Hardbodies (1984) and What It Means for a Movie to Hold Up

One of the many discussions that frequently comes up when people talk about movies is whether or not something holds up. This phrase is bandied around as though it is the sole definitive mark of the quality of a movie. The better it holds up, the better it is. The worse it holds up, the worse it is. There are numerous people who would use the concept of a movie holding up to justify their opinion of a movie. I’ve fallen into the trap before, though I try not to. It’s a fallback position for when people don’t want to get into details about the movie.

The idea of something holding up mostly has to do with time. Nobody would talk about a recent release that they’re seeing for the first time through the lens of holding up. There needs to be some sort of history with the movie before the label of holding up or not holding up can be placed on it. If I were to rent Scoob! and watch it for the first time tonight, I couldn’t possibly say that it holds up. It came out two weeks ago and I wouldn’t have a history with it. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s take things back a step.

What does it mean for something to hold up? There are two ways that this idea could be interpreted. One is in an emotional way. That’s where repeat viewings come into play. If people discuss something holding up on a repeat viewing, they tend to be talking about the general viewing experience of the movie. They mean whether or not they felt as highly about the movie on that repeat viewing. Was there a diminishing return? Did they notice things they hadn’t before that bettered the experience? Did they just like spending time with the characters? That sort of stuff makes up this idea of something holding up.

The first idea of a movie holding up could also be a result of expectations. That’s an unfair assessment of a movie that people are getting from outside influence. When someone hears about how great a movie is, they could go into it with their expectations set too high. Take the case of Citizen Kane. There are people out there who would say it doesn’t hold up solely for the fact that they were told it was the greatest film of all time. They watched it, it didn’t live up to those expectations that they set for it, and they said it didn’t hold up. This first version of something holding up is completely and entirely a personal bias.

Now we come to the second version of what people mean when they say something doesn’t hold up. This one pertains solely to movies that aren’t new releases. There needs to be some world history for this to make any sense whatsoever. The movie must have a life beyond the initial release. The world needs to change for the movie to be seen in a new light. There could be some behind-the-scenes stuff that affect people’s perceptions of it. There could be some technical things that aren’t as good as they became in later years. It could be in the writing. Or it could be in the people on screen. There are various ways that a movie could leave a disappointing feeling in the viewer based solely on the movie and the people who made it.

Some people will say a movie doesn’t hold up based solely on their opinion of when the movie was released. They’ll say something about not being able to watch black and white movies. That’s fair if a person says they don’t like black and white movies. But when they write them all off as bad or not holding up simply because they don’t have colour, that’s where we start to get into the problems with the idea of things holding up or not. Over time, many aspects of filmmaking have changed. That shouldn’t negate everything that came before it. The world changed. That shouldn’t discount anything that happened before the changes.

Specific things regarding the changes may have affected how people feel about a movie. That’s where we get into the next part of the discussion. When you look at the specific reasons that something might be considered to not hold up, there are some justified reasons for it. Advancements in technology and changes in cultural morality might have skewed how people look at certain material. It could be something as simple as a filmmaker experimenting with new-to-them techniques. There could have been so many similar movies that one movie influenced that it lost the feeling of being fresh, of being an innovator in some sort of ground-breaking aspect. All these things could lead to people thinking that a movie doesn’t hold up. It wouldn’t stand up to a modern release.

Take technology, for example. The transition from practical effects to computer generated effects had a major impact on the idea of something not holding up. The primitive computer effects are nowhere near the quality that they currently are. With technological advancements in effects, they gradually became more realistic. People gained experience in how to create the effects. Computers became more sophisticated, allowing for better rendering. New tricks were created through programs like Photoshop and After Effects. As time advanced, technology advanced, and the realism of the effects advanced. Budget obviously will still have influence over the quality of computer generated effects in modern movies. As a trend, however, things have been progressing to better realism.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie would be an example of effects that feel out of date. The Zords didn’t fit the live-action world of the film, standing out as though they were a piece of animation from the show Reboot placed on top of the empty streets of Sydney, Australia. People might say that the effects don’t hold up because, by today’s standards, they wouldn’t hold any water. The effects were new at the time, and in 1995, they would have been the standard for this kind of effects work. Now, however, they look bad.

Humour and morality work in the same way as technology. There were standards in the past that have changed so that the mentality of the present is notably different. People now might take issue with some of the things said and done in those older movies. There were times when misogyny, racism, and homophobia ran rampant in comedies. Look at Soul Man. That movie wouldn’t be made today. There’s no way that people would accept a movie about a white man pretending to be black so that he could get a basketball scholarship to the school he wanted to attend. Most of the time, racism isn’t the whole concept of the movie, so the racist jokes get sprinkled in here and there, offending people in little spurts.

Misogyny is a whole different beast. Where movies weren’t usually promoted on a racist concept, there was a whole flood of 1980s sex comedies that were promoted on misogyny. Hardbodies was a good example of the Hollywood misogyny coming out in the sex comedies of the 1980s. Scotty (Grant Cramer) was a lowlife California ladies’ man who knew how to get women through dialogue instead of pickup lines. He was hired by Hunter (Gary Wood), Rounder (Michael Rapport), and Ashby (Sorrells Pickard) to help them get women and get laid. The comedy flowed from that.

The basic idea of Hardbodies was how to trick women into wanting to be with the men. Instead of throwing out cheesy pickup lines, the guys would talk to the women. They would tell the women what they wanted to hear and promise them something better, known as the bigger better deal. Then they would sleep with the women and be done with it. It was their way into one-night stands. They made the women think they cared and preyed on that. This would not fly in modern movies. You’re not supposed to coerce women into sex. The movie wouldn’t be able to get away with the main character teaching them these tactics then experiencing no punishment for it. People might say it doesn’t hold up because of these misogynistic themes. Same with many of the other sex comedies of the time. Men were treating women like sexual objects rather than people.

Another way that a movie could be considered as not holding up would be through the skill of the filmmakers themselves. If someone was just starting out and they didn’t have the talent built up that they would have in their future projects, what they made initially might not be seen as worth watching. The same could be said for a filmmaker experimenting with new techniques. When someone first feels out a new technique, it will be rough around the edges.

Robert Zemeckis has returned to motion capture animation many times. The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol were movies that used motion capture animation to varying degrees of success. Some people might say that the movies don’t hold up due to the quality of the technology that Zemeckis was experimenting with. When Avatar was released in 2009, the same year as A Christmas Carol, it showed how far motion capture had come. It seemed to stop Zemeckis’s forays into the technology, until he later returned to it with Welcome to Marwen.

Then there are always the people involved in a movie. The public perception of a film can be greatly affected by the off-screen antics of the cast and crew. Kevin Spacey is a perfect example of this. American Beauty was a best picture winner at the Academy Awards. It was already a little risqué in material, as a middle-aged man became infatuated with a teenage girl. Things got messy when it was revealed in 2017, when Kevin Spacey was accused of making sexual advances on many teenage men in the 1990s. The gender might have been different, but the idea of the real life Kevin Spacey sexually preying on teenagers made the story of American Beauty even more problematic than it already was. Sometimes it can be tough to separate an artist from their art, and this was one of the many cases where people might say the art doesn’t hold up because of what they artist did in reality.

Finally, we come to a broader idea than something as concrete as technology or morality. Sometimes, a movie can come out and be heralded as a great motion picture because of what it help shepherd into the art form. Instead of being simple experimentation, the movie became an inspiration for everything that came after it. A movie like Battleship Potemkin helped to bring the concept of a montage into film. It changed the way that film editing worked and influenced nearly everything that followed. Some of the films that manage to do this sort of thing lose the lustre of their innovation after a bunch of other movies use that technique in the years that follow.

Going back to Avatar, it was one of the ground-breaking movies in both the use of motion capture and 3-D cinematography. It became the highest grossing movie of all time. That was 2009. In the eleven years since, all the high praise for Avatar has dissipated. Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out two years later and took the motion capture goodwill that Avatar got, and never looked back. That trilogy of modern Apes movies has remained everyone’s go-to for motion capture. The abundance of 3-D releases in the years that followed Avatar’s release dampened the excitement that people had for the 3-D that Avatar presented. Without those two things, people saw Avatar as a generic story, rehashing what they had seen many times before. The love for Avatar was gone and people thought it didn’t hold up because they no longer loved it.

Saying that a movie doesn’t hold up is a general term that can encompass so many things that it renders the phrase meaningless. It could be an emotional feeling where expectations or repeated viewings can affect a person’s feelings about a movie. Or it could mean something much more observational. People could think a movie doesn’t hold up because of the time it was released, the technology used within, experimental techniques that never panned out, morality, the lives of the people involved, or the many movies that came after it and improved on techniques it used. Whatever the case, the question of whether something holds up does not get into the real reasons that people don’t find a movie good. It’s the sizzle without the steak.

People are always trying to find quick and easy ways to describe their feelings. They want to say something that will garner attention, rather than something that will make people think and consider the deeper meaning. It’s like a movie reviewer tailoring their review to have as many pull quotes as possible. Saying something does or does not hold up always has a deeper meaning. People just don’t want to give it, so they leave it at that.

I’ll give you a few notes to end off the post:

• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (week 226) and Soul Man (week 354) were mentioned in this post.
• Kane Hodder was in Hardbodies. He was also in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (week 85), Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294), and 3 Musketeers (week 384).
• The star of Hardbodies was Grant Cramer, who was previously seen in New Year’s Evil (week 318) and Killer Klowns from Outer Space (week 361).
• Courtney Gains has a role in Hardbodies after making his first Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Dorm Daze (week 40).
• Hardbodies was the second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance of Michael Miller after Hercules in New York (week 68).
• Darcy DeMoss was in both Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190) and Hardbodies.
• You may have recognized Kristi Somers in Hardbodies. She was also in Hell Comes to Frogtown (week 206).
• Finally, Kathleen Kinmont returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies in Hardbodies. She was first in Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster (week 320).
• Have you seen Hardbodies? Would you say it holds up? Do you have problems with the morals of it? What do you think of people saying something holds up? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• I’m always here and always looking for suggestions about what I should watch. If you have any suggestions, send them my way on Twitter or in the comments.
• While you’re at it, go take a look at the Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m usually posting some interesting-ish things over there. Join in the fun.
• Now it’s time to talk about next week. I’m not looking forward to it. It’s a movie that I’ve only ever heard bad things about. I already watched it and can confirm that the bad stuff is true. But what will I write about it? Why am I putting myself through the torment of thinking about it more than any sane person would? I couldn’t tell you. That movie is 2002’s Swept Away. Ugh. I’ll see you next week with a post.