Archive
LIFEFORCE – Henry Mancini
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
What do you think of when you think of the music of Henry Mancini? The gentle romance of Breakfast at Tiffany’s? The effortlessly cool jazz of Peter Gunn or The Pink Panther? The forbidden passion of The Thorn Birds? The playful “Baby Elephant Walk” from Hatari? I’d bet my bottom dollar that most people would come up with those classics long before they thought of an epic orchestral sci-fi horror score, but that’s exactly what Mancini wrote for Lifeforce, a British-American production directed by Tobe Hooper and produced by the notorious Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan for Cannon Films. The film is a loose adaptation of Colin Wilson’s 1976 novel The Space Vampires, and stars Steve Railsback as the head of a multi-national space exploration team sent to investigate Halley’s Comet as it makes one of it’s regular 75-year passes past Earth. The team finds a space craft concealed inside the comet’s corona, and inside the space craft they find the preserved bodies of three seemingly humanoid aliens in suspended animation, including one incredibly beautiful female. However, when the space exploration team’s ship returns home, Mission Control in London finds it empty, save for the three aliens, which soon awake and begin draining ‘life force’ energies from every human they encounter. The film co-starred Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart, and Mathilda May, who spends almost the entire film completely naked; despite this obvious selling point, the film was a disaster, recouping less than half of its $25 million budget, and receiving terrible reviews from most critics of the time. Read more…
COCOON – James Horner
THROWBACK THIRTY
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Cocoon was one of the major box-office successes of 1985, a winning combination of science fiction adventure and family drama directed by Ron Howard. The film stars Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronyn as three old-timers living in a retirement community in Florida; part of their daily routine is to sneak into an unoccupied house next door and swim in its swimming pool. One day they find a number of strange, rock-like objects at the bottom of the water, but after checking them out, decide to swim there anyway; following their swim, the three geezers suddenly find themselves rejuvenated with a vigorous, youthful energy, and they share their discovery with their respective wives and lady friends, played by Gwen Verdon, Maureen Stapleton, and Jessica Tandy. However, much to the shock of the senior citizens, the ‘rocks in the pool’ turn out to be cocoons containing dozens of sick aliens, left behind by friendly extra-terrestrials centuries ago, and which were about to be returned to their home planet by their leader, Brian Dennehy, with the help of a local ship captain, played by Steve Guttenberg – until the pool was drained of its life force by the old folks. As such, the sextet of retirees must work with the aliens to help them find a way home, without revealing the secret of the pool. The film earned two Academy Awards – one for Best Supporting Actor for Don Ameche, and one for Best Visual Effects – and boasted a magnificent score by the then 32-year-old James Horner. Read more…
THE GOONIES – Dave Grusin
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most beloved children’s adventure films of the 1980s, The Goonies tells the story of seven friends – Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, and Ke Huy Quan – who are about to be separated forever when their homes in small-town Oregon are bought by a ruthless developer. In a last-ditch attempt to raise the money they need to buy back their property, the Goonies embark on a mission to locate the long-lost treasure belonging to the pirate One Eyed Willie, whose shipwreck is rumored to be just off the coast; however, as they search for the booty, the friends quickly find themselves embroiled in a much more dangerous situation when they accidentally stumble across the Fratelli gang (Anne Ramsey, Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano), bank robbers who are hiding from the law nearby. The film, which was directed by Richard Donner, produced by Steven Spielberg, and written by Chris Columbus, caught the imagination of a generation, and has gone on to be a genre classic, with a multitude of quotable lines and memorable scenes: the cry of “hey, you guys!,” and the term ‘truffle shuffle’ have since gone on to be part of the Hollywood lexicon. Read more…
A VIEW TO A KILL – John Barry
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A View to a Kill is the fourteenth official film in the James Bond canon, and the seventh and last to star Roger Moore as the fictional British secret agent. In this wide ranging story which spans the globe from Siberia to Paris to San Francisco, Bond locks horns with the psychopathic industrialist Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken, who hatches a plan to destroy Silicon Valley in order to gain a monopoly in the worldwide microchip market. Bond is assisted in his assignment by wealthy geologist Stacey Sutton, played by Tanya Roberts, who helps uncover Zorin’s dastardly plan after he tries to strong-arm her into selling her family’s oil company, and there is the usual cast of supporting characters, evil henchmen, beautiful women, and ingenious gadgets. The film was directed by John Glen, co-stars Patrick Macnee and singer Grace Jones, and has an original score by John Barry, the tenth of his eleven works in the series. Read more…
RED SONJA – Ennio Morricone
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Cashing in on the popular success of Conan the Barbarian and the various other sword-and-sorcery epics of the early 1980s was Red Sonja, the tale of a barbarian warrior princess, based on the original story by Robert Howard, the creator of Conan, and directed by Richard Fleischer. The film starred Brigitte Nielsen, the Danish supermodel and future wife of Sylvester Stallone in her first acting job, in the title role as a woman seeking vengeance upon those who murdered her parents, while simultaneously embarking on a quest to find a magical talisman whose power could destroy the world. Despite the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a supporting role as the legendary swordsman Lord Kalidor, the film was critically decimated, receiving brickbats for its acting, writing, direction, and wooden action sequences. In fact, possibly the only member of the cast and crew of Red Sonja to escape unscathed was the legendary composer Ennio Morricone, who unexpectedly found himself scoring the movie. Read more…
THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH – Trevor Jones
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Last Place on Earth was a critically acclaimed British TV mini-series, directed by Ferdinand Fairfax, which aired over seven episodes in the spring of 1985. It charted the epic race between two teams of intrepid adventurers and their efforts to become the first men to reach the South Pole – one from the United Kingdom led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, and one from Norway led by Scott’s great rival, Roald Amundsen. Their trials and tribulations caught the attention of the world in 1912, but ended in great tragedy, as the entire British party famously died from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold on the return journey, having been beaten to the Pole by Amundsen by just a matter of days. The series starred Martin Shaw as Scott, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen, Max von Sydow as Amundsen’s mentor, the famed explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and Brian Dennehy as the American Arctic exploration pioneer Frederick Cook, as well as several now-popular British actors in early supporting roles, including Hugh Grant and Bill Nighy. Read more…
THE COMPANY OF WOLVES – George Fenton
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Company of Wolves is a dark fantasy from director Neil Jordan, based on English author Angela Carter’s mature, sexualized take on the classic Little Red Riding Hood story. The film stars Sarah Patterson as a teenage girl named Rosaleen, who dreams that she lives in a fairytale forest with her parents and sister. In her dream, Rosaleen is given a bright red shawl by her kindly grandmother, accompanied by a warning to stay away from “any strange men whose eyebrows meet in the middle,” Of course, before long, Rosaleen meets a seductive and handsome young huntsman – whose eyebrows meet in the middle – and whose bestial nature proves to be overwhelmingly alluring to the impressionable young woman. The film tackles a number of interesting and complicated themes, ranging from the nature of dreams and nightmares, to emergent sexuality, desire, and revenge. The film, Jordan’s second as a director, co-starred a litany of British character actors, including Angela Lansbury, David Warner, Brian Glover, Stephen Rea, Jim Carter and Terence Stamp, and made liberal use of a number of gruesomely realistic special effects, inspired by the similarly lupine An American Werewolf in London. Read more…
LADYHAWKE – Andrew Powell
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 1985 the sword-and-sorcery genre was still very much at the height of its powers, with successful films like Dragonslayer, Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja and Krull having been released to popular acclaim during the preceding few years. Ladyhawke was less an action-adventure, and more a love story, telling the tale of two cursed lovers in twelfth century France: Etienne Navarre, a brave and noble knight, and Isabeau d’Anjou, a beautiful young noblewoman. The twist of the story comes due to the fact that, despite being in love, they can never truly be together until a curse is lifted – by day, Isabeau assumes the form of a hawk, while Etienne is human; at night, Etienne becomes a wolf, while Isabeau returns to her human form. With the help of a wisecracking thief named Philippe and a kindly priest, Etienne and Isabeau resolve to try to break the curse so they can finally be together. The film was directed by Richard Donner, and stars Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer and Matthew Broderick. Read more…
BABY: SECRET OF THE LOST LEGEND – Jerry Goldsmith
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In my review of Supergirl earlier in this series, I remarked how a number of Jerry Goldsmith scores are essentially ‘parallel universe’ scores, inferior versions of films John Williams scored. From the late 1970s through the mid 1990s, Goldsmith wrote a lot of great music for some truly awful movies, and if you look at his filmography during that period, you can see the pattern developing: where John Williams had Superman, Goldsmith had Supergirl; as Williams had Raiders of the Lost Ark, so Goldsmith had King Solomon’s Mines; and so on. Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend is basically Goldsmith’s Jurassic Park, eight years before Steven Spielberg broke all box office records with his dinosaur movie. It’s a family adventure directed by Bill L. Norton, starring William Katt, Sean Young, Patrick McGoohan and (inexplicably) Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes in an early acting role; it tells the story of Susan and George Loomis, a paleontologist and her husband, who discover a mother and baby brontosaurus in Africa, and try to protect them from hunters who want to capture them. Read more…
THE AVIATOR – Dominic Frontiere
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I would wager than 99% of the people reading this didn’t know that there was a film called The Aviator released 19 years prior to the Oscar-winning Howard Hughes biopic directed by Martin Scorsese – but there was, and this is it. The film is a period action adventure directed by George Miller – not the famous director of Mad Max and The Witches of Eastwick, but the less famous George Miller who directed The Neverending Story Part II and that movie about a seal called Andre. It stars Christopher Reeve as Edgar Anscombe, a rough and ready pilot working for the postal service in the 1920s, who reluctantly agrees to take a passenger, a rich heiress’s daughter named Tillie Hansen played by Rosanna Arquette, on his latest run. Naturally, the plane crash lands on a remote mountain range in Nevada, and the pair must fight to survive against the elements, most notably a pack of hungry wolves that sees them as their next meal. Read more…
WITNESS – Maurice Jarre
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Witness is a thriller set in Pennsylvania’s Amish community. The film stars Harrison Ford as John Book, an honest cop, who is forced to travel to rural Pennsylvania to protect a young Amish boy named Samuel, played by Lukas Haas, who unintentionally witnesses a murder while visiting the big city with his mother Rachel, played by Kelly McGillis. To keep his witness safe, Book tries to maintain a low profile within the community, which shuns modern conveniences and technology, but unexpectedly begins to develop romantic feelings for Rachel, causing friction among the elders, who view Book as an interloper and outsider. Worse still, the murder suspects have discovered the whereabouts of the one eyewitness to their crime, and are coming after the young boy. The film was directed by Peter Weir, and was one of the major cinematic successes of 1985, receiving critical acclaim and eight Oscar nominations, including nods for Best Picture, Best Actor for Ford, and Best Score for the film’s composer, Maurice Jarre. Read more…
CHAMPIONS – Carl Davis
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I was a kid, Grand National day was one of my favorite days of the British sporting calendar. I had, and continue to have, a very personal connection with it, as it was something I shared with my late grandfather, who had a passion for the sport of kings, and my childhood memories of spending those Saturdays with him in the 1980s are some of my fondest. For those who don’t know what it is – which is probably every American reading this – the Grand National is a steeplechase horse race, in which 40 brave and gallant horses and their equally brave and gallant jockeys test themselves by negotiating 30 daunting fences over two 2-mile circuits of the challenging Aintree racecourse in Liverpool. The race has been run every year since 1839, and has grown to become a major television event in the UK, watched by millions across the country. The winning horses, winning jockeys, and the race’s controversies go down in history and become part of the nation’s sporting lexicon – speak to pretty much any Englishman of my generation, and he will know what you’re talking about if you mention Devon Loch or Red Rum, Ginger McCain or Jenny Pitman. However, by far the most famous Grand National in terms of human and equine drama was the race run in 1981. Read more…
STARMAN – Jack Nitzsche
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Starman is a science fiction romance movie, directed by John Carpenter at the height of his studio powers, from a screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, who would later collaborate on the classic coming-of-age drama Stand By Me. The film stars Jeff Bridges as an alien who, in response to the message of peace from the Voyager II probe, is sent to Earth on a scouting mission prior to a planned ‘first contact’ meeting between humanity and the rest of his species. Unfortunately, the alien’s craft is shot down by the military and it crash lands in rural Wisconsin, next to a farm owned by the recently-widowed Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen). The alien takes the form of Jenny’s late husband, and convinces her to drive him to Arizona to rendezvous with his mothership; on the journey, Jenny and the alien bond, initially due to his physical resemblance to her husband, but later due to the alien’s child-like curiosity regarding Earth, and his genuine goodness and compassion. Unfortunately, the US government – personified by NSA colonel Fox (Richard Jaeckel) and a compassionate scientist named Shermin (Charles Martin Smith) – has found out about the alien, and wants to capture him for their own ends. Read more…
THE RIVER – John Williams
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The River is a contemporary drama film directed by Mark Rydell, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek as Tom and Mae Garvey, a married couple trying to make ends meet on their farm in rural Tennessee. Over the course of several years, Tom and his family battle desperately to save and hold on to their home, despite the threats they face when a bank threatens to repossess their farm, when severe storms threaten to make the nearby river burst its banks and ruin their crops, and when a ruthless hydroelectric developer (played by Scott Glenn) threatens to cut off their power supply for his own ends. The film was a moderate critical success when it opened in cinemas in December 1984, and picked up four Academy Award nominations, with nods for Spacek as Best Actress, cinematography, sound, and John Williams’s folksy original score. Williams wrote The River at a time when he was still regularly working with multiple directors, and this was the last of his five collaborations with director Rydell, which previously encompassed similarly Americana-heavy films such as The Reivers, The Cowboys, The Long Goodbye, and Cinderella Liberty. Read more…
UNDER THE VOLCANO – Alex North
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Under the Volcano is a critically-acclaimed drama based on the important novel by Malcolm Lowry. Set against the backdrop of imminent war in Europe, and taking place on the Mexican fiesta celebrating the Day of Dead, the film follows one day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a British consul living in alcoholic disrepair and obscurity in a small southern Mexican town in 1939. The film was one of the last directed by the legendary John Huston, and starred Albert Finney as Geoffrey, Anthony Andrews as his idealistic half-brother Hugh, and Jacqueline Bisset as his ex-wife, Yvonne, who has returned to Mexico with hopes of healing Geoffrey and their broken marriage. Lost amid the blockbusters of the period, the film is largely forgotten today, despite its stellar credentials, and despite its multiple Award nominations, which included Oscar recognition for Finney’s leading role, and for its score by the great Alex North. Read more…
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