It Came From . . . 1979

“It just doesn’t matter.” – Meatballs

Those are some large balls.

Going back through the list of movies that came out in 1979, you could see the excellence that would come in the 1980s, but it wasn’t, for the most part, there yet.  The formula wasn’t quite right.  Some movies left off the list like The Villian, for instance, should never have been made.  I love slapstick.  I love satire.  But The Villian was just horrible in the way it executed both – it had less character development than a Roadrunner cartoon.

On the flip side, some of the movies below are classics that are far better than anything being made today.  A great, classic movie that hits all the beats and isn’t a sequel is possible.  Also of note, there just weren’t a lot of sequels made in 1979 – Hollywood® still felt it had ideas.

Many of these I saw either on video or on HBO® later and not as releases in the theater.  Also, as always, the list is in no particular order and excludes sequels.

In a city where 10,000 of Trump’s ICE are on their tail, they’re just trying to get home to Oaxaca.

The Warriors – “Warriors . . . come out to play . . . Warriors . . . come out to pla-ay . . . .”  The 1970s were a darker time in the country, and I think folks generally looked around and wondered if it was really the end.  Gangs and crime were top news in major cities, especially New York where The Warriors was set.  On a re-watch a few years ago, it wasn’t nearly as well done as I had remembered, but did okay telling the story of a gang (the eponymous Warriors) who had to make it to their home turf, after falsely being accused of killing the guy who was trying to unite the rest of the gangs to take control of New York City.  Violence was okay, but the movie was sadly missing in hot chicks.

I can imagine The Tall Man as a Tall Cat.  Quite a bit less threatening.

Phantasm – It’s 1978, you’re 28 and somehow you’ve scraped together $300,000 bucks, and have a script you wrote.  So, why not direct.  And be the photographer, too?  That’s Phantasm.  It has all the hallmarks of a huge failure, but it turned into a very well-made horror movie for the budget, including some very inventive effects.  I first saw this one as a late night movie on some cable network (The USA® Network??) and really enjoyed it.  I give it four spiked silver balls out of five.

Hey, it’s almost like something is missing from this picture.  Oh, yeah, it’s his dead father.

The Champ – Okay, technically this is a remake, and not a sequel.  I only saw it once, and that was in the theater.  Why did we go?  Ma Wilder wanted to see it, because she had seen the original when she was young.  If you’ve seen it, you’ll know that, apparently in the last few minutes of the film, it gets really dusty:  out of 250 film clips shown to 500 people, the last three minutes of this movie were judged the saddest by a majority.

What is he holding, exactly?

Mad Max – This is the movie where I first saw St. Mel the Gibson.  It was on HBO™ late one night and I watched it again and again.  Every Mad Max® sequel looks like this movie – the fast-paced shots and the impossibly quick kinetic action on screen.  The dialogue is good (well, action movie good), and (like The Warriors above) takes place in a world that is slipping away.

Where’s the egg?  Stupid A.I.

Alien – This movie is a classic, and created a new genre that people have been trying to copy since it appeared on screen.  Mostly with poor results.  Even James Cameron wisely decided to avoid trying to emulate Alien and instead went and created the classic military science fiction film.  The film is simple:  it’s a haunted house, but in space.  Where no one can hear you scream, but that’s not exactly true because I saw it in a movie theater and there was tons of screaming and most of it was in stereo.

Old Bill Murray makes it a thousand times creepier.

Meatballs – Again, seen on HBO™.  I bought a DVD to watch it again around 2010, since I remembered it as a version of “Rocky Balboa, but he’s a kid at a summer camp, and he runs instead being a boxer”.  Then I re-watched it.  Oh, my, this movie is beyond cringe, and the sexual innuendo involving young teens was more creepy than watching Biden around eight-year-olds.  The plus side?  Bill Murray developing into the comic genius that would steal the show in Ghostbusters.

ApocaPEZ® now?  Why didn’t Brando shave like he was supposed to?

Apocalypse Now – There are some really great parts to this film, but as a complete film I think it’s a failure – the odd scenes with Brando and Sheen detract from the rest of the film.  Brando was awful and I think his performance would have been better if he had not even shown up and been replaced by a one-legged kangaroo.  This movie, I think, more than anything (thankfully) killed the experimental films of the 1970s.  I saw this one on the television for the first time, so it was obviously very heavily edited.  I’ve seen a couple of versions since, and maintain that there is a good ending hiding in there somewhere in the original script Coppola bought from John Milius (Dirty Harry, Red Dawn).  Sadly, Coppola never found it.  I’m likely alone in this opinion.

Skol!

Monty Python’s Life of Brian – The local college played this movie one afternoon much later than the original release date.  Since it was meant for the students, admission was absurdly low, $0.50.  Two quarters.  But the film?  Hilarious.  Even though it’s a touchy subject, Monty Python made it clear that Brian was not Jesus, since there were several scenes depicting an intersection with some of the miracles of Jesus.  What’s hilarious from 2025 is how it mocked the GloboLeftist movement, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate, in a box?”  A nearly perfect comedy.

Skol!

10 – There are some genuinely funny moments in 10, but they are few and far between.  The plot centers around Dudley Moore wanting to bang someone’s new wife.  Not his new wife, but some other guy.  The only reason teenage John Wilder really wanted to se this movie was, well, let’s say there were two reasons.  The movie, though, was very much in keeping with Hollywood’s increasing use of film to spread the “anything goes” sexual propaganda of the era.

And now for something completely different.

Star Trek:  The Motion Picture – When Star Wars made it big at the box office, absolutely everyone wanted to recreate it.  They stuffed Gene Roddenberry full of money, and took a script from an abandoned television show (Star Trek:  Phase II) and fluffed it out to a movie that lasted 36 hours.  I kid.  It only lasted 18.  It made a bunch of money because people missed Star Trek enough to spend six days of their lives watching this this very lovingly crafted movie that consisted mostly of people talking in rooms.  At the end, one person has space sex with the computer-possessed body of a bald woman and everything is solved.

I told the A.I. I wanted Manet, not Monet.  Stupid A.I.

The Jerk – Steve Martin was at the top of his standup comic success and decided that movies would probably be easier.  The result?  One of the funniest movies ever – The Jerk.  It’s about a poor black child (Steve Martin) that goes from rags to riches to rags to much improved rags.

The Mouse is now public domain, baby.

The Black Hole – This one I saw in the theater, and it certainly was one of the causes of the death of Disney®.  The Black Hole was stupidly expensive, aimed at eight-year-olds, and mixed science fiction with ghosts and religion, but in a really bad way.  Very, very bad.  What could have saved it?  Not filming it.

Deleted due to length: 1941 and Being There.

There is an amazing drop off in quality in just a single year.  1980?  Some good films.  1979?  The lingering effects of the doom from Jimmy Carter’s Bidenesque presidency dominated.  We were a defeated nation, filled with inflation, embarrassed by what went on in Afghanistan and Iran, and overrun with the GloboLeft.

What a difference a year makes.

This post has been blessed by St. Mel.