The 1980s are a difficult time to explain to people who weren’t there. For the 20th century, every decade had a distinctive look and feel, right up until the late ’90s when everything cultural started to have a whiff of nostalgia. One can look at only a few seconds of a film from the 20th century and be able to tell which decade it came from. Meanwhile, here in this rotten century, nothing seems to have changed since the early 2000s. Fashion, music, movies…there are new names, but a unique, stylistic identity to the times we live in has been lost.
Back to the ’80s. Then was the culmination of decades of change, and the overarching theme seemed to be garishness. Bright colors everywhere (except in the home, which remained stubbornly brown), music with strange sounding instruments, big hair, and, as today’s movie shows, outfits that are beginning to look as bizarre as powdered wigs and pantaloons.
From 1989 comes Alien Private Eye, written, produced, directed, and edited by Vik Rubenfeld. Shot in 1987, but stuck in a can until it obtained a VHS release, Alien Private Eye is another film rescued from the approaching abyss by Vinegar Syndrome, who cleaned it up and released a Blu-ray in 2022. And it’s good they did. Before they ran this flick through the ringer, the only way to watch it were degraded VHS transfers uploaded to the tubes, and those are barely watchable, with fuzzy picture and muddy sound. Continue reading “Alien Private Eye”
1989 was a banner year for producers Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi. After a falling out with Ronald Gilchrist at City Lights Entertainment, the two formed PM Entertainment and began cranking out wonderfully inept direct-to-video movies. They released seven movies that first year, and distributed two more. Three of those movies were ersatz neo-noir Los Angeles thrillers featuring Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, whom older readers will remember as Freddie ‘Boom Boom’ Washington from Welcome Back, Kotter. The relationship with Hilton-Jacobs was so worthwhile, in fact, that PM tapped him to direct. Written alongside Raymond Martino and Merhi, Hilton-Jacobs helmed Angels of the City, the story of a sorority initiation gone wrong.
Filmmaker David A. Prior has become a favorite here at Shitty Movie Sundays. Whenever we see his name pop up in the credits of some cheapie action flick the air shimmers with excitement. Low rent. Joyous and lacking all shame. Gloriously stupid. Prior, sadly lost in 2015, had an innate sense of what made action flicks of the 1980s work. He could never muster the technical skill to push these flicks into a higher tier of objective quality, but he knew that keeping things light and preposterous was the starting point for successful action at the time.
Nick (Nicholas Hoppe, who also produced and had a story credit) has a dream. Well, he has two dreams. And, also a third. Firstly, Nick wants to write the Great American Novel. Dream number two is to open Los Angeles’ newest and hottest nightclub in an old factory building (played by the former Boyle-Midway plant in beautiful City of Commerce, California). Nick’s third dream is to have passionate, unrestrained, and on-demand sex from his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Kaitan).