Michael J. Fox is the latest actor to enter our Heroes of the 1980s Hall of Fame.

A founding member of Saturday Night Live and an icon of 1980s comedy, Daniel Stephens reviews Chevy Chase’s top ten films.

I’m in the mood for some eighties science-fiction this week. When I say eighties science-fiction I don’t mean the horror shows of John Carpenter and James Cameron, I’m talking about the innocent romanticism of space seen in child-centric films such as The Last Starfighter, E.T., and Battle Beyond the Stars. For tonight’s Midnight Double Feature we are going to close the curtains and settle down to a double bill of kids heading into the stars. My choices for tonight are Joe Dante’s Explorers and Randal Kleiser’s Flight of the Navigator.

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!

The 1980’s produced some of the best and most cherished coming-of-age, comedy-dramas to grace theatre screens, and it is these that the era is most fondly remembered for. George Lucas’ 1973 ensemble piece American Graffiti and Richard Linklater’s superb Dazed And Confused (made exactly 20 years after Lucas’ effort), are notable absentees of the eighties teen catalogue, but what does become apparent is that not one but several films made between 1982 and 1989 equal or better the quality of these two films that arguably standout in their respective decades …

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 vaguely remember my introduction to the horror film. My cousin was visiting, the curtains had been drawn on a sunny afternoon, and John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London had been placed in the VCR. I was seven years old. As I lay in bed for days after all I could see were those green hills shrouded in the black cloak of night, and the warning: ‘Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors,’ delivered in that Yorkshire twang. Brian Glover’s short, controlled outburst – probably his unusual form of goodbye – ‘Beware the moon, lads.’