80sfilms

In 1986’s Big Trouble In Little China, Kurt Russell stars as Jack Burton, a quick-witted, semi-tough truck driver who stumbles into another realm when his friend’s fiancee is kidnapped.

Jack heads under San Francisco’s Chinatown into a world ruled by Lo Pan, a 2000-year-old magician who can call upon anyone, dead or alive, to do his bidding.

Oddly enough, Big Trouble In Little China was pitched to be a western, but thank goodness the powers that be went for a Hong Kong action picture instead, because the results were magical.

Kim Cattrall (”Sex and the City”, Sex and the City, Mannequin) plays a lawyer named Gracie Law who becomes involved in the search, and also becomes the romantic interest for Jack.

Directed by John Carpenter, Big Trouble In Little China is a departure from horror into a world where karate chops replace chopped body parts, and characters deliver funny lines instead of screams.

Carpenter’s other popular directing efforts include Halloween (1978), Starman (1984), Christine (1983), The Thing (1982), Escape from New York (1981), and The Fog (1980).

While Big Trouble In Little China isn’t heavy on plot or character development, it more than makes up for that in combining martial arts and sci fi to produce edge-of-your-seat excitement.

Big Trouble In Little China might never pass today’s polotically-correct standards, but in 1986, it was a classic action/adventure/comedy that delivered plenty of fights/martial arts as well as some truly funny dialogue.

The Blue Lagoon came out in 1980, and I was too young to pay much attention to it at the time.

Years later, however, when my older sister proclaimed her undying love for one of the film’s young stars (Christopher Atkins), I finally watched it.

Looking back now, I’m not quite sure what The Blue Lagoon was trying to accomplish.

Was is aimed at adults (and therefore, along the lines of kiddie porn), or was it aimed at teens (it’s R rating seemed to shut out a large portion of its audience, if that was the case)?

To this day, I’m still confused.

That’s not to say that the storyline is anything but straightforward (albeit preposterous).

On a trip to San Francisco, Richard, his father and his cousin, Em (played by Brooke Shields) find themselves in danger. The children are pushed onto a life boat with Paddy Button, and their Father/Uncle is on another boat.

The boats are, or course, separated, and Paddy, Richard and Em find themselves with no food and no water, and stuck in the middle of nowhere.

When they wash ashore an island that seems to be paradise, Paddy teaches the children to survive by fishing, hunting and building.

When Paddy (predictably) drowns, Em and Richard are left to fend for themselves.

Years later, hormones and nature take their course, and the pair learn about the birds, the bees, and what can only be called…incest.

I can only hope that Shields, who was 15 at the time the film came out, and Atkins, who was 19, were paid handsomely for their parts in this 80s stinker.

I’m sure back in 1981 that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford had no idea just how far the Indiana Jones franchise would propel them–all the way to 2008!

The film that stared it all, Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark, brought an action-adventure, comedy-romance hybrid to the big screen, and in the process turned Indiana Jones into a household name, and made fear of snakes sexy.

While successive Indiana Jones films came out in the 80s (Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom in 1984, and Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade in 1989), it took almost 20 years to bring him back for a fourth (2008’s Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), also reuniting Ford with his romantic lead, Karen Allen, who was in the first, but not the second or third installments.

It’s no surprise that given the success Lucas, Spielberg and Ford achieved with the first three, their latest Jones effort earned $56 million in its first two days.

Just goes to show that Ford’s still got it, although I never doubted it for a second.