What’s Up, Buttercup?

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

A triple shot of 1980s thrills.

FORTRESS (1985)

If you were a youngster in the 1980s and had access to the premium cable channel HBO, there’s a chance you may have witnessed – and perhaps even traumatized by – the 1985 Australian thriller Fortress. I certainly was. I wasn’t quite two years old when the movie received its North American release through HBO, and while I doubt I saw it at that time, it wasn’t much later, and definitely still in the ‘80s, when I caught sight of some of its imagery on the TV set. What I saw stuck with me for a long time, burned into my brain, even though it would be years before I ever had the chance to see the movie again (or before I even figured out what the title was). Once I did cross paths with it again, I found that this is a really great movie.

Directed by Arch Nicholson from a screenplay by Everett De Roche, the writer of such cool movies as Roadgames and Link, and based on a novel by Gabrielle Lord, Fortress actually draws inspiration from a real-life incident, which makes it all the more unnerving. The real event took place in 1972 and is called the Faraday School kidnapping. Two man raided a one-teacher school in the town of Faraday in Victoria, Australia and kidnapped six students and their teacher, holding them for ransom. Thankfully, all of the victims managed to escape and the men were arrest and convicted... But that’s not quite how the film version of the story plays out – which is a good thing for the viewer, as it allows us to see the villains get some violent comeuppance.

The film stars Rachel Ward as Sally Jones, the sole teacher at a small school in rural Australia. She teaches nine children of all ages – and one schoolday, a group of men wearing creepy masks (there’s Father Christmas / Santa Claus, a cat, a mouse, and a duck) raid the school and take Sally and the children hostage. They stick them in a panel van and haul them deeper into the countryside, forcing them into a cave for safekeeping while the men set out to collect a ransom. The scene of the masked men coming into the school and forcing Sally and the kids into the van is what I saw when I was kid. The visuals and the concept, they were some of the creepiest things I had encountered at that point, even though I was already watching horror movies. Revisiting the film as an adult in his forties, it’s still unnerving.

Sally and the kids don’t conduct themselves like helpless victims, though. They’re always trying to figure out a way to escape from the situation. So don’t expect the characters to spend the rest of that movie in the cave – and don’t expect them to back down from the villains when it comes time for a climactic confrontation.

Forty years after its initial release, Fortress still holds up as an engrossing, emotionally involving thriller – and as far as I’m concerned, it deserves to be celebrated as one of the all-time greats of the genre. It’s awesome. Blog contributor Priscilla agrees; she also stumbled across the movie when she was a child, and it freaked her out and stuck with her just like it did me.

STRIPPED TO KILL (1987)

Actress/writer Katt Shea reluctantly accompanied her husband and writing partner Andy Ruben to a strip club – and out of that trip to the club, we got one of the most popular B-movie thrillers of the 1980s, Stripped to Kill. Awed by the sight of women spinning on poles and “performing as if they really cared,” Shea was inspired to write a script with Ruben that would tell the story of a female cop going undercover as a stripper to solve a murder mystery. She strongly felt that the image of women pole-dancing needed to be brought to the screen – and when she pitched the concept to legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman, he agreed. Stripped to Kill went into production with Shea at the helm, making her feature directorial debut.

Kay Lenz stars as Cody, a Los Angeles cop who witnesses a women being doused in gasoline and set on fire in public. Cody would shoot the perpetrator, but she also gets splashed with gasoline and would go up in flames if she were to fire her weapon. But she is, understandably, left with the need to bring the killer to justice – so when she and her partner, Greg Evigan as Sergeant Heineman, discover that the murdered woman was a stripper at a club called Rock Bottom, they come up with the undercover idea. Rock Bottom holds Amateur Night competitions where winners are determined by applause meter and they’re usually given a job dancing at the club, so Heineman stacks the audience with fellow officers who cheer loudly for Cody and make her the winner. Even though she’s the worst dancer club owner Ray (the great Norman Fell) has ever seen, Cody gets hired at the Rock Bottom – and starts evaluating clientele and interacting with the strippers in an effort to figure out who murdered their fellow stripper. In the process, she starts to see the appeal of stripping and being able to let loose on stage.

More people get killed along the way and the mystery of the homicidal maniac builds up to a reveal that some find to be problematic, but it’s one that I certainly didn’t see coming. (And I didn’t find it problematic because I don’t think the villainous character represents anyone other than themselves.)

Stripped to Kill is a decent thriller, but it does have a whole lot of nudity, with much of its sub-90-minute running time being taken up by lengthy stripping sequences that will bog things down if you’re looking for story and not enthralled by the sight of nude dancing. But that’s part of the charm of B-movies / exploitation movies like this.

LADY BEWARE (1987)

Katya Yarno (Diane Lane) is a young woman who has just landed the dream job of being the corner window dresser for Horne’s department store in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, she and her work quickly catch the eye of Jack Price (Michael Woods), an x-ray technician who works in the clinic across the street from Horne’s. If Jack were a regular guy and would approach Katya in a nice, normal way, he might have a shot at taking her out on a date – after all, she does seem to be rather lonely. She lives by herself in a large loft apartment (which has a bathtub in the middle of the space, where she bathes by candlelight), her work is inspired by her fantasies, and she has intense wet dreams. When nice guy journalist Mac Odell (Cotter Smith) comes into her life, well after Jack has his eye on her, they quickly strike up a relationship.

But Jack isn’t a regular guy. His approach to “wooing” Katya is to stalk her, making creepy phone calls, threatening to take her by force, pretending to have insight into her life through intuition when he’s actually just intercepting and reading her mail. He couldn’t just date her and take her back to his place anyway, because he has a wife and daughter waiting for him at home. So he touches himself while creeping Katya out on the phone, then goes and gets rough with his wife.

Jack’s stalking gets more involved and even creepier as time goes on. He breaks into her apartment while she’s out, bathes in her tub, uses her toothbrush, dances with her clothes. We know, and Katya knows, that it’s only a matter of time before this situation escalates to physical violence... but director Karen Arthur and writers Charles Zev Cohen hold back on that. 

Lady Beware is an idea Arthur had in mind for almost ten years before the film finally went into production, and the hold-up was specifically that she didn’t want this to be a violent movie. As Arthur told The Los Angeles Times, the project was passed from studio to studio and company to company, going through "100 homes, 17 drafts, and eight writers" before it was finally saved by Scotti Brothers Pictures.

The lack of violence is surprising; movies like this usually do have more violent acts in them – but it’s an interesting approach, making this more a psychological thriller than anything else. Jack doesn’t even have to touch Katya to start tearing her life apart. The ending could have been more cathartic, but it’s an interesting watch nonetheless.