User Reviews

I loved this film as a kid and appreciate it even more as an adult. When I finished my Air Force basic training in San Antonio, I made sure to visit many of the locations used throughout the film. Both the writer and director of Cloak and Dagger collaborated together on Psycho II, another terrific '80's film coming soon on shout factory blu-ray release February 2021

Henry Thomas, in the afterglow of E. T. stars in this Atari inspired movie that is lots of fun. It's the kid version of WarGames so it's fun for the family. Dabney Coleman of 9 to 5 provides some adult stablity.

At the time I loved Atari.

Cloak & Dagger started off fine. Davey Osborne (Henry Thomas) with his runaway imagination made the most mundane activities fun. On one of his "missions" with his friend Kim (Christina Nigra) Davey witnessed a murder. The man murdered gave him a video game with some top secret information on it. Yeah, I didn't think that was too smart either. You just got shot and now you're going to endanger a little kid by giving him the thing you got shot over.

Davey didn't need any help interpreting the recent events. He took it as an international plot and he was smack dab in the middle of it.

With a movie involving kids escaping adults there is a little suspended disbelief. There's suspended disbelief with adults in action movies so it's no different with kids. Davey spent the movie escaping and trying to get adults to believe him. It was fun and frustration free until the end.

The bad guys sought to get rid of Davey and Kim, which makes sense. What didn't make sense was that they would do it with enough explosives to blow up a city block. 1.) That's overkill and 2.) That all but ensures that the law will not let the matter go. At some point, which we don't see, they rigged Kim's walkie-talkie with plastic explosives. It was totally unnecessary except to build up some artificial suspense.

But O.K., Kim is walking around with a bomb that has to be disposed of or disarmed. When Davey comes to the realization that Kim has a bomb he seemed to be perpetually sidetracked by other things. Dude, she has a bomb on her person that's going to detonate at any moment. Focus!

Even when he got the bomb from Kim he seemed totally stymied about what to do. Of course, no one believed him about the bomb because of his overactive imagination, but I'm sure he could've thought of something to do other than take it on the plane and try to disarm it by just pulling wires.

Inevitably, everything worked out. The bomb went off killing the elderly spies and his dad was his hero. Not the ideal finish, but not bad enough to ruin the whole movie.

Originally released as a double feature with The Last Starfighter, I first saw this movie as a VHS rental.

It was directed by Australian Richard Franklin, who also made Fantasm, Patrick, Roadgames and Psycho 2. The writer of the last film was Tom Holland (Fright Night), who wrote this film as well.

This is a remake of The Window, which was based on the Cornell Woolrich story The Boy Who Cried Murder. Another of Woolrich's stories, It Had to Be Murder, became the Hitchock film Rear Window, which inspired Roadgames. This same story was also made as The Boy Cried Murder and Eyewitness.

Davey Osborne (Henry Thomas, E.T.) wants to be Jack Flack, a daring man of spy derring-do. The only problem is that Jack doesn't exist in the real world, but his father (Dabney Coleman played both roles) does.

This all changes when his friend Morris (William Forsythe) sends him on an errand to get him a candy bar. Davey and his friend Kim witness a murder and are given a Cloak and Dagger video game by the dying man. Yep - the Jack Flack video game itself, now part of a real world spying mission.

This is pretty much a forgotten movie today, but I really have always loved how the real world and fantastical spy world meet in the middle, with real life death having a dramatic impact on our hero. I don't want to spoil the twists and turns, but the first time I saw it, there were at least two moments that totally shocked me.

You should find this one, watch it and let me know what you think. I got a copy from a beaten up old Pizza Hut pawnshop for a dollar, which is way more than it is worth.

'Cloak & Dagger' is a 1984 motion picture with the same title as one of Nik Kershaw's great songs (equally from 1984). I don't know if that song is related to this film or not. However, I read that this film is a remake of 1949's masterpiece 'The Window'. I couldn't disagree more on this...

While I agree that 'Cloak & Dagger' has minor plot similarities with 'The Window' (a little boy with a vivid imagination who witnesses a crime but isn't believed by anybody), the rest is completely different. If this is a remake of 'The Window', then it is a heavily disguised one.

In 'The Window', the boy is a teller of tall tales and his mother is alive. The criminals are his neighbors. There are no video-games or 'Cloaks and Daggers'. It takes place in a completely different generation, the pace is very different, it takes place in New York city and the sceneries/backgrounds are in a totally different league, as well as the levels of intensity and suspense. The runtime is also far shorter and the movie is noir.

In 'Cloak & Dagger', the kid is more grown-up and is not a teller of tall tales. His mother is dead. The criminals aren't neighbors. It takes place in the 80's and there are typically 80's video-games (like 'Cloak & Dagger'). It takes place in San Antonio, Texas (precisely where Henry Thomas was born). The criminals aren't after the kid because of the crime he witnessed, but because of the content hidden in the 'Cloak & Dagger' in question. The film is much longer and colored (not in black and white). Suspense and intensity cannot be compared. Among many other differences.

That said, the movie is interesting. It's nowhere near as good as 'The Window', but instead of comparing them think of them as movies apart. 'Cloak & Dagger' has many characteristic elements of the 80's in its favor but also lots of action without being excessive. It is undeniable that it's also a violent movie, with many murders. Davey even has to kill a murderer!

The ending has a touching side, with father and son regaining love and respect for each other. Plus, as Davey says shortly before, he doesn't want to "play" anymore.

Henry Thomas (best known as "Elliott" from 'E.T.') is the star of this film. Comparing to his most popular role, he improved, showing a more mature and natural acting. And here we have no such thing as the famous or infamous (depending on the way you judge it) 'E.T.' line «penis breath». Kim, the little girl, ain't annoying either, unlike Drew Barrymore's character from 'E.T.'

The movie focus on Davey's runaways from the killers who murdered a man. This man, before dying, gives Davey a 'Cloak & Dagger' video-game cartridge and reveals what it contains. However, the police doesn't believe Davey (not even his father). This leaves Davey in danger of life during the whole movie. Davey has one make-believe friend (Jack Flack) who doesn't always give good advices. Davey is constantly chased by the murderous spies from his house to canal boats, to the Alamo, across the city... even the apparently friendly old couple, as we realize later in the movie, work for the spies.

Henry Thomas drives a car here. I don't know what make and model it is, but it's a nice and beautiful car.

The star of E. T., Henry Thomas, returns to the big screen in a children's action/adventure film that is a lot more intelligent and well made than most films for kids get to be. The hook of the movie is that the young hero, Davey, is playing out his fantasy of being a spy in a board and video game that he excels at, but the spy game has become real. He gets deeply involved and consults the imaginary hero of the video game on what to do as he is drawn into a real life espionage thriller.

Dabney Coleman has duel roles as Davey's father, a Master Sargent in the Air Force, and an Jack Flack, the fictional spy and hero of the board game and it's video game version. This is the second film in which Henry Thomas plays a kid, alienated from his father who develops a close relationship with an exotic figure that makes his life far from mundane. There are no spaceships and the Spielberg touch is missing from the picture, but it is still an effective story that kids will be happy to spend some time with.

The movie starts off with a spy parody. Jack Flack, America's greatest spy, parachutes into an embassy function wearing a retractable chute that mimics the opening of "The Spy Who Loved Me". After taking care of the Russian security men, he manages to steal the briefcase containing important documents from a German General, An Arab Diplomat and a beautiful seductress. During his escape he is cornered and nearly mowed down by giant polyhedral dice in a tribute to Indiana Jones. This is how we discover that the hero of the story is a fictional character in a Role Playing Game. The miniature figure of our spy is located in a cardboard set on a board game that is being played in the back of a GameKeeper shop. RPG Set Davey is always the winner in the game which frustrates his friend Kim, the neighbor girl who hangs out with him because he is the only boy in the neighborhood who isn't boring. The reason Davey is not boring is because he leads a rich fantasy life built around the spy game he loves. His mother has died recently and he is a lonely kid living with a stern father who does not understand him. This is certainly a familiar cliche in films. Just a month earlier, the same story structure was used in "The Neverending Story". The difference is that the little boy in that movie gets pulled into a fantasy world while in this story, the boy is being pulled into the real world from his fantasy life.

Many of you will know about RPG games. I never played although my daughter liked D and D. Computer games at the time had very limited graphics and you were frequently given choices to make in the game, as if it were a story that you were writing as you went along. Console games like Atari and Coleco began to visualize those games but with very primitive computer graphics. Arcade versions of the game sucked up kids quarters by the millions in the late part of the 70s and early 80s. Sometime before the release of this movie, the gaming industry experienced a crash and had to reinvent itself. The financial ramifications were that the game version of this movie did not get widespread release and it's not likely that enough kids played the game to make this movie a bigger hit.

Davey has two friends, Kim who is close to his own age and Morris, the computer geek who runs the Gamekeeper store. Morris is played in an early role by William Forsythe, who will go on to play crooks and cops for the next thirty years. In an attempt to play along with the kids but also get them out of his hair, he gives them an assignment to go to Techno and get some new game catalogs. Davey plays it as a game and takes Kim and a couple of walkie talkies to the high rise where the company is located. Like a character in a Hitchcock movie, he gets involved accidentally with a spy plot to steal government secrets concerning a Stealth bomber. He witnesses a murder that no one believes he really saw, and is pursued by the thugs from the spy ring.

Having acquired the secrets contained in a video game cartridge (for Cloak and Dagger, what else?), Davey looks to Morris for help in finding out what is in the disc. This is when things start to get serious. Davey's dad is struggling to help his kid get through the trauma of losing his mother. Like all parents he worries that his son is over doing it with all the games and is having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. The truth is, Davey does come off as an ungrateful kid sometimes, but it is an honest type of eleven year old ingratitude. He tells his father he hates him, because his dad won't believe his outlandish story. A story that the cops would not accept either. Of course hisMSDCLAN EC047 dad doesn't believe that Davey hates him either and you can see that they actually have a warm relationship. That's probably why Jack Flack appears as a doppelganger for Davey's dad Hal. Davey just needs his dad to be the kind of hero he wants rather than the kind he really is, a struggling father who is worried about his boy. You know at the end of the movie there is going to be a reconciliation between these two versions of the father and in the end it plays out pretty nicely.

The movie turns into a chase film with Davey trying to get away from the spy ring, rescue the little girl Kim from the thugs who have kidnapped her and get the authorities to take his spy story seriously. The one thing that I most remembered about the film from the one time I saw it in the summer of 1984 was that a lot of the chase involved the Riverwalk and the Japanese Gardens in San Antonio Texas. The movie at one point was accused of being a big commercial for Atari, but the San Antonio Visitors Bureau are the real beneficiaries of any endorsement. The tourist areas look clean and attractive and who would not want to visit the Alamo and then cruise down the river in the middle of town and enjoy some ice cream?

There are several character actors in the film besides Forsythe that people familiar with the time period will recognize. The main bad guy is played by Michael Murphy. Murphy still works in film and television, he may be best remembered as the star of "Tanner 88" a mix of fictionalized presidential candidates with real ones in an early HBO series. Showing up as a sympathetic police Lieutenant is Robert DoQui, who gets demoted to Sargent in the Robocop movies a few years later. Stuntman/actor Tim Rossovich plays one of the thugs and he gets more screen time here than usual. Rossovich is a former NFL player who was roommates with Tom Selleck during their time at USC. His brother Rick was also a fixture in movies in 1984, playing a cop in "Streets of Fire" and a street punk in "The Terminator".

During a chase late in the film, Davey has to drive a car and it shows that he has never been behind the wheel before. So often in movies like this the precocious kid is an expert at everything. It gives the movie a lot more credibility that the car scraps and bumps and smashes into almost everything and that Davey has trouble figuring out how to turn the steering wheel the right amount. Jack is no use since he only knows the spycraft that Davey knows from playing the game. Learning to DriveIn the end, the character has to trick Davey into saving himself by using a gun and it is a fitting end to the character. The one thing that did bother me was the inconsistency of the relationship between Jack and Davey. Sometimes Davey listens to Jack's advice and treats him as a real character, other times he ignores the advice and acts as if a fictional character could not understand him at all. The screenplay was written by Tom Holland who would write and direct one of my favorite 80s films the next year with "Fright Night". The switch in loyalty and trust seemed to be a nut that the screenwriter and director had a tough time cracking. It is not a major distraction to the movie but it does keep it from being as memorable as it should be.

The ease with which people are getting into the airport at the climax of the story will be a interesting cultural difference for those living in a post 9/11 world. People could get right up to the loading gate without a ticket, and the screening lines sure went a lot faster. There is another nice Hitchcock twist involving some friendly characters in the film but it would be unfair to spoil it for you. CLOAK AND DAGGER, Dabney Coleman, Henry Thomas, 1984, (c)Universal PicturesThomas is good but you can see how much difference a director like Spielberg can be in getting a natural performance from a kid. This movie did nothing at the box office and disappeared from the charts after it's second week. It's a nice little kids spy film and I can't for the life of me figure out why I never showed it to my kids. I guess they were so used to seeing James Bond on the TV, that a kids version would not make much sense to them. "Cloak and Dagger" is a relic of 1984, it is interesting and mildly entertaining but it is not essential.

First of all, I think this is an excellent film. It's perfect for its targeted juvenile audience and can be appreciated by adults as well. The question I want to raise is how "real" is the little boy Davey's imaginary friend Jack Flack. Throughout the film he is presented as an imaginary playmate whom nobody but the boy can see. Then, toward the end, a couple of incidents occur that make you believe that Jack Flack may have a certain level of reality beyond the boy's imagination. First, there is a scene in which Davey is running along the Riverwalk in Austin. There are a number of sidewalk cafés located there. It is late at night and the area is deserted except for Davey and the killers chasing him. Jack Flack is sitting at a table drinking a cup of coffee and offers Davey some advise as he passes by. Davey runs on and as the killers pass the table, it is of course empty but the coffee cup is still there. Shortly thereafter, Davey is cornered by a killer. Davey has a pistol and attempts to threaten the killer, who laughs. Jack is standing next to Davey, unseen by the killer. Davey keeps talking to Jack and glancing at him. The killer Is confused by this and tries to see to whom he is speaking. Jack moves away from Davey and calls to the killer, who fires at a shadow or something he thinks he might have seen. When Jack goes down, Davey fires at the gunman, killing him. Jack stands up but Davey is angry that he has been forced to kill a man and tells him he doesn't want to play any more. Jack says, "You're just the same as your father. We used to play Cowboys and Indians but then he got mad and broke his toys." At that point Jack begins to "die". Before he does, he tells Davey, "You're the best playmate I've ever had." To me, these instances indicate that Jack inhabits a level of existence that goes beyond imagination. He is some sort of trans-generational immortal entity that passes from parent to child. Or maybe I just never wanted to give up my toys. That's why I cried at the end of Toy Story 3.