Over May and June 1979, Britain was gripped by a sensational trial. Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the Liberal Party, stood accused, along with three alleged accomplices, of conspiring to murder his former lover Norman Scott. As falls from grace go, this one was spectacular…
A few years ago, I was at a New Year’s Eve party where the TV was tuned to a Cannon Films action movie marathon. The mindless gunfire and body blows became perfect New Year’s Eve party fodder as the crowd got more and more intoxicated…
When it comes to Italian genre filmmakers, Antonio Margheriti is perhaps the underdog when compared to the likes of Dario Argento, Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. His 1963 gothic masterpiece, Castle of Blood, may be his most revered film, but it’s certainly overshadowed by the work of other Italian genre directors…
By K.E. Roberts
The Shootist is one of the greatest Westerns ever made, although it is rarely named as such. It is John Wayne’s final film, and possibly his best performance. Wayne, of course, essentially invented the on-screen American cowboy: swaggering, gritty, terse, self-contained, charming, relentless, invincible…
The lure of eternal youth is itself seemingly eternal. Myths like the Philosopher’s Stone, the Fountain of Youth, the elixir vitae, and many others have lived with humanity for as long as there’s been an awareness of our own mortality. In the 1980s, several films in a row took on this idea of the elderly discovering a supernatural wellspring…
The Golden Girls premiered on American television’s NBC network in September of 1985. The sitcom features four women—Dorothy and Sophia Petrillo, Rose Nylund, and Blanche Devereaux—who are older, single, and living together as friends in the popular retirement locale of Miami, Florida…
An experimental music group founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970, The Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble began as an exploration into the edges of jazz, folk, and free-form ambient music. Their self-titled debut album with Folkways Records, an independent label focusing on international music and spoken word recordings, was released in 1973…
It’s hard for me to square the aesthetic of these friendly, vivid, hippie-lite cartoons with the messages they convey. The patriotic, even nationalistic approach to American history was nothing if not commonplace in K-8 schools even in the liberal Northeast as late as the 1980s. Plymouth Rock, 1620, taxation without representation, Bunker Hill, Lewis and Clark, Manifest Destiny, Civil War, women’s suffrage: the parade of America’s history presented as a series of easy-to-remember facts and figures…
Designed to educate the country’s public in virtuous behaviors and warn them of the dangers they might encounter in everyday life, Public Information Films, or “PIFs,” were broadcast on British national television throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, and were one of the tools successive post-war UK governments employed to educate the populace in civic comportment…
By Mandy Leetch
As a little girl in the 1980s, one of my favorite movies was the weird and wild animated adaptation of Harry Nilsson’s folk rock concept album The Point!. I had a well worn VHS copy that my mother had recorded off of the TV when she saw they were airing one of her favorites from the ’70s…
