Apartment Zero (Conviviendo con la muerte) (1988)

In this "apartment thriller", as in Single White Female (which has the same homoerotic undertones and is about as deep), apartment doors (and masks, sunglasses and wigs) hide potential dangers (satan, psychopathy, or death, say) and certainly as Colin Firth's neurotic, introverted moviehouse owner Adrian Le Duc takes into his apartment a new tenant, the James Dean-like (or really very Tom Cruise-like) Jack Carney (Hart Bochner), there are brutal political executions taking place, and I suppose in a city like Buenos Aires in the mid-80s, so soon after State-sponsored terrorists have disappeared thousands and brutally killed artists and intellects, it is hard for the residents of an apartment complex to know whom to open their doors to.

★★★★☆

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Masquerade (1988)

The plot is the stuff of old-school gothic romantic thrillers of the Daphne Du Maurier kind with an heiress to an immense fortune (Meg Tilly) not realising how much danger she is in as she falls in love with a gigolo (Rob Lowe) but fails to notice the childhood friend-turned-policeman who vies for her heart, but the acting is often terrible and the characters paper-thin, giving this romantic thriller a perfunctoriness that no amount of sweaty Body Heat-style sex, nor Rob Lowe's glistening torso, and not even a fleeting partial glimpse of Lowe's manhood can make up for. 

★★★☆☆

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Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

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Poltergeist III (1988)

The previous year, in Jaws: The Revenge, Spielberg's co-opted shark tracked a family from Amity, New England, to The Bahamas, so your scepticism about Spielberg's co-opted poltergeist, here, following Carol Anne Freeling - the 12-year-old who looks ninety - to a Chicago skyscraper in this threequel is summarily dismissed: it's just what bastardised Spielberg villains do, alright? - but once ensconced in this Windy City state-of-the-art megastructure, the 'geist wreaks havoc in only the most bewildering ways: Tangina, for one, finds it all so urgent she won't even finish her cup of tea before sweeping in, hair and make-up electrified from her last-minute jet-set across America - she's like some psychic rockstar version of Pat Benatar - and she fingers a necklace and assures everyone the repetitive ice and mirror motifs of the SFX make wonderful sense to anyone versed in the psychic sciences - you need to read more, is the inference - yet through the mess we do learn that evil can't overcome familial love (even when one family member spends a large part of the movie wishing another stuck forever in a hell portal, good riddance); we learn that elevator emergency buttons are not just for fire but also for instances of demonic elevator possession; and we learn that Lara Flynn Boyle existed before The Practice.

★★☆☆☆

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Criminal Law (1988)

A defence lawyer (Gary Oldman), the impressive sort who places a glass before a jury and says the decision they have to make is "as clear as water", starts muddying things when he turns against a client he has just got off a murder charge, suddenly believing him to be a crazed killer that needs taking down from within their lawyer-client relationship, and how could he not come to this conclusion given the client (Kevin Bacon) is doing crazy eyes so hard he is cross-eyed (see poster) and has a perfectly plain-to-see serial killer's relationship with his mother, all crude, eyeroll-inducing plot details out of all balance with the movie's attempts at loftiness as the lawyer engages in heady Socratic dialogue about justice with an annoying law muse and at the same time engages in fiery revenge talk with an unlikely love interest.

★☆☆☆☆

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Another Woman (1988)

Woody Allen's terrific psychological drama concerns an austere philosophy professor and author played by a really wonderful Gena Rowlands, who starts to re-evaluate her life after she becomes privy to, via an airvent (like a synapse she can block or unblock) the therapy sessions of a sad young pregnant woman (Mia Farrow).

★★★★☆

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Big (1988)

When 12-year-old Josh Baskin has his wish to be big granted by an unplugged Zoltar Fortune Telling machine and wakes up in Tom Hanks' body, he charms his way into a top-level job at a toy company even before he has time to check out what's in his underpants, then charms his way into the bed of one of the company's executives, but apart from two or three genuinely icky sex-with-a-minor moments, this is a great fun 80s comedy classic with Hanks at his 80s peak.

★★★★☆

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Without A Clue (1988)

Full of laughs but light on mystery, this comedy posits that Ben Kingsley's Dr Watson is the real great detective of 221B Baker Street - he merely attributes his genius for solving mysteries to the mythologised Sherlock Holmes of his stories - while his colleague who presents himself as Sherlock Holmes to the adoring London public is an out-of-his-depth, drunken, womanising dolt played by Michael Caine. 

★★★☆☆

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Beaches (1988)

This 1988 movie machine-guns through the career and relationship highs and lows of lifelong best friends C.C. and Hillary as if in a hurry to fit into its runtime the tearjerker bit at the end.

★★★★☆

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Agatha Christie's Appointment with Death (1988)

Peter Ustinov's last appearance as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot was in this 1988 film version of Appointment with Death, a mystery set in the Holy Land with more characters than it knows what to do with, a threadbare plot full of inconsistent characterisation, and clues so artlessly dished out they couldn't be more obvious if they were announced by dinner gong.

★★☆☆☆

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Rain Man (1988)

After his father's death, self-interested wheeler-dealer Charlie Babbage discovers he has an older brother with autism who has inherited his father's entire estate, and so with his eyes on the money, Charlie whisks this brother, Raymond, out of his care facility and on a transAmerican roadtrip where the two engage on topics such as airlines, underwear, hot water, smoke alarms and "watchmans", and that's it.

★★★☆☆

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Cellar Dweller (1988)

Fans of 80s horror with claymation sequences like the Evil Dead series or The Fly will delight in this 1988 creature feature with shoddy but fun creature effects that almost make up for the movie's derivative plot - something about a book that looks a lot like the Necronomicon and an ancient curse that brings the drawings of a community of comicbook artists alive.

★★★☆☆

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Brain Damage (1988)

From its offensive title through to its meaningless conclusion, this 1988 exercise in bad taste about a badly animated blue phallus, Aylmer, who gives mind-altering brain hickies to a college jock is about as fun as being the responsible driver for someone on a drug-addled night out - he's blown away by psychedelic lights and noise while you're cross-armed, po-faced, just watching someone walk down a street for two long minutes...for one actual example.

★☆☆☆☆

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Dead Ringers (1988)

The identical twin brothers in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller, both played by Jeremy Irons, are indistinguishable to the women they share and pretty much indistinguishable to viewers who will find it not worth trying to keep track of whether it is Beverly Mantel who is the sophisticat and Elliot Mantel who is the snivelling one, or vice versa, and which one is using drugs and going mad and which one isn't, but that seems to be the point - the two big questions here are, "Where does one twin start and the other twin end?" and, "How long will it be before this movie ends and another more enjoyable, less twisted one starts?"

★★☆☆☆

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Die Hard (1988)

Ever since Hans Gruber and his 'terrorists' faced off with John McClane in the Nakatomi Plaza, action movies have tried to emulate the 80s action classic Die Hard to the extent a formula developed: add to one hostage situation an everyman hero, a droll baddie who spends a scene pretending to be a hostage, then mix in a smarmy, self-interested double-crossing hostage who gets his comeuppance; among the hostages, have an insider love-interest, while outside there is an out-of-their-depth assistant; and make the authorities, the police and government agencies, powerless; but despite the efforts of many copycats, no action flick has bettered Die Hard's formula - not even its four sequels.

★★★★★

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Working Girl (1988)

In her career best performance, Melanie Griffiths plays Tess McGill, a big-haired receptionist from Staten Island who decides she deserves better than her demeaning job and cheating boyfriend and so sets about making it big in the corporate world, in this comedy drama that anyone who has ever had a job or a boss they didn't like will find impossible not to love: a kind of 80s corporate office version of The Devil Wears Prada with Sigourney Weaver in the role of boss from hell.

★★★★★

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Heathers (1988)

Long before Scream Queens, 90s cult classic Heathers was making light of murderous teenage angst; today, the movie is still a riot and the satire as black as pitch in light of so many real trenchcoated Jason Deans wreaking havoc on the jocks, geeks, emos, loners and 'Heathers' of their US high schools.

★★★★☆

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