1980s

  • Tôru Kawashima – Chi-n-pi-ra (1984)

    Tôru Kawashima1981-1990ActionAsianJapan

    Based on the script by the late Shoji Kaneko, director Toru Kawashima turned it into a buddy movie that has quite the cult following in Japan. The two already collaborated on the, in my opinion, excellent Ryuji a year earlier and shortly before Kaneko’s death.Read More »

  • Toshiharu Ikeda – Shiryô no wana AKA Evil Dead Trap (1988)

    Toshiharu Ikeda1981-1990HorrorJapan

    A late night TV presenter receives a snuff tape, in which a woman is brutally killed. She decides to take a crew out to a location indicated in the tape, but only death and despair await them.Read More »

  • Alexander Kluge – Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit aka The Blind Director [+extras] (1985)

    Alexander Kluge1981-1990ArthouseDocumentaryGermany

    Quote:
    In this “film essay,” director Alexander Kluge handles two different stories with both fictional and documentary aspects. In one story, a foster parent cares for a traumatized young girl who is now an orphan after witnessing a car crash that killed both her parents. After the foster-parent does the right thing and takes the girl to her aunt — her court-appointed guardian — she is shocked to see that neither the wealthy aunt nor her servants are very interested in the girl. An unusual decision follows. In the other story, a director goes blind in the middle of a film project but has to be kept on because of his contract. This situation leads to some philosophizing on the nature of film and art in the modern world. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

  • Jesús Franco – Bahía blanca (1985)

    1981-1990CultJesus FrancoSpainThriller

    Bahia Blanca is an obscure but beautifully atmospheric thriller shot on the Spanish coast. Part crime, part character study, and all Franco… (MondoDigital)Read More »

  • Halit Refig – Teyzem AKA My Aunt (1987)

    1981-1990DramaHalit RefigTurkey

    (warning: you may not want to read this review before watching film.)
    If I am not mistaken, the scenario of this film is based upon an award winning story from Cumhuriyet,a prestigious paper in Turkey.Teyzem( My maternal aunt) is a very sentimental and successfully- managed story of relation between a young aunt in Istanbul and her nephew coming to the city to visit her and his grandparents.The aunt and her nephew, Baris,manage to construct a sound and secret friendship and alliance amongst each others during summer holiday and arrange visits to the former’s boyfriend who is a handsome guitarist in a local band. Noone in the family is aware of these secret visits.In the film, the audience is given opportunity to observe daily life of an Istanbul family making his way through a very moderate economic resources.For grandparents, nothing could be more important than their daughter’s eventual marriage with a decent man.Read More »

  • Brian Eno – Thursday Afternoon (1984)

    1981-1990Brian EnoExperimentalUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    “I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium. Video for me is a way of configuring light, just as painting is a way of configuring paint. What you see is simply light patterned in various ways. For an artist, video is the best light organ that anyone has invented.”

    “I started working with video in the late 70’s … as a way of making paintings. Rather than dramas or stories or all the things that are usually connected with video, because of its background and its connections with theatre and film. I wanted to connect video with pictures and with picture-making, and began by making pieces that were very long, slow, slowly changing examinations of, for instance, a landscape – or in my case the skyscape of Manhattan, where I was living at the time.”Read More »

  • Manuela Serra – O Movimento das Coisas (1985)

    1981-1990DocumentaryManuela SerraPortugal

    A film-documentary which has been very praised by many Portuguese critics / bloggers.

    Quote:
    “A sua singularidade define ao mesmo tempo um modelo – de cinema, de autor, de um país, de uma época –, se esse modelo pudesse ser constituído sob a forma da indefinição e do inacabamento”.

    “Its uniqueness defines also a model – of cinema, of auteur, of a country, of a time – if that model could be established under the form of vagueness and of incompleteness.”Read More »

  • James Robert Baker – Blonde Death (1984)

    USA1981-1990ComedyCultJames Robert Baker

    Meet Tammy, the Teenage Timebomb. Eighteen years of bottled-up frustration are about to explode.

    Quote:
    Romance blooms as the pair spends their days intertwining loins and exterminating innocents. But the endless rumpus falters in the looming shadows of one-eyed homicidal lesbians and former prison boyfriends, and everything soon spirals into apocalyptic, suicidal oblivion. Their lawless descent finally explodes in a sadistic poisoning scheme that wipes out every park-goer at Disneyland; a scene that was illegally shot inside the guarded gates of the actual Magic Kingdom™.Read More »

  • Dean Stockwell & Neil Young – Human Highway (1982)

    Neil Young1981-1990CultDean StockwellSci-FiUSA

    Quote:
    The new owner of a roadside diner stuck in a town built around an always leaking nuclear power plant plans to torch the place to collect insurance. However, an assortment of bizarre characters and weird events (such as spaceships flying around) gets in his way.Read More »

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