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30 years ago - October 11, 1985

Silver Bullet
Silver Bullet is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella “Cycle of the Werewolf.” Everett McGill, Corey Haim, Terry O’Quinn, and Gary Busey star as townsfolk trying to fend off murders by a werewolf. Reviews were mixed to poor. Silver Bullet opened at #3 behind Commando and Jagged Edge with $4 million on 1,285 screens. It went on to earn $12.3 million, the weakest performance of a Stephen King story to date until Maximum Overdrive threw under it in 1986.

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
This is my favorite anniversary of the week. Every year I like to put my brothers through a 1980s movie reeducation camp by screening my favorites they never saw when we were kids. To date the response has been fairly tepid: The Man With One Red Shoe and Buckaroo Banzai didn’t age as well in recent viewings as they did in my memory. But just this past year, Remo Williams generated plenty of laughs.

Fred Ward stars as a cop who is recruited by a secret government agency to be a lone weapon against the country’s enemies. In a training relationship similar to Luke Skywalker and Yoda, Remo learns the Korean martial art of Sinanju and attempts to master movement in the dark and speed faster than his enemies can shoot. Academy Award winner (for Cabaret) Joel Grey plays his hilariously politically-incorrect instructor Chiun, who is more interested in watching soap operas than in giving Remo a break. Kate Mulgrew plays an Army Major who insists on helping Remo take down a corrupt defense contractor. Director Guy Hamilton previously directed four James Bond movies, and the tone of this movie similarly reflects both humor and action.

One of my favorite laugh-out-loud sequences involves an ingenious set of Doberman guard dogs, and we also see an impressive sequence of actors actually scaling the scaffolding of the Statue of Liberty renovation that was in progress at the time of filming. The movie even earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup and a Golden Globe nomination for Joel Grey.

Unfortunately, audiences instead chose to see Commando this weekend. Remo Williams opened at #4 with $3.3 million on 1,170 screens and went on to earn $14.3 million. Though The Adventure Begins was intended to be the first of a series of movies based on the "The Destroyer" novels by Murphy & Sapir, tragically there was never a sequel. Give this movie a look for some fun 1980s entertainment.


Come back next week for another installment of Marquee History!

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