I know, right? I know.

Laying down the template for many, many mad affairs to come, 1988’s Fresh Horses could very well be the first example of Tennessee Williams-lite drama that’s actually set in the North. From here onwards, any starlet wanting to be taken seriously would start to drop her g’s and act as a runaway from a broh-kan, you-can’t-fix-me nameless town. Or, for that matter, any pretty boy wanting to account for more than being a pretty boy would just try the junkie/bookie/victim/angel/lunatic angle.

So, let’s get to the plot, fast:

“A Cincinnati college student breaks off his engagement to his wealthy fiancée after he falls in love with a backwoods Kentucky girl he meets at a party. She says she’s 20, but he finds out she’s 16 and married to an abusive husband.”

Yeah. Everything you need to know, tidily compressed into a 1’ trailer. Except Ben Stiller. And the abuse-y bits. Neat.

Ringwald gives off a distinct  “Southern Gothic dame lost in a maze of negatives” vibe here, which should never, ever sound like a backhanded compliment, but it sort of does.

Oh, this one’s a keeper.

A quintessential rite of passage for any girl born between 1965 and 1980, depending on the mood, John Hughes’s Pretty In Pink becomes a) the reason why an awesome soundtrack was put together; b) a very Eighties take on the Cinderella paradygm; c) the lowest common denominator for anything connected to nostalgia; and d) all of the above.

It also makes for a classic trailer, in its own right. The opening credits montage of Molly Ringwald getting dressed and ready for school [i.e. is the chick flick equivalent of the other Eighties staple, the “hey, let’s go grab some guns” action montage] is spliced throughout the whole thing, acting as a visual refrain to the Psychedelic Furs’ lyrics for the title song. Every possible subplot is explored, as far as the teen characters are involved (guess that poor Harry Dean Stanton not letting go of his deadbeat wife didn’t resonate at the box office), while the main plot is, well, laid bare. At least the third act resolution is left as a guess.

Which makes me think of another trailer that made the rounds back then (video release, maybe? dunno), this one with an unusually Duckie-heavy slant. Did wacky borderline obsessive third wheel sell more than star-crossed class-transcending teenage love? Really? Oh, ok.

If you never saw it as a grownup, be sure to check out The Spader in all his own sniveling glory. He looks so much better with the benefit of some distance.

Confession time: I never managed to sit through more than 10’ minutes of Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire, even though at a certain critical point of my pre-teen years a local cable network was playing it on a daily basis. Had I known my pre-teen self was so in tune with the global zeitgeist, I could have tried to get some money out of it. Oh, well.

As Jonathan Bernstein would say, the amount of times St. Elmo’s was showcased on pay-per-view channels might suggest it was a hit movie (it wasn’t) and/or it somehow conveyed the spirit of the time (it didn’t). What it actually managed to do was:

a) predate Rob Lowe’s real life bad boy turn;

b) introduce general audiences to the notion that Judd Nelson’s perf in The Breakfast Club was mostly a stroke of luck;

c) mindfuck us into embracing the fact that Demi Moore would be around for a loooooong time;

d) give many of us our first shot of Young Actors Overcompensating For Being Desperately Out Of Touch With Their Peers.

To this day, I suspect it mostly works like a Brat Pack yearbook. And the “interconnecting storylines” thing (which is edited all out of sequence here) was hardly a new trick in the Eighties. Still, two things cannot be denied: the script set the template for ensemble TV dramas such as Melrose Place, and the theme song’s clip was still on the air months after the film had died at the box office.

And now, let’s all help ourselves to a money shot montage. And/or Molly Lambert’s screenshot history.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “do anybody know óf other movies where a lead character play the sax?”

Ah, the memories.

Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys is widely celebrated as two things: a piece of gaudy, yet coherent ’80s horror-lite, and a textbook example of sneaky (x) = homosexual lore.

Both things are true.

The trailer introduces baby-faced Corey Haim as the nominal hero of the picture (and he is, kinda), with an odd couple of sidekicks, while broody Jason Patric is placed in the victim/antagonist-in-training slot (and he is, definitely). Plus, the violence/humour switch is hit almost as much as it would come into play.

On the other hand, the dude who put nipples on the Batman suit was working overtime (this discussion reads like a bullet list of do’s and don’t-mind-if-I-do’s), but you can’t quite let yourself drown in the gayness here. The most spectacular pieces of scenery (such as the underground Art Déco hotel which serves as the clan’s home) are kept under wraps, too. Guess the power struggle within the family angle was a safe box office bet, unlike the look at me, I’m so cool one.

And you see really little of The Boys, but plenty of the final 20’. Talk about sending out mixed signals.

Great use of Echo & The Bunnymen’s “People Are Strange” version, though, just like in the credit sequence (which, seeing it here and now, makes me realize why I love my new home so much - it’s close to the infamous Viareggio boardwalk, aka Santa Carla minus the funhouse).

A few weeks ago I had the dubious privilege of introducing a girlfriend to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. She kept a stiff upper lip until the end credits were rolling. Then she turned to me and said, “you know, I always thought it was a comedy”.

Blame it on the trailer: general vibe falls squarely in the “kids today and their wacky (but still sort of wholesome) hijinks” category, what with the running in the hallways, the rockabilly riff coming up halfway, and all those shots of the leads busting random moves.

In retrospect it’s a little weird that they threw the pot smoking in, but maybe it was the then-compulsory bait for the lowbrow comedy crowd. Why, was “Molly Ringwald holding a lipstick between her tits” an unmentionable asset those days? (Come to think of it, it probably was.)

Strangely enough, there’s no mention whatsoever of the hu-u-u-u-u-uge amount of drama inside.

Marketing divisions all over the world were still to discover the “1980s are the new 1950s” angle, and teenage angst would become a newly profitable genre only later in the decade. Were it made now, the trailer would come with its own built-in LJ community. I guess.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “theres a guy in my language class that looks almost exactly like the jock.”