1981: it’s the witching hour in America. A recession is in full bloom and Ronald Reagan’s promise to “make America great again” remains, for good or ill, unfulfilled. Strung out between the aching, post-’60s come-down nihilism of the late ’70s and the neoconservative free-market mass-consumption orgy of the Reagan era, the masses occupy a strange, pre-apocalyptic no-man’s-land moment in American culture, and so do the movies.
The great movie year is a ubiquitous concept of movie culture. We love to canonize certain calendar years for marking a changing tide in the world of film, or for just being stacked with excellent movies (or both). Lately I’ve been kinda fixated on 1981, just a banger of a year for genre flicks, killer sequels, exploitation romps, and high camp. I’ve also been reading J. Hoberman’s latest book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan. Hoberman paints an indelible portrait of the ’80s as a decade when Hollywood spectacle crystallized into a new “dream life,” modeled after the American dream of the 1950s and early ’60s, and filled with Reagan’s own “law & order” and deregulation fantasies.
“If the sixties and early seventies were, at least in part, periods of disillusionment,” Hoberman writes, “the late seventies and early eighties brought a process of re-illusionment. Its agent was Ronald Reagan. His mandate wasn’t simply to restore America’s economy and sense of military superiority but also, even more crucially, its innocence.”
But in 1981, re-illusionment was still looming. The New Hollywood’s countercultural ethos would stick around just long enough to collide with the budding commercial and genre-storytelling aesthetics of the newer Hollywood “industry” to birth one of the most influential and oddly underrated movie years ever. Lemme show you what I mean with these 9 great 1981 genre flicks, all seeing their 40th anniversaries this year.
Thief
It’s always a trip when an artist seems to come fully formed right out the gate. Michael Mann’s first theatrical feature has pretty much everything you think of when you think of Mann — a lone-samurai-esque protagonist, cops and robbers, a propulsive synthy score, and lots of cold dark streets wet with rain and neon. Thief is also a thoughtful, melancholy meditation on blue-collar burnout under late capitalism, not something you’d see a ton of from Hollywood in the years to come.
“Played with an apathetic swagger by James Caan, Frank [the titular Thief] is the logical end point of a capitalist society that exploits manual labourers,” writes Blaise Radley for Little White Lies, “selling them a white picket-fence fantasy they’re ultimately excluded from. It’s telling that the annihilation of the house’s picture-perfect facade is the film’s climactic sequence, Mann shooting each cathartic explosion from multiple angles.”
The Evil Dead
If there’s one genre that really did the most in 1981, it’s horror. Hell, it gave us not one but two fuckin’ rad werewolf movies. The Howling and American Werewolf in London — both from seasoned directors who came out of the New Hollywood – ended up having a huge influence on the look and feel of big-budget horror for the rest of the ’80s. Satire, slapstick, genuine terror, and top-shelf practical effects all became synonymous with horror throughout the decade.
But what’s even more remarkable is that 1981 gave us The Evil Dead, a movie that incorporated all the essential elements of ’80s horror, cranked them up to a Looney Tunes frequency, and remade the genre in its image for a while. Evil Dead‘s hectic guerilla shoot and shoestring budget is now the stuff of horror cinema legend, and why wouldn’t it be? Shooting an R-rated, effects-heavy horror comedy Cassavettes-style is exactly the type of filmmaking we crave but seldom see in Hollywood anymore.
Ms. 45
I think most people who gravitate toward exploitation films do so because they understand most of these films are about exploitation, whether intentionally or otherwise. If you’re interested in the strange catharsis that comes with watching movies that tow this line, Abel Ferrara’s early exploitation flicks are still what’s up. Ms. 45 in particular is a disturbing rape-revenge movie with a style and pathos that feel as direct an influence on Todd Phillips’ Joker as anything from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy.
“It’s an unsettling film to see in a grindhouse, which is probs the best place to see it because it plays with your expectations,” says screenwriter Josh Olson on Trailers from Hell, “I remember as the film progressed, you could just tell the audience was getting increasingly uncomfortable because they were looking for some kind of cheap sexploitation. By the end of it, it was almost as if they themselves were being shot.”
Outland
“The ultimate enemy is still man.” The tagline for Peter Hyams’ foreboding space western Outland is a sentiment that still dominates good sci-fi cinema today. Cribbing from the industrial space-horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien and lifting its plot directly from the classic Gary Cooper western High Noon, the film casts Sean Connery as a lone federal Marshall uncovering a corporate drug-smuggling conspiracy at a brutal Jupiter-moon mining colony. It’s a sinister setup for the western hero of America’s past and another anti-capitalist piece where, according to Michael Blowen’s review for The Boston Globe, “it doesn’t make any difference whether the miners are digging gold in the Colorado hills or titanium on Jupiter’s moon, the greed of the corporate class will prevail.” See also George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior for the Australian Outback version of the 1981 apocalyptic sci-fi western.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
I guess this is the big one. The uber-successful “return of the great adventure,” and, from the ages of like 10 to 18, my all-time favorite movie/thing to exist. Depending on your age and the flavor of your movie upbringing, this might be the first movie you think of when you hear the word “blockbuster.”
When movies like Raiders (or the original Star Wars before it) spawn mega-franchises and become pillars of the monoculture, it’s a unique but worthwhile challenge to re-imagine them in their original context. And like Star Wars ’77, there’s a fresh creative edge and moody sense of mise en scène to Raiders that gets lost in the further adventures of Indiana Jones. The inspired lovechild of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Raiders might’ve been the last isolated work of commercial art from either of these guys before they really became Hollywood institutions. The industry at large would mine the shit out of their respective brands of childlike wonder and aching nostalgia for the next, well, forever.
Escape from New York
As already evidenced by Outland, the recession malaise of the early ’80s kind of extended the shelf life of post-apocalyptic sci-fi indefinitely. ’81 is a flagship year for dystopian sci-fi flicks that portend everything from Blade Runner to Children of Men. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York presents a future Manhattan “so degenerated by poverty and crime that it’s been turned into a maximum-security prison.” writes Eileen Jones for Jacobin. Carpenter, like George Romero and other progenitors of ’70s “siege structure” films before him “fell out of Hollywood’s good graces just as the Reagan Revolution was revving up,” Jones argues, by portraying “American society careening toward its disastrous end way back when it was deeply unpopular to do so.”
Blow Out
If we found out today who killed JFK, no one would care. This is the central conceit of Blow Out, an American update of Antonioni’s Blow-Up that’s often considered Brian De Palma’s best work. A crisp thriller that lovingly incorporates elements of the budding slasher genre and a healthy dose of Giallo sleaze, Blow Out is an elaborate, pure-cinema take on the waking American nightmare left over from the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, Chappaquiddick, and the Bicentennial celebration. It’s a non-literal dreamscape made up of top-down corruption and conspiracy, exposing the death of the American dream and breaking fiercely with the great re-illusionment that the movies would soon reinforce. Pauline Kael put it best in her famously glowing review: “It’s hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking that it’s only a dream.”
Mommie Dearest
Mommie Dearest is a catalyst in the rich tradition of movies that start out as objects of ridicule and age into beloved cult classics. Based on the salacious memoir by Christina Crawford, Hollywood icon Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, the film was mired in public scandal upon release and all but tanked Faye Dunaway’s career, which is the real unforgivable shame of the whole thing.
In the vein of future trashterpieces like Showgirls, Batman & Robin, and even The Room, Mommie Dearest moves beyond the oft-misused “so-bad-it’s-good” moniker. It operates on a plane that successfully challenges the entire notion of “good taste” with a Kabuki aesthetic and brilliantly monstrous performance at its core. Last year in my newsletter I wrote about the experience of watching Mommie Dearest for the first time and being utterly perplexed as to why it screwed up Dunaway’s career so severely. “People love when male actors play to the rafters and fucking GO FOR IT, but seldom praise women for doing the same.”
Friday the 13th Part 2
It’s often said that Friday the 13th was a Halloween ripoff, but every ’80s slasher that came after was a ripoff of Friday the 13th. Both Halloween II and Friday the 13th Part 2 came out in ’81, and though the sequel to John Carpenter’s seminal ground-zero slasher film would have a significant impact on what these movies would look like for the next like 15 years, it’s the second Friday that really encapsulates everything the movies of 1981 are all about. Friday Part 2 sort of bridges the gap between Halloween and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre — trading in Carpenter’s singular shape-in-the-shadows approach to the masked-killer madness for a grimy, explicit, and often harrowing edge to all the slasher carnage. It’s where the wave of ’80s slasherdom breaks from the post-Vietnam nightmare vibes of ’70s horror and ripples out into the Reagan-era sheen of the Friday, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street films that would dominate the rest of the decade and beyond.
