Spooktober IV Reviews 10 & 11: They Came from the 80’s!

I’m a bit fed up with 80’s nostalgia. While I’ll freely admit that I enjoyed the first season of Stranger Things, it was in the way that I also enjoy episodes of bizarre sci-fi police procedural Alien Nation. Was it a pleasant enough distraction at the time? Sure. Will I ever go back and watch it again? Not on your life. 

What is there to be nostalgic about anyway? The 1980’s sucked, at least at a societal level. We look back fondly on the consumerist hellscape that sprouted up around our ears, but when your wistful obsession with an entire decade boils down to “you can turn this car into a robot” and “wow remember Eggo Waffles, that thing that still very much exists at every grocery store in the country,” it might be an intellectually hollow pursuit.

Do not misunderstand me, there are so many things that came out of the 1980’s that I love; things that could only have come out of the 1980’s precisely because of the shitty nature of the world at the time. Constant threat of nuclear annihilation? Check. A supervirus pandemic that attacked some of the most vulnerable and under-served communities of people? Check. A psychotically unsympathetic government in charge of everything? Check. What about rampant consumerism combined with the complete erosion of our financial system that only benefited the already impossibly wealthy? Double check. All of the smart people making good art in the 1980’s were shaped and molded by this poisoned cultural well. The shiny fun Stranger Things bullshit is surface deep, and by their very nature can only offer fleeting moments of “ah yes, I do indeed remember [pop culture reference or discontinued consumer product].”

This review is not about some of the great films from the 1980’s. This review is about a couple of not-so-great movies that are so blissfully and stupidly 80’s that they scratch that nostalgic itch while also reminding us of that important fact: it was a dumb decade. 

The Stuff (1985)

Larry Cohen

“Can’t get enough of The Stuff!”

Remember that episode of Futurama where Fry and Leela discover a planet covered in a delicious snack they call Popplers, and it becomes a worldwide sensation before it’s discovered that they’re actually alien embryos? You do? Perfect! Then you’ve already seen The Stuff and you don’t need to be worried about spoilers.

Well, to be fair, The Stuff is not alien embryos. It is a gelatinous, yogurt-like substance that evidently A) tastes amazing, B) is good for you, C) cures what ails ya, D) is addictive, E) controls your mind, and F) turns you into one of the hollow robot employees from the Silver Shamrock company in Halloween III so that when you get punched, your whole face falls off. It also comes from the ground and is sucked out of the earth by the petroleum corporation that discovered it, rushing it to market after paying off the FDA so that they wouldn’t research its potential downsides. You can see where the VERY SUBTLE social commentary might come in.

It might sound like I’m shitting on The Stuff, and, well, maybe, but it’s really not as bad as I’m flippantly making it out to be. It’s just sloppy. Like dropping a full carton of yogurt onto your rug sloppy. There are moments here that are truly great. When The Stuff is either entering or leaving a human’s body without their approval, we get some great mask and splatter effects as the white goop shoots out of their face holes with great aplomb. There are also some really wonderful camera tricks when the titular stuff is moving on its own, giving something that looks like Cool Whip a menacing, almost Blob-like quality. All of the fluff (no pun intended) around The Stuff is also fantastic. The commercials, songs, and even fashion shows devoted to The Stuff are all great, but are never long enough and don’t pack the same punch as the extra fluff in, say, Robocop. It comes off feeling a little thin here.

This man is full of stuff

The movie was a passion project for Larry Cohen, a man who built his career on B-movie schlock, and is clearly poking fun at the genre, especially at the trend in films at the time to take something from the 1950’s and remake it for a modern audience (The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Fly). The only problem is that Larry Cohen is not John Carpenter, Philip Kaufman or David Cronenberg, and so The Stuff tries to make fun of the very thing it is: a schlocky half-baked horror/satire. I actually like some of the performances here, especially from Detroit’s own Michael Moriarty playing a corporate saboteur hired by ice cream companies to find out what The Stuff actually is. His accent never really finds a home, and his character is just so poorly written, but he acts his heart out anyway, and I respect that. Oh, and Garrett Morris shows up for about seven minutes, and steals the show, but I’m guessing they could only afford him for one day of shooting, because he disappears for an hour before showing up right at the end still wearing the same clothes from the earlier scene. 

By the time Paul Sorvino’s too-goofy-by-half army man character shows up in the third act, you just want to eat a tub of Cool Whip and go to bed.

REVIEW: A pint of mediocre ice cream that your dog licked the top of. You’re still going to eat it, but you’re only going to enjoy some of it.

HOW I WATCHED IT: Amazon? I rented it? I don’t remember.

BEVERAGE: I also don’t remember, but let’s say: beer.

Bloody Birthday (1981)

Ed Hunt

“Clippings of murders? What are you, a little ghoulie?”

When John Carpenter’s Halloween came out in 1978, it simultaneously created the genre of teenage slasher and proved to every director that, regardless of means, they too could make a career defining horror film. And so three short years later, Bloody Birthday is thrust unto the world for all to enjoy.

Bloody Birthday is not such much an homage to Halloween as it is, at times, almost a shot-for-shot ripoff. Obviously the premise is slightly different, but the ideas at the gooey center are all the same. In Bloody Birthday  we have three (unrelated) evil 4th graders who were all born under the double whammy of bad signs: a solar eclipse AND a planetary convergence. As they approach their 10th birthdays, the evil inside them begins to stir, and they terrorize the community around them. 

Well, sort of. The movie talks a big game, but the body count is disappointingly low (as is the blood). The kids really just go after a parent, a teacher, a few horny teens (fun fact: a group of horny teens in a movie is known as a murder of horny teens) and some pesky witnesses to their horrible crimes. They hint that they have bigger evil plans in mind, but these never come to fruition. Probably because 10 year olds are stupid. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it; the kids are evil and so they have to kill. Finally we have an answer to the question of “what would have happened if Michael Meyers hadn’t been institutionalized as a small boy?” And that answer is “he would have maybe killed a couple people and then been stopped easily by literally any adult paying attention.”

In Halloween, the sparse body count and dearth of gore works because every scene is working to build the tension. In Bloody Birthday, the scenes in between kills are just the kids farting around with dumb hijinks like pretending to put ant poison in birthday cake icing, or using a peep hole to spy on one of the kid’s teenage sister while she changes (they have to pay the little girl 25 cents per peep). 

Easily the best scene in the movie, both in terms of absurd hilarity and genuine creep factor, is at the birthday party for the three little creeps. Nobody gets killed, but in the background of one of the shots, there’s a horrible early 80’s birthday clown juggling for a group of kids. When the camera gets closer to him, for just a brief moment, you get a shot of his face and his shirt, and friends it is chilling. Take a look:

His shirt says “I Can’t Say No!” At a birthday party! For children! That is simply not an appropriate outfit for a clown. It's just a t-shirt for Christ's sake. This is scarier than all 14 hours of the IT films.

It’s hard to believe that a 4 second scene can make a movie, but here we are.

REVIEW: You can definitely say no

HOW I WATCHED IT: Shudder, baby


BEVERAGE: Ant Poison