I can say “rat droppings”. That does not mean I wish to eat them.
It’s a little scary how well I can remember this movie.
It’s no “Big Trouble in Little China”, but it is a classic!
Me too!! Then again, I watched it yesterday.
Sorry, but I must disagree with this article. Remo Williams was a GREAT movie. Action, humor, absurd action, and even a young “Captain Janeway” from “Star Trek: Voyager.”
This movie gets two “thumbs up” from me!
“. . .almost ideal 1980s B-movie.” Almost? ALMOST? This movie has everything fool, and it’s fabulous. You’ve got Wilford Brimley before he went over the edge of maximum crustiness, you’ve got Joel Grey playing an Asian martial arts master when Hollywood was littered w/ the real thing, you got Cap’n Janeway, you got Fred Ward doing his own stunts. What do you want? Production value? The real Statue of Liberty? A prop killer satellite that doesn’t look like it was made out of foil-wrapped cardboard?
The only “almost” part about this cinematic masterpiece is that “The Adventure” began and ended with it, an outcome that undoubtedly has had producers Larry Spiegel and Judy Goldstein weeping into their pillows nightly for the last 29 years.
See? Janeway makes it. Well, her and that whole thing w/ them clinging to a log on a zipline, but mostly Janeway.
yarding line, but now I’m just being pedantic.
None of you were blessed with Korean birth, unless you were.
No no, you’re right, and I’ve learned something new.
A few years later they did a TV pilot version with Roddy McDowall as Chiun. Although McDowall was quite good the rest of the pilot was pretty awful.
I’m pretty sure the 1980s as a whole were a semiotic scam.
I propose The Last Dragon. It’s like a Disneyfied blaxploitation movie. The soundtrack has such mall food court gems as the synthy Stevie Wonder ditty Upset Stomach and a Rockwell song that’s NOT Somebody’s Watching Me (Peeping Tom).
Lest any of you think I’m a hater, I love this movie. But I understand what it is.
Sho 'nuff!
I remember wanting to see that movie, when it came out, but somehow three decades slipped by… Love the trailer, tho! Is there a scene in the movie where Joel Grey is, like, at his wits’ end with his new charge, and has to visit Mickey Rooney, to garner more gems of wisdom?
Hmm, “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” is also a nice pastiche of 1970’s blaxploitation films. “Romancing the Stone” was a sorta fun Jones pastiche. And of course almost anything with Chuck Norris or Charles Bronson, with Norris leaning more to the camp side of pastiche and some of Bronson’s work representing stuff that gets… pastiched(?).
That BluRay case took some heavy styling cues from Atari 2600 cartridge boxes.
Rob, I’d suggest that making an 80s pastiche would be redundant, since many 80s movies fill that role themselves–the Back to the Future films, for example, highlight Marty McFly’s quintessential 80sness by plopping him in other time periods. (For example: the scene in which he convinces his own father that he’s an alien with the help of a Walkman.) Or Purple Rain, Prince’s retelling of his own early career as a hero’s journey, but set in the then-present day, not in the seventies when he was actually getting started. Or Tron and The Last Starfighter, saving the world and/or the galaxy with videogames.
To me, the one single movie scene that most exemplifies the eighties is the one in The Terminator in which the T-800 sweeps past Sarah Connor in Tech Noir as the clubgoers dance in slow motion to this song, which sounds itself like Generic 80s Pop–it’s even by a band called, dig if U will, Tryanglz–and Kyle Reese waits in the background; even though the cyborg is technically emotionless, it’s easy to read an implied cold contempt of the scene and the world in general as not really mattering. The 80s seemed to observe itself like that, as something less than organic, whether it was the inherent weirdness of Marty McFly in any era that he went to, or Prince playing himself as a product of a specific urban subculture that he himself largely created, or imagining worlds in which videogames actually mattered.
I dunno. It’s a theory, I guess.
Let’s not start wars that cannot be won.
#AliensWithRastaAccents
I tend to think of that movie as an ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to deliberately make a cult film, and generally more admired than liked. That having been said, among its die-hard fans include quite a few cast and crew of the Star Trek franchise, and references to it in the different shows are numerous.
