MovieChat Forums > Batman (1989) Discussion > The last cheesy 80's blockbuster?

The last cheesy 80's blockbuster?


I just watched this again recently, it's got all the stock screams, thuds, broken glass, along with bad one liners that so many 80's action movies were full of. I know by the time we got to 1991's Terminator 2 all that old junk was gone.

Ok, except for cheesy/bad one liners lol.

reply

Yeah, like you don't find all that in the Avengers series. :-/

reply

I don't understand why people call this movie cheesy. It's cherry-picking very specific moments in the film out of context and branding the whole film on that basis. It's gothic and hearkens to German expressionism. It's nothing close to Batman & Robin or the '60s TV series, both of which were very cheesy/campy.

reply

In my case I see Batman as cheesy mostly because of the horrible stock sounds from their production library, seemed like all the studios used these same low quality sounds. Check out the broken glass at 0:54 and Kim Basingers' "screams" at 1:10. scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5DuIiBNl4g

reply

I dunno. I guess sound effects don't bug me like that. I watch a lot of classic film stuff, though, so maybe I'm inured to it from years of Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and the like.

reply

yeah , its a real shame they couldnt afford a new piece of glass to break

reply

The glass sounds like glass... breaking? How is that cheesy?

reply

Ever gone on a roller coaster with a woman? Women sound like that when they scream.

reply

Agreed.

The 1960s show was gleefully camp, and smelled heavily of cheese. (And was brilliant because of it.)

Batman Forever and Batman And Robin were more cheesy than this one too.

reply

Well whether it was cheesy or not, it came out in the second half of 1989, so it's really one of the last "pick a category of your choice" movie of the 80s

reply

Also one of the first superhero movies to take the subject matter seriously and get a big studio to back them up to the point of realising that vision (I know the Christopher Reeves Superman pictures were '70s - still though).

reply

This is true. And even though it wasn't rated R, it seemed like one of the first superhero movies to not be made for kids.

reply

Batman was definitely not made for kids. I don't think it was going out of its way to exclude them, it just was Tim Burton going, "This is what I find great about the story and the character, this is how I relate to the psychological and emotional aspects, and this is what I want to do visually," and it just happened to be more "grown up".

reply

"it seemed like one of the first superhero movies to not be made for kids."

yep , the beginning of the end.
Fast forward 30 years - cinema is ruined, crammed to the underpants with gay superhero films

reply

Some give that honor to TOTAL RECALL even if that was a 1990 release.

reply

total recall (1990)

reply

[deleted]

Some of its moments aren't cheesy. Like when Joker fries a guy's face off with a hand buzzer. Or when Joker gasses all those people in the museum.

reply

Very few moments in Batman are cheesy. I'll grant the giant pants gun, but even that kinda worked within the Joker's character and the comic book universe created. There are fantastic elements, but they're not really cheesy.

Frankly, I don't get that accusation at all. I think a lot of people watched Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and decided any Batman film that didn't look and feel like Nolan's Batman universe were default cheesy or for kids or something, but there's a difference between cheesiness, campiness, and just a different vibe or style. Nolan was going for "realism" (as real as one can get with a guy dressed in a rubber bat costume karate chopping bad guys, anyway), and Burton had more of a fantasy/comic book vibe. Doesn't make either of them better, worse, cheesy, adult, or serious, it's just the style.

reply

I agree. Ever since Nolan's Batman movies came out, a lot of people on the internet suddenly decided that all Batman movies that had come before were crappy cheesy films.

reply

One of the big downsides of Batman Begins was, in my opinion, that the IMDb's Batman '89 boards got polluted. It started as, basically, a bunch of Batman fans talking about how slick, cool, gothic, and vibey the Burton film was, or what their favourite moments were, or dissecting the nuances of the film's look, feel, and performances. Almost the bare minute BB got wide release, a bunch of people came flouncing over to talk smack, sometimes trolling, sometimes just not liking the old one, sometimes pretending not to troll but being snide ("It's not a *bad* movie, it's just a little dated, DON'T YOU THINK!?"), and in-general just going, "It's cheesy!" When what they meant was "All the press releases said Batman Begins was a gritty reboot, so that means everything else is cheesy!" Darnit, people, the hype put out around the "grittiness" was to rinse out the bad taste of Batman & Robin from fans' mouths, just like The Force Awakens press was flogging the "practical" effects!

reply

You put the finger on my biggest gripe with Nolans Batman. It's about a guy in a rubber batsuit. Realism has nothing to do in a Batman film.

reply

I like the first two Nolan films, but yeah, flogging "It's realistic!" only goes so far when you have a guy, ostensibly sane, who leaps from buildings to throw bat-shaped shuriken at people, and this is presented as the best hope a city has to fight the stranglehold organized crime has on said municipality. At a certain point, the two can't be reconciled. Although, again, I did like the first two Nolan films, and I didn't think they had that out of balance; they just strayed really close to the tipping point.

reply

I think they mostly danced on the tipping point and often enough went over it. It's comic book films, they come with at least some cheese no matter how you slice it. Or grate it. You can do whatever you want with your cheese.

reply

I know what you mean, although from a different discussion, I would maybe more characterise that element as intrinsic "fun" or "fantastic-ness", more-so than necessarily "cheese". I think it comes to the same thing, and maybe that's semantics, but for what it's worth, I agree with a slightly different wording.

reply

No matter how much darkness nor how much grit you put in a Batman film, it's still about a scared man dressed as a bat punching people in the face. It will be at least a bit "stupid" and if you go overboard with dark and gritty, it ends up being not "stupid" but straight up stupid. But yeah, for all intents and purposes we seem to be on the same page.

reply

I think we're just loudly agreeing with each other, yeah.

Comics are fantasies, or at least, superhero ones are, and you have to buy into that fantasy. Consider Lord of the Rings: your retinas are reflective, so if were really invisible, you'd go blind since light would just pass through. But physics don't apply because it's a fantasy; it's magic. If somebody made a version of Lord of the Rings that was "grounded in real-world physics," it would rapidly become ridiculous.

Maybe it's this: when you have a fantastic world, the more real you try to make it, the less real it seems, and sometimes not taking it 100% seriously is the best way to take it *really* seriously.

Or, thought of from a third angle, anything that can't laugh at itself is weak and teetering on the brink of foolishness. Anything that has a sense of irony is maybe actually more grounded.

I take Firefly and Serenity very seriously in terms of how their stories grip me and move me. But Whedon included lines like, "Psychic, though, that sounds like something out of science fiction!" with the reply, "You live in a spaceship, dear."

reply

Well hello there fellow Browncoat! Are you perhaps in the Big Damn Browncoats (Ain't We Just) group on Bookface?

I agree wholeheartedly with all three angles you present. That's kinda the problems I have with the DCEU, I mean; "Why so serious?".

reply

I'm a Big Damn Firefly fan, bu I'm not in the group. I'll have to look it up.

DCEU has a bunch of problems, and yes, overly-serious is one of them. I understand that they're trying to counter-weight Marvel's "light 'n' happy" superheroes, but I think they could have done it better. I haven't watched a lot of those films, but they don't look good.

I have a feeling the biggest problem with them is that they had one goal in mind: "Get this stuff out there so we can get some money just like the MCU." You can't tell a story when your objective is, "Sell the story," because that does nothing. They also put too much pressure on to fast-track a Justice League movie and get that out there. If they weren't in a rush and they put story first, they might get a good thing going.

reply

You should totally join, it's real shiny.

I think we have come to roads end here since we're in total agreement.

Hey, look! Two strangers on the internet are agreeing over comic book movies! Who'd thunk?

reply

Ha, yeah. If we keep being congenial any longer, the internet might implode.

reply