Streets Of Fire (1984)

Screened at Luna Cinemas Leederville as part of the Trash Classics season programmed by VHS Tracking.

My brother attended the Streets Of Fire (1984) screening because of its trailer: “If the movie is anything like that, it’ll be great!” After the movie, my brother said, “It was good, but it’s like these old movies always run out of budget…“ Referring to Michael Pare as the hero Tom Cody, “And the guy doing the John Wayne impression, it’s like we get it…” For a movie to truly be a cult movie, I think it needs to be imperfect. That there needs to be something missing or something wrong with it. If it had all the elements, and if it was perfect, then it would’ve been a hit, right? Before and after Streets Of Fire, I spoke to people who had seen it at a very young age and thought it was great. A perfect movie. Maybe it’s all about when you see it.

Director Walter Hill was going for a comic book movie, one that would be aimed at teenagers and seemed to be borne from Hill’s own obsessions as a teenager in the 1950s. If you’re at that 1980s comic book age and there’s this Star Wars type adventure but completely separate from science-fiction or mediaeval fantasy, “another time, another place”, mashing up different genres from classic western to neo-noir and finally motorcycle gang movies. Streets Of Fire is at its greatest in the opening sequence which hits the ground running with a hard-charging Ellen Aim and the Attackers concert sequence set to ‘Nowhere Fast,’ matching the bombast of songwriter Jim Steinman’s overblown “rock n roll dreams come true” iconography. Right up to the end of the credits, after Cody’s introduction slapping down a gang of teenage hoods. The lighting of neon scenes and wet streets in the night, and the splash panel scene transitions.

The second act is where the film eases off the pedal and slows down. There is a stop and start pace as the characters switch cars and journey back home after Ellen’s rescue from the Bombers motorcycle hideout. The main engine the movie runs on are our heroes making fun of Rick Moranis’ character, a stand-in the capitalistic producer figure and also a total nerd. Then again, I am a sucker for nocturnal odysseys, and when the motley crew of heroes has to bolt from the shadows of the street to an elevated train platform for salvation, echoing a similar scene in Hill’s The Warriors, I was in heaven!

I keep wondering if the film would’ve been better or more complete with another action sequence included, or a more charismatic star in the lead role of Tom Cody. I like Michael Pare, but he and the character lose their shine around the midway point, the stoic drifter begins to feel like a complete jerk, cold-cocking his sweetheart to keep her out of danger and not even apologising for it afterwards! All the characters are archetypes, and the dialogue is a tough front. There’s no depth to the dialogue or the character relationships. The only depth comes in, alongside listening to the soundtrack songs over and over again, in the closing ballad, ‘Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young,’ another Steinman composition, a finale that provides the sweeping romantic feeling that may not be present between the separated lovers.

The cinema audience was a great crowd, particularly the boisterous applause for whenever Willem Dafoe showed up as Raven, the vinyl leather clad biker villain, providing flair with every saunter and every sneer.

Tales From The Crypt (1972)

One of the many horror anthologies that British studio Amicus produced in the 1970s, Tales From The Crypt (1972) is based on the William Gaines EC comics well before HBO revisited them with a quippy animatronic ghoul in the 1990s. Here, the Cryptkeeper is played by Sir Ralph Richardson, basically wearing brown robes and acting quite imperious as sits down five wayward strangers who have become lost during a tour of a graveyard’s catacombs. Five strangers, five self-contained stories, transplanting their American comic-book origins into drab domestic interiors with reliable British character actors. I really had a fun time with Tales From The Crypt. To cover five tales in 90 minutes, well, it doesn’t mess about and gets stuck into each plot, with enough variety between the tales of terror and enough memorable bits of style and horror imagery to satisfy. I have a fondness for these old British anthology horrors as they can feel a bit quaint while conjuring a classic spooky tone, and this one is a rather satisfying entry in the genre, comparable to Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors and even Romero’s Creepshow. It carries on the spirit of the comics in that the tales are mainly nasty people receiving a nasty fate through some strange turn. The cast includes a young Joan Collins, Patrick Magee (from A Clockwork Orange), Ian Hendry (from Get Carter), and of course, Peter Cushing (who apparently took his role, a more sympathetic one of a kindly neighbourhood widower, as a way of coping with the loss of his own wife). Directed by Freddie Francis who was also a successful cinematographer, particularly later on in Hollywood (Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Lynch’s The Straight Story) later on. Available to stream on Tubi. Recommended.

Friday Foster (1975)

While it has violence and nudity, there’s something lighter and frothier about the blaxploitation film, Friday Foster (1975); it’s almost ready to be a crowd-pleasing TV movie pilot, maybe because the film is being based on a comic strip (comparable to Modesty Blaise in terms of syndicated newspaper comics). A vehicle for the great Pam Grier who proves her star power here as the title character, a photo journalist for Glance magazine who has ties to the fashion industry, and is assigned to cover the airport arrival of Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala), a black billionaire Howard Hughes type. When there’s an assassination attempt (one of the shooters is a young Carl Weathers) and Friday gets the scoop, the stage is set for her to be an amateur sleuth that continually gets into The Perils Of Pauline type sticky situations; this gives Grier the chance to alternate between earnest sincerity and charming goofiness. There’s a murder mystery and a political conspiracy, and multiple location shots of Washington DC, and a whispered figure at the centre of it all, the “Black Widow”. It’s also refreshing to see Yaphet Kotto in a wise-cracking hero role, playing Colt Hawkins, a private detective on the case and a foil to Friday; their partnership feels like a nice spin on The Thin Man or Bogey-and-Bacall Hollywood detective dynamic. There’s a great cast including Godfrey Cambridge, Julius Harris, Scatman Crothers, and Eartha Kitt as fashion designer Madame Rena, delightfully tearing through their scenes without even a glance in the rear-view mirror. There’s a sunny neo-noir vibe and screwball comedy throwback gags and patter, just with more casual sex. Music by Luchi De Jesus who also contributes the very catchy title track. As with most 1970s blaxploitation, this was directed by a white guy, Arthur Marks, who also made other classics of the genre that I haven’t seen like Detroit 9000, Bucktown and JD’s Revenge. Streamed on Criterion Channel but also available to rent on iTunes. Recommended.

Darkman (1990)

There’s a scene in Darkman (1990) that had me pumping my fist in giddy delight. Liam Neeson plays Peyton Westlake, a dashing scientist who is trying to crack the code of developing synthetic skin for grafts, and whose experiments have been failing, the cells breaking apart. When the power goes out in Westlake’s home laboratory with his assistant watching, the cells hold even longer due to the darkness (something to do with photosynthesis). Neeson steps into the shadows, a strip of light cast across his eyes, pondering, “What is it about the dark? What secrets does it hold?” I was just so tickled with director Sam Riami’s heightened style here, a scene that harkens back to classic gothic horror melodramas, and this film is a tribute no doubt to the type of movies that inspired Riami as a youth, everything from the classic age of Universal Monsters to Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Hammer Horror. A comicbook movie not based on any comicbook, instead an original idea by Riami when he couldn’t get the rights to adapting The Shadow, Darkman is a movie that stirred my imagination when I was a kid reading comics and seeing the John Alvin illustrated poster advertised in its pages; Liam Neeson wasn’t a big enough star to have his name headlining and it was mysterious, the dark figure in a hat and coat reaching out to you. I taped it off TV and unfortunately the last 15 minutes were cut off, but I would just rewatch it knowing I was missing the ending (truly bizarre to remember that I would just rewatch incomplete movies due to the tape running out or the timer stopping short).

Darkman arrives at a particular point in Hollywood with the mega success of 1989’s Batman ushering in a wave of comic book movies, but it’s also Riami’s next movie after Evil Dead II and his first for a big studio. The imagery also hits at a time when the wave of horror movie franchises are cooling off, yet it stands in between Freddy Kreuger’s pop culture appeal and something like Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, grotesque monsters promoted to a mass market audience. When Westlake’s lawyer girlfriend, Julie (Frances McDormand) uncovers real estate corruption involving a developer Strack (Colin Friels doing an American accent) and sadistic gangster Durant (Larry Drake), Westlake is inadvertently targeted, with his lab and assistant destroyed in the search for key evidence. Electrocuted, thrown into acid and blown up, Westlake survives disfigured, a walking ghoul wrapped in bandages, also receiving the mixed blessing of a medical experiment (as a washed up John Doe) that has severed his pain receptors, which has left him with super-strength and emotional instability. Escaping and reviving his lab in an abandoned factory, Westlake attempts to perfect his skin graft to reclaim his past with Julie while also plotting revenge against those that took away his old life. Neeson’s operatic performance is really great here, evolving and alternating between misery and nastiness, and is keyed into Riami’s signature over-the-top style with dutch camera angles, rear projections, film noir/horror lighting, montages, camera zooms, etc.

A key scene became a bit of a viral point, the ‘Pink Elephant’ scene at the carnival, which is better experienced than described. And while some might mock or belittle the sequence as being bad and silly, to me, it’s a clear example of Riami’s trademark approach, going for extremes that border between campy and maniacal. The movie moves at a clip, and doesn’t spend too much time on the villains – both Friels and Drake are great – and any of their back-story, nor does McDormand really escape the boring ‘girlfriend’ nature of her part. Most intriguingly more time is spent on charting Westlake’s mood swings, and his melancholy loner status, a twisted and grotesque avenger, The Phantom Of The Opera as Frankenstein’s Monster. You can feel Riami clamping down on some instincts to make a mainstream experience, in regards to grotesque violence or gothic gore, and at times the dark satisfaction of the revenge can feel a bit reined in. There’s also the older era of action cinema, the physicality of seeing a stunt-man dangled off a helicopter by a rope while explosions are set off on a city bridge, intermixed with Riami’s use of pre-CGI back projection. While Darkman may be flawed in some ways, I love the flaws and think its a fantastic cross-genre concotion of horror, detective noir and superhero adventure, particularly shot through with the distinctive feel that Riami provides alongside Danny Elfman’s fantastic score, Bill Pope’s cinematography and Tony Gardener’s make up effects. Available to stream on iTunes. Recommended.