One of the great tragedies of online streaming services is that they often don’t offer a very good selection of older films. Type in “1980s” into Netflix’s search engine, for example, and you’ll probably be very disappointed to discover that most of the decade’s best films aren’t available. In fact, most of the whole decade is unavailable, period. If you’re feeling nostalgic for any time period earlier than the 2000s you’re basically out of luck, and that’s a shame.
Fortunately, Netflix does still have a smattering of great 1980s classics. It’s just that, with the exception of the occasional highbrow art film (Kagemusha is available on Netflix, believe it or not), they seem to represent the 1980s as a cultural idea. The sorts of films that seemed to define the most popular of popular culture are reasonably well represented. The blockbusters, the cult flicks, the sorts of entertainment you see name-checked on — fittingly enough — the Netflix original series Stranger Things.
So let’s take a look at the best the 1980s had to offer. Or rather, the best Netflix has to offer of the 1980s. The selection may be small, but there are some shiny diamonds in the rough.
The screenplay for Adventures in Babysitting had been kicking around Hollywood for decades, but by the time Chris Columbus directed it, it felt almost quintessentially 1980s. Elizabeth Shue stars as a teenaged babysitter who has to pack up the kids and rescue her runaway best friend, but a series of bizarre coincidences strand them all in the big city, where they’re chased by murderous gangsters, forced to sing spontaneous blues songs in front of tough audiences, and even meet — kinda, sorta — the mighty Thor. The cast is great and Columbus brings an infectious, family-friendly energy that would eventually serve him well in the blockbusters Home Alone and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
If you flipped a coin with Adventures of Babysitting on one side, Heathers would be on the other. Michael Lehmann’s biting satire of teen power dynamics and coddled suburban affluence stars Winona Ryder and Christian Slater as outsiders who start murdering the most popular kids in school. Heathers came from a different time, when teen murder could be the stuff of escapist and cynical comedy, but even in 1989 there was nothing else quite like it. It’s as sharp as teen comedies get and it still cuts deep.
Joe Johnston’s inventive sci-fi family adventure stars Ric Moranis as a hapless inventor whose latest creation accidentally shrinks his children — and the neighbor kids — until they are smaller than ants. That would be bad enough, but then they’re taken out with the trash and have to make an epic journey through a back yard filled with bees, scorpions, and all manner of other terrifying obstacles which, in any other context, would be totally humdrum. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is a smart, funny film with groundbreaking visual effects that turned the average suburban household into a place of incredible wonders.
After the acclaimed stage show, but before the popular TV series, Pee-wee Herman starred in a hit comedy that made him a household name, and put fledgling director Tim Burton on the map. It’s a kooky cross-country road trip starring Paul Reubens as Pee-wee, an eccentric whose bicycle is stolen, and who will stop at nothing to get it back. He tangles with ghosts, biker gangs and rodeo bulls, charming everyone in America — in real life and the film — along the way. There’s an innocent attitude to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that still gels perfectly with the its manic, childlike energy.
It may be easy to take E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for granted. It’s one of the most popular motion pictures ever made, a blockbuster of the highest order that spawned parodies, satires, and a sprawling subgenre of children on secret fantastical missions. (See also: Goonies, The Monster Squad, The Last Starfighter, etc.) But watch it again today and you might be surprised by how innovative E.T. still feels. Steven Spielberg tells the story of a child befriending a lost alien from the perspective of a child, looking up at the world in equal parts fear and wonder. And yet E.T. is also a meaningful tale for adults, with Dee Wallace playing the role of a single mother who is missing her children’s most magical years because she has to focus on putting food on the table. It’s as effective and dynamic as ever, and still one of the most incredible sci-fi/fantasy films ever produced.
And then there’s Gremlins, a film about breaking things. Joe Dante’s ghoulish little comedy introduces audiences to a Capra-esque community, tied together by wholesome values and community pride. Then he introduces a species of impish little monsters that wreck, maim, and kill anything they can get their claws on. Gremlins is a funny, scary, impressively original tale about the fragility of suburbia. All it takes are a few little monsters and some power tools to bring it all crashing down.
For the most part, Disney wasn’t producing their finest work in the 1980s, leaving plenty of room for other animators to break out and find an eager audience. Two of those filmmakers were Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, who made a series of beloved fantasy films like The Hobbit, Flight of Dragons and — perhaps most popular of all — The Last Unicorn, an ambitious adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s fantasy novel. Mia Farrow plays a unicorn who ventures out of the safe confines of her forest when she learns that she may be the very last of her kind. Along the way she encounters wizards, witches, corrupt kings, and nightmare monsters in a surreal and memorable animated classic, which also features the voice talents of Jeff Bridges, Alan Arkin, Angela Lansbury, and Christopher Lee.
Stephen King may not care for Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his best-selling novel, but he’s actually in the minority. The Shining is one of the most frightening motion pictures ever produced, a harrowing and ethereal tale of a small family, isolated from the world in the dead of winter, with an enormous hotel all to themselves. Jack Nicholson plays the patriarch who devolves into abusive behavior, Shelley Duvall plays the meek matriarch who must overcome her fears to protect her child, and all the while the hotel itself seems to be watching them, manipulating their already precarious relationships until murder seems nearly inevitable. The Shining takes a few liberties with the novel, but all of the terror made it on screen.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? wasn’t the first film to combine 2D animation with live-action characters, but it was by far the most ambitious. Robert Zemeckis’s film takes place in a sprawling alternate history, in which beloved cartoon characters have their own community when they’re not working in Hollywood. It could have been cutesy, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit? plays out like an old-fashioned film noir, with murder and infidelity and corruption driving the storyline and giving all the bizarre comic asides a serious, emotionally and intellectually engaging counterpoint. It’s not just a technical marvel, it’s a great story featuring wonderful characters. That’s why we still love it so.
The 1980s was a rich and fertile time for horror movies, from slasher movies to high-concepts, suburban anxieties to hallucinatory nightmares. Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Streets seems to operate on every possible level. It’s a story about a boogeyman who kills innocent kids, but it’s also an intelligent and disturbing trip into the human subconscious, where guilt and fear and subconscious awareness of dark family secrets bubble and froth into terrifying imagery and, ultimately, horrible tragedies. Robert Englund plays Freddy Krueger with a cruelty that flies in the face of his later, jokier performances. His performance goes a long way towards making A Nightmare on Elm Street one of the scariest movies ever made.
John Carpenter envisioned a world in which crime was so rampant that the government decided to just wall off the island of Manhattan, drop criminals inside, and let them do whatever they want to each other. But when Air Force One crash lands and the President gets kidnapped by violent criminals, the guards send another violent criminal in to rescue him: Snake Plissken, played by Kurt Russell, in a role that would redefine his career. The actor best known for Disney comedies was suddenly a credible badass hero, in a sci-fi western full of colorful characters, deadly action set pieces, and cynical attitudes about society as a whole. Escape from New York is a bitter movie with a low opinion of the human race in general, which makes every shred of decency we can wring from its grimy storyline all the more powerful.
The heavy metal generation got a good, hard goosing by Rob Reiner in This Is Spinal Tap, a hilarious mockumentary about a rock band whose hardcore stage persona contrasts sharply with their affable, dorky idiocy. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer lead an impressive ensemble cast from one ill-fated performance to another, as they play ridiculous power ballads and routinely shoot their career in the foot. Many of This Is Spinal Tap’s finest moments have made their way into the comedy lexicon — “These go to eleven” — and even the film’s faux-documentary format helped popularize that (now-commonplace) genre of cinematic humor.
Netflix is light on so-called “Badass Cinema” from the 1980s. As of this particular moment you won’t find the early Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or even Steven Seagal action classics on the service. But they do have Big Trouble in Little China, a film that exists to take the piss out of all of those movies while still operating more-or-less on their level. Kurt Russell stars as Jack Burton, a blowhard musclebound truck driver who thinks he’s the hero but spends most of the film’s fantastical storyline — about the ghost of a wizard, trying to break back into the mortal world by marrying and sacrificing women with green eyes — getting knocked unconscious or distracted whenever anything cool happens. It’s a film about the blandness of 1980s American action cinema getting its butt kicked by Chinese action and fantasy, and it’s awesome, subversive, exciting, hilarious cinema from start to finish.
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