45 Movies For 45 Years: 1988

The summer of 1988 was a milestone of a year for me. I finished elementary school when I graduated from Ms. Bouchet’s homeroom class. The following fall I would be a big kid, and I’d start taking classes across town at the middle school. Yes, in the south, we don’t usually call it Jr. High…we call it “middle school”.

And my love of movies was just beginning to kick into full gear. I wasn’t just obsessed with movies themselves anymore. I was quickly becoming enthralled in the production aspects as well. I know that year brought us the classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For a long time…that was it. I didn’t need anything else. A movie filled with live-action AND cartoons? Yes! Please, yes!

I devoured magazine articles that told how all the special effects were done. I was amazed at the lengths they went to make a cartoon rabbit drink out of a real whiskey glass. It was amazing!

As I have grown, I still have a fond appreciation for that film. I watch it every now and again to scratch that nostalgic itch. But several other films came out in 1988 that I also consider among my favorites. Tom Hanks was getting Big…Michael Keaton was grossing us out in Beetlejuice…and Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman had the classic Rain Man.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I started to grow an appetite for action movies. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was hooked on films that had heart-thumping shootouts, car chases, people hanging from buildings, explosions, and everything else you’d associate with brainless popcorn films. One thing that I’ve noticed is that many of the action flicks I loved as a teenager seem to be cut from a template. There is a pattern that most of them follow that leads to them becoming successful. It’s a quality that has only been done perfectly one time; in the movie that created the cloth from which all others are cut.

Die Hard.

Die Hard stars Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, Alan Rickman, and Reginald VelJohnson. It was directed by John McTiernan, who was mostly known for the film he’d directed the year before… Predator.

Bruce Willis was a fairly well-known person in 1988. He was in a pretty popular comedy/drama called Moonlighting at the time. But, in my opinion, this movie solidified him as a leading man in film.

Willis plays John McClane, a cop from New York who flies out to LA to spend Christmas with his family. His marriage has been on the rocks lately, and he’s hoping to get back into his wife’s good graces. His wife is Holly McClane (Bedelia). She has recently taken a job as an executive for the Nakatomi Corporation. They are having their Christmas party when John arrives. When he gets there, he goes to the bathroom just in time for some terrorists, led by Hans Gruber (Rickman), who want to steal the bearer bonds that the company has in their vault. They take the party-goers hostage except for John. Iit is up to him to stop the terrorists from killing any innocent victims and save his wife.

Before I tell you what I think of the movie (love it), I want to give you a bit of background info that I’ve always found interesting.

Die Hard was based on a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever, written by Roderick Thorpe in 1979. In the book, the main character’s name is Joe Leland. He is a retired New York City cop. He flies out to visit his daughter who is working for a big corporation, and they're having their Christmas party. The rest of it is pretty much the same. He even swings through the window just like Willis does in the film.

This is where it gets a little interesting. Nothing Lasts Forever was the sequel to another novel that Thorpe wrote in 1966 called The Detective. That book was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland. He had in his contract that if they ever decided to make a sequel to that film, he would get the first opportunity to reprise his role. So, honoring the contract, Fox offered the lead role in Die Hard to Frank Sinatra. Can you imagine ol’ Blue Eyes, in his late sixties, crawling through the ductwork in his undershirt and with his bleeding feet? It would have been something altogether different.

Luckily, Sinatra turned the role down. It was retooled into what we have now. Bruce Willis was chosen mainly because he was new and he was a lot cheaper than some of the big stars that were eyeing the role.

The rest is history.

Die Hard is the perfect action movie. It has the gunfire, explosions, and fight scenes that you’d expect. But this was one of the first times I remember seeing humor so perfectly woven into a film in which the stakes were life and death. Willis had so many one-liners that it’s impossible to remember them all. And those little jokes did not detract from the tension. They actually made it feel more real. It made John McClane seem more like a real person. And that made the movie that much more intense.

And what can I say about Alan Rickman? He was one of my favorite actors. So many movies that I love he was a part of and just made them so much better by doing what he does best. The slow, methodical way he delivered his lines with just enough of an accent to make them seem more menacing was incredible. And this was the first movie that I ever remember seeing him in. If he had not been there, I don’t think this film would be the classic that I think of it as being today.

I really can’t do anything but gush over this movie. I watch it at least once a year. It was so well received, they made another one a couple of years later that was very good as well. It wasn’t AS good as sequels usually aren’t. But it was strong and stood on its own.

The third one though…wow! We’ll have to see in a week or so, but I think that one has a chance of making it on this list as well.

Then we get the stories of movies written to be Die Hard sequels and ended up becoming their own thing. You can see the origins coming from that original film. Under Siege (Die Hard on a ship). Speed (Die Hard on a bus). The list goes on.

And then there are the movies that were supposed to be other things and eventually were rewritten to put John McClane in them. Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard both suffer because of that.

But there was a teenager that just happened to be in the room one night when his dad turned on the TV and started watching Die Hard…and that kid was hooked on stupid blow-em-up flicks ever since.

45 Movies For 45 Years: 1987

In 1987 I had been alive for a solid 10 years. I distinctly remember going to a barbecue on my birthday, as we usually did since it was also the 4th of July. I walked to the sitting area on my uncle’s deck overlooking the lake and announced to my grandparents that I was a decade old. It didn’t impress them that much, especially since they had over 50 years on me.

The year I turned 10 was a pretty big year at the movies. Leonard Nimoy was working his directing chops with Three Men And A Baby. Michael Douglas had a Fatal Attraction. And Mel Gibson and Danny Glover started a franchise that spanned four films with the original Lethal Weapon.

The movie that came out that year that had the most of an impact on me is kind of embarrassing to admit. I may have to turn in my cinephile card once I admit how big of a fan I am of Ernest Goes To Camp.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Ernest P. Worrell. If you’ve never heard of him, you need to go to YouTube and at least watch some of the old commercials that he used to appear in. It was a weird thing that happened in the 80s because usually, a character that appears in commercials is owned by a brand like Flo or Mayhem. This time, the character was owned by an ad company and was licensed to advertise all kinds of products. The ones that I remember the best were for Mello Yello.

Ernest was played exquisitely by Jim Varney. He was the quintessential redneck, complete with a denim vest and ball cap. And in the commercials, he used to address his unseen neighbor, Vern, whose point of view we were usually looking at him through. He tortured Vern, continuously terrorizing him with his attempts to “help” him. He usually ended up demolishing a part of Vern’s home or injuring him in some way.

Ernest first transitioned to film in Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, which went straight to video in 1986. It was a weird movie in which Jim Varney played multiple characters, only one of which was Ernest. Varney was a master of faces and voices. You can tell by watching his performances that Jerry Lewis had a huge influence over him. Future comedians such as Jim Carrey drew inspiration from him…whether or not they admit it.

Ernest Goes To Camp was the first theatrical movie to feature Ernest. The story is something that we’ve seen a few times. Ernest gets a job as a cook at Camp Kikakee. Being a perpetual 13-year-old boy at heart, he becomes fast friends with many children attending the camp. When the camp is bought by a big corporation that plans to demolish it, he and those kids go to war to save it.

This movie is hilarious. There were a lot of movies that followed with Ernest in the title where Varney reprised his role, but this one was very different. The later movies tended to have more slapstick and almost skit-like things thrown in. They almost turned Ernest into a cartoon character and put him into situations no human could survive. But here, it was almost like all the characters around him were from a different kind of movie than he was. Ernest stood out because he was in normal surroundings. There weren’t any monsters coming after him like in Ernest Scared Stupid. He wasn’t saving Santa like in Ernest Saves Christmas. And he wasn’t becoming a basketball phenom like in Slam Dunk Ernest.

This movie had a ton of comedy which was great for the 10-year-old me that loved watching the commercials every time they came on. But later on, when the camp is closing and Ernest seems to be losing his friends, I discovered that there was more to this character than just a lot of sight gags. And I discovered the genius of Jim Varney, whose career I would follow until his death in 2000 at the age of 50.

A lot of people look at the name Ernest on a movie poster and automatically assume that it’s going to be some stupid comedy that kills a few brain cells every minute that it’s on the screen. And if you’re watching some of the later direct-to-video films, then those people would probably be right. But this first movie was an exception. This is a heartwarming story told through the eyes of an exceptionally funny character played by a talented comedian. I strongly recommend you take 90 minutes and give Ernest Goes To Camp a shot. It is my favorite movie of 1987.

45 Movies For 45 Years: 1986

1986 is a year that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Not because of any particular movie that came out, but because of something that happened in the news.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read every book that my library had about the space program, the planets in our solar system, the moon, NASA…you name it. So, when I was I the third grade and we got the news that a teacher was going to go into space and conduct classes for us on television. I was thrilled.

That was the year the Challenger exploded a few second after blast off. The entire crew died.

That we saw it happen made it so much harder to deal with. It was a defining moment in my life. It was the moment that I realized that not all the stories had a happy ending.

I just wanted to take a moment and acknowledge that at the top of this entry. But this blog is about movies, and there were a few of them in 1986.

Sigourney Weaver was fighting Aliens, Ralph Macchio was back in The Karate Kid Part II, and Matthew Broderick was making comedy history with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But, for the second time in this series the film that made the biggest impact on me was a Star Trek movie. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

I wrote a while back about the fantastic movie that I thought Star Trek II was. Star Trek III has never been one of my favorites, even though it was the story of how Spock came back from the dead. But it was successful enough for Paramount to trust Leonard Nimoy to fill the director’s chair one more time. The Voyage Home is the third part of the Star Trek trilogy, which a lot of fans call II, III, and IV. They have a story thread that runs through them, starting with the death of Spock, then the destruction of the Enterprise, and finishing up here as the crew returns to Earth and takes on a new ship.

The difference in this movie and the others is that it is a comedy, though the premise doesn’t seem very funny. In the 23rd century a mysterious probe show up out of nowhere and starts evaporating the Earth’s oceans. It is threatening the life of the planet. Just as this is happening, the Klingon Bird of Prey that the Enterprise crew took over in the last movie show up. Spock does a little bit of magic reasoning and figures out that the probe is trying to communicate with what it thinks is the main life form of Earth, humpback wales. They were prominent in the oceans the last time the probe came around a few million year ago. But by then they’re all gone. So, Kirk decides to do what any of us would do…go back in time and scoop up a couple of whales.

So, we get a funny movie about Kirk, Spock, McCoy and company walking around in San Francisco in 1986. Most of them are human, but their reality is so far removed from what life was like in their ancient past that it’s hilarious to see them try to blend in. A lot of the comedy comes from watching Spock doing the nerve pinch on a bus punk, McCoy resurrecting a bed-ridden old lady with some future medicine, Scotty causing a paradox by inventing future materials, and Checkov asking various passersby where he can find the “nuclear wessel”.

As far as plot…there isn’t really much. This movie was supposed to be a light-hearted romp and give fans a welcomed breather after the heavy plots of the last two films. The crew had dealt with the death and resurrection of their friend. This time, they were looking for whales in the past.

That’s all that I really have to say about it. It’s not the best Star Trek movie…but of all the movies that came out in 1986, it is the one that had the biggest impact on me. I love Star Trek…and I love time travel. Some of the best Star Trek episodes had to do with time travel, and this was the first film that dealt with it. It wasn’t the last, and it didn’t even do it the best. That distinction belongs to First Contact. But, if you want to have a fun adventure with the crew of the Enterprise…er, HMS Bounty…The Voyage Home is the way to go.