Vibes

The reason I bought this bluray is because the cover looks like this:

How could I not buy it!!! But I assume that it’s probably the worst film in the universe, although… it’s got Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Julian Sands, Steve Buscemi, Park Overall and Peter Falk. How bad can it be!

Max 80s.

Why didn’t Lauper get the Oscars for this? She was robbed!

Hey! Isn’t that… er… that guy!? I think it is! From Buffy! This movie has all the people!

And there’s that guy!

I love these NY-ey shots.

Columbo!

This is such an odd movie. (But aren’t all movies odd?) But I mean, it feels (in some ways) like a straight to VHS release — it’s silly, it’s leisurely paced — but they really went to South America to film? And it just looks really good.

Oh, it wasn’t a straight to VHS movie! $18M was a pretty solid budget back then. But it seriously bombed.

(The gag is that he’s afraid of germs so he brought water from the US. Love the umbrellas on the water tank.)

He’s the bad guy.

Heh heh.

SPECIAL EFFECT IS OUR PASSION

Yeah, OK — the first two thirds of this movie was just really, you know, amiable? There were lots of jokes, and most of them missed, but then you’d get some more… and Lauper is fun to watch, and Peter Falk hammed it up to match, and Goldblum was Goldbluming away, as he does. It almost felt like some kind of lost treasure? In just how likeable, silly and easygoing it was?

But then we got to the dreaded third act, and Julian Sands shows up, and is, like, all Serious Actor, and it all goes down like a lead balloon.

I mean, it’s probably not Sands’ fault, precisely — presumably the script was bad — but…

It’s like Peter Falk was holding it all together, and then when they killed his character off, it’s *thud*.

OK, now things are looking up again…

True colours

Aykroyd was such a dick:

The movie was described as “Romancing the Ghostbusters in the Temple of Doom. It was originally meant to star Lauper and Dan Aykroyd.

[…]

Aykroyd met with Lauper and decided he did not want to do the film. Columbia Pictures stood by Lauper and Jeff Goldblum replaced Aykroyd.

Ebert was such a dick:

Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars and wrote: “Movies like Vibes appear and disappear like fireflies in the dog days of summer. Nobody seems to have made them, nobody sees them, nobody remembers them.

Wow, that’s quite a critic/audience spread.

Anyway, I did like this movie. The last third was a total drag, though.

Vibes. Ken Kwapis. 1988. ⚃