(Photo by 20th Century Fox/courtesy Everett Collection. THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION.)
50 Best 1980s Cult Movies & Classics
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai celebrates its 40th anniversary!
If a movie some distance from the mainstream inspires you to watch and watch again, quote obsessively, recommend to friends and family to occasional bewilderment, while finding community with other like-minded fans, congratulations: You may have just helped create a new cult classic.
And the 1980s may just have been the big boom of the cult movie, as the home market of VHS tapes and cable television let people re-visit and share movies like never before. It’s hard to imagine the movies without Blade Runner, The Thing, and Scarface now, but they were not huge box office successes on release (with Blade Runner and The Thing outright bombs), but the fandom grew them into the pop culture cornerstones they are today. Arguably, they are the greatest cult movie success stories ever.
Ditto for The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap, both directed by Rob Reiner. Tap popularized the mockumentary format, and Bride has been welcomed into family homes for generations. Again, these movies are more of those muted box office stories that became publicly entrenched through generations of critics and audiences championing them.
And John Carpenter was the directing king of cults in the ’80s. Along with The Thing, he helmed They Live, Big Trouble in Little China, and Escape From New York. Terry Gilliam was no slouch either with Brazil and Time Bandits, along with David Lynch (Blue Velvet) and and David Cronenberg (Videodrome).
In selecting the 50 best cult movies of the 1980s, we tried to cover every corner and fanbase. There’s comedies whose off-kilter sense of humor have people feeling like that finally something out there understands them. We’re talking the likes of nowhere epic Repo Man, the Coen brothers’ comedy Raising Arizona, supremely cynical Heathers, relentlessly quotable Withnail and I, deeply deadpan Stranger Than Paradise, spatulatastic UHF, and big-bootay’d Buckaroo Banzai.
’80s horror is still celebrated and sought after today, and the fringes are what make them special, populated with the likes of Re-Animator (still the best movie with H.P. Lovecraft’s name hovering over it), musical Little Shop of Horrors, transgressive slasher Sleepaway Camp, Evil Dead 2 (throw in the first Evil Dead while you’re at it), and two vampiric servings of Near Dark and The Lost Boys.
Filed under fantasy: Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. While on the action shelf, you can pull To Live and Die in L.A. (with director William Friedkin topping his French Connection car chase), hard-boiled musical Streets of Fire, the Bruce Lee-inspired The Last Dragon, and The Legend of Billie Jean, which is Joan of Arc by way of neon spandex.
And some cult movies really started gaining traction in the online age, like Hard Ticket to Hawaii, whose widely-shared video clips had people seeking out context for the insanity, and Miami Connection, an earnestly incompetent martial arts movie lost until 2012. These days, you can watch it in 4K with surround dragon sound.
We’re sorting the best of ’80s cult movies by Tomatometer, with Certified Fresh films first, including cyberpunk flashpoint anime Akira, and superhero camp Flash Gordon. (Alex Vo)
98%
93%
93%
98%
91%
95%
88%
91%
91%
92%
91%
89%
89%
88%
89%
85%
86%
85%
81%
83%
83%
78%
78%
75%
78%
71%
60%
100%
84%
90%
82%
77%
75%
73%
73%
73%
69%
67%
66%
68%
64%
57%
59%
54%
58%
45%
39%
25%
