Aliens is one of my favourite films. It arrived at a time – during the middle 1980s – when science-fiction was a huge box office attraction. Lucas had kicked it all off with “Star Wars”, with Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” continuing the trend. “Aliens” was the perfect follow-up to “Alien” – bigger, more expansive, and equally as scary, it also benefitted from a fast-moving action-movie aesthetic that wryly mocked the war credentials of America’s military in Vietnam. Here was a crowd-pleaser and blockbusting spectacle that had depth, character, and intelligence.

Angie and Chantale over at CinemaObsessed.com were kind enough to invite me to write a guest post for the site. I decided to wax lyrical about my love of the films I saw growing up – notably those late 80s movies that started appearing on UK television in the early 1990s. You can see my little article right here!

Two classics from the 1980s for you in Midnight Double Feature #3. Teen angst and bad behaviour go just that little bit further in Michael Lehmann’s “Heathers” and Mark L. Lester’s “Class of 1984”. Both films look at teenager life in a way that would make John Hughes cower behind the sofa. Cynical, dark, unsentimental, at times funny, at other times quite frightening, these two films paint an alternative picture of growing up.

“An American Werewolf In London” is the film that I remember most distinctly as a child. It’s partly because I knew I wasn’t allowed to watch it, partly because it scared me so much. It’s only later in life that I fully appreciate the frightening influence it had on me – the reason I slept with the light on for weeks afterwards – was because it was so good. It is the cinema of attractions, the spectacle. An immediate and direct injection of emotion, be it humour, fear, anger, happiness. John Landis was a master at toying with his audience’s primal emotions. But, with classic Hollywood narrative as his blueprint, he could also tell a great story.

The ‘coming of age’ movie is a bit ambiguous. There’s a tendency to link the sub-genre to films about kids, so Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, and Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars seemingly came of age too late in life. It appears there’s a timeframe on the coming of age movie that sits somewhere between childhood and adulthood before, as protagonists grow into their twenties, the film fuses itself with other sub-genres like the yuppie-in-peril or social problem movie …

I originally wrote this for my old site Strange Conversation HERE. I present it on Top10Films.co.uk in its entirety including my feature on the horror genre which looks at the films in America leading up to the 1980s. Also, I’ve included by top 5 “moments” from 1980s horror films, as well as a link to watch film clips and trailers related to all the films mentioned.
To jump down the page to the Top 10 list CLICK HERE
I vaguely remember my introduction to the horror film. My cousin was visiting, the …