Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

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Parenthood (1989)

 

Steve Martin stars and is perfectly uptight as Gil Buckman, a family man trying not to freak out on the rollercoaster of parenthood, but there's a veritable Love Actually-sized ensemble here too: a single mother (Dianne Wiest) struggles to raise a teenage boy (a young Joaquin Phoenix) while trying to steer an older daughter (Martha Plimpton) away from no-hopers like Tod (Keanu Reeves playing Ted again), and more (Rick Moranis, Tom Hulce, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Robards) all in Ron Howard's comedy smash hit about the trials and tribulations of the privileged white raising kids in traditional family units.

★★★☆☆

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Ten Little Indians (1989)

Transporting Agatha Christie's classic mystery, an early example of the modern slasher, to an African safari rather than an island off the Devon coast was probably just meant to reduce staging costs to the purchase of a single tent, and it gives the classic story of gathered guests being picked off one by one by a mysterious safari host a distinctly Gilligan's Island-feel as our gathered guests, or doomed victims, including Frank Stallone as Phillip Lombard, take showers behind cane shower screens, traverse ravines in a rickety vine cable car,  and deliver lines of dialogue in the wooden manner of The Skipper.

★★☆☆☆

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Weekend At Bernie's (1989)

This 80s comedy with a cult following will make you smirk a couple of times, especially when Bernie — the dead body Andrew McCarthy's shouty and annoying Larry and Jonathan Silverman's straight-man Richard drag around pretending it to be alive — is dragged behind a boat and banged against buoys or dragged across uneven ground, but these black slapstick moments, a single joke played over and over, hardly sustain the just-short-of two-hour runtime.

★★☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Those roman numerals in the titles count up the episodes, in case you thought it was a daftness factor inexorably ratcheting up, a reasonable mistake given things are dafter than ever in this eighth installment - as daft as the acting is bad (try to decide which death scene is the most lethargic) - with a resurrected-from-his-Camp Lake Crystal-grave Jason Voorhees - sodden, moldy, mute and ridiculous, not scary -  plodding around a NY-bound ship (it sometimes resembles the Love Boat but at other times looks like a weather-beaten paddle steamer), killing one-by-one a group of high schoolers who are on as unlikely a cruise as you are ever likely to see - 'unlikely' because it is a school group with a supervising teacher but the students on board nonetheless participate in full-gear boxing matches; they take saunas; they honeytrap their Principal and film it with the canera equipment they've brought with them on the trip; they pack in their luggage electric guitars so they can jam in the boiler room; and other really really daft things-to-do while they wait, like the bored audience, for Jason to, well, not so much 'strike' as 'lumber heavily, tiredly in'.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Abyss (1989)

Three years after his huge success sending a Sigourney Weaver-led crew of marines on a deep-space salvage mission in Aliens, James Cameron blasts a Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio-led crew of oil engineers on a deep-sea salvage mission where an Aliens' gun metal blue and grey colour-palette (cut across with bright yellow industrial pipes and machinery) is the setting for a convergence of underdeveloped plotlines (like one character's bad case of the bends, a volatile marriage, and political tensions between Russia and the USA), things all better explained in a later released extended version but here only very loosely held together by the presence in the movie's periphery of a species of, what, lost jellyfish Aliens?

★★★☆☆

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Batman (1989)

The batsuit is so rigid poor Michael Keaton can only turn his head by moving his whole upper body - it looks like Batman slept badly - and the movie, er, literally follows suit in that it too is awkward and unmoving: Tim Burton's Gotham is a poorly populated theatre set, the hero is oddly mannered and neurotic, and the story is lifeless with neither the camp fun of the Adam West tv series (except for Jack Nicholson's Joker's half-hearted band leader marches x 2) nor the weight and menace of the much later Christopher Nolan movies.

★★☆☆☆

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K-9 (1989)

This differs from Turner and Hooch, released only three months earlier, in the way that the German Shepherd of the mismatched cop-dog duo is the straight-laced, authoritative, respectable Tom Hanks one while Jim Belushi does a slobbering Dogue de Bordeaux version of a cop-with-a-deathwish a la Martin Riggs/Axle Foley; which movie you prefer will largely depend on your actor and your dog breed preferences and how much you can tolerate this movie's weak love triangle-involving-a-dog subplot.

★★☆☆☆

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

The sought-after archeological wonder in number three is the Holy Grail but Indy's biggest challenge isn't death-defying derring-do as he races the Nazis to decipher biblical clues and decode Knights Templar maps but his father, the doddering academic Dr Jones Snr played hilariously by Sean Connery.

★★★★☆

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Pet Sematary (1989)

A well-meaning neighbour introduces Louis Creed to an ancient burial site that will reanimate his daughter's dead cat because the best lesson about death a child can get is to have adults pretend it doesn't happen, but the neighbour neglects to mention that all his previous experiences of reanimating the dead have resulted in foul-smelling, murderous beasts -  a considerable oversight, thanks neighbour - in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, brought to the screen here with a cast of not very expressive actors who themselves might benefit from a trip to the burial ground to be reanimated.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Karate Kid Part III (1989)

Daniel-san, who as a young adult is starting to look and sound like Joe Pesci, comes up with his own domestic chore-inspired karate move in this third The Karate Kid movie ("It's easy," he tells a girlfriend, and in a second flat invents a pottery wheel sweep of the arms) but the undermining of this franchise's formula doesn't stop there: Daniel-san doesn't even come to need this karate move or any special karate move; Mr Miyage doesn't help - his training barely fills a three second beach montage; and the movie doesn't even try to make interesting the grand finale at the All Valley Karate tournament showdown where Daniel-san faces off with more weirdos from the Cobra Kai dojo.

 

★★☆☆☆

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Black Rain (1989)

Ridley Scott's occasionally brutally violent buddy cop action movie takes Michael Douglas' cop Nick Conklin (a Martin Riggs type - he even sports the mullet) and his more even-tempered partner, Charlie (Andy Garcia) to Osaka to handover a yakuza criminal to the Japanese authorities, and while it is plainly and simply inconceivable to think these loose cannons would be permitted to carry on their rogue Lethal Weapon-style antics during the Japanese police investigation into counterfeiting that they become privy to, and harder to imagine even a hothead like Conklin putting himself in so much danger by wilfully headbutting and kinghitting yakuza crime figures over the course of his illegitimate, non-jurisdictional, "unwanted tag-along" police work, the movie manages to be an engaging clash-of-cultures action thriller and does achieve an occasional ring of cultural authenticity during all the nonsense, filmed as it is on location in Japan and populated with Japanese supporting actors, Ken Takakura, Yasaku Matsuda, Tomisaburo Wakayama and Shigeru Koyama. 

★★★☆☆

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Turner and Hooch (1989)

Turner and Hooch is essentially a buddy cop movie except that one of the buddy cops is whiny, dopey, incessantly barks, and has an irritating schtick - he teams up with a drooling Dogue de Bordeaux to solve a not very interesting crime and of course the mismatched pair grow to love each other despite their initial differences.

★★☆☆☆

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The Fly II (1989)

The son of Seth Brundle, the character played by Jeff Goldblum in the original The Fly, investigates his father's experiments and falls victim to the same fate, slowly tranforming into a human fly, in this perfectly entertaining but inferior sequel that is all about the Brundlefly reveal because when he at last appears, he brings with him some truly grisly 80s horror effects in the movie's final twenty minutes.

★★★☆☆

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Bride of Re-Animator (1989)

I haven't seen the original Re-Animator, but if it is anything like this sequel - a H P Lovecraft-inspired horror coupling cartoonish action with goofball music and repulsive gore that leaves you wanting to have a wash - then I don't want to - Evil Dead it ain't.

★☆☆☆☆

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Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)

As a kid, I was mad about this buddy cop sequel to Lethal Weapon that reunites Riggs and Murtaugh on a case investigating a rascist drug-dealing South African diplomat, but now, watching it again, the extent of its success beggars belief with nothing in it even closely resembling real police work and while the zippy story offers plenty of humour and tension between the cop duo and the bad guy, it is otherwise about as complex as a two-hour fistfight.

★★★☆☆

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Ghostbusters II (1989)

Apparently not even Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers, thought Ghostbusters II was a good idea - it was never going to improve upon the original - but as far as studio-driven money-grabbing sequels go, it is pretty fun: like a Lethal Weapon sequel, the cast has grown and so things are busier - Dana has a baby, for one, and there are several new characters standing between the Ghostbusters and the city mayor, and Louis Tully has been adopted into the Ghostbusters' circle, so his role of goofball demigod conduit is handed over to newcomer Peter MacNichol who plays a very Rick Moranis-ish 'Igor' assistant to the evil Vigo - when their evil plot requires a loan of Sigouney Weaver's baby, the Ghostbusters get their proton packs back on.

★★★☆☆

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Tango and Cash (1989)

Rascist (at one stage, Kurt Russell's Cash impatiently screams at a Chinese man to speak English) and sexist (sisters need chaperoning, and an on-duty policeman asks two women on the street for a threeway), but somehow this vacuous 80s buddy cop story is tolerable - nostalgia for children of the 80s like me and a means of marvelling at how much more politically correct the world now is.

★★☆☆☆

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