Around the World in 80s Movies

In this “Get Smart” sequel movie made for network television, KAOS makes a comeback in a world that hasn’t been terrorized by them since CONTROL took them down and put themselves out of the international terror business.  Recurring “Get Smart” actor Bernie Kopell returns as Maxwell Smart’s (Don Adams) main nemesis Conrad Siegreid, who leads the new KAOS after it...

Maxwell Smart (Don Adams), the dimwitted super-spy from the hit TV series from the 1960s, “Get Smart” returned in 1980 for a brand new, racier adventure.  Entitled  The Nude Bomb , it has lost that title over the years in favor of the more TV-programming friendly  The Return of Maxwell Smart .  The gist of the film is that an agent from the super-terrorist organization, KAOS, is threat...

The comedy writing team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker brought this first of a trilogy, based on their short-lived 1982 TV show “Police Squad”, of zany screwball comedies to Hollywood in 1988, offering plenty of sight gags, plays on words, pop culture sendups, and downright silly slapstick.  Leslie Nielsen returns to star as Lt. Frank Drebin, who seems to have a high s...

Ted Wass stars as New York City police sergeant Clifton Sleigh, who ends up getting selected by an Interpol computer that is choosing the second-best sleuth in the world to use to find the missing best sleuth, Inspector Clouseau. Except Sleigh isn’t the best, as Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) deliberately sabotaged the computer to try to find the worst and assure the whereabouts of Cl...

Trail of the Pink Panther is a film done nearly two years after the death of  Pink Panther franchise star Peter Sellers, compiling the best clips and unused outtakes from prior films, along with new material to hang together a plot around the. That plot involves the theft of the infamous and priceless Pink Panther diamond from the fictional country of Lugash, and Chief Inspector Clouseau, at the r...

John Candy plays Harry Crumb, the bumbling son who never quite lived up to the reputation of his sleuthing father and grandfather in his family’s long-standing detective agency. Instead of running the company, he’s been relegated to being a lowly trainee as their Tulsa office. Ineptitude is just what the CEO of the company, Eliot Draisen (Jeffrey Jones), in Los Angeles wants from an in...

Fletch (Chevy Chase) quits his job as an investigative reporter when he learns he has inherited his aunt’s expansive plantation estate in Louisiana called Belle Isle.  Unfortunately, he arrives to find that the property is completely run down through many years of lack of upkeep, though there are offers for the land from mysterious sources. When the executor of the will ends up dead in Fletc...

Chevy Chase plays a Los Angeles Times investigative reporter named Irwin M. Fletcher (he prefers to be called by his nickname, “Fletch”) under the pseudonym of Jane Doe. While working undercover trying to uncover the secret to a major beachside drug ring, Fletch is approached by a wealthy businessman named Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) who thinks he is a transient and makes him an offer of $50,000 t...

Shelley Long plays prissy longtime acting student Lauren Ames who has never gotten an actual gig, finally finding some hope when she makes her way into a prestigious drama class led by an all-time great international acting coach. Bette Midler co-stars as Sandy Brozinsky, a mouthy, earthy waitress who also suddenly finds herself in the same class without any of the talent or desire to be there. Th...

James Belushi stars as Nick Pirandello, a crude smart-ass that just so happens to be one of the country’s top CIA agents, who is ordered to recruit a mild-mannered suburban insurance salesman father, Bob Wilson (John Ritter), a lookalike for a recently iced agent, to join him on a secret mission that may have interplanetary implications that may result in the end of the world as we know it....

The plot of Spies Like Us involves the two most inept, low-level U.S. intelligence agents they could find to go on a mission as expendable decoys for the real agents. Emmett Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase) and Austin Millbarge (Dan Aykroyd) were scouted by the CIA after cheating on their advanced placement exams, with a mission that sees them parachuting into Pakistan. From there, the bumbling duo ends up...

This time it’s a bit more personal for John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), as his former Vietnam commander and friend, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), has been captured by Russian forces as he tries to rally the Afghan rebels who have been winning the resistance.  The Afghani people are too suspicious of the American to willingly join his crusade to spring Trautman from his prison cell, leav...

The story follows  First Blood , where John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is in prison for his one-man army heroics against law enforcement in the first film.  Here, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna )   approaches Rambo to undergo a covert operation that will presumably save the lives of thousands of POWs still in Southeast Asia, if he can find evidence that they are still being held captive.  Rambo...

Sylvester Stallon stars as John Rambo, who has spent years trying to track down the only family he ever really knew — the soldiers who fought alongside him in the war.  To Rambo’s dismay, he finds he is all alone, as all of the rest were killed in action, or died from cancerous war-related exposure to chemicals, leaving him but to drift along the roads in search of new meaning to his l...

Cannon Films and Golan-Globus productions push out this ultra-patriotic film in the middle of the 1980s whereby American elite commandos kick major butt when trying to secure the freedom of a plane full of hostages hijacked by a group of Lebanese terrorists. Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin head the super-soldiers to action on the hope of saving not only as many lives as they can, but their own reputat...

In this onscreen persona-defining movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Col. John Matrix, a highly-trained military special-ops expert whose unit was disbanded and now live under secret identities in retirement.  Matrix spends his days as a single father taking care of his spirited young daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano), to whom he has promised not to go out on any more special missions.  However,...

Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Major “Dutch” Schaeffer, who, along with his crew of elite special ops commandos, is sent to the jungle of a hostile Latin American country on a covert hostage rescue mission.  However, he soon finds out there’s more to the mission than he had originally been told by his old friend, Major George Dillon (Weathers), leaving them in a firefight with ot...

Aliens starts where the first one leaves off, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in hypersleep drifting in the escape shuttle. What Ripley doesn’t know until after she is rescued is that she has been that way for 57 years.  When she gets back, the company that owned her ship is very interested in why she decided to blow it to smithereens, and are not too impressed with her implausible “ali...

The story begins in the year 2122, onboard the commercial towing vessel, the Nostromo. Its mostly blue-collar crew, five men and two women, are awakened prematurely while still in deep space from their cryogenic slumber en route back to Earth.  The reason for their early disturbance has to do with the company’s policy to investigate potential alien life forms, so when what appears to be an SOS sig...

In Cannon Films’ Lifeforce , we find a space shuttle mission co-funded by American and British space agencies traveling to explore Halley’s Comet up close. They soon make a discovery of an alien ship hiding in the comet’s coma, so they go on board to investigate, only to find desiccated bat-like creatures and three naked humanoid beings, a woman and two men, seemingly in a perpet...

Fright Night Part 2 is a follow-up to the 1985 cult hit, Fright Night   (naturally), where we find the same protagonist, Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), as a college student no longer believing in the existence of vampires after three years of therapy. Also helping him overcome his supposed fantasies is his new girlfriend and fellow student at the college, Alex (Traci Lind). However, things g...

Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale)   is a typical suburban teenager with a special interest in old-time horror b-movies, the kind seen on the local creep-fest TV showcase, “Fright Night”, hosted by the self-proclaimed king of vampire hunting films, Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall).  It’s all fantasy to Charley until he spies on his new neighbors in the house next door to discover...

Lucy Emerson (Dianne Wiest) is a divorced mother of two teenage sons, Michael (Jason Patric)   and Sam (Coey Haim), who relocates to the strange oceanside California town of Santa Carla, which is filled with a mix of punk and hippie cultures.  The residents of Santa Carla have taken to calling it the “murder capital of the world”, with deaths and disappearances occurring on an increasi...

Adrian Pasdar stars as Caleb Colton, a young and somewhat passive small-town guy in Oklahoma who has his eye set on a visiting mysterious boyish beauty named Mae (Jenny Wright).  Caleb and Mae spend the night talking and flirting, but Mae has to make it home before the sun comes up, for reasons that aren’t too clear for Caleb.  Before the end of the evening, Mae bites Caleb on the neck, alth...

C. Thomas Howell stars as Jim Halsey, a young Chicago native driving a car cross-country to California. The Texas road he’s currently on is lonely and Jim is tired, but he spies a way he might stay awake in the form of hitchhiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). It doesn’t take long before Jim becomes unnerved by his new passenger, as Ryder claims he’s decapitated viciously the last pe...