Big Hair Revisited

What better way to spend a sunshiny, summery public holiday (Australia Day) than holed up in a dark home cinema (not mine, unfortunately) with cheesecake, pastries and three sci-fi B-movies? Two of the films were old favourites from the 1980s that we hadn’t seen for decades. Would they stand the test of time?

First up was Millennium, a 1989 time travel movie based on the brilliant 1977 short story "Air Raid" by John Varley. Once I got over being distracted by the permed hair and padded shoulders paraded by all the women, I enjoyed the non-linear storytelling, the intelligent setup and the humorous dialogue sprinkled throughout the script. I wonder why it didn’t do better at the box office back when it was released. This time around, however, I was somewhat disturbed by the dubious morality and sudden selfishness displayed by the characters at the very end (though not as annoyed as the reviewer over at Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies). I still love Cheryl Ladd’s turn as the girl from the future negotiating a seduction in the past (YouTube clip here)

Next we watched Enemy Mine from 1985 (the sci-fi version of Hell in the Pacific) with Dennis Quaid as a human space pilot stranded on a crappy meteor-bombarded planet with an alien pilot played by Lou Gossett Jr. Lou’s sterling performance as the reptillian Drac is the beating heart of this movie, and it was a pleasure to watch him strut his stuff again.

Finally, there was Priest, a 2011 alternative history-wuxia-western-steampunk-post-apocalyptic action movie full of great stars like Paul Betthany, Maggie Q, Karl Urban and Christopher Plummer, which could have been really good if they’d only taken out a few of the rushing-into-dark-and-dangerous-places-without-a-plan scenes that just made the characters look really stoooopid and used that time more productively on explaining... No, I won’t go into my many gripes about the plot, politics and God’s participation, or lack thereof, in a conflict which abounds in crucifixes. It was entertaining enough B grade fare, and pretty to look at. It’s a pity though, coz I reckon this movie coulda been a contender.