Ten 80s movies you may not have seen

With writer-director Ty West’s 80s-set rager MaXXXine now in cinemas, it’s the perfect time to celebrate some often-overlooked treats from that decade.

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From comedy to action to horror, there’s something here to make you feel 15 all over again…

1) The Secret of My Success (1987)

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Michael J Fox recently made everyone’s day/night with his Coldplay cameo at Glastonbury, so let’s sing the praises of his screwball corporate comedy, another winner of a watch. Teaming up with Footloose director Herbert Ross, Fox plays Brantley Foster, a just-graduated young fella who realises he’s not in Kansas anymore as he tries to make his way up the ladder in New York. Delivering a masterclass in needs-must nous, Brantley comes up with quite the hustle to give him the edge. Trouble is, it has a lot of moving parts… Any caper that can use Yello’s Oh Yeah after it featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has some neck – but that’s all part of the freewheeling charm of The Secret of My Success, a movie that delivers laughs in the bedroom and the boardroom. Chicka chicka!

2) American Flyers (1985)

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Just in time for the Olympics. In 1985, Saturday Night Fever and Wargames director John Badham got on his bike for this story of two brothers (Kevin Costner and David Marshall Grant) competing in the Hell of the West race – with quite the mountain to climb in their relationship along the way. The action sequences are classy, Costner’s ‘tache is a thing of wonder, and the keyboard player on the soundtrack does overtime. With a script by Steve Tisch – an Oscar winner for his work on the coming-of-age charmer Breaking Away – American Flyers is perfect for a Sunday afternoon sitdown and should inspire you to make the most of every minute outdoors, whatever the weather!

3) Streets of Fire (1984)

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Walter Hill’s (The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs) western meets noir meets musical didn’t light up the box office on its summer release 40 years ago, but it has since ascended to the pantheon of cult movie cool. In “another time, another place”, Michael Paré plays the gunslinger tasked with rescuing Diane Lane’s kidnapped singer from a biker gang led by – wait for it – Willem Dafoe! How could you not be in?! Streets of Fire has action and wisecracks galore, looks gorgeous, and tops it off with a great soundtrack. Not only does it feature the Dan Hartman hit I Can Dream About You, there are also two absolute bangers from Bat out of Hell composer Jim Steinman, Nowhere Fast and Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young.

4) Rumble Fish (1983)

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Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make an arthouse film for teenagers. Job done – and then some. This bewitching black-and-white from the wrong side of the tracks received little love on its release way back when, but the fascination with it has grown over the decades. Along with being Coppola’s most personal film (it’s dedicated to his older brother August), Rumble Fish is now rightly regarded as one of his best. A never-cooler Matt Dillon stars opposite a never-cooler Mickey Rourke in a story of sibling adulation, time’s audit, and the pains of being pure of heart. Rumble Fish goes all-in on style and emotion, has a magical supporting cast that includes Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage (son of August), Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, and Tom Waits, and a soundtrack by The Police’s Stewart Copeland. Just don’t start smoking after watching it…

5) Say Anything (1989)

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John Cusack, Ione Skye, and Jerry Maguire writer-director Cameron Crowe proved themselves to be keepers of the flame with this study of that certain age. Cusack is Lloyd, the guy with no direction in life who falls for Skye’s Diane, the classmate who has things all mapped out. It’s the oldest of stories, but in his directorial debut Crowe finds new things to say about settling, striking out, and seeing something in someone else that they can’t see in themselves. “I knew there were moments in it that mattered to me,” Crowe told entertainment website The Upcoming at Say Anything‘s 30th-anniversary screening at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. “What that movie taught me, gloriously, was when you feel it deep inside, other people might too.” Thirty-five years on, there’s still no end to the goose bumps.

6) Thief (1981)

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Director Michael Mann’s big-screen debut – his first film was the must-see TV movie The Jericho Mile – set up what was to come in his iconic 80s series Miami Vice and the De Niro-Pacino classic Heat. James Caan plays Frank, the safecracker who has everything locked away until he sees the possibility of a better life with love interest Tuesday Weld. Ah yes, best-laid plans… The top supporting cast includes James Belushi, Robert Prosky, Dennis Farina, and Willie Nelson; the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream adds to the Chicago-centred tension no end, and, to top it all off, Thief has one of the best finales of the 80s. Caan, who died in July 2022, ranked the thriller among his finest two hours. “I’ve done a hundred and something pictures,” he said in an interview to accompany the film’s 4K transfer in 2014. “I’m most proud of, I think, if there were two or three pictures, Thief is certainly one of them.”

7) Top Secret! (1984)

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Brace yourselves… After the Airplane! movies and their shortlived TV series Police Squad!, the Naked Gun trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker delivered this absolute howl, one of the funniest films ever made. With the Zucker brothers and Abrahams in the directors’ chairs and Martyn Burke on board as their co-writer, Top Secret! mercilessly sends up war movies, spy thrillers, romances, and Elvis musicals. Here, newcomer Val Kilmer gets in way over his head in East Germany as heartthrob American singer Nick Rivers – “not the first guy who fell in love with a girl he met in a restaurant who then turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, only to lose her to a childhood lover who she’d last seen on a deserted island and who turned out 15 years later to be the leader of the French underground”. And that’s only half the story!

8) To Live and Die in LA (1985)

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After giving us one of the best car chases in movie history with The French Connection in the 1970s, director William Friedkin did it again in the 1980s. And just how do you try to outdo The French Connection? You have a chase up an LA freeway – the wrong way up an LA freeway. CSI‘s William Petersen is the Secret Service agent on the hunt for Willem Dafoe’s master counterfeiter in a hardboiled thriller where the sweat just drips off the screen. To Live and Die in LA is a film very much of its time but still manages to wear its age very well. “I love the film, and I value my films or don’t value them in a different way,” Friedkin, who died last August, told Vulture magazine in 2013. “When I think of them in terms of success, I think of how close I came to my original vision of it. The two films where I came extremely close were To Live and Die in LA and Sorcerer.” The latter is another film for another day…

9) Prince of Darkness (1987)

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After making Big Trouble in Little China – the sure-fire summer hit that somehow flopped – John Carpenter returned to the dark side for this spooky siege movie, best viewed between midnight and 5am… Mixing metaphysics and the desperate-hours dynamics of Carpenter’s classic Assault on Precinct 13, Prince of Darkness finds a bunch of boffins joining a Catholic priest in a downtown LA monastery to face “a secret that can no longer be kept”. The cast includes Halloween favourite Donald Pleasance, the Big Trouble in Little China duo of Dennis Dun and Victor Wong, singer Alice Cooper, and Jameson Parker, star of the much-loved 1980s private eye series Simon & Simon. Prince of Darkness is a mad one, and the acquired taste on this particular list, but if you’re all in for anorak antics, then knock off all the lights.

10) The Hitcher (1986)

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“My mother told me to never do this…” The late Rutger Hauer brought one of the scariest screen villains to life as The Hitcher‘s John Ryder. Like Halloween‘s Michael Myers, Ryder is a seemingly supernatural force – but with a better line in repartee. A wide-eyed C Thomas Howell plays Jim Halsey, the unfortunate who stops for Ryder en route from Chicago to San Diego and soon must battle to stop him as all hell breaks loose in the middle of nowhere. In the word-of-mouth days of the 80s, The Hitcher picked up a cult following upon its Irish cinema release; that fanbase grew when it arrived on VHS at the tail end of 1986, and 38 years on some of us are still trying to get people to watch it instead of streamer landfill. It’s perfectly cast (the redoubtable Jennifer Jason Leigh is also in the mix), has a tight-as-a-drum script, relentless tension, and clocks in at just 90-odd minutes – see, you will have time to watch it! Buckle up with this final word of warning: make sure it’s not the 2007 remake.

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