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From the list “What Your Favorite ‘80s Band Says About You” by John Peck (see full column online at www. mcsweeneys.net):

Big Country: You have a Highlander poster in a tube in the back of your closet.

Soft Cell: You mouth the words when you watch Highlander.

A-ha: You own a VCR with a copy of Highlander stuck in it.

(Brief apologies in advance: Although I did promise it at the end of my last column, there will be no Quickening this week. There will, however, be Highlander II. And if that sounds confusing to read, it’s been equally confusing for me to wrap my brain around. Tumble on in further at your own risk.)

Considering the film I had already chosen for this installment of Chapter Two, I deem it fortuitous that I stumbled across Peck’s column last week while checking out a link to a humor piece written by Jesse Eisenberg that a friend had forwarded me. I spent the better part of an hour reading this and two similar columns pertaining to classic rock bands, laughing harder than I have in at least 10 years, to the point of a riverful of tears streaming out of my eyes, and my throat spasming (when I go in on excessive laughter, I go all in.) My personal favorite was

Steely Dan: You have snorted cocaine off a copy of Remembrance of Things Past.

I found the three Highlander references humorous, even though I had a limited frame of reference for them, because the film, released in the US in the spring of 1986, had always given off the vibe as being very much of the mid-1980s, as tied to those few years as the bands Peck references, and as a textbook example of the cinema created by the first wave of music video directors turned feature film directors (in this case, Russell Mulcahy.)

Mulcahy helmed the first ever music video to air on MTV, as well as nearly all of the videos that made Duran Duran who they were visually, and most of Elton John’s ‘80s video output. He ran the artist gamut from XTC to Taylor Dayne, with stops in between for Falco, Billy Joel and Def Leppard. Prior to this weekend, I had seen exactly two of his films, the lurid and stylish and largely forgotten Denzel Washington cop thriller Ricochet, and the would-be franchise launcher The Shadow, notorious - at least for me - as one of the few films boring enough to make me seriously consider dozing off in the theater.

I was well aware of the cult surrounding the first two Highlander films, and in particular the infamy surrounding Highlander 2: The Quickening but never felt an overriding need to dive in, particularly since there seemed to be a clutter of director’s cuts, international cuts, extended versions, and Special Edition DVDs to wade through. My discussion of both films that follows is based upon the 116 min director’s cut of Highlander as distributed by Anchor Bay in 2002, and the 2004 special edition of Highlander II (no subtitle and with Roman numerals) released by Lionsgate Home Video and clocking in at 109 mins. Although I hoped to see The Quickening in all its critically drubbed glory, I was not able to secure a copy of the 91 minute version released in the United States in early 1991.

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