It Came From . . . 1990
“Alas, poor Yorick.” – Hamlet
I can’t really think of a worse interpretation of the instructions I gave the A.I., but yet, here it is.
I seem to recall we have one more year in the 1980s before we’re done with it, but I decided that we could zip along and move to 1990. VHS changed everything – of the nineteen eighteen movies on this list, I saw 11 on VHS tapes. I had to drop a movie because Ernest Goes to Jail is technically a sequel.
As I look through the movies that are on this list, only two of the top ten grossing films are on it. Again, the rules are that there are no sequels on the list, and the list is in no particular order. One of these I included because of personal reasons, and you’ll see that when you get to it.
With that, here’s the list.
Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer – Wow. Picked this one up at the video store, and I had no idea how grim a movie could be, and then this one topped it. Looking back, the title includes the words “portrait of a serial killer” so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve seen this one twice. The second time, I said to myself, “Nah, it can’t have been as grim as I remember.” It was.
Tremors – In every way possible, Tremors is the opposite of Henry. It’s a buddy comedy about two less than bright handymen who run into a bright scientist and discover a species of giant landwhales (this doesn’t refer to Democrat voters) that they have to outwit to survive. A good time filled with lots of firepower.
Well A.I., at least you tried. Here’s a star. Not a gold one. But a blue one.
The Hunt for Red October – The Cold War was already winding down and the end was near for the Soviet Union, but, hey, this is a pretty good story, told pretty well. Sean Connery’s Russian accent sounds like it came from the Edinburgh part of Moscow, but it still works. I rewatched this a couple of years ago, and it holds up pretty well.
Joe Versus the Volcano – This movie always seemed to me to be only slightly better than a TV movie of the time. The major difference was the cast, with Tom Hanks attempting to sell the silly plot, and Meg Ryan before plastic surgeons performed those bizarre experiments on her face. Brain cloud.
Blind Fury – Rutger Hauer as a blind guy who carries around a walking stick that’s also a samurai sword. What more do you need??? Technically, this is a remake which would make it invalid for the list. Meh. It’s on the list anyway.
I guess this poster describes the movie absolutely perfectly. If you were a blind person going to a movie.
A Shock to the System – Aesop suggested this one to me a few years ago. It’s about a guy with a midlife crisis that he solves with murder. Bippity, boppity, boo.
I Love You to Death – What’s funnier than a wife killing a philandering husband? A wife failing to kill a philandering husband by shooting him and poisoning. What’s even funnier? That it’s all based on a true story, and that the wife and husband are still married 40 years later.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane – This isn’t a great movie, and I only put it on the list because I’m theoretically in it. Yup. In a crowd shot. At night. Maybe a pixel or two. I’m sure everyone wants my autograph now. Life forms on the left, next to the gift shop.
Quick Change – Most people like Groundhog Day better than Quick Change. They’re wrong. Quick Change is Bill Murray in a sharp, funny, very rewatchable comedy where a clown robs a bank and needs a monster truck to try to get away and where Murray’s character doesn’t grow or change in any way. Which is as it should be.
I guess Geena Davis is gonna be pissed by this poster.
Arachnophobia – This is a movie that simply disappeared. Why? I have no idea. I haven’t seen it show up on any streaming service. Regardless, it was what is mostly rare today: a summer popcorn flick that doesn’t promote any sort of agenda with the exception of “Auuuuuugh! Spiders!”.
Pump Up the Volume – What teen boy didn’t want a pirate radio station to blast his silly rants out to the world while having sex with Samantha Mathis? That was the best of all possible worlds. This was a fundamentally silly movie, sort of like if rabbits had an opinion. I blame this movie for all the teen angst of the 1990s.
Men at Work – Yes, another silly comedy, this time about brothers who are sanitation workers living on the edge, getting in the face of cops, and solving a crime involving illegal toxic waste dumping. Emilio Estevez both wrote and directed the movie, I think while on drugs, which was a net positive for him.
Since when did Fabio do sanitation work?
Goodfellas – Another movie based on a real story, this one involving the Mafia. You’ve seen it, so I won’t dwell on it, except to ask, does it amuse you?
Quigley Down Under – Tom Selleck as a cowboy who decides to not kill aborigines in the Outback in Australia and picks up Laura San Giacomo in the process. Alan Rickman plays the perfect villain. “This ain’t Dodge City. And you ain’t Bill Hickok.” One of my favorites.
Home Alone – Home Alone was the biggest money-making action comedy for decades, grossing half a billion dollars in 1990. So, you’ve seen it, you filthy animals.
If Keven was a Soviet officer attacked by Clint Eastwood and Peter Cushing. I guess.
Robot Jox – This was a huge box office flop, and really part of that was the production values. The story itself is fun. After a nuclear war, the major countries decided to solve all of their conflicts by having giant robots fight each other. Yes. That was the basis of international order, and I, for one, would like to dissolve the United Nations right now and have everyone buy robots. I would love to see the one from India – I imagine it would be steam powered.
The Grifters – This is John Cusack’s first attempt at a real dramatic role, and he does a fine job in this tragedy. It’s a shame that he turned into a horrible Leftist. This movie is a tragedy, and its not a lot of fun at all. I don’t suggest watching it, but I really do remember it.
Hamlet – This 1990 version is my favorite version of this tragedy. Mel Gibson was a bit long in the tooth for playing the sad Dane, but it’s fine because he plays the part with such verve. It was really lost on me when I was a kid, but now, alas, I finally understand his speech to Yorick.
Not gonna lie, this movie looks like the best movie ever. What a paragon of movies this could be….
At the end of the 1990s, there seems to be a difference in the way the movies feel. The 1980s were giddy with the challenge of coming together to beat the Soviets. The GloboLeftistElite propaganda machine owned television then, but movies had to make a buck, and Reagan won a resounding victory in 1984 not on a weak America, but on building a strong one.
So, what happened? Why did the victory sap our strength? Why did the brash, in your face sounds of Cherry Pie turn to the lament of Lithium?
Maybe, just maybe . . . a man needs a goal.
Blind fury sounds like a whitewash of the Japanese character Zatoichi.
100% it is. So, not a sequel, and, Rutger Hauer. I haven’t watched any of the Zatoichi films, but I was really close to buying a Zatoichi “walking stick”.
I don’t understand why AI does the text so horribly in all the posters, except maybe to AI it’s not text but just an image to emulate. Which ironically would be not very intelligent.
It’s ironic that “AI” which is really based on Large Language Models (LLM) …… can’t really do language well.
And you don’t see the rejects. Most of them are far worse.
“Henry” is one of my all-time favorites. I rented it during the summer of 1994 after a miserable freshman year in high school. It revived my love of cinema. I had the pleasure of meeting both Mike Rooker and Tom Towles at conventions over the years.
It was so, very, very surprising to me.
Night of the living dead, the Tom Savini remake… In the year… 1990. Tow Towles was in it
I have only seen a couple of films on this list (Red October, Home Alone, Goodfellas and Tremors that I watched for the first time just a few years ago). 1990 was the year I graduated high school and started college so I guess I didn’t watch that many movies although we never missed an episode of Simpsons viewed on the enormous console TV one of my roommates brought to the dorm.
Much better things to do in high school and college – there’s a full decade of network television I “missed”. I’m not sad I “missed” it.
Quigley is the best Tom Selleck movie, with Alan Rickman as the perfect bad guy foil and Laura San Giacomo (yeah, OK, I had to look up her name just now) as the perfect maddeningly quirky damsel in distress. A personal favorite of mine. Awesome movie if you haven’t seen it.
So many others for 1990! Ghost, Home Alone, Pretty Woman and Dances With Wolves topped the box office for the female audience. Some great action / SF movies for the guys trailed these – Total Recall, Die Hard 2, and the Back To The Future trilogy conclusion. All enjoyable.
Altho I didn’t see it when it first came out in 1990, The Big Bang is an interesting film – a existential documentary that asks big questions to ordinary people. Like…would you kill a complete stranger in a perfect murder for a million dollars? Another existential movie I did enjoy at the time it came out was Flatliners – the baby brat pack does medical horror.
But for medical horror, nothing tops the great Robocop 2, another personal favorite of mine.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ha6rl
There’s a glitch in that Robocop 2 file, if you’re patient the video will eventually catch up to the audio. I have thought an awfully lot about this scene over the years since I saw it decades ago. We are all just floating along through life in our own little containers…
On a happier note, here’s the entire Quigley movie on YouTube! A delightful flick!
Good times.
I’m only gonna address Total Recall. Interesting movie, but the physics at the end made me just go, “Pffffft”. Yes, it was PKD, but that was just awful.
Pump up the Volume had a killer soundtrack. I still have all the songs in my rotation. Tremors was just silliness, but in the good way—crack open a cold one and get the popcorn way. Goodfellas is a masterpiece. I still haven’t watched Home Alone, and refuse to.
How about a thread on the old Hammer Studios horror films? Some great cheesy fun there.
Bob, interesting idea! I might go broader and call it the “Creepy Creature Feature”.
You say “Bill Murray doesn’t change”, but when he did Groundhog Day, the director shot the scenes in reverse order. The happy, friendly Bill (at the end of the film) was typical of his attitude when starting a project, and the grumpy, cranky weatherman (at the start of the film) was typical of his attitude when the end (of filming) was in sight and he was ready to move on, already! So, Murray changed, and his character changed, but in opposite ways.
Did you ever consider that while filming Groundhog Day, all of the minor players had to keep going through their parts over and over, scene by scene, until Murray got HIS performance just right?
Lathechuck
So, Groundhog Day is a movie about the process of making a movie. The Director forces you to go through each scene over and over and over until you get it just right. And the script keeps changing, so you’re never quite sure what the plot is.
Well, some people think that it’s about being reincarnated through enough lives to move on to the next higher stage of existence, but (in this case) that reduces everyone else around you to a non-player character. YOU have to improve; they’re just there to provide karma.
Sorry, Bill Murry totally did change in Groundhog Day. He didn’t in Quick Change, which is why I love it.
Ha! Great thought on the minor players with respect to Bill on Groundhog Day.
Of those movies, the only two I remember seeing in theater were Tremors and Joe Versus the Volcano. Tremors was awesome, my buddy and I laughed through the whole thing. I worked at the theaters back then. I saw Joe Versus the Volcano while working, several times, in pieces. The only thing decent about it was the opening rendition of “Sixteen Tons.” I’m surprised I didn’t see more of these while working, but I think I stopped before summer 1990.
I rented Pump Up the Volume, which introduced me to “Everybody Knows.” I spend years trying to find the source. The soundtrack only had a rendition by Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde. She did OK, but didn’t have the deep, mournful bass of Leonard Cohen.
While working the theaters, I saw an improbably amazing movie called Spaced Invaders. My entire family finds it hysterical, but we are decidedly not normal. The jokes come quick and it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with War of the Worlds. We have a list of movies we like to watch around holidays. The Halloween list includes both Tremors and Spaced Invaders.
-Sigmad00d
Hmmmm, Spaced Invaders. Have to give it a look.
Have seen that last part of Tremors on HBO years ago, but the only 3 watched in theaters are Red October, The Grifters & Goodfellas. Caught part of the last on FXM Retro last month. The Grifters was OK but loved the slease and the plot twist at the end.
Oh, big funny alert about RO. The closing scene is supposed to be somewhere off the Maine coast. It was shot on Lake James just north of Morganton, NC, a wealthy 25K pop. county seat in the NC Foothills.
In the mid-80s the “Morganton Mafia” (furniture $$$, around $100M back then) migrated to Charlotte and are now BIG time in real estate, franchise restaurants and other enterprises. One is selling his 731 acre estate in Colleton County, SC on the Ashepoo River for $12.5M.
If only the Morganton Mafia had gone to Montana to raise rabbits with fat women.
The Hunt for Red October is a favorite (although there is a certain distaste in watching it now due to Alec Baldwin; fortunately Sean Connery and Sam Neill balance that out, along with the short appearance of Tim Curry). Others I had forgot about: Total Recall (The campy original with Schwarzenegger, not the new remake I cannot bring myself to watch), Miller’s Crossing (A great double cross crime movie), and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is one of the best of the adaptations even to this day (they took it seriously instead of later, when it got campy; it was not until 2007 that they managed to capture the same magic – and then lost it again).
We watched Home Alone this past Christmas; the film holds up a great deal better than I had remembered.
I still need to watch Miller’s Crossing. I almost put in TMNT, which really wasn’t that bad.
John, here is a chance to right a wrong and bring balance back to the universe. You were in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane so it is only fair that your picture should also be on the movie poster. So generate a new poster showing yourself holding a PEZ dispenser. It’s even okay if the poster depicts you punching Ford Fairlane in a dramatic way. Help bring back justice in the world.
Ha! It was a crowd shot at night. So, my contribution would be a single black pixel. Oops, Black pixel.
“Abracadabra! Alakazaam! Bye bye baby. Boom.”
Shock To The System was the perfect dark comedy.
It holds up beautifully, like a modern day Edgar Allen Poe tale.
And Michael Caine’s voiceover: perfection.
“It was then that he knew: she was a witch.“
And I wouldn’t have watched it if you hadn’t suggested it. Thanks!
What did you have to do to get tickets to Fairlane?
So, I actually won a radio contest. Fifth caller. Got a shirt, an Operation Mindcrime cassette, and my name on the list for the shoot.
I find the AI posters just never make it across the uncanny valley. In fact, instead of crossing it, they get to the uncanny valley and make it even worse. Hideous is a good word. People don’t look right, the illegible text is annoying instead of teasing, and even the inanimate things in the pictures are creepy. Look at the hand holding the gun in Blind Fury (Blinb Fury). WTF is that?
What you are describing also applies to Joe Biden when he makes public appearances. If you wrote down some of his word salad, it would probably look about like the movie poster. Not sure if the uncanny valley with Joe is because he is using body doubles as some suggest or if it is because he is almost an inanimate object.
SiG, again, keep in mind that these are the *best* ones from my generation sets. Most of it is just garbage.
Flashback – You cannot hit a man from the back of a moving train!
Blue Steel
Pretty Woman
Bird on a Wire
Cadillac Man
Jesus of Montreal – The best movie I’ve ever read.
Total Recall
Ghost
Air America
Flatliners
My Blue Heaven – The comedic continuation of the true crime story begun in Goodfellas.
Darkman
The Witches
Memphis Belle
Edward Scissorhands
Kindergarten Cop
Dances with Wolves – Not one I like, but it’s hard to leave it off the list.
“Dances with Wolves – Fair, McChuck, although like you I only saw it once and have never really felt the need to re-view it.
Only so many I can write about, and Dances with Wolves was not on there on purpose. I haven’t seen Jesus of Montreal. You recommend?
re: Jesus of Montreal. Yes, I recommend quite highly, even though it’s in Quebequois, with English subtitles. It’s a Passion play, in a Passion play, about a Passion play.
Okay, it’s on the list.
I have seen less than one of the movies on this list. That one is “Quigley Down Under”. It was on the boob tube when I stopped flipping channels and I watched Tom make successful standing unsupported shots at a target half a mile away. I continued to flip.
Hey, it was a superpower.
Joe vs the Volcano had a few very good moments… I’ll never forget the “fliberdigibit” line… but…
The one scene in which Joe has just accepted his imminent death by dehydration adrift at sea, and feels compelled to express his gratitude for his life.
That was good. Pluss the march to work.