I remember being infatuated with 1984’s Cloak & Dagger on its original release, but I am surprised I was enough of the fan that I had the board game.  The board was a simplified map of the world with only a few available cities.  One of those was Reykjavik, and this was the first time I had seen the name of this mysterious sounding locale.  I remember trying to figure out how to even say it, awkwardly rolling around the syllables in my mouth like they were marbles.

In the plot of the movie, Henry Thomas is obsessed with such a game.  This is established in a clever opening sequence where Dabney Coleman is Jack Flack, the spy who is the hero of the game.  We see Flack do such things as land in a Soviet country by way of American flag parachute, uses his combination watch and circular saw to steal the briefcase chained to some Nazi guy’s wrist, then deflects a shot with this bulletproof hat.  The surprise is when a gate comes crashing down and block his exit.  Giant multi-sided die come rolling around the corner before Flack is lifted out in the nick of time, revealing him to be a metal figurine of the man as used by Thomas in the game.

Coleman also plays Hal Osborne, Thomas’s father, and a completely different character from Flack.  While Flack is a mischievous thrill-seeker, Osborne is a career man in the Air Force.  Thomas’s dad is not happy with his son’s obsession with games and Flack.  That Thomas openly has conversations with Flack in public has dad worried.

Christina Nigra is embarrassed to be with Thomas in public while he is conducting his own imaginary spy missions, yet she hangs out with him just the same.  I like a moment where simply walks directly across the lobby of an office building, while Thomas insists on ducking behind pillars as if he is sneaking in.  She takes the elevator and he quickly tosses her a baseball he says is the grenade.  She casually tosses it back with a “thanks anyway!”  Her general demeanor is that of a bitter, middle-aged divorcée trapped in a little girl’s body.  So, why does she hang out with her friend?  As she tells her mother, “He’s the only boy in the neighborhood who isn’t boring.”

For a change, Thomas has accidentally found himself in a moment of genuine intrigue, as one of the two dodgy guys (the one I will forever remember as “Pornstache”) who got on a different elevator is packing heat.  The boy, having taken the stairs, witnesses those guys shooting a man who then stumbles into the stairwell, handing Thomas an Atari 5200 cartridge in his final moments before getting shot again and plummeting to his death.  In the ensuing chaos, Thomas leaves behind that stupid baseball which, naturally, has his full name on it.

Thomas will get away and alert the guards in the lobby, only for the body at the bottom of the stairway to have disappeared.  The guards might have been more receptive to his story if he hadn’t speculated the killers were Nazis, or maybe Russians.  Continuing this “boy who cried wolf” motif, dad doesn’t believe any of this when Thomas is brought home by the police.  The boy knows there has to be something different about that Atari cartridge for a man to have been killed for it, but it superficially appears to be indistinguishable from other units of the same title.  Admittedly, it is understandable dad would be exasperated as the detective who brings his son home informs him, “For an hour, all he would give us is his name, rank and serial number.  If it wouldn’t have been for the little girl, we’d have never gotten him home.”

For here on out, it is a game of cat and mouse of Thomas against spies and thugs trying to retrieve that game cartridge.  Michael Murphy would seem to be the ringleader, though it is made apparently early on he takes orders from somebody else.  I won’t reveal who that is, though it was likely only ever a surprise to those who were the target demographic of the time, and I seem to recall even I had it figure out back in the day.  Eloy Casados and Tim Rossovich are Murphy’s surprisingly ruthless and humorless henchmen, the latter of whom is the guy I called “Pornstache”.

One element of the movie which confuses me each time I see it is the exact nature of Flack as he appears to Thomas.  He is obviously more than just a purely imaginary friend.  This is an imaginary friend who sometimes gives good advice, such as going wherever there’s the most people as he’s pursued by the killers.  He also convinces the boy to “commandeer” another copy of the game cartridge from Forsythe’s shop to use a decoy to get Nigra released from being a hostage.  Unfortunately, the bad guys track the real cartridge down to Forsythe when they find on the back of the plastic case a sticker for the store.  I’m still questioning how Forsythe put that sticker on the back of a cartridge in a shrink-wrapped box.  But Flack also somehow has on occasion knowledge Thomas could not, such as when this imaginary friend tries to warn the boy he’s headed towards a dead end.  At other times, Flack doesn’t have info Thomas needs, such as one of my favorite moments, when Thomas needs to know how to drive a car.  Flack: “I don’t know—this is a real car!”

Though the film has a fair amount of humor like that, it could use more of it.  That it so frequently puts Thomas in what feels like life-threatening situations is also odd.  This PG film still feels like it should be PG-13, what with Murphy taunting Thomas at one point that he’s going to kneecap the kid, shoot him in the stomach and then leave him to die.  Still, there are many other moments which pull a punch, such as when Nigra is held out by Pornstache high over a cliff and she ineffectually squirms until just going limp like a kitten being carried by its mother.

Proof that characters can be expendable occurs early on with the death of a mall game shop owner played by Wiliam Forsythe.  He is shot at the moment he has discovered secret plans for the stealth bomber which are hidden in that cartridge’s code.  I’m not sure why anybody thought the additional of a human voice supposedly incorporated into that code would make this more believable.  Not that anybody born after the era would care, but digitized audio was in its infancy at the time, and what we hear wouldn’t have been possible.  Synthesized speech would have been more likely, but hearing samples from such home console devices as Intellivision’s Intellivoice or Odyssey2’s The Voice would quickly prove that unlikely.

And there is a great deal of computer and gaming tech of the time in this movie.  There is a great deal of Atari product, such as the Atari 800 computer on which Forsythe programs and the Atari 5200 game console in Thomas’s bedroom.  Forstyhe’s store also has on display a row of boxed games that has caused much consternation of fans of Atari’s 2600 and 5200 consoles over the years, as Tempest boxes appear for each, yet the game was not released at the time for either.  We also see copies of Cloak & Dagger, which not only didn’t exist for the 5200 but, when it looks it is being played on that console, it is actually the arcade game.  Even more trivia: that arcade game was already developed by Atari under the title Agent X.

There is even more of the 80’s on display here for those feeling nostalgia for the era either first- or second-hand.  The mall in which Forsythe’s store is located is heavy on the wood and looks exactly like how I recall the mall where I first played Centipede.  I liked seeing such real-life locations, as nothing really looks like such places anymore.  What was so commonplace isn’t something you see anymore now that all such buildings have been remodeled.  I found myself wondering why every place styled in the trappings on an era has to change and it never seems a single one can remain the same as it was.  I also liked the space shuttle wallpaper in Thomas’s bedroom, a sign of more optimistic times.

While I am not consciously aware of nostalgia shaping my opinion of Cloak & Dagger, it is inevitable it has.  Even when it was original released, it had a nostalgia for an even earlier time, as encapsulated by a moment where Flack tells Thomas about how his dad used to play cowboys and Indians until he stopped believing: “I never did like that whole ‘leaving when they stop believing’.”  I may not like the movie as much now as I did then, but I can still feel the way I used to feel for it.  As for the board game it inspired, I don’t think I ever really warmed to that.

Dir: Richard Franklin

Starring Henry Thomas, Dabney Coleman, Michael Murphy, Christina Nigra

Watched on Vinegar Syndrome 4K UHD special edition blu-ray