Revisit: Going Overboard

A Trimark release 1989

Directed by Valerie Breiman

Written by Valerie Breiman & Scott LaRose & Adam Sandler

A struggling young comedian takes a menial job on a cruise ship where he hopes for his big chance to make it in the world of cruise ship comedy.



Going Overboard, Adam Sandler's first feature film, rests comfortably at #71 on IMDB's Bottom 100 list. It's the kind of film you'd find on the turn-style rack at your local supermarket - forgotten. Let's hope it stays that way.

Going Overboard is terribly humorless. It strains to wring laughs out of mean-spirited characters, a lame-duck plot, and piss poor production values. Of course some of the quality issues have to be forgiven - director Valerie Breiman made the film on a shoe-string budget while on a cruise - but it doesn't help when the script is an unfunny travesty to begin with. Sandler leans on the usual angry man-child schtick, though not quite as refined. The rest of the cast adds nothing. The result is a film that feels like a bunch of slapdash ideas with little comedic merit. Avoid at all costs.

Revisit: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part V: The Dream Child

A New Line Cinema release 1989

Directed by Stephen Hopkins

Writing credits:
Wes Craven (characters)
John Skipp (story)
Craig Spector (story)
Leslie Bohem (story & screenplay)

Alice, having survived the previous installment of the Nightmare series, finds the deadly dreams of Freddy Krueger starting once again. This time, the taunting murderer is striking through the sleeping mind of Alice's unborn child. His intention is to be "born again" into the real world. The only one who can stop Freddy is his dead mother, but can Alice free her spirit in time to save her own son?



A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of my favorite horror flicks of all time. Combining slasher scares with meta-physical reality, Wes Craven crafted an original and truly scary film that took advantage of the 80's gore effects boom. It also spawned a slew of knock-offs and an obsession with altered-reality/dreams/paranormal activity that dominated 80's horror.

The sequels all tinker with the nightmare formula a little bit - Freddy's abilities to haunt and scare and the definitions of the dream world are all a bit fluid - but one element always keep these films from being a predictable slasher flick: the kills. Freddy Krueger murders are always an excuse for outlandish, over-the-top effects, and the crazier the better.

In this film, the fifth in the series, Krueger returns in an attempt to inhabit the soul of Alice's unborn child. The precedence for Freddy's soul-stealing was set in the second film - which is universally hated, I believe, for having gone astray from the original formula - and is no less ridiculous here.

Neither are the kills, which range from a ridiculous comic book style slashing to Seven-style force feeding to the infamous "Freddybike". This film is all about the effects, which take a cue from the works of Rob Bottin (The Thing) and feature a lot of flesh mutation and slippery tendons.



By this point in the series, Freddy had developed a strong personality too, which also separates it from many other slasher flicks. He's given some hilarious quips and says the word "bitch" a lot.

Look out for a great scene that addresses the subject of abortion (if Alice just got rid of the damn baby, Freddy couldn't keep killing). The dialogue is priceless.

Revisit: Dead Poets Society

A Touchstone pictures release 1989

Directed by Peter Weir

Written by Tom Schulman

English professor John Keating (Robin Williams) inspires his students to love poetry and seize the day.




Before he donned a white coat and sickened audiences with extreme saccrine in Patch Adams, before he won an Oscar for portraying the hard-nosed mentor to Matt Damon's genius janitor in Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams tackled another inspirational role of sorts in this 1989 drama about prep-school students who step out of themselves and 'seize the day'. Something about dramas from the late 80s/early 90s make them so unmistakibly from that time period; the film hasn't aged poorly, per se, but you can tell that it's from that period right away. The script is good but not great (you can see a lot of the 'conflict' coming from a mile away), and Williams gives a surprisingly good, restrained performance (something he isn't very well known for, especially in such overly-affecting fare). One of his better films.

Revisit: The Puppet Master

An Empire Pictures/Paramount Pictures release 1989
Directed by David Schmoeller
Writing credits:
Charles Band (story) & Kenneth J. Hall (story)
David Schmoeller (screenplay) (as Joseph G. Collodi)

André Toulon (William Hickey) is a puppet maker who discovers an ancient Egyptian formula for the creation of life. Holed up in a bay area hotel, he uses the ancient power to rejuvinate his puppets, but commits suicide as the Nazis seek to use his knowledge to their advantage. Flash foward twenty years later at the same hotel: four psychics (Paul Le Mat, Irene Miracle, Matt Roe, & Kathryn O'Rielly) decide to investigate the suicide of a former colleague (Jimmie F. Skaggs), along with his widow (Robin Frates). They uncover the secrets of the Puppet Master and are stalked by Toulon's puppets, who have a variety of strange traits including a drill for a head and the ability to spit up leeches.

The Puppet Master series is one of the largest horror franchises in recent history, with over 9 movies in twelve years, and yet I'm hard pressed to find anyone who's actually seen the damn thing. And no wonder - this movie is bad, bad in all the ways 80's horror movies can be bad. It's a high concept, low action snoozefest that takes itself way to seriously. There's a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo about psychics and dreams and "metaphysical" shit in there that's clearly cashing in on the Nightmare On Elm Street boom, but is irrelevant to the plot (unlike in Nightmare) and doesn't engage with any concepts of reality (also unlike Nightmare). The gore is pretty weak in terms of 80's splatter, although the deaths are fairly original. The coolest thing about this flick are the puppet effects, which only slightly improve upon Ray Harryhausen's early stop motion techniques, but there are not enough of them. I can only assume that's why they made a sequel - the people demanded more puppets, and more puppets they recieved. But I'm still pretty curious as to who exactly was making those demands...