Psycho II (1983)

Bringing Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates back to the screen twenty-three years after the original Hitchcock classic required an audaciousness you really have to admire - especially given this sequel sees him released from prison and getting a kitchenhand job (!) - and it is surprising, given this absurd setup, how strong it is at the outset, nostalgically recalling the original, with a short-haired heroine stumbling into the danger of a gothic hilltop home and neighbouring motel, taking showers and discovering peepholes while Californian cops in pilot-shades drain swamps, explore cellars, and tail suspects through town; yet bringing Bates back also sadly requires some clumsy writing in which grisly murder is committed with zero clean-up, bodies vanish, cops scoff and dismiss witness accounts of murder in a famed murder house, and lots of other highly unlikely behaviour occurs from characters maintaining an impossible flippancy about their close proximity to a famed serial killer - it is all the mess of writers desperately trying to perpetuate an unlikely series with, by the film's end, a complete cleaning of the slate and a reversion back to the beginning of Psycho to where it all started.  

★★★☆☆

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Christine (1983)

Pretty much, Carrie (CAR-rie) comes back as a 1958 Plymouth Fury in this Stephen King adaptation that has director John Carpenter doing his horror-movie best with the Horror Novel King's big, ugly and empty story about a vehicle whose gender is ascribed by men and whose unexplained sentience, jealousy and murderous nature serves only to eclipse the psychopathy of the movie's real monsters, those men themselves: ugly, knife-wielding, sniggering, self-loathing, cigar-chomping, bullying and friendless, gambling and drinking, erection-obsessed and female-objectifying boys aged 15 to 80.

★★★☆☆

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Scarface (1983)

In this Oliver Stone-penned, Brian De Palma-directed ugly 1983 update of a 1932 Howard Hughes crime thriller, a Cuban refugee, Tony Montana, trades hitman services for a Green Card then ruthlessly works his way to the top of Miami's drug world, a world of violence so unrestrained it can seem ludicrous, but it is only a matter of time before Montana becomes a victim of his own lawless excess and he and all his little friends come plummeting back down with a splash.

★★★☆☆

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Trading Places (1983)

Apparently inspired by Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper and thematically similar to movies like Man With A Million (The Million Pound Note), this prince and pauper story, a huge comedy success in the 80s but fairly ugly now with its gratuitous T and A, N-words, and only glib social commentary, has a pair of unpleasant New York brokers make a bet to see how a 'have' and a 'have-not' fare when their roles in society are reversed; when the 'have' and the 'have-not' learn of the bet, they seek revenge.

★★★☆☆

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Never Say Never Again (1983)

The title really is a response to Sean Connery's claim that he would never play James Bond again, but twelve years after Diamonds Are Forever, at age 52, and looking like George Hamilton sporting a liberal application of spray-can baldness concealer, Connery returns to play the agent with a licence to kill in this remake of the 1967 Thunderball, this time featuring Kim Basinger, an 80s-arcade game showdown, an exploding pen, and a memorable urine joke.

★★★☆☆

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Superman III (1983)

The one in which a down-and-out Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) transforms into Mark Zuckerberg opens with a scene of slapstick mayhem in Metropolis, a prelude to the sprawling mess of loosely held together plots that follow: Superman attends his high school reunion in Smallville; reacquaints with old flame, Lana Lang; is exposed to synthetic kryptonite laced with cigarette tar; drinks irresponsibly; splits into a good and bad version of himself (the bad being a lecherous Superman with bigger hair and more mascara); and battles a supercomputer...and even though Lois Lane departs early and Lex Luther is nowhere to be seen, and despite its unprecedented levels of campiness, in 1982 this third Christopher Reeve Superman movie was everything this then-seven-year-old Superman fan could have hoped for!

★★★★☆

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National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)

Clark Griswold is so determined to take his family on a roadtrip across America that nothing will stop him, and this hugely funny 1983 comedy throws everything at him - a pubescent and errant son Russell, a lovelorn, overeating daughter, Audrey, a long-suffering but loyal wife, Ellen, mechanical problems, a dead dog, a dead aunt, embarrassing trailer trash relatives - and through it all he drives, growing increasingly frazzled until a hilarious climactic sequence in which he becomes completely unhinged at a Disney-inspired theme park, Walley World.

★★★★☆

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