Black Moon Rising (1986)

Back to the Future; 'Knight Rider'; Christine: In the Eighties, the Supercar! was king...

Hollywood Vice Squad (1986)

Traumatic acts of underage S&M sit uncomfortably next to scenes of googly-eyed prurience and slapstick violence in Penelope Spheeris's godless hymn to the LA porno scene...

Caption Comp #2: Escape to Victory

He might have donned the jackboot for '95's plasticky sci-fi no-no Judge Dredd, and the mandibles of CGI Marxism for drab insectoid Commie allegory Antz, but Sylvester Stallone has always otherwise displayed a contempt for any hint of totalitarian repression of the individual that borders on the fanatical - be it from the Evil Empire of the Great Bear in clangorous fistic flagwaver Rocky IV or the strike breaking, cigar-chompin', labour racketeering Cleveland tycoons of F.I.S.T.

This sublime still from soccer-centred boy's-own WWII drivel Escape to Victory witnesses a supremely relaxed Sly cocking a snook at what appears to be a Hitler Youth recruitment poster churned out by Herr Goebbels' Nazi propaganda machine, and is just begging for a juicy caption...

Easy Money (1983)

Rodney Dangerfield quits the smoking, drinking, gambling, and crap one-liners in a cromulant bid to win his mother in law's heart (read: cash) in a film that was memorably described by the Denver Examiner as being 'as much fun as pushing a donkey up a ladder'...

The Survivors (1983)

...pretty soon Williams is sitting in a downtown saloon working through his paltry redundancy money by repeatedly firing Phil Collins’ ‘I Missed Again’ into the jukebox and depth-charging Boilermakers...

Volunteers (1985)

A Bridge on the River Kwai for the hi-life set...

Production Notes: The Howling (1981)

'There is no escape from the nightmare vision that is - THE HOWLING!'

Hmm...

ERH is a bit of a shithouse when it comes to horror films, but once kept its shit together for just about long enough to actually enjoy Joe Dante's batshit werewolf aria - scripted by leftie indie laureate/moonlighting script-tinkerer John Sayles (alongside some poor bastard consigned to navigate the choppy waters of life under the name Terence H. Winkless). We were less keen on the indelicately monickered follow up Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch, and by the time rum Ocker Shocker Howling III: The Marsupials rolled round we'd lost all interest, but dig these grundy production notes for the original that we recently found stuffed inside a plastic bag while investigating a blocked cistern in the ERH lavvies...

Homer & Eddie (1989)

As Andrey Konchalovskiy circles his wagons after yet another career's worst in The Nutcracker 3D, we look back at the mentally defective 1989 offering that makes Tango&Cash look like Gilbert&Sullivan...

One Crazy Summer (1986)

John Cusack, Demi Moore and - perhaps inevitably - Bobcat Goldthwait are 'out of school, out on Nantucket and out of their minds!’ Nurse - the codeine!

Die Hard: Elegy To A Badman

"There is a difference between not liking one's brother, and not caring when some Irish flatfoot drops him out of a window..." ERH very rarely dares dip beneath the barnacled Plimsoll Line that is the YouTube comments box, but was much taken by this ribald summation of the Die Hard I/III split! The Gruber brothers have it all - suavity, sophistication, beaucoup weapons training, killer accents and an endless raft of disposable Eurotrash goons. Now they have their own motivationally-suspect music video too.

'Where are my detonators?'

Indeed.

Good-Bye Cruel World (1983)

...a ‘Sex in the City’ for LA bottom-feeders...

Dead Heat (1988)

... the plot involves Mortis getting turned into a zombie early doors and motoring around Santa Monica in a soft-top Caddy with Doug and some blonde doxy they’ve picked up til it’s time for a bonkers shoot out in a disused warehouse - we think you know the drill by now...

Soul Man (1986)

It might have held a mournful beat on a rusty tin lid in pre-bellum Mississippi, but to politically correct mid-Eighties audiences Soul Man must have sounded more like the Banana Boat Song ...

Downtown (1990)

Anthony Edwards and  Forest Whittaker police a precinct of downtown Philadelphia that looks uniformly like Robocop has broken up the video shoot for Lionel Ritchie’s ill-advised rap foray, ‘Rock around the Glock’...

RGB: The Chevy Chase Show (1993)

Was there ever an episode of 'Larry Sanders' in which an unprepared Hank had to hastily fill in for the truant Larry? No? Well, ERH's much-abused Shit You Could Have Found On Youtube Quite Easily By Yourself Desk is back to bring you the next best thing with a tantalisingly bleak clip from VHS leviathan Chevy Chase's short-lived but legendarily sketchy chat show. Best buckle up, as it's a bumpy ride...

Film File: Silkwood (1983)

The ERH Proper Film Desk breaks off it's eternal milky lunch long enough to dig up some archived bumf from 1983's Silkwood, including an article on the making of the film published in the Village Voice...

Photo Archive: The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

'Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the Muppet in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent. '
                                                                                                      Sigmund Freud
 

The Muppets' second big-screen blitz didn't have the cracked charm of 1979's The Muppet Movie or the staying power of their later literary adaptations, but it did have Kermit cycling through Regent's Park in a scene of towering somehow-wrongness that chills ERH's bones to this day, as well as the sensual delights of 'Miss Piggy's Fantasy' - a sequence that has led many men-of-a-certain-age to place La Porca alongside Julie Newmar's Catwoman, Betty Rubble and Wilma Deering off 'Buck Rogers' in the distant, hallowed halls of their sexual awakening.

Click through for more 'Muppet mayhem'...