You might be surprised, dear reader, to learn that I’ve been in five movies. That would be a surprise to me, too, as I have only been in one movie listed in the IMDb, “A NORML Life“, and only for a brief snippet. It’s enough to get me a Bacon Number of 3, if you include documentaries.
The headline is purposefully misleading clickbait. What I’m here to tell you about are the top five moments in movies that are unforgettable to me, “Radical” Russ.
Drunk Plinko at “Ghostbusters (1984)“
I was just sixteen years old when my friends and I got drunk at a showing of the original Dan Aykroyd / Bill Murray / Harold Ramis “Ghostbusters“. I was the youngest member of our set and my best friend since 2nd grade, Ricky, was already eighteen, the oldest of our set. The drinking age back then in Idaho was nineteen and Ricky was tall enough and mature enough to fool some cashiers in town. Carding wasn’t as big a thing back then, either.
So, Ricky and I believe Darren and Marty, maybe Joe and I all decided we would sneak alcohol into the Pix Theater for a showing of Ghostbusters. Pix was one of those single-screen theaters that largely died out as the 1980s multiplex era began. To survive, it offered $2 tickets to movies that had already passed their opening and second runs. We’d all probably already seen “Ghostbusters”, but we hadn’t seen it drunk.
The guys all got themselves cans of beer. I, however, could not stand the taste of beer and opted instead for the newest craze for 80s alcoholics, the Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. We all secreted our booze in the long trenchcoats we had taken to wearing for some forgotten trend reason that would later become forbidden after the Columbine school shootings. I had two bottles in each interior pocket and two more up my sleeves.
We watched the movie and drank. By the time the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was defeated and Gozer was returned to the ethereal plane, returning the Keymaster and Zuul back to Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver, we were plastered. With an aisle full of empty beer cans in front of them, the guys push me toward the aisle to exit. Ricky says, “Whatever you do, don’t knock over your bottles.” That, of course, is the first thing I do. The whole theater, which probably had a couple dozen folks in it, then got to hear those bottles made as they rolled down the sloped polished concrete floor, bouncing off the the metal frames of the theater seats along the way. There was an increasing laughter as more people recognized what was happening as we five drunk teenagers try to leave the aisle.
“I told you not to knock over the bottles,” Ricky scolded.
JAMES BROWN! in “Rocky IV (1985)“
My late friend Greg was really into Sylvester Stallone. I was as fond of the “Rocky” movies as any teenager in the era and had also just recently enlisted in the Idaho National Guard. It was with that fresh infusion of patriotism in my heart that Greg and I skipped school one day to see the premiere of “Rocky IV“, the one where Rocky solves the Cold War in a stunning training montage pitting cold Soviet science and technology against natural American heart and grit.
As the movie progresses, we are getting more and more pumped. Apollo and Rocky hanging our together. Apollo in those U.S.A. trunks! Whoa, that Dolph Lundgren is bad-ass! Ooh, the hype for the big exhibition! Rocky’s gonna be Apollo’s trainer! Here it is, the main event! That music? Oh my god, it can’t be…
“JAMES BROWN!”
Both Greg and I had actually leaped out of our seats, pointed at the screen, and literally shouted “JAMES BROWN!” in unison, completely spontaneously. We were quickly hushed by others in the packed theater, then hushed moments later when Drago kills Apollo in the ring (no spoiler alerts for movies over forty).
Cramping at “A Fish Called Wanda (1988)“
I don’t even recall if I was watching this movie with someone, but “A Fish Called Wanda” remains the one film that has made me laugh the hardest. I was always a Monty Python geek as a kid, finding its reruns on the local PBS station, rewatching grainy VHS copies of “The Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” and “Meaning of Life” until I had them entirely memorized.
So I was excited to see John Cleese and Michael Palin co-heading up this new movie, along with Kevin Kline, whom I’ve always enjoyed, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who every male (straight or gay) loved in the 1980s. I was not to be disappointed, with every hilarious scene building on the previous, a comedy of perfect construction, and John Cleese playing to the hilt the hilarious discomfort of British awkwardness as only he can, leading up to this scene:
I don’t know why that scene hit me so hard, but it was so funny to me at that moment that I cannot remember laughing harder in my life. Tears streaming down my face and my stomach muscles literally cramping, it took me another couple of viewings before I could remember what happened in the following scenes.
Can We Leave Now? at “The Terminator (1984)“
When we weren’t watching second-run movies at the local Pix theater in Nampa, we were road-tripping to Boise and the four-plex theater that ran midnight movies. There was usually a set of regular features from the past that were good with rowdy late-night crowds, like “Pink Floyd: The Wall”, “Heavy Metal”, or “The Warriors”.
Somehow one weekend, they were running “The Terminator” and against all odds, none of us guys out that night had seen it. They often showed “Conan the Barbarian” at the midnight movies, so what’s wrong with another Schwarzenegger flick? It was still 1984 and he wasn’t yet a huge movie star, so he was still kind of a joke to us teenagers, like, let’s watch the muscle man talk funny.
Another staple of the midnight movie showings is that afterward we teenagers too young to drink would head over to the Perkins, an 24-hour diner down the road from the theater, and eat baskets of fries and drink coffee and hang out.
Well, we watch “The Terminator” and you know how it is, absolutely riveting. Nothing in sci-fi had been so action movie, and few action movies had been so sci-fi. We were captivated by Linda Hamilton’s fight against this unceasing killing machine played to perfection by Arnold. Okay, there it is, she’s blown up the killer robot. Great, let’s grab our things and we stand up and start shuffling out… hold on. The damn thing ain’t dead.
So we sit back down. Sarah Connor runs from the skeletal killer robot. She valiantly beats him, tearing him apart. Finally, our heroine is safe and we can grab our things and head out to Perkins and… hold up. The damn thing ain’t dead!
Sarah continues to flee until she is able to crush the life out of the skull and upper torso of the skeletal killer robot. The red light flickers out in his eye. Finally, the damn thing is dead!
But we just sat there. Oh, no, you’re not fooling us again, he ain’t really dead. And there we sat, all the way through the end credits, before the time when movies would sneak extra scenes into the end credits, just to be sure that the killer robot was really dead. Turns out, “The Terminator” is also a horror movie.
Crying at “Highlander (1986)“
I’m not one to cry at movies often, though there have been a few compelling moments. When Spock dies in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, for instance. Or movies for which not crying would be sociopathic, like “Schindler’s List” or “The Color Purple.” But once I’ve seen those movies and cried through them, upon a second viewing I am not going to be as emotionally affected.
With one glaring exception. Every time I see Conor MacLeod’s flashback montage in the movie “Highlander“, I cry. It’s the scene where the immortal MacLeod is remembering his marriage to his first love, Heather. He’s watching the years pass as she grows steadily older, unable to bear him a child because of his immortal genes, while he remains the same young age, until he’s finally burying her. Poignant enough cinema, but then you pair it with the soaring vocals of Freddie Mercury and Queen playing the lush orchestration of “Who Wants to Live Forever?” It’s waterworks for me, man, every damn time. I can barely even listen to the song alone without misting up.
I suppose it’s cliché that my top five movie memories happened between my ages of sixteen and twenty.
