1980: Popeye. Much as I dig Robin Williams when he’s good, this was just a dog turd piece of shit waste of celluloid.
1984: Johnny Dangerously. Michael Keaton, WTF were you thinking?
1982: Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Steve Martin, after “Let’s Get Small” and other promising material, you really fucked up.
And the worst turd of the 1980s, coming from 1981, goes to:
Cannonball Run. It was funny reading about this in Car & Driver magazine, and the movie had great potential for hilarity. I remember watching it and thinking, ‘This is going to get funny any second now!’ and it just. never. happened.
Burt Reynolds was probably already a total dickhead. None of the other stars could rescue this steaming pile. It was the very first time I realized that the the few cool parts in the movie were slapped together as a trailer for TV and there. was. no. more. How do I get this 95 minutes of my life back?
That’s an interesting one. When it first came out, I really liked it. At the time, I was newly into RPGs, and was starving for source materials that would give me a feel for gaming. I was, in fact, just counting down the decades until LOTR would be released. Goonies was the closest thing to fit the bill at the time.
I saw it in theatres maybe half a dozen times.
It has not stood up to the test of time well at all. Kerri Green was in it (once again, I had a major crush on her, but she epitomized bad 80s movies), it had a drum machine end title, it had a Cindi Lauper song, it had bad boy yuppie frat boys, rudimentary ILM effects, and it borrowed heavily from the Indiana Jones movies (and even had one of the actors). Oh, and it had Corey Feldman and Martha Plympton.
On the other hand, Sean Aston went on to fantasy greatness.
The Agony Booth has a fantastic in-depth commentary of that film and it is awesome! It is complete and freakin’ hilarious.
“And then, suddenly, there he is, standing in front of the bar, nodding along to the Cruzados beat. His mullet is indeed mighty, and it forms a silhouette not unlike the head of the proud American bald eagle. It is the man of the year, of the century, perhaps even the millennium. Men want to be him, women just want him. It is he, and only he, that may be called The Swayze.”
"Mr. $100 Bill: Okay, Dalton! I’ve always wanted to try you! I think I can take you!
If a man has ever written his own epitaph, this would be it. "
You know, Robocop wasn’t a* bad* movie, but it sure piles up the 80’s-ness in a big, big hurry. The hair, the clothes, the corporate greed-is-good mentality. Cocaine on the table with the fashion models and getting kneecapped by Kurtwood Smith. And let’s not forget the techno-music in the dance club. It sounds like the opening theme to the Tracy Ulman show. It all makes me want to put on my Members Only jacket.
MTV montage thing - all over the place
Bad 80s hair cuts - in spades!
Leg warmers - don’t remember any
Pop Star - do models count?
cold war politics? - the boys do hack into a super secret military computer and accidentally create a nuclear missile
Brat Pack - Bill Paxton + Robert Downey Jr.
Punks - crash the boys party
Drum Machine? - If Oingo Boingo weren’t using one, Id be be very surprised.
Also, bonus points abundant use of really bad computer graphics.
Dude, I’m STRAIGHT and I know that campy = good. And I miss the unselfconscious tackiness of movies from the 80s. Maybe the enormous money in modern movies prevents it…aw, hell, who am I kidding? The money back then was just as (relatively) big and the studios let coked-up morons without the slightest inkling of how to make movies beyond, “That last one worked so let’s copy it,” make movies.
I was always a sucker for “Escape From New York.” I think I will watch it tonight.
Top Gun for “everyone loved it before but now it’s a steaming pile of garbage”, political relevance (sort of, i guess), bad “do it for the single” music, and gratuitous skin. The volleyball-leads-to-sex scene was abyssmal, but I loved the crap out of that movie when i was 10 years old.
I actually mentioned that movie in my post because I loathed it, but I deleted it because I didn’t think it met enough of the criteria in the OP. “Fortunately” you remember it much better than I do. I just thought it was sort of crass and bad in a way that was very 80s, but you’ve made a very strong case for it.
Its about a bunch of idiotic kids, who decide to occupy their run-down military HS. How these kids got hold of machine guns is not clear-and their senile commandant shoots a kid by mistake?
Anyway, the best scene is when the acting commander (Tim Hutton) gets caught in the crossfire. I kept wondering “why”??
Is it really reasonable to condemn a movie because it reflects the fashions, politics, and social mores of its time? Granted, a great many of the nominees so far are crap because they’re crap, but I’m not sure that the presence of the hairstyles of the day makes them so. In 20 years will you be saying the same things about the movies of today?
You obviously haven’t read any of the reviews on the internet about the latest blockbuster summer hits, which will automatically be called derivative and shallow.
