Let’s put on our favorite scrunchies and a pair of fully tubular leggings and, for example, head to the mall to stretch our legs with a new movie!
Oh wait. Are all the malls that buy groceries now decrepit shells where rats live alone?It’s not so cowabunga. Well, let’s settle for this list of videos from the 80s that can be found lately in streaming. Not leggings. They are useful at all times.
As Andrew McCarthy’s recent documentary Brats (now streaming on Hulu) made incredibly clear, you can’t make a list of films from the 1980s without adding those that star The Brat Pack and/or were directed by John Hughes. Of course, The Breakfast Club meets any of those criteria brilliantly. Setting in stone the best school archetypes that any of the best school movies have struggled with since, The Breakfast Club showed us what happened when “The Jock” (Emilio Estevez), “The Nerd” (Anthony Michael Hall), ” The Basket Case” (Ally Sheedy), “The Criminal” (Judd Nelson) and “The Princess” (Molly Ringwald) stopped being well-mannered and started getting real when they were trapped in custody together on Saturday. As they are slowly taught to see each other’s shared humanity beyond the roles they’ve found themselves locked into, the film is painfully honest, just as most of the school’s top students are. Just forget about the world’s worst makeover series (Justice for Sheedy!), shake your fist in the air, and do nothing for them.
How to watch: The Breakfast Club is now streaming on Netflix.
From the yin to yang of The Breakfast Club, director Michael Lehmann’s darkest black comedy draws inspiration from all the types explained in John Hughes’ films, but with a lingering sincerity torn by biting satire. As proto-Mean Girls, Heathers joins a clique of the school’s most popular girls, the titular Heathers, who are so vicious that they may have made the “badass” Judd Nelson curl up and cry in ten seconds or less.
Winona Ryder plays Veronica, who at the beginning of the film travels around the outskirts of the Heathers, not quite sure if she is part of them. After all, her call is Veronica. Because yes, all Heathers are named Heather; there are Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) and the wild queen bee Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), the illustrious author of immortal phrases such as “Fuck me softly with a chainsaw”.
Enter bad boy J. D. (Christian Slater doing the best he can, Jack Nicholson), who turns Veronica’s indecision into action, especially homicide, when he begins to eliminate the Heathers and their goofy boyfriends one by one, with tremendously funny results. We say (a bit jokingly) that they can’t make videos like this anymore, but it’s actually hard to believe a mainstream comedy about teenagers killing each other now that the gun lobby has allowed our schools to become full-fledged Battle Royale recreations. Stop by and enjoy this one!
How to watch: Heathers now streams on Prime Video.
Vastly underrated in director Jonathan Demme’s impressive oeuvre, this favorite auteur film from 1986 stars Jeff Daniels as Charlie, a New York investment banker who desperately wants to unbutton his tie and loosen up a bit. Enter the ultimate maniacal of dreamy maniacal pixie girls, a dark-haired Melanie Griffith as Audrey, who lightly kidnaps him, jumps on his shaken bones, and takes him on a wild road vacation across Long Island. (Long Island? Really? Yes, only Long Island). Audrey is being stalked through her sinister ex Ray (a very creepy and also attractive Ray Liotta). AndArray Demme combines light, wacky comedy with elements of true mystery, while remaining unlikely. Sexy, funny, and legitimately wild stuff.
How to watch: Something wild is now broadcast on Tubi.
Set in New York City’s gay leather scene, William Friedkin’s 1980 serial killer mystery sparked understandable controversy upon its release, as it upset those who were rightly interested in a positive portrayal of other gay people in film. However, in the post-Will world
The cruise is completely immersive in its time and place, immortalizing bars like Eagle’s Nest and Hellfire Club; In With the Exception of Pornography, no one looked at those places around 1980. Where else can the general public notice the code on the handkerchief, let alone the fist?The tension between terror and preference is palpable in Friedkin’s work; The film seems to me less homophobic than a dissection of homophobia. It’s actually a portrait of the precise state of the brain at that time. And the disturbing nature of this situation, which promptly foreshadows the AIDS crisis, adds yet another point of darkness.
How to watch: Cruising now airs on The Criterion Channel.
While Eddie Murphy’s other film about the 80s friend of crime, Beverly Hills Cop, has proven to be the most successful franchise, financially; in fact, 2024 has a fourth entry in the works, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – I’ve Team 48. Directed by genre legend Walter Hill (Warriors) and starring Nick Nolte in his most hilarious and brusque film, 48 Hrs. he sees San Francisco police officer Jack Cates (Nolte) forced to team up with fast-talking convict Reggie Hammond (Murphy). to catch Hammond’s former delinquent partner, a villain named Ganz (James Remar).
Mostly considered to be the crime film that invented (or at least popularized) the genre that is still relevant today, Nolte and Murphy share a monstrously infectious chemistry in those roles. Hill offers a truly action-packed vehicle that provides Murphy has complete freedom to play with his comedic skills, making it a comedic game for all ages. It’s the best combination.
How to watch: Hours now airs on Paramount.
Mike Nichols’ bubbly 1988 romantic comedy stars Melanie Griffith (her again!) as Tess, a Staten Island Friday woman who is tired of being used and abused by the tough Manhattan rulers under whom she works. Harassed, Tess believes she has earned gold when she gets a task for a; unfortunately, that’s ruthless mountaineer Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver, brilliant), whose betrayals manage to sink even deeper.
When Katharine breaks her leg during a business ski vacation and finds herself stranded abroad while she recovers, Tess takes over in her absence and climbs the ladder on her own. The fact that bigwig Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford at the peak of his popularity) is right on the most sensible side of the ladder is a plus, I don’t think any of us can or can’t refuse. With the stellar backing of a sexy, seedy Alec and an epic, lacquered Joan Cusack, Working Girl takes on and rips aside. The corporate global that was at the center of so much culture in the 80s with a crazy revenge.
How to watch: Working Girl Now Streaming on Hulu.
Although the question of whether or not Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie has proven to be an annual verbal exchange in itself, its role as a definitive action film of the ’80s has never been questioned. But in 1988, there really was a lot of uncertainty surrounding the concept of Bruce Willis as an action star. That smiling guy from Moonlighting? That opinion is very difficult to believe after decades in which Willis proved to be an ace in action, but that was the era of the great Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Then Bruce came along and replaced all of that, so now our action heroes can be human-sized and funny. And thank God.
For the first of what would end up being five rounds, Die Hard sees Willis as John McClane, an NYPD detective who finds himself trapped in the Los Angeles skyscraper where his ex-wife (Bonnie Bedelia) works after a gang takes over him. . Terrorists. The leader of said gang is the man, the myth, the finalist Hans Gruber, played through the man, the myth, the finalist Alan Rickman, with his own malicious smile for centuries. And so McClane fights to save his wife and defeat the terrorists, while director John McTiernan turns it into a claustrophobic hellhole. There you have it! For us, a vintage of action (Christmas) was born.
How to watch: Die Hard is now streaming on Hulu.
You can’t talk about the 1980s without adding Tim Burton, who burst onto the scene in 1985 with the classic comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and then invented the superhero blockbuster as we know it with his Batman. movie 4 years later. Between those two lies what looks much more like a definitive Burton film, perhaps even The Definitive Burton Film, the 1988 masterpiece about the afterlife, Beetlejuice.
Winona Ryder (her again!) plays Lydia Deetz, a goth teenager who has just moved from New York to a small town with her parents Charles and Delia (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara, the only genuine one). God). The only challenge is that the place is haunted by its former tenants, a hopelessly lovable couple named Adam and Barbara (Alec and Geena Davis) who recently met their unhappy end in a covered bridge-like twist of car fate.
Adam and Barbara need those terrible other people to leave their homes right away, but they don’t have much chance to hang out alone. So they summon a poltergeist fighter named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who pretends to be very clever at this kind of thing. Unfortunately for everyone, Mr. Juice has his own angels, and soon all hell and its striped sandworms are unleashed. Flooded with a strange and surreal madness in the style of the Burton Angels, Beetlejuice is the ghost that has the ultimate of it.
How to watch: Beetlejuice is now streaming on Prime Video.
Five years before Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs won each and every one of the 1992 Oscars with a clever bottle of Chianti, director Michael Mann brought us for the first time (cinematically speaking) the cannibal psychiatrist to wipe out all the cannibalistic psychiatrists in this 1986 film. And while I can’t and wouldn’t, I would beat up Lambs, Manhunter is a charming, creepy beast in his own right.
Based on the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (which will be adapted into another film in 2002 and will star in one season of the TV series Hannibal), Manhunter stars William Petersen as FBI agent Will Graham, who is on the hunt for a serial killer nicknamed “The Tooth Fairy. “And just as Clarice Starling eventually does, Graham is forced to use the skills of imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (played by Brian Cox, aka Daddy Succession) to help him solve the case.
Mann’s third feature film, after Thief and The Keep, Manhunter is a tropical horror series; it is as if a nightmare had occurred an episode of Miami Vice. Extra broadcasts for Tom Noonan’s terrifying stunt as serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, one of the scariest ever involved in celluloid.
How to watch: Manhunter now airs on The Criterion Channel.
If we’re talking about the definitive stewards of the 1980s, we can’t leave room for Paul Verhoeven, who saw through the glitter of that money-obsessed American decade to their darkest hearts. A filmmaker that Verhoeven still is, he wrapped that message in a hilarious and biting satire called RoboCop, a brutal inquiry into the copagande series of the decade that helps keep kicking ungodly ass along the way.
Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy, a guy with a good circle of family members and a police officer whose kindness literally tears him to pieces as he patrols the streets of Detroit’s dystopia. Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) for Murphy, the police branch has been handed over to a tech company called Omni, and wakes up undead still locked in a robot body, which they’re now testing as a new way to monitor the streets.
Hyperviolent wherever they come from, RoboCop takes all their concepts to such pop extremes that it’s easy to find yourself pummeled by acquiescence while watching it. But make no mistake, this is a heartbreaking satire, which is getting more and more terrifying with each passing year. (Take a look at the robot dogs that have been patrolling most primary cities lately as the lamps in our libraries go out. )Like Leonard Cohen, Paul Verhoeven also saw the future, when he was a baby, and it was murder.
How to watch: RoboCop now streams on Max.
Jason Adams is an independent entertainment artist at Mashable. He lives in New York City and is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved reviewer who also writes for Pajiba, The Film Experience, AwardsWatch, and his own private site My New Plaid Pants. He has extensively covered several film festivals, including Sundance, Toronto, New York, SXSW, Fantasia, and Tribeca. She is a member of the LGBTQ critics’ guild GALECA. He loves slasher and Fassbinder videos and you can follow him on Twitter at @JAMNPP.