We’ll do August 1, 1986 and the release of the infamous Howard the Duck another year. August 1, 1980 is far more interesting. Let’s take a look back…
On this date in 80s movie history, four new wide to moderate releases would join one New York City/Los Angeles exclusive and five regional openings in theatres.
Cathy’s Curse.
A young girl becomes possessed by the spirit of her dead aunt. The 1977 French/Canadian supernatural horror film would be a minor hit up north, but it would take more than three years for the movie to make it across the border, where it would have a short theatrical life before becoming a cult film thanks to regular cable screenings throughout the decade.
The film would be released by the small indie distributor 21 Century Films into 32 theatres in three Southern markets, where it would gross $160k. There would be a few more regional release dates, but the film would, as best I can tell, never get released in major cities like Chicago, Los Angeles or New York City, and would quickly disappear from theatres with less than $400k in ticket sales.
More recently, Cathy’s Curse would be rescued from obscurity thanks to a 2017 restoration and Blu-ray release from specialty genre label Severin Films.
Believe it or not, Steven Spielberg was never very happy with the final 1977 cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The release date was locked, he was running out of time, and distributor Columbia Pictures was desperate for a hit. The film was a hit, grossing more than $116m, and would give Spielberg his first Oscar nomination as Best Director, but he would spend two years trying to convince the studio to give him a chance to complete the movie to his satisfaction, and in 1979, once he completed 1941, Columbia Pictures would give him $1.5m to create his “director’s cut,” but with one proviso… show the inside of the mothership, so they would have something to hang the marketing on.
Against his better wishes, he would add a few moments from inside the ship (a decision he would quickly regret). Spielberg would end up adding seven minutes of new footage, but deleting or shortening other scenes by ten minutes, making the Special Edition three minutes shorter than the original 1977 release (132 versus 135). Audiences were ready to come back, and the Special Edition would be one of the biggest hits of the month. Playing in 665 theatres, CE3K:SE would gross $2.79m in its first three days, and gross another $15.8m during its six-week theatrical run.
Personally, I prefer the Special Edition, but I love both editions, and will regularly stop and watch it if I come onto it while flipping through channels looking for something to watch.
The Final Countdown.
While on an exercise in the mid-Pacific Ocean, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is somehow transported from 1980 to December 6th, 1941, where the commander of the ship (Kirk Douglas) and his top officers must decide whether to stop the impending Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor and change the course of history, or allow history to play out as it’s meant to. It’s not a great movie, but The Final Countdown has one of the better premises to be seen in a movie around that time, and it was always a treat to see Kirk Douglas in a leading role, even in his mid-60s, and his supporting cast is pretty good too, including Charles Durning, James Farentino, Ron O’Neal, Katharine Ross, and Martin Sheen.
Opening on 681 screens, The Final Countdown would gross an acceptable $3.25m, on its way to a final gross of $16.65m after three months.
Fun fact: if you watch the “making of” documentary Starring the Jolly Rogers, available on the 2004 DVD release of The Final Countdown, you’ll see a familiar name under the “Special Thanks” section of the end credits.
Mine.
At the time of the making of the documentary, I was working for the legendary B-movie company Troma, whose co-founder, the legendary Lloyd Kaufman, was the associate producer on The Final Countdown while he and Troma partner Michael Herz were trying to establish their company as a production company and distributor. When the special features for the Final Countdown were being planned, I assisted the production company of the documentary get access to Lloyd and others who worked on the movie nearly a quater century before.
As it would turn out, The Hunter was the last Steve McQueen to be made before he died at the age of 50 that November. At the time of its release, McQueen was still a big star, despite the fact that he had taken four years off from acting after starrring with Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno. His return to movie screens should have been in 1976, when he starred in An Enemy of the People, an adaptation a Henrik Ibsen play, in which McQueen went against type as a bearded, bespectacled 19th-century doctor. The studio, Warner Brothers, was so confused by how to market that film that when it finally did open in theatres, it plays as the B-title at a couple of drive-ins in Illinois and Indiana supporting the Clint Eastwood cowboy comedy Bronco Billy in June 1980. The pairing would so anger moviegoers at the two drive-ins that An Emeny of the People would be pulled after only two days, replaced by an older Eastwood film, Every Which Way But Loose.
Then McQueen made Tom Horn, a Western about the legendary frontier lawman. Westerns were mostly out of style by 1980, despite Eastwood’s constant attempts to make them relevant again, and most moviegoers would bypass McQueen’s first time on screen in six years.
The Hutner would do a little better.
It was a modern-day story, and it was a film McQueen desperately wanted to work. Rumors persist that a good portion of the movie was directed by McQueen, even though Buzz Kulik is the credited director. McQueen would play another real-life person, Ralph “Papa” Thorson, a bounty hunter who regularly helped the men he would help put away after they got out of prison. Along with McQueen, the film also featured LeVar Burton, Kathryn Harrold, Oscar-winner Ben Johnson, Eli Wallach, and Tracey Walter.
The film would not get a kind crticial response, but audiences were a little happier to see McQueen back in action. Opening on 440 screens, The Hunter would gross $2.5m. The following week, Paramount would add another 400 theatres, and it would gross an additional $3m. But the excitement over The King of Cool’s return to movie screens would quickly cool when word got out the film just wasn’t very good. The Hunter would exit theatres just weeks before McQueen passed away, with a final gross of $16.3m. And to Paramount’s credit, they didn’t put the movie back into theatres to capitalize on its star’s passing.
Middle Age Crazy was just one of a number of late 70s/early 80s white middle age men having a mid-life crisis movies that just sprung up like weeds in a yard after a hard rain. And outside of Blake Edwards’ 10, the first out of the gate in October 1979, they all really sucked despite having good leading actors. 1980’s A Change of Seasons, with Anthony Hopkins and Shirley MacLaine. 1980’s Loving Couples, with James Coburn, Susan Sarandon and, again, Shirley MacLaine. 1980’s Serial, with Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld.
And then there’s Middle Age Crazy, with Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret.
The plots of all these movies are virtually identical. Guy has a birthday (usually the fortieth), wonders what the hell he’s doing with his life, fucks a younger woman (while his wife, after tolerating his craziness for a little bit, decides to fuck a younger guy), and eventually goes back to his wife because he got it all out of his system. And, for some reason, the woman always takes her man back, because he got it out of his system and is ready to settle for her once again.
It’s all a bunch of bullshit, and by the time this one came out, the cycle was already played out. Opening in a Texas regional release, near where the movie was set, the film would gross $71,267 from ten theatres. It would get a few more minor playdates, but Fox saved some money by not throwing away good money after bad by playing it in major markets with its major media buy requirements.
It played on cable throughout the 80s, and it would get a VHS release in the late 80s, but it has never been made available in the streaming world, and has not been available on any physical media since that one VHS release.
The Mountain Men. Two fur trappers in the Wild West team together to protect an Indian woman from her ex-mate. Now, I can tell you exactly why this movie failed.
First, look at that poster above, and tell me that movie isn’t a comedy. Because it’s not. It’s a serious Western drama, a bit more violent than the average Western of the day.
Second, the movie is really bad. Siskel and Ebert would call it one of the worst movies of the year. Leonard Maltin called it crude, bloody and tiresome, and gave it a rare Bomb rating. A critic for The Boston Globe said the picture was, “quite simply, the worst film of the year.” Heston would, years later, say the final film was much different from the one the screenwriter, his son Fraser Heston, had created, and he wished he had fought more for his son’s vision. (Heston himself would direct Fraser’s next screenplay, Mother Lode, but that 1982 wasn’t much better.) In fourteen theatres in the frontier areas, The Mountain Men would only gross $69,683, and like several of the other movies released this week, would quickly disappear from theatres, although you can find the movie, with much more serious key art, on DVD and streaming.
No Nukes. A concert film featuring a number of the biggest rock stars of the late 1970s who came together to protest the proliferation of nuclear power plants in the United States, which was organized shortly after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in March 1979. The film would become legendary for being The E Street Band’s first appearance on film (remember, MTV wouldn’t launch for another year, on this date in 1981), and the soundtrack would feature the first release of the Springsteen song, three months before his double album of the same name was released. The film would open at the Cinema 1 in New York City, the Plitt Century Plaza Cinemas in Century City CA and the SRO Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, and it would gross $44,324 in its first three days. But the idea behind the film would be very polarizing for fans of the band, and the movie would not get much of a release outside of these two markets. It would get released on VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc during the early part of the 1980s, but today, the movie is no longer available under any circumstances, and the only way to see any of the footage is in the 2021 documentary “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts” which was released as part of a box set in November 2021, featuring 13 songs the band performed during the two No Nukes live shows. You can also rent or buy the show from streaming services like Apple and Amazon. You can watch a trailer for the concert movie here.
At the time of its making, Raise the Titanic was one of the most expensive movies ever made, with a budget of $40m. Based on the best-selling 1976 book by Clive Cussler, British film producer Sir Lew Grade spent $450k to buy the book rights, hoping that he could turn Dirk Pitt, the hero of the story, into a franchise-leading character not unlike James Bond. Grade has discovered that director Stanley Kramer, the one-time king of message films (The Caine Mutiny, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) was interested in making the film, and would sign on in January 1977. Kramer would begin pre-production right away, and would end up spending nearly $5m on the models of the Titanic that would be used for filming, based on the actual blue prints used to make the real ship. Grade was shocked at the price tag, and even more shocked to see just how large the models were, and would remove Kramer from the project.
Grade would next bring in director Jerry Jameson, who Grade had hired to make a movie out of the Alistair MacLean novel Golden Gate (which never would get made), and had recently had a surprise hit in Airport ’77. Ironically, one of the factors that helped convince Jameson to come aboard was how Grade had already spent $5m making these very detailed models of the Titanic for the film. Grade would spend another $5m building a water tank in Malta to shoot the climactic scenes of the Titanic rising out of the ocean, because there was no water tank anywhere in the world that could accomodate what the production needed. Although he had originally planned on spending $20m to make the movie, Grade was nearly $15m in the hole when the film finally began production in October 1979, which included the salaries of actors like two-time Oscar-winner Jason Robards, Oscar-winner Alec Guinness, and signing Richard Jordan to a long-term contract to play Dirk Pitt in a series of movies.
When the movie finally opened, on 167 screens, initial audiences seemed to be excited for the film, buying up $1.62m in tickets, the highest per screen average of any film in moderate or wide release that weekend. But the film could not find much success outside the initial major cities, where the film would be shown on 70mm six-track Dolby Stereo prints at theatres like The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City. The film’s final gross would be just over $7m.
Clive Cussler hated the final film so thorougly, he refused to allow Grade to adapt any of his other books into movies, and would go to court against the producer of the 2005 movie version of his novel Sahara (featuring Matthew McConaughey as Pitt) for breach of contract. The two sides would spend nearly $20m over seven years suing and counter-suing each other over practically anything they could, until a judge in 2012 told them both to get lost and stop wasting the court’s time.
Steel.
The construction of a steel skyscraper becomes a race against time and challenges the sanity of a building foreman and his crew.
I have to admit this is a movie I don’t think I had ever heard of before. I of course know who Lee Majors was at the time. I had probably seen ever episode of The Six Million Dollar Man when it was on the air, and I had the misfortune of seeing his 1979 Viking movie The Norsemen, at the Long Beach Drive-In next to where the 405 and the 710 cross paths. Boy, what an awful movie that was.
But this one sounds better than The Norsemen or Majors’ other movie of 1980, The Agency, and certainly has a pretty darn good supporting cast, including R.G. Armstrong, Oscar-winners Art Carney and George Kennedy, Terry Kiser, Richard Lynch, Jennifer O’Neill, and Harris Yulin.
The film would first open at three theatres in Lexington KY, where the film was shot in the spring of 1978, and it would gross a very respectable $29,913 from those three screens (one would beat a house record previously set by Jaws). But I cannot find any other information about the film, where else it may have played after those three theatres, or how much it may have grossed during any other runs. It’s not available on any physical media, and is not available on any streaming services, although you can find a poor copy videotaped off a pay-tv movie channel in the early 80s on the interwebs with relative ease.
Our final film of the day, Walk of the Dead, is kind of a cheat. It’s not a new movie at all, but a re-release of a 1973 Spanish-made film called Vengeance of the Zombies, with a new title, in order for new distributor Independent Artists to cash in on the zombie movie craze set off by the release of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Paul Naschy stars as an Indian mystic in London who raises women from the dead with magical incantations and then sends them to do revenge killings. It wasn’t a good movie in 1973, and it was still not a good movie in 1980. The film would only gross $15k from three theatres in the midwest before disappearing from theatres after a couple weeks and a sub-$100k final gross.
As for the national top ten… well, that’s a hard one. Up until 1982, there wasn’t as much demand for national box office grosses the way some obsess over them now, but based on my research, the top ten highest grossing films in America that week were:
1) Airplane (Paramount)
2) The Empire Strikes Back (Fox)
$5,758,789 from 1139 theatres
3) Dressed to Kill (Filmways)
4) Caddyshack (Orion)
5) The Final Countdown (United Artists)
$3,250,000 from 681 theatres
6) Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition (Columbia)
$2,790,750 from 655 theatres
7) Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (Universal)
8) The Hunter (Paramount)
$2,500,000 from 440 theatres
9) The Blues Brothers (Universal)
10) Raise the Titanic (AFD)
$1,615,000 from 167 theatres