August 1985 kicks off with smooth vampires and some weird science

The premise is simple, but the task is not.
Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s,
reviewed in chronological order,
published month by month.

Buckle up,
because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

AUGUST

The Major League Baseball Players’ Association staged a successful mid-season strike that lasted one entire day.

Michael Jackson announced his purchase of ATV Music, making him the owner of the vast majority of the Beatles’ song catalog, much to Paul McCartney’s very public surprise.

In Los Angeles, police finally caught Richard Ramirez, ending his 17-month streak of terror as The Night Stalker killer.

And elsewhere in the city, Barbara Streisand wrapped recording on The Broadway Album, a massive hit that consisted of her singing the ever-lovin’ shit out of some of the biggest songs in Broadway history.

August 1985 was one of the most turbulent months of the decade for my family, and it was all because of me.

If you had asked me when I was a teenager if I was rebellious or wild, I would have laughed off the idea. Me? Perish the thought. I thought of myself as a bookish nerd, a goody-two-shoes. Looking back on those years now, I have no idea how my parents put up with me. I was a disaster. I spent most of my 20s filled with such shame about who I was as a teenager, constantly worried that my past defined me permanently, constantly worried that the self-destructive Drew of 1985 would show up again unexpectedly. I am still unpacking all of this today with a therapist because I spent years afraid to even look back at the era in any honest or reflective way.

As the month began, we were packing up our lives. We’d been in that house in Chattanooga for the first half of the decade, and I think my parents loved living there. They loved their friends, they loved the neighborhood, and my dad seemed genuinely happy in his job. We were moving because I had made such a calamity of my life that my parents felt like the only way for me to progress was with a fresh start. I was a liar, a fabulist, and when I think back on how I behaved back then, I think of the Wilco lyric, “All my lies are always wishes/I know I would die if I could come back new." I was impatient in an existential way. I believed I was supposed to be in Hollywood, making movies, and I felt like my life was moving too slowly. I didn’t care about anything other than somehow getting into filmmaking, and so I treated the people around me like they were temporary, like I would be moving on without them any minute now. I hurt people who cared about me, both my friends and the adults in my life, and I had no idea how to go about trying to repair anything.

So we were moving. My father found a job in Tampa working for the county, and he decided that we would go there and start over. I think it helped that we lived in Dunedin when I was a little kid, which is basically right next to St. Petersburg, just across the bay from Tampa, and my parents already had many friends living in the Bay Area. My father decided to build our next house so he could customize it, and he bought the lot and told them to start building. We hadn’t even sold our house in Chattanooga yet, which is why my parents made a difficult decision as the beginning of the new school year loomed closer. My dad and I would move to Tampa and live in an apartment near the place where they were building our house so I could start my sophomore year at my new school. My mom and my little sister would stay behind in Chattanooga until the house was sold, so my mom could help the realtor and make sure everything got done. My parents hadn’t spent that much time apart since my dad went to Vietnam at the start of their marriage, so it was a genuine challenge for them. They’ve been married for over 60 years at this point, and it pains me to think about some of the ways I tested their incredibly strong union. My father felt strongly, though, that the move was essential. I think he hoped it would reset my brain in some way, and I regret to spoil it for you, but it did not. I don’t think I really calmed the chaos until I moved to California in 1990. Things weren’t quite as off-the-rails bad at first, but my teenage lunacy was still ramping up in many ways.

I understand the move now. In 1985, I was furious about it, angry at being forced to move again, refusing to take any responsibility for the mayhem. I had my close friends, and I assumed they would all forgive me and we could get back to normal, and so I didn’t want to go. I liked my job at the Honors Course, a private golf club where I caddied, and I liked the money I made there. More than anything, I didn’t want to go back to Florida because I hated the sticky humidity of it all, so I went into this move with a giant stupid chip on my shoulder. As with most things in my life, I can trace the date of the move thanks to movie release dates. I know I saw Volunteers and The Return of the Living Dead in Chattanooga. I would have sworn I saw Better Off Dead there, too, and I’m wondering if they did a studio sneak preview of the film the week before it came out. I know I saw Teen Wolf and American Ninja with my dad in the theater in Tampa. So sometime in those last two weeks, we made the drive down from Tennessee, a giant U-Haul packed with the stuff I would need for school and the stuff my dad needed for work. I was told to prioritize because the apartment we were in was going to be a small one, and my dad wasn’t kidding. We went from our big family house in Chattanooga to this tiny two-bedroom apartment where my dad and I were basically right on top of each other, and it was a hard adjustment, especially because my parents were justifiably furious at me.

That first trip my dad and I took to the theater was a tense one. There was one theater in Seffner, the suburb of Tampa where we lived, and they had four screens to choose from, which meant my dad and I had to figure out what we were interested in. The first thing we saw together was Year of the Dragon, a day after we moved. My dad loved cop movies, and it was fairly easy to talk him into taking me along to most of them. I’m going to write about Sharky’s Machine when we jump back to December 1981, which I saw in the theater, and that was a heated conversation between my parents on the car ride home because of how wild that movie was. I thought cop movies were crazy, and in the era after the release of Dirty Harry, there was a sort of arms race mentality with a sense that they were getting crazier and more extreme because that’s what audiences wanted. I think it was also a result of filmmakers really testing the boundaries of the R rating. The PG-13 was much wilder in 1985 than it is now because the MPAA was trying to figure out what the rating was and where they wanted to draw the lines. The films that were wild in August of 1985 were incredibly wild, and we’ll get into it. The last weekend before school began, my dad and I were basically in the apartment together, going a little crazy, and we decided to spend the day doing a double-feature. That gave us a good five hours out of the house and not really talking to each other. Our choice for the films? Teen Wolf and American Ninja. One picked by me, one picked by him, and I’ll let you guess which was which.

I look back at that now, and I am so glad I had that time with him. Things started to thaw as I got acclimated to school. One of the reasons we picked Seffner was because my dad read about a high school that had just been built that had closed-circuit televisions in every room and a fully-operational TV studio in the library where people could learn to shoot and edit video with professional equipment. Even when I was being a giant butthole, my dad was determined to find a way to keep me on track and engaged with school. He had no idea I was going to meet a kid named Scott Swan because of that TV studio and the TV production classes that were taught at the school. All he knew was there was a chance I would settle in if the school offered classes in something that interested me, and he was right.

I didn’t know that yet as the month wrapped up. All I knew then was that September was the official start of my new life, which I guess made August the end of my old one. Before all of that, though, I had one last trip to Memphis by myself. My parents would put me on a Greyhound bus and send me to my grandmothers, both in Memphis, and I had to have been there between that first and second week of the month. I know that because I saw Fright Night there. I saw European Vacation there. I saw Weird Science and My Science Project both in Memphis, but then saw Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Real Genius back in Chattanooga. I know I saw Weird Science twice because I remember seeing it in two different cities. It is crazy that even with me creating so much drama and turmoil in my house, I was still clearly making it to the movie theater two or three times a week. I was spoiled for choice and didn’t even realize it at the time. I thought that’s just how movies worked. I had no idea this was a sort of inflection point between the first half of the decade and the second half, as the building of multiplexes started to change the habits of theaters and theater owners nationwide. One of the things I remember from my first few weeks in Seffner was driving past a giant empty lot where there was a sign promising a new shopping experience coming soon. The Regency Square Mall was supposed to be open at the start of 1986, and one of the things they promised was an eight-screen AMC theater. My dad encouraged me to write a letter to AMC to ask them to consider me for a job when they finally opened the theater, since I’d be 16 the following summer. It was a good suggestion, and we’ll get into that in a few months.

For now, we’re going to start with a ten-movie weekend. We’ve got art house royalty, a recut version of one of an Italian master’s weirdest movies, a terrible horror sequel, the first Sesame Street movie, and John Hughes cutting loose like a lunatic. All of that plus one of the year’s cheekiest horror films? What are we waiting for?

AUGUST 2

Biohazard
Aldo Ray, Angelique Pettijohn, William Fair, David O’Hara, Frank McDonald, Art Payton, Charles Roth, Carroll Borland, Richard Hench, Loren Crabtree, George Randall, Brad Arrington, Ray Lawrence, Robert King, Mike Bonavia, Robin Schurtz, Michael Bober, Bret Miller, Steve Welles, Liam Stone, Emanuel Shipow, Stuart Weitman, Cynthia Hartine, Kimba, Donald G. Jackson, Fred Olen Ray, Jairo Leon, Christopher Ray
cinematography by Paul Elliott and John McCoy
music by Drew Neumann and Eric Rasmussen
screenplay by Fred Olen Ray
additional dialogue by T.L. Lankford & M.L. Preissel
produced by Fred Olen Ray
directed by Fred Olen Ray
Rated R
1 hr 24 mins

An alien tries to use its connection to a psychic woman to take over the Earth.

The opening titles for this movie make my eyeballs hurt, just white text over some green vector graphics. Even so, that’s preferable to the movie itself. We’re going to talk about big budget films in August of ’85, and very low-budget stuff as well, and the miracle of that particular moment in exhibition was the way all of these films would play at the multiplex side by side. Yes, you had the studios all dropping some big titles in August, competing for that end-of-the-summer teenage money, but you also had straight-up exploitation junk taking up screens as well.

This is an early effort by Fred Olen Ray, and it feels like he hadn’t quite settled into his eventual lane yet. When you say his name now, you’re talking about a trash maven who has been shoveling garbage onto video store shelves for decades, one of those guys who works under a half-dozen different names, a guy who is responsible for Bikini Frankenstein and The Girl from B.I.K.I.N.I. and The Bikini Escort Company and Bikini Royale and holy shit I just realized this guy’s got a real thing for bikinis, huh? To be fair, he also makes garbage that isn’t about bikinis occasionally. He released Alien Dead in 1980, and Scalps in 1983, and they are both micro-budget movies. It took him two years to put Biohazard together, and he ran out of money at one point during the production, forcing him to take the footage he had to MIFED to try to raise enough cash to finish. The experience taught him how to lock down his financing, if nothing else, and we’ll be talking about a lot more of his films, since he released almost a dozen more movies by the end of the decade.