Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Werner Herzog takes as his inspiration the story of Carlos Fitzcarrald, a Peruvian rubber trader in the 1800s who transported a disassembled ship over a mountain, and turns this audacious business endeavour into a tragi-comic misadventure of epic proportions, rendered with his usual metered storytelling and cinematic visuals, but there's also rich thought-provoking analogy in the fact his own film-making famously became an undertaking as audacious, dismaying, and mad as Fitzcarrald's.

★★★★★

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Still of the Night (1982)

Roy Schneider is a psychiatrist - the sort role Cary Grant plays in a Hitchcock thriller - and Meryl Streep is the blonde femme fatale who comes to him for help when her lover (his patient) is found murdered, in this enjoyable but dopey tv-grade mystery thriller full of attempts at classic Hitchcock thriller moments - a dream sequence, psychobabble, auction-house hijinx - but all delivered in a laughable threadbare plot.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Like most third movies, Halloween III is the one that opts for unrestrained series-perpetuating exposition over simply doling out another episode and here not only do we not get another simple "Michael Myers comes home" episode, the masked killer does not even feature in a departure from the slasher horror series that, with its pair of investigators heading into a toy factory to find it full of brainwashed henchmen and a diabolical secret (mass production of Halloween masks with brainwashing microchips in them!) is more suited to an episode of 70s TV series "The Avengers" with slasher fans being told suddenly that Halloween is not just a calendar event but a pagan backstory.

★★☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Like its deranged killer Jason Voorhees who keeps getting up no matter how many times he is knocked on the head with an axe, this slasher series just keeps shambling on - lifeless, flat-footed, and with nothing to say - and from the end of the original to the end of this Part 4, the series has been free of anything constituting a plot or interesting development, although this Part 4 offers a marginally more interesting string of impalements than Part 2 and 3 given the victims here are a more diverse bunch - not just teen camp counselors - all again gathered nearby Camp Lake Crystal.

★☆☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

Wikipedia tells me there are eleven movies in the Friday the 13th series, so Friday the 13th the 13th is an interesting series development not too far off that everyone can look forward to, but back in 1982, Part 3 had no such special quality and is a movie virtually indistinguishable from the 1980 original or the 1981 sequel, except to say that each successive episode surprises by being even worse than the previous one; here, advances in 3D film technology over the course of the year to 1982 mean viewers can enjoy even more explicit impalings and the most anyone has done to try to make these impalements interesting is to vary the implements Jason Voorhees uses - a knitting needle, a rake, a spear gun, a shovel, and so on, and so on.

★☆☆☆☆

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An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

This eighties romantic drama is basically the very first Police Academy movie, just as not-very funny as all the others, with Richard Gere in the Steve Gutenberg role playing a new recruit trying to make his way through a thirteen week-long training camp, with a dastardly training officer, climbing walls, and the expectations of female sex partners threatening to get between him and his attainment of true self-satisfied manhood.

★★★☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Evil Under The Sun (1982)

This is the third Hercule Poirot mystery written for the screen by Anthony Shaffer after his uncredited work on Murder On The Orient Express in 1974 and his screenplay for Death On The Nile in 1979 and Shaffer again does great service to Agatha Christie's plot, injecting the script with enough humour to help break up the long string of detective-suspect interactions that Agatha Christie mysteries essentially are, while terrific use is made of another exotic setting, this time an island resort in the Adriatic Sea where a star-studded cast of whiny British toffs and Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot become embroiled in the beachside murder of a movie star.

★★★★☆

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The King of Comedy (1982)

He doesn't have a demo tape and appears to have no regular gigs, instead just sits in his basement dreaming, so it is hard to empathise, but when fame as a stand-up comedian eludes Robert De Niro's idiosyncratic Rupert Pupkin, a citydweller as isolated and mad as Travis Bickle, he enlists the help of an unhinged friend (played with rabid relish by Sarah Bernhard) to kidnap tonight show host Jerry Langford, (played by Jerry Lewis essentially playing himself), in Scorsese's peculiar, darkly amusing comedy thriller that in the end says what: audacity over talent?

★★★☆☆

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Poltergeist (1982)

The Conjuring franchise and all its spin-offs owe everything to this Steven Spielberg-written and -produced supernatural horror of the 80s which starts quirkily with a family enjoying the supernatural oddities it experiences at home but then has family members growing more and more screamy as whatever it is that is haunting them grows malevolent and sucks the daughter into a Mike TV limbo world - putting up with the shrillness of everyone yelling is worth it for the Spielberg set piece serving as the horror-lite movie's climax.

★★★☆☆

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The Verdict (1982)

In the 90s, John Grisham finessed the legal thriller, pitting young, ambitious "David" lawyers against corrupt "Goliath" corporations, ensuring their hardwork and unerring moral compasses were rewarded in the end with rousing courtroom wins, and cramming in a zillion thrilling subplots, but this is 1982, pre-Grisham's first novel, and Paul Newman's silver-fox lawyer is an alcoholic we don't much care about even after hearing a sob story, his hard work is confined to a single night of phone calling which just magically turns up the wee administrative matter upon which the entire court case hinges, the subplots here (a hostile judge, a duplicitous love interest) are momentary scenes abandoned, and while there are plenty of pompous, uncaring Boston stuffed shirts roaming about unfazed by moral injustice and suffering, nothing here constitutes a diabolical "Goliath" organisation that deserves its comeuppance, so all-in-all this courtroom procedural is dry and unfolds at a pace akin to reading a court transcript, not a John Grisham page-turner.

★★☆☆☆

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Airplane II: The Sequel (aka Flying High II) (1982)

Ted Striker, Elaine and Captain Clarence Oveur are again aboard a doomed flight, this time to the moon, in this lesser sequel to 'Airplane!' (Flying High) that has plenty of dopey laughs in its first half but like the Mayflower One, short circuits and comes crashing down in its second.

★☆☆☆☆

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Deathtrap (1982)

This is another Michael Caine film that has been adapted from a suspense mystery play (this one by Ira Levin) and like his two Sleuth films, this one too involves a sinister cat-and-mouse parlour game (check) played out in a theatrically claustrophobic set (check) between a pair of feuding male protagonists (check), one of whom is a successful mystery writer (check), and like Sleuth it is great twisty-turny fun.

★★★★☆

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