1980s – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – Anguish

Anguish (1987)
Written and directed by Bigas Luna

Sometimes, you discover an underrated movie so cleverly made you are shocked that more people aren’t talking about it. That’s how I felt thirty minutes into Anguish as the film made a huge revelation that completely turned the audience on their head. I won’t go into more detail in this introductory paragraph, but I will discuss spoilers below. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, I would recommend finding a way to do so. Streaming in the U.S. is only available via a Full Moon Features channel subscription on Amazon. I don’t know about the rest of their catalog, but this is well worth watching, and it has clearly inspired several contemporary horror directors.

Movie Review – From Beyond

From Beyond (1986)
Written by Brian Yuzna, Dennis Paoli, and Stuart Gordon
Directed by Stuart Gordon

Stuart Gordon was a well-regarded name in American horror cinema, particularly in the 1980s. Born in Chicago in 1947, Gordon was drawn to acting and live theater, which he majored in at university. After graduation, he started his own theater company and engaged in highly provocative stagings. One of these, The Game Show, was designed as an attack on audience apathy. With plants in the audience, Gordon’s cast would begin to provoke the viewers, and each show would conclude with an audience riot that brought the play to a halt. He put on a politically charged adaptation of Peter Pan in 1968, which got him and his wife arrested for obscenity. Live nude actors and allusions to pixie dust being a substitution for LSD seemed to draw ire from the community. Gordon would come around to film in the mid-1980s, with his first production being The Re-Animator and From Beyond as his follow-up.

Comic Book Review – X-Men by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee Omnibus Volume One

X-Men by Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Omnibus Volume One (2021)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #244-269, X-Men Annual #13, and Classic X-Men #39
Written by Chris Claremont and Ann Nocenti
Art by Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Rob Liefeld, Rick Leonardi, Kieron Dwyer, Bill Jaaska, Whilce Portacio, Mike Collins, Dan Green, Steve Leialoha, Kent Williams, Scott Williams, Josef Rubenstein, and Art Thibert

Following the conclusion of Inferno, Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men entered a strange period. He would wrap up the Australia-era team only to disband the X-Men. Yet the comic would continue. Instead of team-centered stories, the book became a rotating anthology about mutants who had been or were associated with the X-Men. There wasn’t a team officially bearing that name for nearly a year, but the stories continued. What was happening was a showdown between Claremont and new line editor Bob Harras.

Movie Review – Damnation

Damnation (1988)
Written by Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai
Directed by Béla Tarr

You must remove any of your expectations when you sit down to watch a Béla Tarr film. He’s a filmmaker I’d heard of for years and even seen films influenced indirectly & directly by him. The Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still by his late protege Hu Bo was one of them. But I’d never seen anything by Tarr himself. I decided to watch his four highest-rated movies, made during the second period of his career, where he changed his style and produced work that is considered some of the finest films ever made. These are definitive slow cinema stories in no hurry and use their plodding nature to emphasize some cruel truths about being human.

Comic Book Review – X-Men: Inferno Omnibus

X-Men: Inferno Omnibus (2018)
Reprints X-Factor #33-40, X-Factor Annual #4, X-Terminators #1-4, Uncanny X-Men #239-243 and New Mutants #71-73
Written by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, and Mark Gruenwald
Art by Marc Silvestri, Walter Simonson, Jon Bogdanove, Terry Shoemaker, Bret Blevins, Jim Fern, Rob Liefeld, Dan Green, Bob Wiacek, Al Williamson, Al Migrom, Joe Rubenstein, Mike Manley, and Hilary Barta

For five years, Madelyne Pryor had existed as a mystery in the X-Men corner of the Marvel Universe. A few years after losing Jean Grey, Cyclops met her doppelganger, an Alaskan pilot. Their love blossomed, they married, and they even had a baby. But then Jean miraculously returned, and Cyclops abandoned his wife and child so that he could head back to New York City as part of X-Factor. Maddie was attacked by the Marauders, and her baby was stolen. She’d end up with the X-Men in Dallas, where they were killed in front of television cameras only to be resurrected by the goddess Roma and sent off into a new chapter of life in the Australian Outback. Finally, Claremont would reveal the true nature of Maddie in what would serve as the first true X-Men crossover, an event that touched on all the ongoing books and had tie-ins throughout the Marvel Universe.

PopCult Podcast – Beetlejuice/Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

With Tim Burton’s latest opening in theaters, we decided to take a look back. The first is a classic, his second feature which introduced us to the ghost with the most. The second is YA novel adaptation from 2016 that is heavy on the CG and exposition.

Comic Book Review – X-Men: Inferno Prologue Omnibus

X-Men: Inferno Prologue Omnibus (2021)
Reprints X-Factor #27-32, X-Factor Annual #3, Uncanny X-Men #228-238, X-Men Annual #12, New Mutants #62-70, New Mutants Annual #4, Marvel Age Annual #4, and Marvel Fanfare #40
Written by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, Tom DeFalco, Walter Simonson, and Mark Gruenwald
Art by Marc Silvestri, Walter Simonson, Rick Leonardi, Jon J. Muth, Bo Hampton, Bret Blevins, Terry Shoemaker, June Brigman, Arthur Adams, Steve Lightle, Tom Artis, Paris Cullins, Ron Lim, John Buscema, and Craig Hamilton

The X-Men are dead. At least, that’s what the world believes in Chris Claremont’s landmark run. The Fall of the Mutants storyline ended with the team dying and secretly being resurrected by the goddess Roma. These are not the X-Men from the animated series or the films but a roster not referenced in contemporary comics or media adaptations. Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, and Rogue are here – standards that we associate with the team over the decades. But there’s also pre-ninja Psylocke, Cyclops’s brother Havok, pop star Dazzler, and Mojoverse refugee Longshot. Madelyne Pryor, Cyclops’s wife & a dead ringer for Jean Grey, is there too. More on them later, as this collection begins with X-Factor.

Movie Review – Black Rain

Black Rain (1989)
Written by Shōhei Imamura and Toshirō Ishido
Directed by Shōhei Imamura

In a bizarre coincidence, two movies titled Black Rain were released in 1989. They both take place in Japan. They opened in theaters one week apart. The other Black Rain we won’t be reviewing is a Michael Douglas-led action picture about the Yakuza directed by Ridley Scott. No one involved in the writing of that film was Japanese. But they both derive their title from the same phenomenon: the black rain that fell after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This substance was nuclear fallout falling like rain from the massive pyrocumulus cloud left in the bomb’s wake. The U.S. picture uses the black rain as a plot point and doesn’t really provide context or give adequate respect to the victims. As is typical in escapist Western cinema, it’s exploitation from top to bottom. Not so with the Japanese film.

Movie Review – Miracle Mile

Miracle Mile (1988)
Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt

Part of the curse the United States put upon itself by developing and then dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations in Japan is that they had set a new precedent. In places like Dresden, they employed similar tactics with less, but still devastating weapons. Pre-industrial war had always affected civilian populations, but this was something new. The atomic bomb wasn’t just a tool of destruction; it was mass annihilation. It was genocide contained in a small package. Once you use something like that on another society, the U.S. would inevitably live in paranoia that it would be done to them. They forgot the part that few societies on Earth are as profoundly sociopathic as ours.

Movie Review – Grave of the Fireflies

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Written and directed by Isao Takahata

Not all the horrors in Japan were the result of the two atomic bombings. What gets less coverage in U.S. history books are the ongoing firebombings of civilian areas. The same B-29s that would eventually drop the horrid nuclear weapon would also drop standard bombs and burn neighborhoods to the ground, creating orphans and widows. What made this so much worse was the fascist stance of the society. There was some community, but certainly not the level needed for people to recover. Whereas now we can see those who still survive in Gaza keep hope alive by caring for one another, these sentiments were not nearly as widespread in imperial Japan. Some people even found it within themselves to walk by dying children and not think to help them.