The two hit 1980s movies that “really flat-out stunk”, according to Jack Nicholson
Once the ‘New Hollywood’ period began to fizzle out, wither, and die on the vine, the industry experienced another seismic shift, and not necessarily for the better. Jack Nicholson remained one of cinema’s biggest stars, but he wasn’t entirely enthralled by what was happening.
While it’s unfair to single out Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate as the straw that broke the ‘New Hollywood’ camel’s back, it isn’t too far off. The filmmaker’s wildly expensive, self-indulgent, and money-losing disaster helped the studios wrestle power back from the auteurs, and things were never the same again.
There were still directors making movies on their own terms and wielding complete creative freedom, but on a much smaller scale. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas epitomised the new paradigm; they were part of the ‘Movie Brats’ who took over Hollywood, but they found the most commercial success because they prioritised crowd-pleasing entertainment and escapism above all else.
As for Nicholson, the ’80s wasn’t his greatest decade. That’s not intended as a slight because it was inevitable after a remarkable ’70s. He still won a second Academy Award for Terms of Endearment and earned four nominations for his performances, but the quality of his films was much more inconsistent.
He only appeared in 11 pictures, compared to the 16 he’d made the previous decade, and a large part of it was down to the lack of quality material on offer. He knew there was change afoot, which his disdain for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off made perfectly clear, but it was another two cinematic trends that left the legend with a bitter taste in his mouth.
After John Carpenter’s Halloween, slasher flicks were in vogue and being released in alarmingly high numbers. After Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs., the same was true of buddy cop comedies. Many of them became classics in their own right, but there were a pair of movies he particularly abhorred.
“You know, it’s like a great sickness,” he lamented of the industry’s preference for running a once-good idea into the ground after repeating it ad nauseam. “I thought Beverly Hills Cop II really flat-out stunk for the lack of a more tempered phrase, but it wasn’t as bad as the movie before, Flower Brain Child or whatever it was.”
Eddie Murphy would agree that his second outing as Axel Foley was a pale imitation of its illustrious predecessor, but what the hell is Flower Brain Child? An educated guess would be Flowers in the Attic, the widely panned psychological horror that landed in cinemas in 1987, the same year as Beverly Hills Cop II, which tracks with Nicholson’s timeline.
Both were unqualified hits that recouped their production budgets at least five times over, much more in the case of Tony Scott’s action-packed sequel, but Nicholson wasn’t impressed. The buddy cop caper and the low-budget horror had become staples of the release schedule, and it wasn’t long before familiarity bred contempt, with many of them falling short among critics and at the box office.
Coincidentally, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off premiered the previous year, so it looks as though Nicholson doesn’t remember 1986 and 1987 too fondly for being bastions of cinematic excellence.
