Dead Calm (1989)

Directed by Phillip Noyce
Starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Billy Zane
Rated R
Australia

"This is a low production."

Based on a novel with the same title (which, hopefully, fleshed out some of the  WTF moments in the film version), Dead Calm is a thriller-slash-survival horror flick that presages wave (ahem) of ocean-bound cinematic  horrors produced in the wake (again!) of 2003’s Open Water.

Aussie alpha-ginger Nicole Kidman stars as Rae, a perfectly happy wife of a naval officer, John (Sam Neill) and ,mother of a bouncing baby boy. Or, at least she was happy. Rae’s life is shattered to bits in the startling opening scene. Sam is on shore leave for Christmas break, patiently waiting  for Rae and the baby. But they never show up.

Cut to: Rea, driving  through a furious rainstorm to get to her hubby. This kid’s in the back seat, gurgling away. Everything’s hunky dory. But then, the kid pops out of his car seat, mom swerves, there’s another car, and blammo, the kid sails through the windshield – graphically – in a flurry of blood, shattered glass, and baby-brains.

So that’s why she’s late.

So, where the hell do you go from there? Well, the open seas, apparently. To deal with their grief and reconnect, John and Rae head on a sailing boat (with a motor, you know the kind) and  float listlessly in the Great Barrier Reef. Rae gulps down fistfuls of sedatives and occasionally shrieks in her sleep, but what the hell, they’re  working through some heavy stuff.

Their bubble of pain and solitude is burst by the sudden appearance of a mysterious black schooner dead ahead. It appears to be abandoned. The couple  give it a closer look with their binoculars, and Rae spots a solitary figure in a dinghy, rowing  furiously away from the black boat and towards theirs. As he gets closer, they can make him out: a young-ish guy (Billy Zane), clad only in shorts and a straw hat, slathered in sweat and twitching. He’s so desperate to get away from the other ship that he plows right into theirs. Then he jumps aboard, runs downstairs to their cabin, and hides in a corner, wrapped up in a fetal ball.

The couple are more bemused than alarmed. Rae gives the guy some water and, eventually, he starts talking. Says his name is Hughie, and that there were five other people on the black boat, but they all died ten days ago from eating canned salmon.
“Probably Botulism,” says John.
“What the hell is Botulism?” Says Hughie.

John suggests they go back to the black boat to see if anybody’s still alive. Hughie  tells him to forget it, that he’s never going back there again. Which I suppose is understandable, but also a little (damn  it!) fishy, as well. Anyway, Hughie’s tired. Furious rowing is a bitch. John suggests he take a nap in their living quarters, and once he heads in there, John padlocks the door. Just in case. Then he leaves Rae in charge, and takes the dinghy out to check out the black boat.

When he gets to the boat, he finds the naked corpses of several women  and a fat guy floating around. Also, even though the electricity is fried, there’s a TV set on that’s playing  a videotape of the crew’s antics. Turns out that they were all on a Girls-Gone-Wild-on-the-High-seas type of adventure. Four girls, the captain-slash-producer, and Hughie, the cameraman. As the footage rolls on, Hughie gets more paranoid and delusional, until at the end, it’s all just screaming and running and crashing around.

Huh. So it wasn’t salmon. It was crazy Hughie, murdering everyone on board. Hughie. Who’s on the other boat with John’s wife.

Now it’s John’s turn to row frantically. But by the time he gets back, Hughie’s already knocked Rae out and commandeered the vessel. And he’s headed in the opposite direction. John’s forced to head back to the corpse-stuffed black boat – which is now rapidly sinking – and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, terminally depressed Rae has to snap out of it, subdue this lunatic, race back to the black boat, find it in the fuckin’ dark, and rescue John before he sleeps with the fishes.

But how?

Well, first she makes sweet love to Hughie.

Then she wrestles with him in her underwear.

And then she picks up a spear gun, and things get a little nuts.

Dead Calm’s crazy meter dips substantially after the toddler-splattering opening, but the tension level never lets up. It’s almost pornographic in its single-minded obsession with unease. Nobody’s happy, every moment is fraught with fear and violence, and even If the couple survives their ordeal, they’re left with even more trauma than the dead-kid issues they started with. This is one ugly joyride. Zane’s off-the-charts nuts, Neill’s a better action-hero than you might expect, and Kidman – well, even when she’s desperately trying to kill a maniac with a spear gun and she’s covered in bruises and crusty blood, she still looks good. And her hair is amazing.

All in all, a tight, taut, (very) 80’s thriller. Just be ready for some darkness.

- Ken McIntyre

Up the Creek (1984)

Directed by Robert Butler
Starring Tim Matheson
Rated R
USA
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"Down liver, don't you get it? That's Japanese for down river!"

In the middle of the night, four feckless slobs from a low-rent university are dragged from their beds and corralled into a dark, dank boiler room, where they are propositioned by molester-mustachioed Dean Burch (Magnum PI's John Hillerman). Seems the dean is tired of his college's bottom-rung status. He just wants to fuckin' win something, already. The assembled schlubs are his bottom four students: overconfident cocksman Bob McGraw (Animal House's Tim Matheson, clearly channeling mid 70's Hunter Thompson), near-mute overeater Gonzer (Flounder himself, Stephen Furst, who was making a tidy living at that point playing fat maniacs), twitchy nerd Irwin (Sandy Helberg), and constantly-bewildered Max (Dan Monahan, best known as Pee Wee in the Porky's films). It is unclear why Burch would pick his least-likely-to-succeed students for this, but he wants them to enter a collegiate white water rafting race. They know nothing about rafts or racing, but the dean promises them degrees in whatever subject they desire if they win (Gonzer: "Even Home Ec?"), which is incentive enough to figure it out.

Our heroes climb into a rickety van and head to the river. Along the way, Matheson launches into his first of many inappropriately literary monologues. As he swills a Bloody Mary and chomps on a cigarillo, he explains their chances of winning to a nervous Irwin.

"Everybody's got a chance, kid," he tells him. "Look at you, for example. You're skinny, uncoordinated, you've got a yellow streak down your back a mile wide. You're anemic, you dress like a creep, and you've got the personality of a mayo and baloney on white. You're the kind of guy most people wouldn't give the time of day to. But that doesn't mean you don't have a chance."
I'm not sure how effective that is as a peptalk, but it at least sounded rousing.

They arrive at the river and meet their various allies and foes. There's military nuts, bouncy coeds, golden-haired preppies, and even a bunch of greasers who look like they got lost on their way to the Sha Na Na concert.
"The competition is weirder than I thought," notes our man Bob.
Of course, the preppies have rigged the race, and the ROTC screwballs are quite willing to blow up their rivals, so the usual 80's style mayhem ensues. Heather (the unforgettable blonde b-goddess Jennifer Runyon) is at first a preppy-moll, but is almost instantly seduced to the slob-side by smooth-talking McGraw, who manages to bed her the same day they meet.
"Tell me, was that as good for you as it was for me?" He asks her, as they cuddle in post-coital bliss.
She shakes her head. "No." Tough crowd!

The second half of Up the Creek is taken up with the race. Our heroes are sabotaged, beaten, and kidnapped, but with pluck, humor, friendship, and a Charades-playing dog, the scrappy SOBs endure. But will they win the race and defeat the rich, pompous, Dockers-wearing douchebags? Crazily enough, in 1984, we really did believe they could, man. We really did.

Although it is all formula - Up the Creek pilfers from Stripes and Animal House without shame - this is one of the most consistently entertaining and easy-to-watch movies of the 80's teen-sex cycle. The chemistry between the leads is obvious, and it looks like they're all having a blast. The actual race sequences are fantastic, dropping you right in the middle of some pretty hairy moments, and the mashing of actors and professional racers is pretty seamless. The running gags are actually funny (drink orders are always for grandpa-style concoctions: Brandy Alexanders, Old Fashioned-s, etcs), the dialogue is sharp and witty ("Here's to mediocrity!"), and the music is surprisingly good for a mid-80's film, including a great pop metal theme song by Cheap Trick.
The nudity is sparse, but memorable. There's a brief naked RV party in the opening scene, a topless massage, a blonde chick (Lori Sutton from Night Patrol and Malibu Express) who rips her top open to rally the crowd before the race, and a dean-banging coed (Peggy Trentini) who whips her superjugs out moments before the house she's in blows to kingdom come.
"I think maybe your toilet is overflowing," she says, right before a mountain of mud splinters the room, in what has to be the most expensive gag in the history of teen-sex flicks.

In summation: Up the Creek is pretty swell. Director Butler was already a 24 year TV vet at this point, having directed everything from 60's vintage Batman and Star Trek to iconic 80's cop show Hill Street Blues, so some bullshit about a raft race was kids' stuff to him. He retired from the biz of show ten or so years ago, and is now either laughing all the way to the bank or bobbing away on a yacht somewhere. His actors have also gone on to lucrative careers: I don't think I've ever watched anything else Tim Matheson is done, but we all know who he is, so he must be doing pretty good. Stephen Furst has been steadily acting and directing, mostly in kid-ertainment. He's not fat anymore, but seems happy enough. Dan Monahan is taking it easy and raking in the Porky's royalties. Sandy Helberg's producing. And what of our knockout lead actress? Jennifer Runyon's alpha-blonde, Marilyn Monroe-meets-Erika Eleniak looks and easy grace made her an instantly recognizable fan favorite, and she made a decent 13 year run of it, appearing in a host of sitcoms (Charles in Charge, Who's the Boss, Valerie, etc.), before landing the plum role of Cindy Brady in the 1988 TV-film A Very Brady Christmas. The goofy holiday special was such a success that a reunion TV show was rushed into production and, smelling long-green, the real Cindy, Susan Olsen, stepped back into the fray. So, Jen was out. She did a host of one-off spots on various series afterwards and did one final film: 1993's dinos-on-the-loose romp Carnosaur. The film was a Roger Corman production and, soon enough, so was her life. She married Roger's son, Todd. She has not acted since. We quietly await her comeback.

I leave you with this parting shot from Mr. Matherson, who was peeling himself off of the lovely Jennifer Runyon at the time.
"As soon as this is over, as soon as someone has won this damn thing, I'd like to think I could jump on you again, sometime."
You and me both, sir. You and me both.


Availability: Surprisingly, Up the Creek is a bitch to find. There's an out of print DVD and some very dusty VHS copies floating around. Or you could always scour the internet.
Buy Up the Creek at Amazon.

Clip: Up the Creek opening, including Cheap Trick's theme

-Ken McIntyre