Runaway (1984)
Notes:
- I seemed to remember this being a “fun” bad movie – something more like Timecop and less like, say, Repo: The Genetic Opera? Is that true, or was this a total slog.
- There are a few words for this idea, but “Runaway,” along with movies like “Escape From New York” and “Back to the Future 2” imagine a world in a future year we’ve now lived through. Some people consider this Retrofuturism, but that seems more a stylistic movement, so I personally prefer the term “Past Future,” which is a wonderful play on words: A future imagined from the past that is now actually in the past. What did you think of Runaway’s look forward?
- Seemed insanely antiquated and clunky to me! So many CRTs. If anything, Blade Runner did a better job of more fully realizing a world that felt real and not made of balsa wood spray-painted to look like metal.
- Ugh, the “I Don’t Like Heights” thing is so incredibly contrived. You KNOW this is going to come into play later. And the fact that there’s no reason for it just makes it feel like plot-convenience.
- This has a pretty awesome cast overall. Selleck, Ally, Rhodes, Bailey, Chris Mulkey – a THAT GUY of nearly mythical proportions – as well as Stan Shaw whop played Det. Sapir in The Monster Squad. But most notably, this was the film debut of Joey Cramer, the kid from “Flight of the Navigator” who, interestingly, has started acting again in 2021, after taking a roughly 35-year hiatus!
- The first encounter with a “runaway” – a robot that’s gone bezerk – is actually pretty solid in terms of suspense. There’s a baby in a house where an armed robot is camped out and Selleck’s character has to carefully infiltrate the premises or else someone’s going to be killed. A news camera guy gets a little over-eager, following him in and then gets shot himself. So the stakes are high and while the killer machine is out of view, things feel intense. But then… you see the robot and the whole damn thing just seems silly.
- This pretty much sums up the whole damn thing. Lots of neat ideas, but pretty poor execution.
- Fucking Gene Simmons. Ludicrous. He’s so over the top, eyes-heavy lidded and staring unblinking at whoever he’s talking to in a flat, supposedly evil monotone.
- The meet-cute with Kirstie Ally is too damn funny with Selleck getting tasered by a goddamn Xerox machine that he subdues by… throwing his coat over the damn thing and then going WWE on its ass with a folding chair.
- Bullet sequence with the detonating “smart bomb” in his adorable partner’s arm – pretty solid. Cynthia Rhodes might be one of the cutest looking actresses ever on film, but sadly she retired in the early 90’s to raise a family, so we only got a handful of movies with her and this being one of her only major roles.
- The fucking chief of police is GW Bailey – best known as Capt. Harris from the Police Academy movies.
- There are lots of capable moments in the film – even a split diopter shot at one point. And yet, it all feels flimsy and sort of amateurish.
- Selleck’s cop has a fear of heights, but the sequences don’t have nearly the dramatic tension of something like Vertigo, which shows you just how genius Hitchcock was some 20-odd years before.
- So, how’d you do with the ending, man? Robot spiders that kill via acid-filled syringes? Nightmare fuel or nah?
- One of the best villain isn’t dead jump scares in any movie, though. Laughable, but great. And then he bursts into… smoke. LOL.
- The restaint shown in Twisters is super lacking in this one considering the ending, huh? Sheesh. “Can you cook?” “Try me.” Smooooooch. BLAH. AND THEN THEY AWKWARDLY KISS UNDER SPARKS WHILE THE CREDITS ROLE.
Bottom Five Moustaches:
5.) Prince of Darkness (1987)
dir. John Carpenter
I don’t know what happened on the set of the 1980’s buddy-cop comedy show “Simon & Simon,” but there’s a part of me that thinks Gerald McRaney somehow duped co-star Jameson Parker into believing that he, like McRaney, could base a career on a finely-sculpted upper-lip. You see, there were two Simons, one with a stache and one without. McRaney was, of course, with, as anyone who watched Major Dad as a kid would know. So, Parker grew a mustache and then it became the single most disturbing thing in horrormeister John Carpenter’s 1987 flick, “Prince of Darkness.” This movie is filled with all sorts of vile stuff, including a dude that melts into bugs, a blonde lady with no skin and a dude who shoves a the sharp end of a wooden slat into his neck. But yeah, none of that matters because every time we see Jameson Parker’s goofy ass on screen, he’s rocking the most distracting bit of facial hair this side of Deep Throat. Maybe it’s the color that makes it work – light-haired dudes do not look good with mustaches. Imagine William Katt, Christopher Atkins or Luke Wilson in their prime with ‘staches. NO. Just no. Or maybe it’s just that he looks too uptight, that the neat and tidiness of that upper lip shading is too much an indicator that this dude spends way too much time looking in the mirror to really care about anyone else in the film. And that’s the thing, really, with this movie. You don’t care much about this dude and he’s supposed to be your leading man, your anchor to this crazy situation with an anti-god that’s escaped, via green slime, from a centuries-old YETI thermos. And we don’t care because he looks like a goddamn fool with that damn thing on his lip. FUCK. I blame Gerald McRaney. Could be that John Carpenter could have continued making classic films after ’87, but no… Jameson Parker tried to be the other Simon and collectively the human race lost one of our favorite filmmakers to things like the “Village of the Damned” remake and, ugh, “Ghosts of Mars.”
4.) The Island of Lost Souls (1932)
dir. Erle C. Kenton
On a recent episode of the excellent podcast “Faculty of Horror,” which you – Mike – got me into, co-hosts Alex West and Andrea Subissati discussed the 1932 pre-code horror film “Island of Lost Souls.” This is a hell of an episode on one hell of a great podcast, so if you haven’t tuned into the “fac” yet, I highly recommend you do and give their deep-dive into this flick a listen. And I point the listeners of our show to their show because I’m not going to talk about how the film was banned in several countries nor will I go into depth about the contest held to find an actress to play “Lota the Panther Woman. I’m not even going to discuss how Bela Lugosi, who was bankrupt at this point in his life, did the gig for $800. Nope, instead all you’re going to get from me when chatting about this classic, disturbing and wild adaptation of the HG Wells novel “The Island of Doctor Moreau” is Charles Laughton and his goddamn awful facial hair. Laughton, a well-known stage star at the time, was relatively new to screen acting and “Island” was his second movie. In it he plays Doctor Moreau,” the mad scientist whose experiments in evolution have led to an island sanctuary populated by man-beasts that he controls with strict rules and a whip. Laughton plays the whole thing very big, but the biggest thing about his performance is his insane mustache/beard combo. Above his top lip is essentially two Hitler ‘staches under each nostril, which – depending on the scene – are either merged or separated under his septum. And though it’s out of bounds for this list, it bears mentioning that beneath his bottom lip and stretching down to his chin is the kind of racing stripe you’re likely to find in early 2000’s porn. It’s rumored that Laughton developed an aversion to hair in general after the film – as well as zoos – but I’m unsure of the validity of the rumor; this despite the fact that were that abomination on my face, I’d have shaved several times a day for the rest of my life to ensure if never appeared again.
3.) Dead Again (1991)
dir. Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh’s tempestuous composer’s ‘stache looks ridiculous, but perhaps not as ridiculous as Branagh looks in his modern-day scenes in this crazy mystery/suspense/thriller he directed and starred in back in 1991 with then-wife Emma Thompson. So in this case, it’s really the use of the mustache as a differentiator between the apparently reincarnated version of Branagh’s character, named Mike Church, and the original version, who was known as Roman Strauss. Yes, the one named Roman was the one sporting the Snidely Whiplash ‘stache. And while this disastrous upper lip was used to sway viewers to think a certain way about the character – yes, I’m being purposedly vague because even though this movie is 33 years old, I’m not blowing its awesome reveals – it really is distracting when you go from scenes featuring Roman to scenes featuring Mike. Perhaps it wouldn’t be that bad were they both to have had mustaches, but I gotta tell ya, when you see Mike again after spending time with Roman, regardless of how goofy Roman’s facial hair (and overall demeanor) might be, holy HELL does Mike look freaking goofy. If you’ve ever seen Tom Selleck in the movie “The Love Letter,” you’ll understand what I mean. In that film Selleck plays a bare-lipped TV reporter and GAH, it was a sight! Now, granted he didn’t go back and forth from his clam-tickler to bald from scene to scene as Branagh does in “Dead Again,” but Selleck’s was so era-defining that you couldn’t focus on anything beyond “Oh my God, why is it gone?” That’s how things happen in “Dead Again,” and despite my love for the movie, I cannot deny this is some very bad use of facial hair.
2.) Death Wish (1974)
dir. Michael Winner
I could have just as well gone with any of the movies from this painfully awful series of vigilante justice movies starring Charles Bronson, but considering this is the film that birthed Paul Kersey, a mild-mannered, socially-liberal architect who becomes a gun-toting death-dealer after criminals destroy his family, this seemed like the correct choice. A nasty flick that seems to relish in the American conservative’s fever dream of shooting anyone that wrongs them in place of due process, “Death Wish” has a lot of issues when viewed with modern eyes. But none of those are as noticeable, nor distracting, as Bronson’s goddamn upper lip, which looks like the hair was drawn on with a woman’s eyebrow pencil. Somehow hovering too high above his top lip and too low below his nose, this ‘stache manages to also slope downward on either side, yet be finely-manicured enough not to join in the middle, instead with little handles that point to his nostrils. And as I was writing this, a description of Charles Bronson’s mustache, I suddenly realized just how utterly insane this entire endeavor is – that I’ve now spent hours comparing cinematic facial hair so that I could settle on one so bad that it demanded I describe it in detail. There have been many moments in my life where I’ve questioned the decisions made that led me to where I wound up, but HOLY SHIT, MIKE: I don’t think I’ve ever fallen into as deep an existential well as I did while writing about Charles Bronson’s nostrils. So, I guess for that reason alone, I have this on my list, but also? It’s an absolutely terrible-looking mustache that, perhaps thankfully, fills out throughout the rest of the installments in the series until part 5, when it was re-sculpted to it’s original horrible shape, perhaps as a “back to it’s roots” attempt by the filmmakers. I don’t know, I’m just a guy wondering what he did with his life.
1.) The Conqueror (1956)
dir. Dick Powell
I debated keeping this one off the list because it’s… a LOT and likely would make for a decent full-episode review, but ultimately I decided it belonged here because you cannot have a bottom five mustaches list and not have 1956’s “The Conqueror.” The belief that John Wayne would make a convincing Mongolian warlord is, to put it mildly, a stretch. But veteran actor Dick Powell, who largely took the 50s off from acting to pursue directing, apparently believed Wayne was the right man to play Temujin, the warrior that kidnaps a Tartar chieftain’s daughter, starts a huge war over the situation and, after winning her over, slays his enemies and is anointed as Genghis Kahn. Yes. John Wayne as Genghis Kahn. And it seems all the production team felt Wayne needed to play the first king of all of Asia was… the worst mustache that has likely ever been seen on film, before or since. The production history on this thing is wacky as Hell, and a little tragic. This was among the last of the RKO Pictures during Howard Hughes’s tumultuous time as the studio head, a period characterized by his insistence that all who starred in his films be proven anti-communists. This offscreen madness resulted in reduced output and earnings from the studio, and when their original headliner for “The Conqueror” fell through – which was, incredibly, Marlon Brando, who might be the only person in Hollywood who’d look worse in a Fu Manchu ‘stache than Wayne. When that deal Collapsed, Hughes remembered Wayne had one picture remaining on his RKO contract, and now cinema history has infamous lines like one, drawled out in Wayne’s often-imitated laconic way: “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her. There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar woman.” Good lord. Of course, any time “The Conqueror” comes up in discussion, you have to mention the macabre fact that it was shot in the Utah desert some 140 or so miles downwind from nuclear test sites in Nevada. This famously led to the picture being called “An RKO Radioactive Picture” and there are press photos of Wayne holding a Geiger counter he believed was busted because it was going off so loudly. Out of the 220 cast and crew members working on the picture, 91 of them were diagnosed with cancer during their lives, and 46 of those diagnosed ultimately succumbed to the disease, including Wayne and director Powell. Hughes is on record as saying the location choice for the film was the worst decision he ever made, but I’m inclined to believe that it might be letting Wayne be seen with that mustache which is a smidge worse.