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    Nostalgia Central
    Home»Movies»Movies by Decade»Movies - 1980s
    Movies - 1980s Movies - O 3 Mins Read

    Osterman Weekend, The (1983)

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    The Osterman Weekend is a junk movie dedicated to the destruction of as many material things as possible – not to mention human lives (which seem altogether secondary).

    The movie begins with masked invaders jamming a giant hypodermic needle filled with poison through a naked girl’s nose until it hits her brain. Peckinpah loves this ghoulish scene so much that he repeats it three times during the picture.

    The last thing anybody cares about in a Peckinpah action epic is the plot, but this one is more ludicrous than usual.

    Four friends who went to Berkeley are getting together for a reunion. Three of them, Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper), Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon) and Bernard Osterman (Craig T Nelson) are Russian spies.

    The fourth is controversial TV personality John Tanner, played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer (pictured at right) as a cross between William F. Buckley and Dick Cavett. He’ll do anything for a scoop.

    Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster), the slimy head of the CIA, agrees to be a guest on the TV show if this gullible innocent will betray his friends.

    All of which paves the way for a lot of gratuitous violence that is more laughable than repellent.

    ostermanThe first hour of The Osterman Weekend drones along setting up relationships that never make any sense, piling up motivations so scrambled they defy logic, and dispensing dialogue so undecipherable it borders on idiocy.

    The second hour concentrates on the seemingly endless novel ways these various spies and double agents manage to kill each other. By the end, they’ve managed to dispatch men, women and children with petrol, guns, swords, explosives, laser beams, even a bow and arrow.

    It all ends up on network television, where a mass execution gets a bigger rating than the last episode of Dallas.

    John Hurt, as an anaemic-looking CIA agent called Lawrence Fassett (pictured below) who controls everything on closed-circuit TV to seek revenge for the murder of his sexy wife, phones in his performance from a computer terminal.

    Meg Foster, Helen Shaver, and Cassie Yates are the women who look as glazed as campfire girls suddenly set upon by visiting peapods from Mars.

    Burt Lancaster dashes off his sour-faced performance between martinis at the Polo Lounge, and Rutger Hauer seems bewildered and hopelessly miscast as he grapples unsuccessfully with both a zonked-out role and a wayward American accent.

    osterman9

    John Tanner
    Rutger Hauer
    Lawrence Fassett
    John Hurt
    Ali Tanner
    Meg Foster
    Richard Tremayne
    Dennis Hopper
    Bernard Osterman
    Craig T. Nelson
    Joseph Cardone
    Chris Sarandon
    Virginia Tremayne
    Helen Shaver
    Betty Cardone
    Cassie Yates
    Maxwell Danforth
    Burt Lancaster
    Stennings
    Sandy McPeak
    Steve Tanner
    Christopher Starr
    Marcia Heller
    Cheryl Carter
    Mikalovich
    Jan Tríska
    General Keever
    Hansford Rowe
    Zuna Brickman
    Merete Van Kamp

    Director
    Sam Peckinpah

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