Though this wasn’t a film I remembered first seeing, the VHS box art is one I’ll never forget for how cheesy it was.  For those who don’t know, it had a man having a kebab impaled into his mouth.  While the cover art isn’t the most appealing, what got me interested was seeing that the film was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who has a fun and diverse body of work.  With films like The Guns of the Navarone, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Cape Fear (the one starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum) and numerous others, for film lovers this should be enough to garner some interest to want to check out. Does the film hold up as an 80’s slasher, or should this be a title that should have remained shelved to collect dust?  It’s time to strap on those party hats and find out.

The film opens up innocently enough with a bunch of college friends hanging out in a bar and causing some mischief with the locals.  While the setup and dialog are nothing all that great, it’s the scene with them leaving the bar that got me hooked.  As the gang is exiting the bar, they see that a drawbridge is getting ready to raise its section to let a boat pass, so the students hop in their cars and motorcycles racing to see who will make it across or who will chicken out.  This of course freaks out Virginia (Melissa Sue Anderson), though as the film progresses, we see it’s for good reason.  This was a fun sequence, but what surprised me was that the film kept me entertained.

Family Guy has reached a level of impact upon the American pop culture where I believe the characters need little to no introduction.  Is there anyone really that doesn’t recognize Stewie? After all, he’s reached the status of icon and has even become a fixture of the Thanksgiving parade as one of the many floats.  Where The Flintstones, then later The Simpsons, were at one time the dominating animated family on the television tackling day to day struggles of the modern American (each in their own and unique way), Family Guy (love it or hate it) now seems to be the go-to animated family.

In this collection of 20 episodes, the creative force, Seth Macfarlane and his team continue to deliver the laughs along with their twisted moral messages.    In today’s culture it seems like it is harder and harder to be a comedian and manage to not offend anyone.  Considering how Family Guy has always been a show that seems to enjoy testing the boundaries on what is considered obscene while poking fun at pop culture, I’ve been curious how the show would fare.  Thankfully the show hasn’t seemed to pull its punches and manages to have jokes aimed at just about everyone, and by saying that I want to start off by discussing “The D in Apartment 23”.  In this episode we see Brian suffer the fallout after he makes a “racist” tweet. We’ve seen in the media how quickly a tweet can ruin careers, and in this episode  the show even dares to poke fun at how sensitive people have gotten.  This is one of those social commentaries where though it’s funny in its presentation, it is kind of a sad reflection of what we have become, where a joke can’t just be a joke anymore.  This is one of those episodes I wish everyone could sit down and watch and simply appreciate what the episode has to say, because frankly I’m a little concerned about the direction comedy may end up going, along with that notion of “freedom of speech”. On a lighter note on this episode, perhaps the highlight of the season was seeing Chris and Meg take on the students at their school in a fight scene that parodies the epic fight scene from the first Kingsmen film.   The episode “HTTPETE” piggy-backs on this message, where we see Peter attempt to become a Millennial, though this episode definitely doesn’t have as serious of a tone to it.