this is how misplaced it was. The tractor race was about Bacon's character versus the teen town bigshot. They were playing chicken on tractors. Who would be "singing" this song? Why the girl, of course. She was in a relationship with bigshot, but plotwise, she would inevitably go for the new kid. Hence, she needed a "hero." Got that. But the scene is not about her, and she received very little screentime during it.

So, the film wasn't a bad thing, but it made some errors for the sake of vanity that didn't help it.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter -- 1984 -- R

Aka Part 4 of the gruesome slasher series, this one rehashes the same basic plot we've had for the last three installments in that a group of teens go out to the lake and get killed. Yup, that's about it. The trouble here is that the conventions that have been used in the prior 3 films are re-used here and to a greivous fault.

We kick start the movie with where we left off at the end of 3. Insert a narrative sequence of flashbacks and then we're in. The drivers and everyone are removing the bodies from that farmhouse and then Jason's body from the barn. Since we're in a horror movie, we have to start with the body count, and so right off, we get the morgue guy and his girl at the hospital. Problem 1 is that the girl was not in Jason's way. She was in another room entirely, far, far away from where Jason was laid. Why did he kill her? Didn't make sense.

Then we start into the two-dimensional characters who exist for sex and death. Also in this tale is a family who has lived near the lake for some time now, and was never previously discovered by Jason. Why is it that people like this are still around. It has been many years since the first film (movie time line wise), and he hasn't found everyone? Sorry, the lake ain't that big. Anyway, after a quick intro that tells us little, we get a character who is in the film long enough to get another kill in before we move into the actual "plot." I use the term loosely.

We have two prime targets here. One is the family who lives on the lake. Single mom, son and daughter. Second is the teens who are renting the house next door. Bunch of them. All horny. These are joined by a pair of twins. Who knows where they came from; they met them on the trail. With enough kill fodder, we go into their daily antics of making out, skinny dipping, and drug use. Some of the teens are more characterised than others, and one or two get so little screen time that when they're hacked, we barely know who they are.

The family is not much better. You get mom, but not much about her. The daughter is just another kid. The son gets the most as he makes these scary rubber masks and has a knack for fixing stuff. He fixes the car on one occasion and the power to the house on another. He serves as the hero in our story...well, using that term loosely too.

So we move into the dumb moves that people do just to make sure they're where they need to be as opposed to doing what real people would. The heroes walk into the house and they find blood and the door smashed in. They walk in and explore. We get the "wait here while I explore" and of course, the other person doesn't wait there. Finally, one of them finds a bidy and exclaims "he's here!" Um, didn't we figure that out when the door was smashed in.

Then there's the guy in the basement who says to the girl "get out! He's killing me!" He's exclaims that he is being killed so many times, it humorous. Then, instead of leaving, the girl runs down the stairs into the basement, runs back out, runs back down to cry over the body, and then (big surprise) the bad guy gets ahold of her...but she gets away. Weird.

At another point, a girl comes across a campsite. What does she do? She gets in one of the tents and sits down and waits. ?! Who the heck does that? The guy who is camping there sees someone in his site earlier in the film, and what does he do? Explores it and finds his gun smashed. He doesn't really react to it. Weird again.

Take all that and add in a lot of hack n slash and you get the movie. There's no substance to it, and it serves only to provide a vehicle for gruesome make up effects, which aren't used as extensively as in the prior episodes. We get to the end, and like most horror flicks, the bad guy "dies" a few times before he is done in finally.

Moving through these, I can definitely see the genre deveoping into the cliche-factory it is today with all the classic elements falling into place. This one also serves to introduce the kid hero element into the genre which is used here and there in horror flicks for a "cute" factor.

So, this one is standard fare with nothing new to offer, though it might have given something interesting at the time.