Friday Flix: September 1982 : The Retro Network

September marks the unofficial end of summer. Once the long Labor Day weekend is over school starts back up. In some areas school starts before Labor Day, which is a crime.

After the massive movie dump in August, September is a much lighter. There were only seven movies released in September 1982. Eight if you include the ‘honorable mention’ which is a made-for-TV movie.

There’s not much to choose from this month. A bad horror movie, a trippy musical, a good western and a few other unremarkable movies.

Let’s jump into the movies of September 1982.

Movies from September 1982

Amityville II: The Possession

The Amityville Horror was a good horror movie about a family who move into a house where a mass murder took place. All kinds of scary things happen in the house, a room full of flies, priests going blind, and then the walls start bleeding. That image is forever ingrained in my memory.

Amityville II isn’t as good. It’s sort of a prequel to The Amityville Horror telling the story of the family who was murdered in the house. There’s nothing new in the movie except the family. The same types of strangeness occurs and priests are helpless to bless the house.

The ending of Amityville II is odd as well, it sets the movie up to continue with a sequel but not The Amityvill Horror. If you watch Amityville II first and then The Amityville Horror you will have lots of questions. It’s almost as if the writer for Amityville II never saw the first movie.

The ending of Amityville II doesn’t line up with the beginning of The Amityville Horror and as a direct prequel it should.

In true 80s style they made a third movie, Amityville 3-D. It was a failure.

Siskel and Ebert picked Amityville II as one of the worst movies of 1982. I don’t know if it’s that bad, but it’s not good.

You can watch Amityville II: The Possession on HBO Max.

The Shadow Riders

This one falls into the ‘honorable mention’ category. It was a made-for-TV movie, never released on the big screen. It was a CBS Tuesday Night Movie.

My dad was a big fan of westerns and my mom was a big fan of Tom Selleck. This was a movie made for both of them. I had a strict bedtime but for some reason I was allowed to stay up late and watch the movie.

The Shadow Riders is a movie adapted from a Louis L’Amour novel. L’Amour wrote over 100 novels with the vast majority set in the American Old West. Over 35 of his novels were adapted to movies or TV series.

Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott star as Mac and Dal Traven in The Shadow Riders, brothers who fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. After the war they are reunited and return home to find their home is destroyed and their siblings (and Dal’s girlfriend, played by Kathrine Ross) have been kidnapped by rebel soldiers. The brothers team up and set out to rescue their family.

I like The Shadow Riders, it’s a good western with a great cast. I don’t know how it would have fared at the box office, going up against this months crop of movies it would have had a decent showing.

Did you know Sam Elliott and Katrine Ross were married in 1984 and are still married today.

You can watch The Shadow Riders on Tubi TV.

Other movies released in September 1982

Here are the other movies released. I’m not a Pink Floyd fan and have no desire to see The Wall. In the 80s the Denver Nature and Science museum would show Laser light shows in the planetarium on the weekends.

The laser lights were synchronized with music, Pink Floyd, Queen, Led Zepplin, popular 70s and 80s bands. My sisters would take me anytime I’d visit them and one visit we saw the Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon” laser light show. It was a good show but didn’t make me a Pink Floyd fan.

The Concrete Jungle looks like a hold over from the sexplotation era. I might need to watch it.

If you’ve seen any of them let me know in the comments below.