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Monsters & Mullets: Predator (1987)

We’ve all seen Predator, probably more than once. In fact, we’ve probably seen Predator 2. Maybe Predators. And Alien vs. Predator. And Alien vs. Predator 2. We might have read the comics. (Yes, the Dark Horse comics too.)

Here’s the thing. We all know that the predator is an alien. We’ve known that the predator is an alien since 1987. We can never unknow the predator’s fundamental alien-ness.

And that does Predator a disservice.

Because, burbling away under Predator’s veneer of action movie dumbness, there lurks a pretty good horror film.

And because of that, because of its carefully calculated combination of over-the-top kersplody Rambo-esque Dudes with Guns styling and thoughtful, deliberate exploration of horror tropes, I’m going to make a bold stand. Predator is actually… really good.

Monsters & Mullets: Splash (1984)

There were rules about being a little girl in the 1980s, and those rules included this: mermaids are awesome, always. (Also, unicorns are the best.) Despite never having seen Splash, I knew it had to be the greatest film ever produced. (The Last Unicorn aside; see above.) Splash could, to my fevered little girl’s imagination, only have been improved it if were about a pirate paleontologist mermaid. And maybe it was! My parents wouldn’t rent it for me, so I had no idea. Splash might well have been about a time-travelling, adventure-having, world-saving princess mermaid pirate paleontologist with a pet dragon and a magical sword.

It probably was.

I finally got around to watching Splash sometime in the mid-90s, and I recall finding it more boring than anything else. Having long since gone off mermaids, and having never really cared about Tom Hanks, Splash just didn’t have much to offer my wide-wale-corduroy-wearing teenaged self. It washed across my consciousness leaving little behind but the faint, salt-flavored trace of a childhood dream disappointed.

Revisiting Splash another fifteen years on, however – well, it turns out Splash isn’t just disappointing and/or boring. It’s actually kind of awful. It’s a dated, lukewarm, unfunny comedy at best; at worst, it’s a thoughtless, ugly, wholly reductive paeon to man’s basest desires and fundamental fears about sex, women and adult responsibility. 

Or is it?

What if, deep within the heart of Splash’s puerile fantasies and comedy sexism there’s another film – a secret film? A film that’s not a stupid 80s romcom but a profoundly melancholy examination of a dying child’s fantasy about the adult life he’ll never experience?

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Bear with me, and let’s see where this ship takes us.

Monsters & Mullets: The Beastmaster (1982)

So. What we have today is your basic barbarian movie, in pretty much its purest form. Prince in disguse? Check. Magical talents? Check. Imperiled slave-girl love interest? Check. Revenge quest? Check. Faithful companions? Monsters? Sweeping score? Check, check, check. Naked, muscle-bound, bowl-cut-bearing barbarian? Check and mate.

Of course, in this barbarian movie, Doctor Dolittle Dar can talk to the animals.

The opening titles are credits shakily interposed over dark photographs of two animals: the eagle appears to be a living, breathing animal (indeed, these are stills from the film), but the "black tiger" is clearly a single taxidermied tiger shot from a few different angles. There's a particularly awful irony to that fact; the actual, living tiger used in the movie died two years after filming wrapped because the black dye they used on it was toxic. Which is a bummer of a fact to begin this review with, but there it is.

Monsters & Mullets: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991)

This is a terrible movie. It is also a wonderful movie. It is, indeed, everything a great Monsters & Mullets movie is supposed to be: equal parts nostalgia-evoking, horror-inducing, cringe-warranting and adoration-justifying. It is horrific contrivances running amok amidst the pillars of some of modern film’s greatest campy acting, chased down by the swelling tide of heroic music and lovingly beaten to death by absurd slow-mo action sequences.

It is Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. And it is amazeballs.

The film opens with a titles crawl over the Bayeux Tapestry. The use of the Bayeux Tapestry here is important for one of the following two reasons. A) Because the Tapestry represents the Norman invasion and William the Conqueror’s victory over the Saxon English king Harold a hundred years before this film is set, opening the movie by referencing the Tapestry subtly sets up the central socio-political tension of the Robin Hood myth between the conquering Normans and the subjugated Saxons, or, B) we learn later that Maid Marian embroidered all 230+ feet of the tapestry herself.

Monsters & Mullets: She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword (1985)

Just a quickie guide before we get into this, the “feature-length” origin adventure of She-Ra, barbarian princess of tie-in toys. Mattel passed up the opportunity to produce the Star Wars tie-in toys, a decision they never came to regret despite the series’ immense and lucrative popularity. Oh, ha hah, I kid. How I kid. The Mattel muckity-mucks spent the next few years sacrificing Barbie dolls to Ba’al in exchange for another shot at the Lucasian stupid-money.

Then, in the very early ‘80s, Mattel’s lead designer slapped some clay muscles onto a doll made of knocked-together parts from some random line and Mattel declared his creation “good.” Then he named it He-Man, generic enough to be marketed really easily, and the Mattel called it “very good.” And thus, in 1982, was He-Man brought into the world. It was a world obsessed with swords n’ sorcery, delighted by all things barbarian, and right then, totally digging on Conan (the Schwarzenegger film was one of 1982’s major hits).

The toy line sold well, but Mattel wanted more. So they created a tie-in animated series and BOOM. Lucasian stupid-money achieved.

Monsters & Mullets: The Little Mermaid (1989)

Our generation (late X) has made it to the crossroads of cynicism and nostalgia. Our knee-jerk poo-pooing of the things we loved as children is just starting to become knee-jerk wistfulness, in part because we haven’t done much thinking about these things in recent years, and in part because we’re starting to have our own children, and want to introduce them to the things we loved ourselves. However much qualified our interest in the artefacts of our own childhoods, they remain inherently fascinating to us.

Which may explain, in part, the backlash against the so-called Disney Renaissance films of the early '90s that seems to have infected the internet of late. From Hipster Ariel to Cracked.com’s takedown of Beauty and the Beast, it seems that everyone’s talking about Disney these days. And not particularly flatteringly.

And it’s tempting to want to join that hayride. Traditional cel-animation looks impossibly dated in these halcyon days of (occasionally) exceptional CG: the camera doesn’t move, the figures appear too flat and too smooth. Everything just looks so… well, cartoony.

Monsters & Mullets: Beetlejuice (1988)

Jared and I sat down to Beetlejuice with pretty low expectations. We'd seen the film as kids, of course, and again at some point after we'd hit the puberty wall. Jared thinks he must have been about 14; I honestly have no idea how old I was when last I watched it. But our memories were hazy, all stripes and sandworms and weird subplots about model towns. It's okay, we reassured each other; we only have to watch it once.

You know what we discovered? Beetlejuice is actually pretty great.

Adam and Barbara Maitland are a pleasant couple. They have an enormous, creaky old mansion (a comfy version of the Bates Motel house) and a two weeks vacation ahead of them. They can't have kids (this is nicely, if not subtly, established). They love each other. They're happy.

Of course they die horribly.

Monsters & Mullets: Gremlins (1984)

If there is one name that looms large over the cinematic landscape of the 1980s, that name is Steven Spielberg. Spielberg had already proven his credentials with his break-out Jaws, and cemented his reputation with Raiders of the Lost Ark: both movies were popular and critical successes, and have proven enormously influential over the last three or so decades.  But ET the Extra-Terrestrial, released in 1982, brought Spielberg superdooper fame.  ET was, at the time, the most successful film ever produced, making more money at the box-office than Star Wars, garnering nine Academy Award nominations, and making Reese's Pieces famous. Today the film has a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

It also has a lot to answer for.  ET pretty much set the formula for kids' movies in the '80s.  Twinkly suburban setting?  Check.  Lonely kid, usually a caucasian boy? Check.  Kid-heavy cast?  Check. Fantastic being/ability/occurrence that adults find frightening or incomprehensible, but which improves lonely kid's life? Check.  Valuable life lessons? Check.  External authority subverted?  Check.  Central importance of family reasserted? Check and check.

And somewhere, amidst all these Spielberg-inspired - even Spielberg-created - sweet and unchallenging exercises in schlock-making for the kiddies, something else sneaked in. The Spielberg-produced Gremlins.

Gremlins is not a great movie.  It's not even a very good movie.  But it is a deeply, profoundly weird movie. 

Monsters & Mullets: Flash Gordon (1980)

By the 1970s, sci fi cinema had bloated from its Golden Age roots into something outsized and overwhelming and almost tragic. It was all about the bombast; the skin-tight outfits with their bright colors and spangled cloth and flapping capes; the mediocre effects; the improbable rubber creatures. These films were stuffed to the gills with pretentious Greater Meaning, often cheerfully undercut by generous helpings of lame humor.

Star Wars changed everything. Although the worst excesses of the genre weren't all immediately (or entirely) carved away, Star Wars made it clear that the sun was setting on a certain kind of sci fi movie. The sparkly body-suits, the papier-mâché monster-masks and the middle-school humor didn't just look dated in comparison with Lucas' lean east-meets-west aesthetics and basic chosen-one narrative - they looked cheap. Perhaps even worse, they looked tawdry.

I feel an appealing kind of dissonance when I watch a post-Star Wars film of the pre-Star Wars family. Ray Harryhausen's epic, wonderful, utterly ridiculous Clash of the Titans, for example, seems like a product of about 1963 - not the 1980 blockbuster it (really!) was. These films feel so strange, so charming, so innocent, and so misguided: the work of people who simply hadn't made peace with the fact that the Golden Age of bodysuits and space-needles was over. Perhaps no film rages against the dying of that Golden light more than today's Monsters & Mullets entry, 1980's Flash Gordon.  A lodge in a garden of cucumbers, Flash Gordon is about as un-Star Warsy as they come.

Monsters & Mullets: The Hobbit (1977)

Monsters & Mullets is the bastard child of my obsessive devotion to '80s high fantasy films.  Despite my deep affection for Rankin & Bass' made-for-tv animated adaptation of The Hobbit, however, I began work on the series knowing it was out of bounds.  The Hobbit, after all, came out in 1977.

It's taken me a while to make peace with the idea that Monsters & Mullets is my bloody feature on my bloody blog and, therefore, I can review whatever I like.  I mean, really.  Caligula is 1970s art-house porn, and I grandfathered it in.  The Hobbit is a no-brainer; of course it's a Monsters & Mullets film.  Hell, it's a Monsters & Mullets classic.

Also, The Hobbit teaches us something we may not have realized before:  Gandalf is kind of an asshole