Platoon -- 1986 -- R

The film that put Oliver Stone on the map follows a young Charlie Sheen as a wet behind the ears private during his tour in Vietnam. He moves from a boy of hope to a man of blood, unafraid to do whatever it takes to survive his harsh reality.

During this bit, we are introduced to a variety of different characters, each exemplifying a personality one can expect to find in the Nam world. The idiot lieutenant newbie; the battle-hardened sergeant offset by the understanding, reasonable sergeant; the captain who commands respect; and of course, the myriad of nameless, faceless "gooks" that litter the Vietnam landscape and kill everything that moves.

The characters were developed very well, however, and did force me to care about their lives and what's going on. It even demonstrated the horrors the military enacted by attacking (and killing) innocent Vietnamese and destroying everything in their path.

While pulling a lot of cliches into the mix, the film was very good and dramatic to watch. It contained a slew of solid suspenseful moments enhanced by the development of the story as well as a few well setup shocker moments. It had a satisfying ending and kept me fairly glued by the plot and pacing.

In the end, the film asserted that in this instance, they were not so much fighting against the enemy out there, but the enemy within. I'd say it was quote good.

Labyrinth -- 1986 -- PG

A fantasy tale from the Jim Henson company involving a girl who unwittingly gives her baby brother over to the Goblin King causing her to have to follow him through the King's labyrinth in order to get him back. It's a great little story with some fanciful characters and good humor. Hey, what can you expect from Jim Henson at the helm and a Monty Python alumnus, Terry Jones, writing the screenplay?

While the story is overall quite fun, it is not without shortcomings. One thing that no one would be able to get away with in a normal story is all the coincidental things that go on. Nearly everything happens by apparent coincidence, chance, or just good luck. Sarah marks the ground. These marks just happen to be on movable tiles. Sarah falls into a oubliette. Hoggle just happens to be waiting for her there. They run up against a locked door running from the cleaners. There just happens to be a collapseable wall next to the door that Sarah just happens to find. Sarah escapes the junk lady. Her band of friends just happen to be right outside.

Can't fault the band of buddies as this sort of thing is typical of kid movies, which this one lays no claim to being more than. The over-emphasis on being friends gets grating after awhile, and I honestly wished we would move on from that. "Ludo and Hoggle friends..." Great.

These are my only complaints though. It's a fun movie to watch, and the music is awesome. Some parts are very 80's-ish in style, but it only adds to the nostalgia of the whole thing. I've always liked this film, and I still do.

Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives -- 1986 -- R

I'm not sure what to make of this one. For the sixth installment of a horror franchise, it's actually pretty decent. The major characters were pretty good, it had some good suspenseful moments, everyone wasn't being an idiot, and it almost came off as believable.

On the other hand, what the heck is with the James Bond parody at the beginning? Anyone who knows me knows I have a thing with James Bond. I like it. Got the whole set. As soon as Jason walked across the odd looking circle at the beginning, I said to myself, "Oh no..." and sure enough, he turned the camera and swipe with the knife, we get the red screen.

Anyway, back to the film itself, we open with Tommy Jarvis (a character in his third film and third actor) going to Jason's grave to a) make sure he's there and b) burn his corpse. It's therapy. Seriously. Anyway, the beginning here is probably the most contrived scene in the whole film because when the casket is opened, Tommy is compelled to tear a section of a iron fence off and stab Jason's corpse with it...wait, an iron fence? Um, okay. So there's this long iron rod sticking out of Jason's body when lightning hits it...twice. Jason climbs out, picks up the mask that Tommy kindly returned to him (complete with the axe cut from 3) and proceeds with his usual modus operandi.

Ok, now take a deep breath. It gets better from here. The story follows primarily Tommy as he tries to convince the sheriff and his idiots...er, deputies to follow up on his stupid act of bringing Jason back to life. Now Crystal Lake was renamed Forest Green to get rid of the dreadful memory of what happened in the past films, and as luck would have it, Camp Forest Green has recently opened to a new set of campers with a new set of counselors.

Fortunately for the plot, most everyone in this film belongs where they are, and they behave is a fairly realistic fashion. We still get our share of token death characters who don't survive their only scene of the film, and some of these characters are given some measure of introduction during their scene -- one even remarking when they see Jason that "I've seen enough horror movies to know that some guy wearing a mask is bad news." Most, however, are just there and get hacked pretty quickly thereafter.

One of the cooler character moments for Jason (yes, I said Jason) was when he walked into the cabin with all the kids. The first time he looked at a little girl who was scared to death and prayed; the second was with every kid in the camp, and they all screamed and ran into a corner. In neither instance did Jason kill anyone. Guess what? It tied back to the original plot. Originally, it was the camp counselors killed to prevent the camp from being opened. The kids were never touched because they weren't part of the problem. Some of this has been lost sight of with Jason claiming the lake region as his own and wiping out everyone around it for no real apparent reason, but this moment was so good, that it overshadows nearly every other moment in the film.

Moving on, most of what's left is pretty standard for a Friday flick. Lots of people are killed in a variety of different ways. Our hero finds a way to get rid of Jason "once and for all" (heh, uh-huh). And of course, the girl survives.

What sets this one above the other films is the way people act and react. In only one instance does anyone say "wait here while I go check it out." He walks around a bush, sees some carnage and takes off telling his girl to leave whatever she wants to grab so they can go. Yeah, they die anyway, but it's an improvement. We get a few names thrown out when someone is wondering where that sound came from out of the darkness, but again, not as bad as previous, and it fit in the instances where it happened. Jason wasn't a magic man flitting from place to place is a complete ignorance of the fundamental rules of time and space; he was in one place at a time, and that place was around the lake where he lives.

My final bit of weirdness has to do with the boat propeller at the end. I'll try to talk around this to not spoil what happens, but let's just say for this to actually work, the propeller on a motor boat engine would have to extend about 4-5 feet down into the water. Your typical motor boat propeller rests usually less than 12 inches below the surface, and 12 is long.

So this was definitely one of the better installments in this franchise right up there with the first one. It was not without its problems, but it's a vast improvement over the shlock that has come before it.

Blue Velvet -- 1986 -- R

Ah, David Lynch. A writer/director you try to sink your teeth into and so many times you comes back without any teeth (or teeth looking like they were painted by Picasso). Well, Lynch has become kind of the Picasso of the movie world where he makes a film that has all the elements, but you have to look at it "just so" in order to understand it. However, Blue Velvet is not one of those Lynchian efforts.

For the most part, Blue Velvet is a straight forward narrative with some weirdness attached. A guy comes into town from school in order to help care for his father who is in the hospital. While in town, he finds a disembodied ear on the ground and turns it into the police who apparently, have some ideas as to what it might have to do with, but they don't tell our hero anything about it (of course). So, he's naturally curious and runs across the detective's daughter who lets him know a thing or two. He pursues the clues she gives him and decides to launch his own (somewhat illegal) investigation.

This line naturally gets him into an adventure that he both pursues and falls into. We get a solid sense of some very warped individuals, and see the darker side of the world for a little while -- the darker side that embraces vengeance and crime as a way of life, and finds the torment of others entertaining. to say that quite a few elements here were disturbing is an understatement, but after a whle, we lose sight of what we came for. We learn whose ear it is, but what we never really learn is why the ear was taken. Granted, we lose sight of this very easily within the world we're given, but in retrospect, I still wanna know.

The characters are drawn not for huge development, but for their personalities as they are now. No one really has a past or future, but their personalities are so bizarre that we are more interested in what they'll do next than who their favorite high school teacher was. It is this strangeness of character that will continue to characterize Lynch as his films as he slowly goes more and more Picasso on us.

Lynch had been in the industry for twenty years at this point, so this can hardly be called an early film, but knowing where he goes from here, we see the seeds of madness blossuming to where he passes from the writer/director of Dune to the creator of Twin Peaks and beyond. This one is all about a dark underbelly of happy little suburbia and it accomplishes that task very well.

The Hitcher -- 1986 / 2007 -- R

I thought I'd just tackle both versions together since they have similar strengths and similar weaknesses, so hitting one would be like hitting the other.

I was originally drawn to this film because the 86 version showed up on a list of the scariest movies of all time, and being a sucker for the scary movies, I naturally had to watch it. Ok, on the one hand, I can understand the fear factor. On the other, there should have been a quality requirement to this list. Both films ranked as "ok" on my list of how things are; neither served to blow me away in any fashion.

The 86 version was notably stronger in many respects over the 07 version, and I'm not one to automatically gravitate to the original. For instance, I have always preferred the American Ring to its Japanese daddy (the J-Horror fanatics can stop booing me now!). The use of a single character over a couple gave the suspense factor a few notches that it lost when there were two. After all, two against one is uneven, but one on one is matched and who will win? It also preferred to leave some of the more grotesque imagery out and let our imagination wonder how hideous it looked (and made us lean our heads to try and see better).

The original also let the police stick to the main guy as the killer as opposed to letting the cops know there was someone they did not know: "a third person." This placed the lead in greater danger since it left the cops in the dark, and left us wondering whether they would take him in or kill him, creating yet more threats.

However, let's turn the tables on the 86 version and talk about what 07 did improve. In 86, the love interest was introduced halfway through the film, but in the original, they were a couple from the start. I already stated that the lead being solo was better overall, but being a couple from the beginning created a better bond between the leads for the final showdown. The new one also better illustrated the truck stop, which confused the hell out of me in the original, and instead of ropes (which could have been cut), the bargaining tool was chained up and not going anywhere.

However, since the couple was already together, this necesitated the addition of scenes not in the original, since the original required the couple to meet and learn about each other. This allowed the addition of some scenes that were all shooting and killing as opposed to any building of character, which the film desperately needed.

What do they have in common? Well, there is a hitchhiker named John Ryder who is not a nice fellow, and he hitches a ride with our hero(es) only to show his true colors and threaten to kill them. The original sets this up a lot better, but we are left constantly in the dark as to who this is and why he is so intent on killing our lead(s). It rings back to Duel in its basic construction, though Duel did a lot of things a lot better.

The largest weakness is how John manages to always find our couple, and why the couple was completely unable to escape him. The truck stop plays a pivotal role, but our heroes (in both films) got there on foot and broke in to stay the night leaving no discernable trace of where they were while there. Several places the leads went should have been impossible to tail, but he did. How did John continue to find them? It never explained, and it never made sense. I could understand ID-ing the car along a stretch of road with no where to go (such as the never-ending state highway in Duel), but their roads here could have taken them anywhere. Not only that, but they ended up hiking cross-country. He kept driving. They could have ended up anywhere.

It was overall weak on both films, and contained far too many implausibilities to get enough into it to be afraid of anything. I'm sure it freaked people out about hitchhikers for awhile, but it was not effective at scaring on the spot.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer -- X -- 1986

I finally got to watching this film that I'd heard of it through Entertainment Weekly's 25 scariest films of all time, and it is actually the only 'Rated X' film I've ever seen. This one was said to be rated X due to content, and the MPAA told the filmmakers that there were no changes they could make to lower the rating to an R. After some contemplation following the film, I kind of understand why.

Like Silence of the Lambs, this film doesn't have the trademark shock moments, but it is just creepy and even a bit weird. What gives it the fear factor is the character of Henry; after all, it is a portrait of Henry? Why does Henry do what he does? We don't fully know. In fact, there is no pattern to his killing. He makes a special note of doing it differently every time so he isn't caught and no pattern is established.

His victims are without pattern...almost completely. He tends to go for the lonely female, but within the course of the film, he wipes out male and female at total randomness, but not without abandon. Every death is carefully chosen so he can basically fulfill his addiction and not get caught.

That's really what it is for him: an addiction. He can only go so long before he has to just kill someone else. Anyone else. And therein lies the fear in this film. Because there are people like Henry out there. People who would kill someone randomly -- just for being alone or vulnerable.

There really wasn't a firm plot. It was a film about a killer and who he is. Just a slice of his life and the people around him. We got a piece of his past, but only down to his first killing -- and even that is in question. He remains almost a total enigma except in his habits and somehow in the context of this film, it works. Normally, I complain about lack of character development, but if they went much further into him, it wouldn't work so well.

It was interesting to say the least, and kind of freaky. The ending under normal cicumstances, would be one that is unfavorable, but in the  context of this movie, it couldn't end any other way without coming off as cheap.

So the bottom line at the end of the film, it worked for me. When it first ended, I wasn't sure, but after some thought, it worked out exactly as it should have, and it told a slice of the life of a serial killer. It stuck with his living at one house before he decided to move on. And it was good.