Fatal Attraction -- 1987 -- R

Classic love triangle flick that was nominated for best picture and has been spoofed over and over and over. A man (Michael Douglas) cheats on his wife for a weekend when she is out of town, and is then stalked by the woman he slept with (Glenn Close). Once you get past waiving your finger at the idiot for committing adultery to start with, his family becomes the victims of his wrongdoing, making the consequences of his actions the real plot of this story. After the affair, the movie kicks off and just moves non-stop to the end with several twists and turns along the way as Close's character keeps tightening the noose.

What makes the tale all the more enthralling is the realization that with everything that she is doing to him, he can't (won't) reveal what is really going on to his wife because if he does, he'll be forced to reveal his infidelity. Close's character knows this and continues her dirty game until he dies or gives her what she wants from him.

Hello Again -- 1987 -- PG

This was a cute little romantic comedy involving a woman who chokes to death and is broughtback to life by her transcendentalist sister who owns a shop of items such as crystal balls and books on myticism. Trouble is she was married and wasn't brought back until a year after her death giving her husband ample time to find himself a new life. The film follows her picking up the pieces of her life and working to move forward. Of course, there is a fair amount of jealousy and conflict from both hubby's new wife and everyone who doesn't believe she actually died.

This is a sweet little film and has plenty of laughs and goofiness along with some nice characters and a happy ending.

Innerspace -- 1987 -- PG

Kind of a science-fiction/romantic comedy going on with this one. When we open up, we find Tuck Pendleton making an idiot of himself and we realize right away that he's probably the main character. Shortly thereafter, we get him and Lydia making out before she dumps him. Nice little RomCom setup. Then he gets into a pod and gets miniaturized to be injected into a rabbit, but instead, bad guys show up and he ends up in the body of a supermarket assistant manager.

What follows is a Jack, the manager, running from the bad guys while trying to figure out what to do with his little passenger. It's a great little ride and not a bad film. Very imaginative and neat to see the inside of a body and someone travelling through it.

The ending was a little ambiguous and only marginally ties up the loose ends, so that's a slight weakness. But overall, it worked farily well for me.

Date With An Angel -- 1987 -- PG

Lookie, another click flick. If I could get her to watch The Ring with me, that would be a red letter day. She did watch The Godfather once (during a game of Skip-Bo, but I digress.

Tonight's RomCom was this 80's wonder about a guy on the verge of marriage who is "kidnapped" from his engagement party by a group of "terrorists" to go to a bachelor party -- an event that was not shown, but implied heavily enough that we get it. So while he's recovering from a hangover, this angel was hit by an orbiting satellite and crash landed in his pool with a broken wing.

The movie basically follows him wanting to be faithful to his fiancee who does not believe he isn't cheating on her throughout the whole film. Threats of the thing escalating wreak havoc as we move through the simple plot, but nothing ever really gets as out of hand as it could have. I'm not sure if this ranks as a disappointment because it didn't or a relief that we didn't go into cliche-land of government agents and such.

The focus remained on the guy and his desired relationship with his fiancee who grew crazier and crazier as the story proceeded. The way it was all resolved was unexpected, but ultimately satisfying for the storyline we were given.

Everything else is normal RomComLand stuff. Characters are decently built to service the story and the plot is very easy to follow. Just a simple movie date night kind of film that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy when it's over.

*batteries not included -- 1987 -- PG

So we step back a few years to a movie about some people living in a building slated for demolition. They're stubborn and don't want to move. They refuse the evil developer's money and stay put where they are. As could be expected, they get hoods coming round who are supposed to force them out, and said hoods generally wreck the place to encourage them to move on.

So is where the story heats up. These little robots show up for some reason and start fixing everything and helping these people survive this unfortunate event. Well, this perturbs the goons and the developer since they still refuse to move. The old cafe on the first floor goes from run-down nothing to hopping joint in no time with the construction workers spending their lunches there, and the "fixers", as they term the little alien robots, continue to help.

To go much further is spoiler territory, but the plots flows very easily and logically from point to point (and it should...it had five writers on it, and Spielberg as a producer). The characters are fairly well drawn throughout with the old couple who own the shop, the pregnant Spanish girl who longs for her musician boyfriend, and the struggling artist who wants the building relegated to landmark status so it can't be torn down.

It's a clever and fun film to watch, and although the ending is inevitable from the get-go, watching it all play out makes for an enjoyable film experience. Might I also mention that soundtrack with the catchy jazz tunes that keep running through your head...even now, I hear it. Or maybe that's the voices...

Robocop -- 1987 -- R

I'd seen this quite some time ago as I vividly recalled the line, "I'll buy that for a dollar." Nice little film that follows the "superhero" formula where we get to see how this character came to be hearking easily towards future sequels.

We start with a future where a corporation owns the law enforcement. This corporation has a security division that is working to create a police robot to handle the dangerous situations. When the senior person's idea kills someone, a junior exec jumps with his Robocop idea and they just need a candidate (i.e. someone on the force to die). Well, the get one pretty quickly (they had estimated 40 days), and he gets hooked up to the machinery and becomes Robocop.

But all is not a cheery bed of roses. They sidestep the cliche of him going crazy and killing everyone, and instead go with a guy who remembers how he died and everything and everyone he lost when he did. It really works well to evoke some solid sympathy for our walking bucket of bolt.

While he is remembering, he takes down criminals all over the police, some of whom remember killing him. This sets him on a journey to find this guy and his cohorts in a sort of vendetta against them for killing him. He is stopped, though, by his prime directives for obeying the law.

It's a fun movie to watch, and works very well plot wise. Robocop was a rather well-rounded and sympathetic fellow, but not many of the other characters are. We definitely get some sympathy for him when everyone turns against him for doing what is right. It does get a little gory here and there, but it works well within the structure of the storyline.

So great flick from the eighties. Worth checking out if you're not sure what else to put on.

The Gate -- 1987 -- PG-13

Sometimes, when someone recommends a movie to watch, you take it with a grain of salt. You decide whether or not it's worth spending time on based on what you know of the person, their tastes, their criticisms, etc. Such is the way I came across this film, and frankly, I feel like strangling the one who recommended and removing from my list everything else he thinks is so good. Really, I think the only thing this one has going for it is obscurity, and that's not such a bad thing in this case.

The Gate is the story of a couple of kids who find a geode is the backyard under a tree that collapsed (under some bizarre and almost dreamlike circumstances), but when they try to dig for more geodes, they come across this deep crevasse like a cave and one really huge geode. One thing leads to another and they find that this cave houses a gateway between our world and the demon world, and they have thus far managed to activate this gate and only the sacrifice of two people can bring the demons into this world to make it their hell (bwa ha ha).

Anyway, this film is wrought with ideas gone wrong beginning with the entire concept of how this gate is to be opened and how it is accomplished. First, the "magic words" were inscribed on a doodle pad when the big geode was broken open. This was early on in the film and where my belief started breaking down. A doodle pad? Come on. Now, said doodle pad (It's hard to say doodle pad without smiling, isn't it? Come now, this is a horror movie.) was originally in the house where the gate is located, but somehow, it found its way to the other kids house, so when he was listening to this satanic record album, he could discover the striking similarities between the writing on the doodle pad (hehe, doodle) and the writing in the sizable insert to this record album.

Turns out this tree was busted at the very time when the constellations aligned and the gate could be opened. It also just so happened to be the weekend when the kids' parents went out of town so the demons could attack without parental involvement. I'll bet you can guess what else happened in this movie...

If you said party with a bunch of irresponsible teenagers, then you would be 100% correct. We get all the good cliches of smoking and drinking and dancing, along with insulting the kid brother and general irritatingness that comes with movie teen parties when the parents are out of town.

It looks like this film was made on a shoestring budget. There were some decent stop motion animation effects that blended fairly well with the live action. However, some of the other effects having to do with some moths imposed on the background image were nothing short of shoddy. Huge black outlines around the whole mess which only served to take away from the experience. Sure, it's 1987, but these things could have been cleaned up back then too.

Finally, let's talk about pacing. It was 45 minutes before anything significant happened. We get a few bouts of weirdness, but nothing exceptional. The main kid levitating and a weird occurrence to the friend is about the limit of this first part of the movie beyond the curiosity of the hole in the backyard. There are some decent setups and payoffs here and there, but it just moves really slowly with no perceived threat beyond the gaping hole in the backyard that only threatens with B-movie proportions. This means we are TOLD what it's for, but we never SEE it do anything besides using up the budget buying more dry ice to keep the steam coming.

In the end, this movie was really nothing exceptional. The threat is barely threatening until it finally shows itself very late in the film. It does have some decent characters, but as soon as one of them says "wait here while I check it out," my eyes roll and they miss out on perfection. The plot was contrived, to say the least, and was difficult to accept given all of the coincidences that had to happen to make it conceivable. The main thing you'll have going for you here is a movie no one has seen so you can recommend it and look like a horror hound for having caught a movie from the 80's that no one else has seen. Gosh, I feel so privileged.

Then again, a horror movie with a zero body count is rather unique...I'll give it that.