It’s almost exactly 45 years since the first Star Wars movie opened. (It played for over a year in the same theater in Boston – now sadly torn down), and I saw it again on the TNT Marathon last weekend. But I’m thinking about five years later, when I was pretty much on my own in a strange city and had the money and time to watch a lot of movies. And it was a good summer for science fiction, fantasy, and horror:
Tron
Poltergeist
Star Trek II
E.T. : The Extraterrestrial
Bladerunner
The Thing
Conan the Barbarian
Swamp Thing
Firefox
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
We also got the wonderful documentary Atomic Cafe , the re-release of Disney’s Bambi (which I’d never seen before), and a couple of musicals, Annie and Grease II
I hated E.T., and there were some real losers that summer (Young Doctors in Love wanted to be Airplane, but wasn’t. Paradise wanted to be The Blue Lagoon). And somehow I missed Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
I loved the cheesiness of Megaforce, but I don’t recall it being in any of the theaters near me (even though it was, according to Wikipedia, released in June 1982). I didn’t see it until it appeared on cable TV several months later.
Similarly, Koyaanisqatsi, Liquid Sky, and Fitzcarraldo I didn’t see until I’d moved on to another city, at the Art Cinema there. Q and Road Warrior I saw later on VHS.
E.T. was a big part of my childhood. Popping it into my aunt and uncle’s old top loading, wood paneled VCR. I didn’t see it when it was new, obviously. But it always comes up when the “biggest movie when you were born” meme questions start coming around.
Eye of the Tiger was the number one song the week I was born, by the way.
It always amazes me that blade runner and the thing came out the same weekend, and neither did particularly well in overall box office. Pearls before swine!
A year later, I was able to see Song of the South.
I liked the latter, more, and have permanently had Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah ingrained in my head, even though I’ve probably only seen the film once. (Maybe they played the song on the Disney channel, sometimes?)
I probably saw Tron, around this time, but it was only later when I saw it as a slightly older child that I realized that the story just didn’t live up to the visuals. Regrettably, the new Tron matched its predecessor in the same way (and I’m not sure that, by the standards of today, the visuals were all that amazing, either).
Most of the other films I saw later, when I was older.
I can’t say that I loved Conan. It felt more like a slow documentary about ancient humanity, when we were still nasty and cruel. And that they’d accidentally shipped out the footage before recording the part where the narrator was supposed to fill in the long gaps to explain something.
Bladerunner and The Thing are classics. I’m not sure that it was an exceptional year in film, but two classics probably isn’t a bad record.
Let us not forget the cheese fest of The Beastmaster (August). I must have seen it randomly 10 times on The Movie Channel in college, each time coming in a bit closer to the beginning, until I finally saw the whole thing. I admit, it makes more sense if you can see all of it.
It played so frequently that it inspired the cable tv watcher’s prayer: O Lord, Pease don’t let it be Beastmaster again!
I realize that the OP talks about summer, but I do have to point out that in April of that year, another film we watched endlessly on cable came out…featuring Matt Houston, and Thomas Dolby’s future wife!
Yeah. I saw it before the summer. They rushed it out to beat Conan. as I’ve remarked many times on this Board, Sword and the Sorcerer is actually a better Conan movie that the 1982 official Conan movie (or any of the others, for that matter), because it has elements directly lifted from Howard’s stories, which the others don’t. So the waking of the Evil Sorcerer Xusia (played by Night Court’s Richard Mill in a ton of makeup) is ripped off the the raising of the Evil Sorcerer Xaltotun in the Conan novel Hour of the Dragon/Conan the Conqueror
Of course, it had a Bad Guy named Cromwell and a mega-stupid jet-propelled three-bladed sword, but the Conan refs made up for that.
Another movie from later in 1982 that deserves special mention is Roger Corman’s Sorceress, made to cash in on the success of Conan, also. This movie, however, is unbelievably bad. Bad writing, bad acting, bad makeup, bad special effects. The whole movie looks like they short it in some far-off country in another language and they dubbed it into English – but it wasn’t. After considering European locales, they shot it in Mexico, in English.
The poster looks WAY better than anything in the movie did.
I saw E.T. in theatres three times…once when it first came out, once for my 9th birthday party, and once more with the family on New Years Eve. I got dragged to see Annie with my mom and my sister, and I also saw Tron on the big screen. And that may well have been it for 1982. It seems so strange to me now, considering that as an adult I’m literally at the movies every week.
I was aware of some of the other films on the list, though. I wasn’t a Trekker but I can still remember the newspaper ads for Star Trek 2, as well as the ones for Rocky 3. And I really wanted to see Creepshow. When the family was on our summer road trip into the States, I can recall poring over the Bernie Wrightson-illustrated trade paperback in some American bookstore and being terribly bummed that there was no way my parents would let me see it. I finally got to rent it in the summer of 1987, when I was deep into King-mania.
