The Top 19 Movies of 1983: #19-#15

The Top 19 Movies of 1983: #19-#15

Okay, so you may be wondering why I picked the year 1983 and the very specific number of 19 for this mega list. Who the hell deliberately picks an odd number like 19 for a list? I mean, yeah, if I was doing a mega list for a particular director’s body of work and the number of movies that moviemaker made was 19, doing a mega list with 19 entries would make sense. But this mega list isn’t a look at a particular director’s body of work. It’s a list of movies from 1983. So what the heck is going on here?

Basically I was brainstorming potential ideas for a new mega list and I started looking up lists of movies in Wikipedia. One of the searches was for the movies of 1983. I looked at the list of movies and, for no reason beyond “why not?,” I counted how many of them I liked. And by “liked” I mean genuinely enjoyed and, on some level, loved. And of the movies on that list (for the record, the number of movies listed was 141) I really only liked 19 of them.

Now, I will admit that I haven’t seen every movie listed for 1983 on that Wikipedia page. I’ve seen a good chunk of them, but not all of them. So there will be movies listed where you may go “Why the hell is that movie on the list?” and there will be movies not listed where you will go “Why the hell isn’t that movie on the list?” This mega list isn’t intended to be “definitive.” I just wanted to make that clear before getting into it.

This mega list will take four weeks, with five picks for the first three weeks and then the final four revealed in the fourth week. There will be no honorable mentions, but I will likely discuss a few movies that didn’t make the cut in the intros for weeks two and three. Maybe. I haven’t completely decided on that yet.

And now, without any further what have you, the Top 19 Movies of 1983 list begins:

The Top 19 Movies of 1983: #19-#15

19- Superman III: Superman III was a big deal for me when it first hit HBO because I was a megafan of Superman II and of Richard Pryor, star of The Toy, which was on HBO all of the time way back then. Having Superman and Pryor in the same movie seemed like a “can’t miss” movie, and it sort of still is a can’t miss movie. It certainly isn’t as good as Superman II, but it has plenty of great stuff in it. Christopher Reeve is back as Clark Kent/Superman and he’s once again excellent as both. Seeing him in Smallville, hanging out with Annette O’Toole (Jack Cates’s girlfriend? What he hell?) was mind blowing to me (why isn’t Lois Lane in the movie more than brief moments at the beginning and the end?). And Pryor, as a hacker who gets caught up in a big scheme, is weird as hell but somehow still works. The big villain of the movie, Ross “Bubba” Webster, played by Robert Vaughn, is a good enough substitute for the missing Lex Luthor/Gene Hackman (Vaughn knows how to play a real deal megalomaniac), and the bit where Webster’s sister Vera (Annie Ross) is turned into a cyborg still gives me the creeps to this day. And who can forget the epic “Clark Kent vs. the evil Superman” sequence? I sort of understand why people tend to be down on this movie, but I still like it and enjoy watching it when I get the chance. It’s still fun.

18- Strange Brew: This was another movie that I remember watching quite a bit on cable back in the day, but I can’t say that I ever really understood it until I got older. I didn’t really get the story, either, until much later in life. It always seemed like a movie that was on in the background and featured weird and wacky stuff that I wanted to see again, but what the hell was it actually about? What was the story? Basically, it’s about the evil character played by Max von Sydow (Brewmeister Smith) wanting to take over the world with drugged up beer that will allow Smith to control people’s minds. The McKenize brothers, Bob and Doug (played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas), two complete dipshits, are tasked with stopping Smith from doing what he wants to do. That’s essentially what the movie is about. The real pleasure of the movie, though, is Moranis and Thomas being morons. They’re brilliant at doing it. They’re also charismatic and funny enough to make you try to mimic them once the movie is over. I defy anyone not to say, over and over again, “Free beer, eh” after watching Strange Brew. It still happens to me to this day.

I also had no idea back when I first saw this that Moranis and Thomas were on a Canadian sketch comedy TV show called SCTV and that’s where they came up with Bib and Doug. I didn’t become an SCTV fan until I saw the show on Cinemax and then Nick at Nite. Did anyone else experience this the same way?

17- Vigilante: I didn’t see this terrifically sleazy revenge vigilante movie until I got the Blue Underground DVD. For whatever reason, I never saw the movie in any video store I frequented back in the day (I always figured that the stores did have the movie when it first hit home video but the tape eventually broke because so many people rented it and watched it and the stores never replaced it because they could never get another copy. I mean, it sounds plausible, doesn’t it?). The flick features top notch performances from star Robert Forster, as the vengeance seeking father and husband Eddie Marino and Fred “The Hammer” Williamson as Nick, the badass leader of a local vigilante group that Eddie joins up with once he’s let out of jail (Edie attacks a judge and is sent to jail for a month). The movie isn’t as violent as you expect it to be, but, my God, the violence that does happen is intense as hell. The early 1980’s New York City setting is also a big character in the movie (it’s a time capsule of a city that no longer exists). The Jay Chattaway score is also excellent (has this movie’s score ever been given a CD or vinyl release? If it has, it really needs to be re-released). Just be advised that it’s not a non-stop action flick. It’s more of a drama than anything. It’s dripping with sleaze and will likely make you uneasy watching it, but it’s a drama more than anything.

And, yes, while Vigilante was first screened at Cannes and then given some sort of “sneak preview” release in 1982, the movie didn’t get a proper wide release until 1983, so that’s why it’s a 1983 movie instead of a 1982 movie. So there.

16- Stroker Ace: Directed by Hal Needham and starring frequent Needham collaborator Burt Reynolds, this NASCAR comedy is still a hoot from start to finish. Some of the movie’s comedy is cringy and wildly offensive by today’s standards (pretty much everything involving Lonnie Anderson’s character Pembrook Feeny is abhorrent in retrospect. I mean, it was abhorrent back then, too, but standards were different. You know what I mean), but the movie still manages to succeed through Reynolds’s charisma, his chemistry with co-star Jim Nabors, the villainous performance given by Ned Beatty (easily one of the worst bosses in movie history), and the copious amounts of NASCAR nostalgia spread throughout the movie (several NASCAR drivers pop up as themselves, including Dale Earnhardt, Harry Gant, Neil Bonnett, and Kyle Petty, among others). And who can forget the big Ken Squier scene towards the beginning where Squier says “shit?” I still find that hilarious. The humiliating things that Beatty’s Clyde Torkle makes Reynolds’s Stroker Ace do as his team owner and main sponsor is pure comedy gold (Burt Reynolds dressed up as a giant chicken is just ridiculous enough to always work), and the whole “Aubrey James on track rivalry” thing has never not been funny (Stroker can never remember who Aubrey is. He only knows his car number, 10). If you’re a current NASCAR fan, you have to be familiar with this movie so you can understand what Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is referencing when he does announcing on NBC’s NASCAR coverage. I would love to see someone try to make a movie like this today. Not with the cringy humor, obviously, but in the same spirit. Who is the equivalent today to Hal Needham?

15- Christine: John Carpenter directed this Stephen King adaptation after the disaster that was The Thing mostly because he needed a job (The Thing, which has since experienced a critical and audience reevaluation and is now considered a bonafide classic, was seen as a complete disaster when it was released back in the summer of 1982). While on paper the plot sounds ridiculous (the movie is about an evil car and a guy that comes under the spell of that evil car), in the hands of Carpenter the movie is creepy as hell. The bright red car, Christine, shouldn’t be scary, but Carpenter figured out that what makes the car scary is that it’s a relentless monster when it decides to go after someone. It can’t be stopped, it will do whatever it needs to in order to get you, and if you’re not prepared to deal with it you’re screwed (look at what happens to bully douchebags Moochie and Buddy, played by Malcolm Danare and William Ostrander). The movie also works because of the go for broke performance by the future Jason Melon Keith Gordon as Arnie, the nerd that buys Christine and starts changing soon after he’s finished restoring her. Arnie goes from a nice guy to a complete psycho, and it’s because of the car. As both a Carpenter movie and a King adaptation Christine seems to have gained an even larger following since its release, which it definitely deserves (the movie was a modest hit when it came out and was sort of popular from day one). It’s still entertaining, still scary, still weird. It also has Robert Prosky in it, and a movie with him in it can never be all that bad. Never.

**

Thanks for reading. Agree? Disagree? Sign up with disqus and comment. You know you want to, so just go do it.

Please “like” The Gratuitous B-Movie Column on Facebook!

Oh, and B-movies rule. Always remember that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B1MDPJ98lc