Phelim O'Neill 

With Conan and The Thing back at the cinema it’s like 1982 all over again

Blade Runner, First Blood, Wrath Of Khan … 1982 was a high water mark for genre movies, but we won't see its like again
  
  

ET
ET: so successful, it ensured we never saw another year like 1982 again … until now. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Universal Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/UNIVERSAL

Everyone has their favourite period of cinema. For some, it never gets better than the snappy dialogue of the 1940s; plenty espouse the more freeform cinema of the 1970s; who knows, maybe in some far-flung future there may even be people who claim that the 2010s were where it's at. But if you want to get more specific, then you must turn to the obsessives. The geeks. Because for those argumentative science fiction, horror and fantasy fans, those finickity lovers of genre ephemera, cinema achieved true perfection in a single year: 1982.

In 1982 there was an unprecedented investment in the fantastic. Subjects that would previously have been confined to B-movies, to exploitation flicks, to drive-in fodder became the stock-in-trade of the mainstream. It was a year that changed Hollywood, a year that the movies have never quite recovered from. Already we've had the belated sequel to 1982's Tron on our screens, and now we can now look forward to more films heavily influenced by that banner year with a new Conan The Barbarian and a prequel to The Thing; there's even a remake of Jim Henson's all-puppet fantasy movie The Dark Crystal being prepped. But the influence extends beyond straight remakes: recent sleeper-hit horror Insidious borrowed liberally from Poltergeist, and even JJ Abrams's Super-8 bears the mark (although set in 1979, it's full of anachronisms and really draws its Spielberg influences from the director's 1977-1982 period). So why is the class of 82 casting such a huge shadow over this year's releases?

Well, let's take a look at the films. For fans of the fantastic, hardly a week went by in 1982 without a new must-see movie. As well as The Thing, Conan (in which Arnold Schwarzenegger hit the big time) and Tron (the first movie to employ CGI on a large scale), there was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner; Stallone's First Blood; the best Star Trek movie to date (still) with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan; Alan Parker's bonkers movie version of Pink Floyd's The Wall (starring Bob Geldof) – and that's just the big movies. Further down the budgetary ladder we got the inventive jet-black comedies of Basket Case, Eating Raoul and Liquid Sky. Like today we had comic-book adaptations such as Wes Craven's Swamp Thing and John Huston's musical of Annie. We even had (headache inducing) 3D movies: Parasite, starring a young Demi Moore, and Friday The 13th: Part 3 in 3D (still the most entertaining 3D slasher pic) as well as animated films The Secret Of NIMH and the harrowing Watership Down follow-up The Plague Dogs. Sequels were around (Halloween 3 and Amityville II: The Possession) but not as widespread as today. The same with remakes: The Thing and Cat People were remakes virtually unrecognisable from the originals, more redefinitions than rehashes. So where did this wave of genre movies come from, why are these movies still loved today and, more importantly, why did they nearly all underperform at the box office?

After first being taken totally by surprise by the blockbuster success of Star Wars in 1977, Hollywood then tried to ride on its coat-tails by throwing out as many science fiction films as possible. But while a few directors, such as Ridley Scott, flourished in this environment, most did not, and much of the sci-fi explosion ended in embarrassing failure. It was clear to the industry that they needed to rethink things, to bring in new talent, and let new voices be heard. All this came to a head in 1982.

Film-makers were a different breed back then. They were people who made films. That may sound crushingly obvious, but look to the blockbusters of today – most of them are made by ex-music video and commercials directors. This is all well and good if all you want from a movie is a succession of pretty pictures (reaching such current low points as Sucker Punch and Transformers 3), but not so great if you like storytelling. The class of 82 had all directed films before – maybe not always great ones, but films that granted the opportunity to learn, to see what worked and what didn't. John Carpenter had directed five feature films (including hits Halloween and Escape From New York) before helming The Thing. Conan The Barbarian's director John Milius had directed before as well as scripting Apocalypse Now (Conan's screenplay was co-written by Oliver Stone). Compare those credentials to what we have now: a man responsible for Spice Girls and Simply Red videos (Marcus Nispel) is bringing us the new Conan, and there's a director (barely) known for car adverts (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr) in charge of the new The Thing. It doesn't bode too well.

Things were changing so fast that the movie Class Of 1984 only had to set itself a mere two years into the future to show a total breakdown of society

The movies of 1982 tell us a lot about the times they were made in: Cat People, First Blood, Blade Runner and others have pretty downbeat endings in tune with the cold war paranoia and economic depression of Reagan's first presidency. Even the Star Trek movie killed off a central character (for a while at least), while The Wall's idea of a happy ending was the protagonist suffering a complete mental breakdown. Russia was still seen as an enemy in films such as Clint Eastwood's Firefox; the unfairly derided Tron gave us plenty of exotic computer terms that are commonplace today. We were living on the cusp of the future, things were changing so fast that the movie Class Of 1984 only had to set itself a mere two years into the future to show a total breakdown of society. There are plenty of more explicit markers to the times in films such as Poltergeist where the mum and dad of the haunted family are ex-hippies turned yuppie sellouts. It's hard to imagine such resonance in blockbuster fare this summer.

The budgets were also key, with the average cost for a big studio picture somewhere between $10m and $20m (even adjusting for inflation that's nowhere near the $100m price tags they attach to films now). Directors couldn't rely on expensive visual effects to bludgeon viewers into submission, they had to impress in other less flashy ways. And there were other blessings, too. The original cast of Tron were all in their 30s, so they didn't need a kid character to spout meaningless "I gotta get me one of those" lines. Conan's cast of bodybuilders and non-American faces gave it an exotic, timeless look you don't get with the more homogenised castings currently in vogue. These seem like small changes but they capture much of what made these films memorable. Even the big teen movie of the year, the Cameron Crowe-scripted Fast Times At Ridgemont High, dealt with abortion and drug-taking full on. Now even the nerdiest teenagers in movies have supermodel girlfriends and save the world from robots that turn into cars.

The main reason we'll never see another year like 1982 lies in the biggest success of the year. While Hollywood had a raft of downbeat, punchy films that it didn't understand well enough to market properly, one film came through as the clear winner at the box office: Steven Spielberg's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. ET made more than most of the rest put together. Even though it nails the single-parent family dynamic and deals with loss and loneliness in affecting ways, ET had a happy ending with plenty of wish fulfilment along the way.

With the success of ET and the relative failure of the rest of the crop, Hollywood took the safest, most obvious lessons from what had happened and the trend towards today's bland, boisterous multiplex began. It was also around this time that executives from multinationals pushed out actual film-makers in studios. Creative decisions were now made by non-creative types, there was no glory in losing money, and much more to be had in making as much as humanly possible. No matter how much the titles and styles of many of 2011's films hark back to the glorious summer of 1982, we'll never see its like again.

Five 1982 films crying out for a reboot

ANDROID

This lovely tale of a robot learning about life on a remote space station could be remade as a Moon-type experience.

MEGAFORCE

Colourful clunker concerning a super-super-elite force of US soldiers who employ flying bikes, toy-looking tanks and spandex uniforms to save the world.

Q: THE WINGED SERPENT

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen delivered the goods with a giant stop-motion Aztec flying lizard terrorising New York .

SWAMP THING

Wes Craven's movie was pretty dire but it did revitalise the comic book, bringing in new talent Alan Moore to shake things up. A movie of the Moore-era Swamp Thing would be an instant classic.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCEROR

Conan was supposed to herald in a wave of sword and sorcery epics. It never happened, but this excellent low-budget effort beat Arnie's movie in many ways.

 

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