The 80s Movie Podcast

Edward Havens

2 Creators

Your ticket to the movies. Hosted by film historian and former film critic Edward A. Havens III, The 80s Movie Podcast is a carefully curated and unique journey through a cinematic decade.

#10 in the Top 100 film history All time chart

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55 Listeners

3 Comments

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Top 10 The 80s Movie Podcast Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The 80s Movie Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The 80s Movie Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The 80s Movie Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

A Brief History of the Halloween Movies

The 80s Movie Podcast

10/29/21 • 44 min

In this very special episode, we do something that only 13,948 other podcasts have already done or are in the process of doing this week: taking a look back at the Halloween movies.

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The movies covered in this episode:
Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)
Halloween II (1981, Rick Rosenthal)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, Tommy Lee Wallace)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988, Dwight H. Little)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989, Dominique Othenin-Girard)
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995, Joe Chapelle)
Halloween: H20 (1998, Steve Miner)
Halloween: Resurrection (2002, Rick Rosenthal)
Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie)
Halloween II (2009, Rob Zombie)
Halloween (2018, David Gordon Green)
Halloween Kills (2021, David Gordon Green)
Halloween Ends (2022, David Gordon Green)

13 Listeners

2 Comments

Walker

The 80s Movie Podcast

09/29/22 • 27 min

We complete our miniseries on the 1980s movies of Alex Cox by looking at his most controversial film.

8 Listeners

Who in the Hell Was Alan Smithee, and Why Did He Make So Many Bad Movies

The 80s Movie Podcast

11/12/21 • 47 min

On this very special episode of the podcast, we discuss the life, career, and death of Alan Smithee, one of the most prolific filmmakers of the 1980s... who never actually directed a film, or, really, ever even existed. It's a twisted tale of incompetence, greed, and saving face.

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The movies discussed in this episode:
Accidental Love (2015, Stephen Greene)
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1998, Alan Smithee)
Appointment With Fear (1985, Alan Smithee)
The Barking Dog (1978, Alan Smithee)
The Birds II (1994, Alan Smithee)
Catchfire (1990, Alan Smithee)
City in Fear (1980, Alan Smithee)
Death of a Gunfighter (1969, Alan Smithee)
Dune (1984, David Lynch)
Eep! (2010, Ellen Smith)
Exposed (2016, Declan Dale)
Fade In (1975, Alan Smithee)
Ghost Fever (1987, Alan Smithee)
The Guardian (1990, William Friedkin)
Gunhead (1989, Alan Smithee)
Gypsy Angels (1980, Alan Smithee)
Heat (1995, Michael Mann)
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline (1994, Alan Smithee)
I Love New York (1987, Alan Smithee)
The Insider (1999, Michael Mann)
Let's Get Harry (1986, Alan Smithee)
Morgan Stewart's Coming Home (1987, Alan Smithee)
New York Ninja (1984/2021, John Liu)
The Shrimp on the Barbie (1990, Alan Smithee)
Stitches (1985, Alan Smithee)
Student Bodies (1981, Mickey Rose)
Supernova (2000, Thomas Lee)
Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983, John Landis)
Woman Wanted (1999, Alan Smithee)

7 Listeners

Baseball Movies of the 1980s

The 80s Movie Podcast

03/14/22 • 36 min

In time for the start of the baseball season, we talk about the numerous baseball movies that were made for movie and television screens during the 1980s.

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Movies discussed during this episode include:

Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987, Mike Newell)
Blue Skies Again (1983, Richard Michaels)
Brewster's Millions (1985, Walter Hill)
Bull Durham (1988, Ron Shelton)
The Comeback Kid (1980, Peter Levin)
Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy 'Satchel' Paige (1981, Richard A. Colla)
Eight Men Out (1988, John Sayles)
Field of Dreams (1989, Phil Alden Robinson)
Long Gone (1987, Martin Davidson)
Major League (1989, David S. Ward)
The Natural (1984, Barry Levinson)
Night Game (1989, Peter Masterson)
Only the Ball Was White (1981, Ken Solarz)
The Slugger's Wife (1985, Hal Ashby)
Stealing Home (1988, Steven Kampmann and William Porter [as Will Aldis])
Tiger Town (1983, Alan Shapiro)
Trading Hearts (1988, Neil Leifer)
A Winner Never Quits (1986, Mel Damski)

6 Listeners

1 Comment

A Brief History of the First Blood Movies

The 80s Movie Podcast

05/23/22 • 38 min

On this episode, we take a look back at the history of the First Blood movies.

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From its beginnings as an idea by Penn State English student David Morrell in 1968 to its publication as a novel in 1972, First Blood would spend nearly a decade in development in hell, attracting filmmakers like Richard Brooks (The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood), John Frankenheimer (The Birdman of Alcatraz, Black Sunday, The Manchurian Candidate), Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Three Days of the Condor, The Way We Were), and Martin Ritt (Hud, The Long Hot Summer), before it would finally go into production in Canada in 1981.

The films discussed in this episode, in order of release:
First Blood (1982, Ted Kotcheff)
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985, George P. Cosmatos)
Rambo III (1988, Peter MacDonald)
Rambo (2008, Sylvester Stallone)
Rambo: Last Blood (2019, Adrian Grünberg)

5 Listeners

1 Comment

The Cineplex Beverly Center

The 80s Movie Podcast

07/16/22 • 73 min

On this episode, we take a look back not at the career of an actor or director, nor about a specific movie or a distributor, but at a movie theatre that opened forty years ago today, that would change the course of the theatrical exhibition industry forever: The Cineplex Beverly Center.

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The Beverly Center and its flagship movie theatre, the first theatre in America to have a double-digit number of screens under one roof, opened on July 16th, 1982, and the theatre would quickly become one of the busiest movie theatres in the country, and whose success would help drive an astounding wave of new builds and acquisitions that would take Cineplex from a single theatre complex in Toronto to the biggest exhibitor in North America in less than ten years.

In addition to the host's personal recollections of working at the theatre in the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s, we also talk to film historian, author and UCSB professor Ross Melnick about the impact the theatre had on the entire film industry.

4 Listeners

1 Comment

Christmas 1981 at the Movies

The 80s Movie Podcast

12/25/21 • 41 min

On this episode, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III takes his Wayback Machine back forty years, to look back at the movies you could have seen after Christmas dinner in 1981.

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The movies covered during this episode include (released in 1981, unless otherwise noted):

Absence of Malice (Sydney Pollack)
Arthur (Steve Gordon)
Atlantic City (Louis Malle)
Buddy Buddy (Billy Wilder)
Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson)
Cinderella (1950, Clyde Geronimi and Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson)
Four Friends (Arthur Penn)
The French Lieutenant's Woman (Karel Reisz)
Gallipoli (Peter Weir)
Ghost Story (John Irvin)
Heartbeeps (Allan Arkush)
Modern Problems (Ken Shapiro)
Montenegro (Dušan Makavejev)
My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle)
Napoleon (1927, Abel Gance)
Neighbors (John G. Avildsen)
On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell)
Only When I Laugh (Glenn Jordan)
Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross)
Ragtime (Miloš Forman)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg)
Reds (Warren Beatty)
Rollover (Alan J. Pakula)
Sharkey's Machine (Burt Reynolds)
Taps (Harold Becker)
They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich)
Time Bandits (Terry Gilliam)
Whose Life Is It Anyway? (John Badham)

4 Listeners

Young Einstein

The 80s Movie Podcast

06/12/22 • 24 min

On this episode, we discuss one of the biggest hit films ever in Australian cinema, that was pretty much ignored in the rest of the world, Yahoo Serious' Young Einstein.

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Yes, you read that right. Yahoo Serious was the name of the director of Young Einstein.

And its main star.

And it's co-writer, co-producer, supervising editor, and he even wrote and sang a song or two on the soundtrack. A true modern renaissance man.

We also have a brief history of Australian cinema, the 1970s New Wave of filmmakers like Gillian Anderson, Bruce Beresford, George Miller and Peter Weir who would put Australia on the global cinematic map once and for all, and a scrappy art school student would make, and then remake, himself and his debut movie.

4 Listeners

1 Comment

The Orphans: Part 2

The 80s Movie Podcast

12/10/21 • 17 min

This episode continues an irregular series that takes a look back at a minor cinematic phenomenon that happened more often in the 1980s than in any other decade: the one-time-only distribution company.

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We talk about the 1985 cocaine crime drama The Texas Godfather, featuring Vince Edwards and Paul L. Smith, the 1986 comedy Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, starring Paul Sorvino, Abe Vigoda and Lorne Greene, and the 1986 gender switch comedy Willy/Milly (aka I Was a Teenage Boy, aka Something Special), starring Pamela Segall, Patty Duke, John Glover and Seth Green.

4 Listeners

Peter Bogdanovich and They All Laughed

The 80s Movie Podcast

02/28/22 • 52 min

On this episode, we take a look back at the life and career of director Peter Bogdanovich, with a focus on his forgotten 1981 comedy They All Laughed, and the love affair with one of the film’s leading ladies, Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, which would lead to her murder at the hands of her estranged husband, Paul Snider.

3 Listeners

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