Underrated 80s Movies: Overlooked Films From the Decade of Blockbusters

The 1980s are usually remembered by their posters: a boy on a flying bicycle, a DeLorean, a man in a fedora running from a boulder. But walk down the aisle of any old video rental store in your memory and you will also find the films on the bottom shelf, the ones with one copy and a faded box. Many of the most underrated 80s movies lived there. They were too odd, too sad or too adult for the multiplex, and their studios often had no idea how to sell them.

Here are eight that I return to regularly. I’ve left out horror, which gets its own list of underrated horror movies, and I’ve avoided the decade’s well-established cult favorites, which are covered in the cult movies section.

Eight underrated 80s movies at a glance

The early 80s: films out of step with the moment

The Stunt Man (1980)

Richard Rush’s adaptation of Paul Brodeur’s novel was shot in the late 1970s and then struggled to find a distributor before Twentieth Century-Fox released it in 1980. Steve Railsback plays a fugitive who stumbles onto a World War I movie shoot and is hidden by the director, played by Peter O’Toole, in exchange for replacing a stuntman who has just died. The film keeps asking whether anything we see is real, inside the story and outside it. It earned three Oscar nominations: for O’Toole, for Rush as director, and for the adapted screenplay. Yet it never found a wide audience. Rush directed only one more fiction feature, the very different Color of Night (1994).

Thief (1981)

Michael Mann’s first theatrical feature stars James Caan as Frank, a professional safecracker in Chicago who wants to cash out and build a family, and who makes the mistake of working for organized crime to get there. The heist sequences are almost procedural, built around real tools and real technique, and Tangerine Dream’s pulsing score set a template Mann would develop for years. Released by United Artists, it was admired more than it was seen. Caan’s long monologue in a diner, explaining his life to Tuesday Weld’s character, is one of the best scenes either of them ever played.

Cutter’s Way (1981)

Ivan Passer’s film, adapted from Newton Thornburg’s novel Cutter and Bone, follows a drifting Santa Barbara charmer (Jeff Bridges) and his friend Alex Cutter (John Heard), a bitter, disabled Vietnam veteran who becomes convinced that a powerful local businessman committed a murder. United Artists opened it under the novel’s title, then withdrew it after a poor start; it was reissued as Cutter’s Way by the studio’s classics division, where critics championed it. Lisa Eichhorn’s performance as Cutter’s exhausted wife is the film’s quiet center. It is one of the great films about the hangover of the 1970s.

Blow Out (1981)

Brian De Palma reworked ideas from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation into a Philadelphia thriller about a sound-effects man for low-budget movies who accidentally records a car crash that may have been an assassination. John Travolta gives one of his best performances, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow co-star, and Vilmos Zsigmond shot it in saturated reds, whites and blues. It was a commercial disappointment on release, possibly because its ending is so bleak. That ending is the reason the film is now so admired.

Mid-decade: two very different kinds of American story

Local Hero (1983)

Bill Forsyth’s comedy, produced by David Puttnam, sends a Houston oil executive (Peter Riegert) to a Scottish coastal village to buy the whole place for a refinery. Burt Lancaster plays his star-gazing boss, and Mark Knopfler wrote the score. Nobody in the village behaves as expected, and the film’s comedy is so gentle that you might not notice how sad it is until the last shot. Forsyth won the BAFTA for direction, but outside Britain the film has never had the recognition its admirers think it deserves.

The Right Stuff (1983)

It seems odd to call a film with eight Oscar nominations and four wins underrated, but Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book was a box-office disappointment for the Ladd Company and Warner Bros. Covering the period from Chuck Yeager’s sound-barrier flight through the Mercury program, it runs over three hours and mixes heroism with satire in a way that confused people expecting either a straight epic or a comedy. Sam Shepard’s Yeager and Ed Harris’s John Glenn anchor a huge ensemble. It has rarely been given its due as one of the defining American films of the decade.

The late 80s: history and the apocalypse

Matewan (1987)

John Sayles wrote and directed this account of the 1920 coal strike in Mingo County, West Virginia, which ended in the gunfight known as the Battle of Matewan. Chris Cooper made his film debut as a union organizer committed to nonviolence, with James Earl Jones and Mary McDonnell in key roles. Haskell Wexler’s cinematography was nominated for an Oscar; the town of Thurmond stood in for Matewan. Independent, political and unglamorous, it was exactly the kind of film the late-80s market had little room for. It feels more urgent each time I watch it.

Miracle Mile (1988)

Steve De Jarnatt’s script had a long life before it was made: American Film magazine named it among the best unproduced screenplays in 1983. When it finally reached the screen through Hemdale, it starred Anthony Edwards as a man who picks up a ringing pay phone near a Los Angeles diner and hears that nuclear missiles are about to be launched. Mare Winningham plays the woman he has just met and is desperate to reach. It premiered at the Toronto festival in 1988 and opened in American theaters in 1989 to a tiny box office. Its mix of romantic comedy and panic, again scored by Tangerine Dream, makes it unlike anything else of the decade.

Why the 80s buried so many good films

Several things worked against these titles. The blockbuster model, fully established by the early 1980s, rewarded wide openings and strong first weekends; a film that needed word of mouth often lost its screens before word could spread. Studios were also changing hands and leadership, and a picture greenlit by one regime could be orphaned by the next. Cutter’s Way is the clearest example on this list of a film saved only because critics argued for it after it had been pulled.

Home video changed the story for many of them. A film that played two weeks in theaters could sit on a rental shelf for years, waiting for the right viewer. That second life is why so many of these films have defenders today. Cable television did similar work: a late-night broadcast could turn a flop into a private obsession for a viewer who happened to be awake, and those viewers grew up to become critics, programmers and filmmakers. Repertory cinemas and festival retrospectives finished the job, giving several of these titles the big-screen audiences they never had on release. Most of them may be found through public-domain archives or licensed services, and several have received careful restorations.

A practical tip if you are building an 80s night: pair a thriller with a comedy. Thief followed by Local Hero, or Blow Out followed by The Right Stuff, gives you two views of the same decade, one paranoid and one hopeful, and shows how wide the range of mainstream American and British filmmaking still was before the market narrowed.

If you want an earlier generation of overlooked titles, my list of underrated movies covers the 1940s through the 1990s and skips this decade so the two lists don’t repeat each other.