The Ten Eighties-est Movies

Courtesy of Metafilter

Posted above is a link to specific thread on Mefi about the "Rad-est" 80s movies. ( If you look you may actually see my contribution to the conversation) but I thought I would post my own top ten here. The goal is not to post GOOD movies, that would be too easy, but rather the silly movies, which captured that particular age. ( I'm not going to include the Inter Movie Database links to each of these movies because I have other things to do today, rest assured, if you go to the IMDB they have the titles there.)

10. Cocoon-Aquatic aliens come to earth to save their "comrades" at the bottom of the sea. ( Why now? I mean, did they finally have a couple of openings on their intergalatic fooseball team?) In the process, some senior citizens become revitalized when they stumble upon the pool where these alien pods are being stored. This prompts what I can only call the most nauseating moment in film history, Hume Cronyn and Wilfred Brimley discussing their hard ons. So basically the big to do was they were swimming in a pool of viagra.

Oh and did I forget to mention the Steve Gutenberg saves the day?

So, so 80's.

The only thing worse than the original Cocoon? Why Cocoon II: The Return.

( On a more disgusting side note, why is Steve Gutenberg always having "unconventional" sex with beings from other planes/planets? There are the totally unnecessary sex scenes in these two movies with the aliens and then there is that awful "skelpin'" scene between him and Daryl Hannah in High Spirits. I guess the answer is what human woman would put out for him?)

9. Night of the Comet-What if a comet came round these parts and turned everyone into piles of little red dust? And the few remaining survivors were zombies? And beyond that the very very few immune to both ( one because she spent the night in a steel reinforced movie theater) happen to be too valley girl-esque teenage girls. Well that's the premise of this little cinema gem. Oh yes and there are BAD scientists wearing generic overalls, daring truck escapes, and let's not forget the harrowing Russian Roulette in a department store scene.

8. Night of the Creeps-Not to be confused with Night of the Comet, what if slug like aliens that re-animate corpses come to earth in the fifties and then frozen, but then escape in the eighties thanks to wacky frat boy hijinx?

Well, you get nothing but fun. Our hero a dorky red headed guy who looks like he cut his hair with a floo-bie ( don't ask) and his marked for death disabled comedic side kick manage to survive the bad special effects and absolutely required hot naked chicks in the shower scenes to make a classically bad 80's horror film. Oh and threw in a crazy serial killer revived from the dead just for good measure.

I especially liked the line "Girls, the good news is your dates are here, the bad news is their dead."

7. They Live- Ah yes, because what list would be complete without at least one film with a wrestler as a star? It is a little known fact that Rowdy Roddy Piper the "hero" of this film didn't just make this little corker, but also did a lesser known film called "Hell Comes to Frog Town." Yes, people look into it, because it's hard to resist a film where the main character is named Sam Hell and it ends with him making the sacrifice of sleeping with an entire car full of women in order to ensure the survival of the human race. Oh, I gave the ending away. Well, it's still worth seeing if nothing more to see the dance of the seven veils as performed by the genetically mutated frog king.
I'm not kidding. Really, the frog can move. ( I think he was also in the original Breakin' as well.)

For those particular interest, Hell comes to Frog Town inspired not one, but TWO sequels including my personal favorite, Hell Comes to Frogtown III: Toad Warrior.

But I digress, we're talking about They Live. A film about how evil alien/robot thingys have taken over the world and Rowdy Roddy Piper has a pair of special sunglasses that let him see both the aliens and the encoded messages they have been placing on billboards. Because only in the eighties could sun glasses save the day. Thank you Corey Hart for all the good times.

6 Best Defense- A little known Eddie Murphy film, pairing one of those totally unlikely comedy duos ( Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy) with one of those screwy only in the eighties time concepts. You are watching Eddie Murphy in a tank in the future at the same time you are watching Dudley Moore in the present trying to solve the problem with the "dip-gyro" ( Oh I really miss the tech talk of the 80s) in the very same tank. Of course wacky war hijinx ensue with Murphy as he is trapped in a dysfunctional tank but comes to no harm as American no how ( somehow manifested in a non american) triumphs and saves the day.

If you tried to make a film like that today you would be shot, but the "defense comedy" was fairly popular in the eighties. It included another lesser known film "Deal of the Century" starring Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, and the late Gregory Hines.

5. My Science Project-I choose this particular film to represent the 80's teen-sci-fi-comedy hybrid. The most famous of this type of film was Wierd Science, but that film is TOO GOOD to appear here. My Science Project involves a kind of scruffy teenager who manages to sneak onto an army base and get a time machine. He is simply looking for some sort of object to pass off as a science project. I mean how many times has that happened to you? I don't want to tell you what happened with my history day project, but needless to say I didn't have to call in the national guard. And I think we all agree that the army makes it a habit to let this kind of "don't let anyone get their hands on it" machinery lying around for enterprising kids to snatch.

Once he gets to work the mechanism to work, different time periods start manifesting themselves physically in the school ( think of a more serious version of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure-only instead of them going through time, the time comes to them). The kid and his friend ( played by Fisher Stevens) some chick who will inevitably become his girlfriend and some random, but utterly required nerd who is somehow trapped with them must fight through the school and shut down the electricity in order to stop the ever increasing time warp. On the way they encounter pre historic creatures and of course a little trip into Vietnam War. ( Because what time travel movie is complete without Vietnam?)


4 Tron-Oh yeah baby an action adventure that takes places INSIDE a computer with everything in that annoying blue out o vision. Back when anything with computers was cool. Not quite in the same vein as "War Games", starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, a drama in which a computer learns that nuclear war is bad by playing tic-tac-toe with itself. No, really. Tron was really more of a spy action adventure movie. It was just the concept and execution ranked right up there with Manimal ( an interesting side note: Manimal's alter identity was a professor at NYU-now there's a cool professor-he can teach Kafka by day, and turn into a snow tiger by night AND THE CHICKS DIG IT! ). I remember very little of it except that it kind of bore a resemblance to that A-HA video "Take on Me."

3. The Last Starfighter- Another hybrid it was a teenage Star Wars meets Top Gun type of a film. A young man who wants to get out of his nowhere podunk town manages to score the highest on a video game ( back when you had to go to an arcade to play them). It turns out the game is actually a way for a group of resistance fighters to find eligible new recruits. ( Does this sound to you like Reagen's claim that ninetendo and other video games actually helped train kids to be fighter pilots? Yep, a plot so believable only an Alzheimer's patient would have bought it.) For his high score, our teenage hero is taken into space where he must save the day, which he does. Of course, there are the requisite funny looking, Star Trek rip-off paper plate stapled to the forehead aliens. So the universe is saved, our young man gets out of his little town, and uh well people around the world celebrate yet another amazingly optimistic eighties film.

3 Repo Man-Emilio Estevez reposesses items in a bleak future. Um, I'd like to give you more of a plot, but then I would like the film to have HAD more of a plot. I didn't see this movie until last year when Speed Freak showed it to me. And let me tell you, that movie kills brain cells. Lots of 'em.

2 Creator- Peter O'Toole plays a charming, but grief addled professor who wants to clone his dead wife. Using eggs from self proclaimed nymphomaniac Ally Sheedy and aided by protege Vincent Spano, O'Toole might actually succeed. Along the way he teaches Spano about love. Spano falls for 80's heartthrob Virginia Madsen. In the end, Spano and Sheedy teach O'Toole to stay in the here and now. O'Toole finally let's go of his wife's memory and pours her cloned cells onto the beach. At the time, the movie was considered hopelessly optimistic in terms of its ideas about cloning being an achievable goal somewhere in the near future, but now considering how many people would clone dead loved ones if they could, the film looks optimistic in another way-that the professor could be convinced to move on with his life.

1 Midnight Madness-One of the scavenger hunt/race across country ( Cannonball Run anyone?) movies for which the 80s are famous. ( Rat Race, a recent film, as an attempt to recapture such films. It flopped proving that those type of movies are better left to the decade of power bows and Don Johnson scruff.) In this film, five teams competed in a scavenger hunt for money. The five teams broken down to :nerds, idiots, sorority girls, good guys, and cheaters. Starring Michael J Fox ( who also did the now forgotten "Teen Wolf" as well as the still remembered Back to the Future movies) the film was basically nothing more than an excuse to string together random jokes and bits-none of them worth remembering.

Well, thanks for this little juant down memory lane. Here at the end it seems to be I was a little heavy on the horror movie angle. I think at some later date ( maybe for Blogathon 2004) I need to compose some seperate lists. So in the future I think I need to compose: The Best Bad Horror Movies of the 80's (including Critters 2: The Main Course) The Best Bad Comedies of the 80's ( including License to Drive, Mannequin, and Howard the Duck) and the Best Comedies of the 80's (uhhhhh, nothing is coming to mind) and finally I think the best kid/teenage movies of the 80's ( including Cloak and Dagger, Goonies, and Heathers). Sound good?