Admittedly, while we see a whole lot of television box sets out here, one thing we don’t see is box sets for cop shows from the eighties. Especially cop shows from the eighties with a little edge of humor. And that’s just what we’re going to get today with Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series, a copy of which Image Entertainment sent out for us to review.

Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series follows the cop by the same name, Sledge Hammer. And while Sledge’s way of life might have been appropriate for 1950–very law and order, a little misogynistic, quit smoking, drink your milk, that kind of thing–he’s also got some significant mental problems. He talks to his gun. He also sleeps with it. And showers with it. He has a rocket launcher in the trunk of his car. There’s a bumper sticker on the back of his car that reads “I Heart Violence”. And this guy is going to be set loose on the criminals of his city, with his newfound partner–a tough, smart lady with a surprisingly vicious spin kick who takes to Hammer right away–to protect the citizenry from the criminal element.

Heaven help the criminal element.

If you haven’t already seen this–which was a surprisingly popular show back in the eighties when it was on (about the only reason it went under was because it was up against big names like Miami Vice and Dallas)–then you’ll need to picture Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun / Police Squad, and make him a barely-restrained homicidal lunatic. Now you have a good idea of what we’re looking at here, and you can already imagine the possibilities. We have the Dirty Harry Excelsior model, the Smart And Tough Lady Cop, and of course, the Bellowing Captain. All the major archetypes are in place, and ratcheted clear up to eleven. The results are surprisingly fun and jammed full of laughs.

Yes indeed, laughs. I spent a lot of time laughing at Sledge Hammer; not only the jokes, either, but the sheer wild over the top antics in the plotlines (one episode features a reporter who goes on a ridealong with Sledge, and ends up with two broken arms which spend the rest of the episode in a pair of casts) that got, and kept, my attention.I spent a lot of time laughing at Sledge Hammer, and it’s not every day I get to laugh uproariously at television. This is one of those grand times.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives Sledge Hammer! The Complete Series a full ten out of ten. It’s a riot, and a sweet shot of history to boot. If you missed this one back in the eighties, then prepare to get a massive shot of comic cop glee to make your day.

A long-unexpected revival comes our way, folks, and just in time for Halloween. You won’t be able to catch The Howling Reborn until this Tuesday, folks, but we’ve got a special advance look thanks to the folks out at Anchor Bay. And what we’re getting a fresh revival of is no less than one of the last such untrammeled franchises of the eighties: The Howling.

The Howling Reborn joins us with Will Kidman, who’s about to graduate from high school. Sensing he’s got precious little left to lose, he makes a play for the brass ring, a pretty classmate he’s been interested in for years. But this idyllic young love is interrupted when we discover that Kidman is part of a line of legendary monsters, namely, werewolves. And now, a load of werewolf hunters has recently arrived in town sensing that Kidman is about to come into his full lycanthropic destiny. Now, with young love on one hand and certain death on the other, Will’s got to fight back against enemies both within and without to save his dream girl and land his happily ever after.

This may well be one of the strangest horror movies I’ve seen in a good long while. Not only do you have the sheer massed ranks of weirdness that this movie relentlessly puts up–the bit with Will taking on the school bully, who for some reason has brought a gun to school to take on a nerd, is nothing short of preposterous–but you also have the strange amount of downright Williamson-esque teen drama that gets shot into this thing like adrenaline into a seized heart. In fact, large portions of the movie won’t even make a whole lot of sense even when viewed through hindsight. That and I’m getting kind of tired of watching movie monsters who think they’re superior to normal humanity because they’ve got a few extra abilities and absolutely nothing resembling restraint or decent moral behavior. I got enough of that with the vampires, I sure don’ t need to see it with the werewolves too.

Though even I have to admit, the last half hour of this one really does pick up, and it represents a big improvement over the previous hour. This by itself is somewhat odd–it’s not every day I see a movie manage to overcome a horrible sludgy opening hour to become a worthwhile, killer last half hour. The end result is a very mixed bag that, while somehow managing to be more teen-angst-whiny than anything that came out of the nineties, still has a little good old fashioned horror punch to it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale in turn gives The Howling Reborn a seven out of ten. It’s got its share of problems, but man, does it manage to put on a good show. Stick around after the credits for extra surprises on this one, and I think you’ll find it’s worth your time.

Well folks, with Halloween rapidly approaching, and the prime season for horror in general along with it, I figured it would be a good time to take a rundown of five great titles you may not have heard of. And why have you never heard of them? Because they’re old enough to drink. We’re going to check out the top five horror movies of the 1980s.

5. Clownhouse

A little known title, and an early Victor Salva besides, Clownhouse pitted three brothers, home alone, against a set of three homicidal clowns. The film itself was good enough for three, as it brought in a lot of great suspense. There’s a reason some called this Home Alone with killer clowns, and this combination should be horror enough for most anyone.

4. Leviathan

Combine a monster movie with the claustrophobic horror of being several hundred feet under the surface of the ocean, and you’ve got a great idea of what you’ll be dealing with in Leviathan. It’s got science fiction and horror elements all at the same time, and bringing the two of them together in one convenient package makes it well worth adding to any horror watching party. Add in a great cast like Peter Weller (better known as Robocop) and Daniel Stern, and that’s just icing on the cake.

3.  Monkey Shines

One of George Romero’s lesser known non-zombie titles, Monkey Shines brought out a terrific combination of claustrophobic horror (most of it took place in a house with a quadriplegic guy) and the sheer bizarrity of a monkey who develops not only supreme empathy, but also a stalkerish love for said quadriplegic whom she’s been assigned to serve as a helper monkey. Though it was a box office flop, it took on cult status, and was plenty scary, especially the nice little jump scare they throw in at the end.

2. Evil Dead 2

It’s not hard to pass up a shot of one of the greatest cult films ever made, Evil Dead 2. More than a match for Evil Dead, though not quite as much fun as Army of Darkness, Evil Dead 2 not only brings in some good old fashioned scares with a whole lot of demons running around the back woods, but also brings in a whole load of funny. The possessed furniture scene alone is worth the cost of admission.

1. Scarecrows

A personal favorite of mine, Scarecrows pits a group of paramilitary bank robbers against a field full of surprisingly sneaky stuffed scarecrows. And despite that alliteration, it’s actually much more suspenseful than you think. Not only do the thieves pack some night vision, but there’s even a nice B-story in which one of the thieves actually tries to cheat the rest. Couple these together and you’re looking at some prime horror.

And there you have it–five great horror flicks you may not have heard of, straight out of the big-hair eighties. Should make for some great Halloween–or after–nights to come.

Glamour and glitter, fashion and fame…if you grew up in the eighties and happen to be down a Y chromosome, you probably can sing the rest of that song, the theme song to Jem. The folks out at Shout Factory sent out a little something impressive for us to review for you, namely, the first season of Jem, more recently retitled Jem And The Holograms. And if you’re in the market for a shot of retro animation, then man, are you in the right place.

Jem follows Jerrica Benton, the operator of the Starlight House, a home for orphaned girls, and daughter of the current head of Starlight Records. And when said head dies, he leaves his estate to his daughter. But the rest of the board of Starlight Records, represented by Eric Raymond, a man who not only makes Carter Burke from Aliens look like a god among philanthropists, but on a personal note, makes my skin crawl. Raymond, meanwhile, is not only out to take over Starlight Records and leaves Jerrica out in the cold, he’s out to do it by the most bizarre method possible: by backing a punk band full of big-haired lunatics called The Misfits. Jerrica, meanwhile, has discovered the full extent of her father’s estate, including a computer that specializes in hard-light holography called Synergy. Jerrica uses Synergy to give her and her friends alter egos, which they form into the titular band Jem and the Holograms to secure Starlight Records from The Misfits and Eric Raymond.

Admittedly, I didn’t follow Jem much. As a boy of eight I recall being distinctly annoyed that this “girls’ show” got between me and Robotix. And watching it now hasn’t been much help; Jem and her ilk have not aged well. Looking at this rationally doesn’t help either, with the discovery that The Misfits are actually some kind of insane cult of musical evil. Because come on…how many times have these four nimrods almost killed Jem and the Holograms? And I can’t help but think that all of Jem’s problems would be taken care of–and most of Jerrica’s too–if they’d just press charges on The Misfits for attempted murder. These big-haired wackadoos almost kill that woman more times than I care to count. And for a show geared toward girls age four to ten, roughly, there sure was an awful lot of attempted homicide. And why the hell didn’t Kimber, Jerrica’s sister, put up more of a fight? She’s just as much a Benton as Jerrica, but daddy keels over and where’s her inheritance? I can see that part of the will–”I leave my record company, the charity it’s named after, my holographic supercomputer, my costumes and my antique roadster to my daughter Jerrica. To my other, lesser, daughter Kimber, I leave a raised middle finger because she kept dating that greaseball biker through the tenth grade.”

But despite the sheer lunacy of the show in retrospect, it no doubt has plenty of great memories for those who grew up with Jem, and they likely won’t care how many holes the plot has.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Jem and the Holograms Season One a seven out of ten, as it does so often with niche products, knowing that for some this will be a dream come true, but for those not living the dream, it will still be a worthwhile watch but with plenty of holes.

Remember when we tackled that bit of classic British television in the form of Upstairs, Downstairs? Well, we’re about to get a look at what it might have been like if political aristocrats had been replaced with theatrical aristocrats in the form of The Bretts: The Complete Collection, which the folks out at Acorn Media sent out for us to review. This will be something of a niche product, so settle in and prepare for what might be your biggest treat in a while.

The Bretts The Complete Collection gives us two full years–that’s thirty-four hours regular time–of The Bretts, a series about what amounts to the First Family of British stagecraft, the Bretts. The Brett family has effectively ruled the British stage since the 1880s, and they’re very confident about their place in the universe. But when the stage starts to recede toward the bright lights of Tinseltown and the moving picture show, well, things start to buckle a bit for the Bretts. But they’re not the sort to take the paradigm shift lightly; they’ve bought their own theater and are preparing to keep their way of life alive in the face of an overwhelming change in the entire world.

The great thing about The Bretts is that it’s immersive, for several reasons. Not only will you get to watch the occasional bit of play the Bretts put on, you’ll also get a look at what’s going on with the actors themselves. And even from the word go, you get to see that the Bretts aren’t nearly what their public facade says they are. With bills going unpaid and occasionally unopened, it’s not hard to see the gilt beginning to chip, and that which was thought solid gold is merely gold leaf. But at the same time, the Bretts also show off a wide variety of behind the scenes chicanery that’s surprisingly fun to watch.

Some have described The Bretts as a soap opera of sorts, and this is actually perfectly believable. But what’s particularly strange about this soap opera is the number of laughs it engenders. I’ve seen some soap operas before–usually never understanding much because I clearly wandered in in the middle of absolutely everything–and I’ve never, ever, laughed at a soap opera that I can recall. But The Bretts? Several great laughs. This is some terrific, fully-featured stuff that puts on an almost disturbingly good show, and it’s well worth your time to check out.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives The Bretts: The Complete Collection an eight out of ten–it’s full of laughs and some good old fashioned drama to boot, but it’s hard to disguise the fact that we’re still talking about a dose of ITV fare straight out of the eighties. But it’s still a delight and well worth watching.

For those of you who thought Topher Grace couldn’t do anything but seventies roles and bungle Marvel characters (seriously, Eddie Brock? This guy’s about as believable as Eddie Brock as Lindsay Lohan is as Jabba the Hutt.), well, you’ll be getting a note of validation as he does passably well with another retro decade: the eighties. The folks out at Fox sent out a copy of Take Me Home Tonight for us to review for you, and the end result is astoundingly watchable.

Take Me Home Tonight follows Matt Franklin, mall Suncoast Motion Picture Company worker, who believes his life to be going rapidly nowhere. But when his old high school crush Tori walks back into his life–and his job–he finds he’s got one opportunity to win her heart for the first time. But in order to pull this minor miracle off, he’s going to have to survive a night of drunken, brain-damaging debauchery in the grandest eighties style.

And just in case you’re worried about a lack of eighties references here, don’t be. This thing is positively dripping with eighties references. It’s so eighties it eats glasnost, sleeps perestroika, and breathes Alf. It’s so eighties that it’s always Morning in America…even in the afternoon.

The thing about Take Me Home Tonight is that it’s a pretty amazing commentary on life after high school. I remember thinking about a lot of this kind of thing when I got out of high school. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that’s not too hard to think about even well out of high school–the grand duel of what you want against what you need, the struggle to figure out just what to do with your life, comparing yourself to those around you and wondering if you come up short against them–and will resonate with a whole lot of people.

It resonates, and thus, it’s going to find plenty of people who enjoy it. Really, if you’ve ever looked at your life and wondered if that was all there was, or how you would stack up to the people you laughed at in high school today, well, this is your movie.

Of course, if you’re pretty satisfied with your life, or you’re not into the eighties, then you’re not going to find much to like here. But since that particular segment of the population is pretty small, you’ll probably do just fine here.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Take Me Home Tonight a nine out of ten for being a worthwhile performance that a lot of people will find common ground with. When you see something that might well describe your life, or that of one of your friends, it makes you that little bit more interested in watching. And Take Me Home Tonight will do just that.

Ah yes…the great old action movies of the 1980s.  Rambo, Rocky, the Terminator…so many of our greats emerged from the eighties, and you can add one more to the list which came our way from the French. Lions Gate sent me a copy of their recent DVD rerelease, The Professional, and just in case you’re wondering, sadly, no…Leon has nothing to do with this one.

The Professional follows French master spy Joss Beaumont (French action great Jean-Paul Belmondo), sent to assassinate an African dictator. When the assignment fails, Beaumont is imprisoned as a gesture of international good will. But Beaumont escapes and heads back for Paris, bound and determined to finish the job and kill the dictator. But the politics have changed, and the French government isn’t interested in killing the dictator any more, so now, Joss Beaumont is public enemy number one.  Can the French find their top agent before he finishes a job the government would rather he didn’t finish?

The Professional is a strange sort of action film that doesn’t have a whole lot of action in it, but rather focuses more on foreboding.  Sure, there will be some gunfire here, and more than a few narrow escapes, but most of the movie will be spent plotting, scheming, and reacting to other people’s plots and schemes.

In fact, as action movies go, it’s really rather slow.  I’m not saying it’s bad, necessarily–there are some laughs in here, along with some pretty nice action scenes.  But the overall pacing is a little on the slow side.  In fact, the first half of the movie–I didn’t keep an exact count so it’s a bit of an estimate–there were less than thirty shots fired.  Seriously, not a lot of caps got busted, and I personally consider that a substantial problem when it comes to action movies.

But still, there’s some enjoyment to be had here–in all honesty, it might even be a pretty good date movie.  There’s a little romance in here, just a bit of action, and enough skullduggery for three movies.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, recovered from the laugh riot it took last night, is in a good enough position now to declare The Professional a six out of ten. It’s a little too slow to be an action movie, but it’ll still have plenty of good moments to it. There’s comedy and romance, but it’s a bit short on the action.

The folks out at Warner Brothers just re-released Caddyshack on Blu-ray Tuesday, and as such, they also put out a new version on DVD.  How do I know?  They sent me a copy, and I’m reviewing it for you right here.  Today we’re talking Caddyshack, folks, an example of that great eighties comedy.

Caddyshack revolves around what I’m guessing is typical times at the Bushwood Country Club.  The greenskeeper’s assistant has declared a shooting war on the gopher population.  The son of the club’s founder is in the midst of losing his mind and firing off incredible trick shots.  And a loudmouthed newcomer that looks a lot like Rodney Dangerfield–hey wait, that IS Rodney Dangerfield!–has come in and is busily shaking up everything the staid, straitlaced golfers of Bushwood have come to stand for.  So when a coalition of the grumpy led by Judge Smails wants to get rid of the new misfit, the only way they can think to do it is with a massive golf competition.

Can Dangerfield and company take the day?  Or will he be packing it up for elsewhere?  Will the gophers survive to annoy another day? All this and more in Caddyshack!

There are so many disparate plot threads going on at once here that it’s actually pretty difficult to get bored with any of it.  Sure, it’s not very deep at all–Dangerfield’s forte has never been in cerebral humor, and when Bill Murray might well be the smartest comic in the movie, you know they’re not exactly pushing for an Oscar.  But still, it’s a very rapid and downright frantic comedy, with lots of good laughs.  Sure, this is the kind of thing that seems dated, but that’s only because it’s been parodied so many times that it seems like it’s been covered more than once.

But this is the original property from which all the knockoffs and ripoffs and parodies and homages sprung.  It’s the Patient Zero of comedies, and this hilarious, if wildly crass, Ur-Comedy is filled with laughs and groans, if not necessarily depth and substance.  The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this highly effective comedy an eight of ten.  It may be too crass and light to be a maximum quality piece, but it’s more than sufficiently effective to do the job.

If you were a child of the eighties, you might well remember the prime time soap opera glory that was Falcon Crest.  For some strange reason, I, a young lad, remember watching this show, even though I didn’t understand a lot of it.  This isn’t such an outlandish memory, as the show lasted fully nine seasons.

Thus, when the crew out at Warner Brothers offered to send me a copy of the complete first season of Falcon Crest, I fairly leapt at the opportunity.

Falcon Crest revolves around the Gioberti / Channings, a powerful family of vintners who have lots of infighting over the direction the Falcon Crest Winery should take.  Led by the family matriarch, Angela Channing, the Falcon Crest experience begins when Jason Gioberti dies in an unfortunate “accident”, thus prompting the return of Jason’s son Lance, who takes over a tiny piece of Falcon Crest, much to Angela’s dismay.  Apparently, the grapes on Lance’s chunk are all that stands between a merely average wine and a truly great one, and Angela can’t stand being at anyone’s mercy for choice product.

Falcon Crest was, as eighties dramas went, commonly regarded as “middle of the road”, being somewhat more extravagant and genteel than Dallas, but more subdued and conservative than Dynasty.   And indeed, it does fit into this sort of description fairly well.  It does have that “depiction of the rich” edge to it, but they’re all, in their way, craftsmen, so it’s not quite just the idle rich enjoying their playtime for an hour a week.

Being as the show went on for nearly a decade, it does have a tendency to move a little slowly.  But there is a LOT going on here, even if you’ll only get it in tiny little increments a very, very little at a time.  Suspense is the order of the day here as you discover, little by little, what all’s going on in the deep and twisted world of Falcon Crest.

So if you’re into soap operas or suspense dramas, but hate that they never seem to end, you might want to give Falcon Crest a try with its very definite ending point, and the complete first season is a great place to start.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this fairly immersive if somewhat slow massive drama a seven out of ten–it may be glacial, but man, does it know how to tell a story.

So the crew out at Lions Gate sent me a copy of The Wraith, and if it looks familiar to you it’s because you were a horror buff back in the eighties–or at least got started when eighties horror flicks were still readily available, much like I did.

The Wraith features a stretch of road inhabited by drag-racing punks who like to force people into vicious automotive battles for their very lives.  But one of the victims of this road gang isn’t taking things lightly–he’s come back as The Wraith, kind of like Ghost Rider but without the fire and with a Dodge Interceptor instead of a motorcycle.

Oh, and a much, MUCH lower budget.

You’ll be surprised, royally, by all the “Hey, I know that guy!” moments in this movie.  Charlie Sheen’s here, Randy Quaid, even longtime genre favorite Clint Howard are all on hand.

Okay, so it’s not exactly high art, even by the much, much lower standards of eighties fare.  But it’s still quite a bit of fun.  Lots of fast cars, shotguns, explosions, everything your basic low-rent action fair might need.  Including a few cheap laughs as one of the main villain’s henchmen regularly indulges in drinking hydraulic fluid.

Admittedly, the horror elements of this movie–an undead killing machine in a big black car wearing what looks like motorcycle leathers is a bit on the comically overdone side.  Maybe more like a LOT on the comically overdone side.  But still, it’s pretty entertaining despite its almost cartoony nature.

The Screenhead Ten Scale knows what it’s getting into and hands this cartoony little bit of eighties fluff a seven out of ten for doing its job passably well and for being darned entertaining, even if it’s not anything big and special.