1982. I hit my eleventh year. This one always feels to me like the year that pop culture really started happening. In truth it had been on the boil for a while, but with E.T. dominating cinemas, Michael Jackon’s Thriller storming the charts, and the debut of the CD this was a year of huge tentpoles for consumers to latch onto (or to be fed with until they burst). Perhaps fittingly, the first emoticons (the humble smiley) made their appearance this year. Conversely, in another sign of the old guard falling away, ABBA made their final TV appearance.

In the UK the Falklands War kicked off. Naturally I remember this vividly, albeit through the lens of a politically innocent 11 year-old. It’s strange that, in its wake, I can’t think of a single film or TV series off the top of my head that uses the war as a backdrop (note that this doesn’t mean there weren’t any—there were plenty). Perhaps as wars go it was a particularly uninspiring one.
Overall, browsing through Wikipedia, 1982 looks like a very unsettled year—lots of plane crashes, lots of political unrest, Israel once again invading other territories (Lebanon this time) and various other fairly crap things going on. So let’s ignore all that and look at some movies!!

Read more: Top 10 Films of … 1982

This year we see one of the starkest tales told from the two top ten listings above. Take a quick look (if you’re not already ahead of me on this one) and see where the two most highly-rated movies of the year (from the IMDB list) are on the global box office top ten (which shows us what people actually went to see during 1982).

Nowhere.

Both Blade Runner and The Thing were huge flops when released. John Carpenter was riding high on his horror credentials and was on the verge of making a breakthrough as a major director. Ridley Scott had delivered Alien and one can only assume anticipation for his next sci-fi marvel was huge. Then E.T happened and suddenly people wanted to see huggy aliens that enjoyed M & Ms, not ones that tore people apart. Nor did they want to see Han Solo in a dour noir thriller that barely (if you read the reviews of the time) made sense.

It’s one of those things that fascinates me about cinema. Often the big hits of the year are big because they’re genuinely good and they deserve their critical reputations (The Godfather, for instance). And sometimes films just arrive at the wrong time. Blade Runner is up there as one of the most significant science fiction movies ever made, but audiences weren’t interested back in 1982. It’s only when we look back that we can see how important it was and the impact it’s had over the decades since. Somewhat less understandable is the way a movie can get critically lambasted in the year of its release and then be hailed as one of the best movies ever made some years later. It’s the same film, after all. If you can explain that, please do so in the comments below.

Blade Runner

My Dad loved Blade Runner. Still does. So do I. So does my son. It’s a whole family thing apparently. Because 1982 was the year that I was really getting into films, science-fiction, Doctor Who, etc, it was also when I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, the iconic London pop culture store. At the time it was little more than a book shop, but one filled with treasures. Unsurprisingly Blade Runner was everywhere. It might have died at the cinema, but as a landmark science fiction movie it was getting plenty of coverage in the cult press of the day. The point is: I was aware of it right from the start.

My first real exposure to the movie was via the soundtrack—no, not the original Vangelis one; the version that the New American Orchestra released because Vangelis refused to release his. My Dad played it a lot—enough that I eventually got my own copy so it could listen to it at home too (and not just on the weekends I stayed with my Dad). I eventually got to see the movie when it came out for rental on VHS; I watched it with my Dad one Saturday afternoon. I remember being particularly struck by Rutger Hauer’s performance (and who wouldn’t be). I read the Philip K Dick novel sometime later and would eventually have regular screenings with friends. It’s one of those movies I watched so much that the sound of it became embedded in my memory. (In 2016 I hadn’t watched the movie for quite some time and decided to sit down and revisit it–it was a transcendental experience; I knew the film so well that it felt almost as though I was reconnecting a part of myself, reuniting with a dear friend as if we had never spent any time apart).

Going back a bit, I followed Blade Runner through its slightly frustrating history on home video, feeding off all those rumours of deleted scenes, alternate versions. When the director’s cut came out my Dad was able to get tickets for us to see a special screening at the London FIlm Festival (possibly my first experience of seeing the movie on the big screen). The same director’s cut was one of the earliest DVD releases in the UK (in 1999) but frustratingly was not anamorphic (meaning it was lower quality). It would be another 6 years before a better quality version was finally released, to be followed the next year with the release of “The Final Cut” and a glorious set that included something like five different cuts of the movie. Since then I’ve bought it on blu-ray and, inevitably, on 4k. It’s been a long road but we finally got the home video version that the movie deserves.

My son and I have watched it, perhaps, three times together so far (as well as the surprisingly excellent sequel. Last year my Dad sent me a surprise gift from the UK: a Blade Runner t-shirt, which made my son very jealous (it’s fine: he’s got an Alien t-shirt which I’m very jealous of). As I said: it’s a family thing.

The Thing

I was slightly less aware of The Thing around the time of its release, though there was certainly lots of buzz about the various creature and transformation effects that drew my attention to the film. I first saw it a few years later when a friend lent me a VHS copy they had (which I’m pretty sure was long before it got an official home video release). I recall it causing a nightmare—not because of the death and gore but rather from the concept of the alien organism escaping and, inevitably, unstoppably, overwhelming all life on earth. With all the heads exploding and stomachs erupting, that was the bit that got to me!

Like everyone else over the years I’ve steadily re-evaluated it. I always enjoyed the film—through sheer concept and imagination it earned its placed in my list of favoured watches—but it somehow, eventually, has become one of my firm favourite movies. I suspect that re-evaluation started when I was able to see it on the big screen for the first time at the BFI. Again, remember back in those days our only way of watching films was cropped for pan and scan TV viewing, and often cut to bits for broadcast. Seeing it in widescreen, finally, gave the movie scope, size, weight. It moved on from being a small screen entertainment about some people being killed by an alien force and became a tale of isolation and paranoia framed against the unforgiving, unsympathetic arctic landscape.

As a side note, a few years ago I explored some various alternative tellings (such as the novella) and proposed sequels to The Thing. It’s curious that, despite the supposed flexibility of the concept, it’s almost impossible to wrangle a decent story out of it. Maybe once is enough.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

There was no escaping E.T. It was huge. It was wonderful. It was the saddest movie ever made. At the time I had no idea that it was supposed to be just this small, personal tale from Spielberg (and I daresay it’s that emotional honesty which made it such a big success). I saw it multiple times and I probably cried even more than I did when Lois Lane died in Superman. It’s one of those many films that I revisited in later years and realised “oh, this is actually a good film.” 

I’ve shown it to both my kids and they’ve enjoyed it well enough but been largely unmoved by it. I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s just a film that belonged back in its day—almost the polar opposite of Blade Runner and The Thing, both of which still get talked about now. Does anyone really talk much about E.T now? Other than as something we remember fondly from our childhood?

Tron

Tron was one of the few other movies of the year that I managed to catch at the cinema. There had been a fair amount of hype covering the effects (and also the design, I think it’s fair to say). I’m pretty sure my Dad took me to see it one weekend and it was perfectly good but it definitely didn’t capture my imagination the way other films had. One of my more persistent memories is of people at school playing the various iterations of the games (no consoles or handhelds in those days, barring the Game & Watch). Consequently it makes perfect sense to me to learn that the arcade game actually made more money than the movie did during its theatrical run.

Poltergeist

It’s a strange quirk of the year that while Spielberg was chasing away the likes of The Thing with his cuddly alternative, he was also behind one of the decade’s most popular chillers. Putting aside the debate over who really directed it, you could clearly argue that Poltergeist would never have become the commercial hit that it did without Spielberg’s golden touch. As with E.T the magic here was focusing the tale around a typical suburban family—exactly the kind of people who like to go and see movies.

I enjoy Poltergeist but I don’t love it. There’s a lot to get stuck into here but overall I find it a bit too obvious and cheesy (all of which is probably a big part of the reason why it works). While the horror genre had enjoyed box office hits before, Poltergeist is arguably the first movie that properly bridged the gap between ‘a good time at the cinema’ (which is where the hits are made) and ‘a fucking terrifying time at the cinema’. Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) was a bona fide pioneer of horror cinema, so match him with Spielberg and it’s no surprise you get something new and exciting.

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Kahn

Considering I saw both Star Trek 1 and 3 at the cinema, it’s a bit odd that I missed seeing this one during its release. I suspect it’s because my Dad had already seen it and my Mum was more interested in taking me to see E.T. Like Poltergeist, this is another movie that I found a little cheesy at first (there’s just something about those try-hard early eighties SFX) but came to admire greatly over the years.

My main exposure to it at the time of release was a paperback format photo novel that I would cheekily flick through at my ‘local’ science fiction bookshop (I say ‘local’ because visiting it required me to get off the bus early on my way home from school, and then catch another bus to get home again). I knew about Spock and naturally I was obsessed with this idea of killing off a major franchise character. Despite the occasional habit of 1970s movies killing off their main characters I couldn’t (and can’t) think of any occasion prior to this when a major franchise character had been killed off … possibly because major franchises were barely a thing back then, excepting James Bond.

It is strange, sometimes, to look back on a time when you couldn’t just watch something when you wanted to watch it. I was too young to go to the cinema on my own, unless it was the Twickenham Odeon at the end of the road. My only exposure to films was books and magazines. There was no internet, of course. There were friends at school who had maybe seen films I hadn’t, and would often delight in sharing the details. You had to pull the details from wherever you could and this would often create some sort of imaginary version of the movie in question that would almost always be twenty times as awesome as the actual thing. (And, no, I didn’t really have an imaginary version of Wrath Of Kahn because I only ever looked at the end of that photonovel).

An Officer And A Gentleman

This is another one of those strange cases where I became obsessed with a movie that generally falls well beyond the scope of my typical interests. I first saw it when it debuted on TV (would have likely been around 1984/5) and as was the standard then, we would also record it. I do recall liking the intro music right from that first viewing—an energetic instrumental version of the “Up Where We Belong”—but the rest of the movie proved compelling enough that it went onto my regular rewatch list. There’s little more to it than that classic tale of someone coming up from nothing and making something of themselves, and getting the girl. Maybe this particular version of it caught me at the right time. One day I’ll rewatch it and see if I can figure it out.

Unseen

This year’s unseen fits into three easy categories: films I have not seen and don’t particularly intend to see; films I should have seen and have somehow missed; and films that I have actually seen but remember so little about that I’m including them here.

In the first category are: Tootsie, Rocky III, Annie and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I’ll admit I’m slightly curious about Tootsie, given that it’s reasonably well acclaimed, but I suspect it’s aged horribly and would be quite painful to come to for the first time in this day and age. After all this time I’m unlikely to check out The Secret of Nimh either (although I do remember the press coverage at the time touting it as the last best hope for modern Disney: they got there in the end, but it wasn’t with this movie).

I’ve seen almost every other teen coming-of-age movie so I can’t explain how Fast Times At Ridgemont High remains unseen. Perhaps it arrived too far ahead of the others and gets a bit overlooked. With First Blood I remember quite vividly when it was out—or perhaps when it first hit video. I’ve even read the novel of this one, yet I have yet to sit down and watch the movie. Perhaps it’s been tarred by the Rambo-ness of it all?

I’ve seen Porky’s and 48 Hrs. once each and I’m pretty sure I enjoyed them well enough but don’t really have anything of interest to say about either. I have a feeling that I’ve seen Conan The Barbarian more than once but all I really recall about it is James Earl Jones turning into a big snake.

Others

The King of Comedy

I watched this for the first time during my Film Studies years but I think it was actually recommended to me by a friend. I liked it instantly, with Robert de Niro giving the sort of vulnerable yet menacing performance that he excels at, and Sandra Bernhard lighting up the movie in direct contrast. Weirdly, it’s a film that keeps going on my rewatch list at various times but I never seem to get around to watching it again. I will definitely remedy that soon. Maybe. One day.

Creepshow

I rented this movie around when it first became available (so in those early days of video rental when I would rent any horror film I could get my hands on). I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time (although I did enjoy getting to see Stephen King, The Actor in what I still think is a damn good performance). The stories were a bit variable, mostly good apart from the last one (the one with the cockroaches) which I never really found that interesting. “The Crate” has always been the one that gives me chills: the idea that a deadly creature could just be randomly locked up in a crate tucked away beneath some stairs, waiting to be unleashed. It helps that it features Hal Holbrook, my favourite underrated actor from the era. 

Diner

It’s not quite The Breakfast Club, but it is one of the essential coming of age movies from the eighties with a pre-stardom cast that can almost rival that of The Outsiders. I haven’t watched this for many years, but I remember a random selection of scenes, if not the overall plot (if there ever was one—there rarely is with these coming of age movies).

UK Top Ten

1. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
2. Annie
3. Rocky III
4. Star Trek II
5. Mad Max 2
6. Poltergeist
7. Death Wish II
8. Tron
9. Firefox
10. Blade Runner

A fairly routine top ten for the UK this year, matching most of the top global films of the year but … what’s that at number 7 there? Death Wish 2? How did that get so high? I’ve never seen the movie, but it reminds me that UK cinema had quite a brutal flavour at that time. Audiences, perhaps tiring of sanitised TV fare, looked to the cinema for a cathartic fix that wasn’t delivered by the glossy blockbusters shipping over from the USA. This was also around the era of the video nasty which saw a number of objectionable titles withdrawn under the auspices of the BBFC who definitely had a reputation for grabbing the scissors. Growing up at the time I have distinct impressions of our media being somewhat ‘controlled’. Everything had to be certified. TV didn’t have to go too far to be ‘shocking’. British cinema had shifted away from sex comedies towards more violent fare like The Long Good Friday and the two Sweeney movies. Funnily enough, it’s almost a precursor to the Guy Ritchie crime phenomenon that would hit British cinema at the turn of the century.

Next time: Join us next year as we find out whether or not Jaws 3D ruled the box office …

On August 1 1981 MTV aired its first video. That video was Video Killed The Radio Star, directed by Russell Mulcahy and featuring a youthful Hans Zimmer on keyboards. MTV would change the pop culture landscape, comfortably landing its bootprint in the realm of cinema along the way, and there could be no surer sign that the eighties were coming for our films than this video featuring two people who, in very different ways, would make their stamp on movies over the next decade and beyond.

Elsewhere in the world NASA finally launched its first space shuttle, Columbia, into space following a series of test flights. I vividly remember being at school and having a routine ‘medical’ but being able to watch the launch from the surgery. Talking of medical matters, the first case of HIV/AIDS was identified in the USA—the virus became a biological boogeyman which would haunt us throughout the eighties, would claim around 100,000 lives before the decade ended, and become a vicious political hot potato causing horrific antipathy towards gay people.

I turned 10 years old in 1981 (erroneously thinking this made me a teenager until my mother pointed out that I still had a few years to go) and was just starting to get a sense of myself. I would watch Top Of The Pops every week, and particularly enjoyed Adam And The Ants at the time, and was starting to get a clearer sense of where my film tastes lay too. The eighties were waiting, and so was I.

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I turned nine in 1980 and was becoming a little more aware of movies, largely through sequels to movies I’d already enjoyed. That said, the hype surrounding The Empire Strikes Back was inescapable whether you were interested or not, and most other movies at the time I became aware of because of the posters everywhere. This was also a period of my life where I’d get taken to the USA for summer holidays (perks of having a parent in the travel business) which often meant I’d get to see movies months before they reached the UK—quite the privilege back then!

In terms of other events, 1980 was the year that Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was in the area shortly afterwards and remember there still being ash everywhere. It was also, of course, the year that John Lennon was assassinated. The Beatles were before my time but the shock from Lennon’s murder resonated throughout the UK in a way that we wouldn’t see again until Princess Diana’s death. It’s curious to me that the seventies effectively began with the end of The Beatles and, ten years later, the eighties begins with the loss of one of the group’s major creative forces. With Elvis gone a few years earlier it’s almost as if the eighties was determined to shed the past and bring something new.

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I’m taking a personal look back at the top ten films in every year since the one I was born in. We’re up to 1979. I was cannonballing towards 8 years of age. Margaret Thatcher took power in the UK, setting the political tone for the next few decades. The Ayotollah Khomenei was restored to power in Iran. Sony released the first Walkman, and Philips demonstrated the compact disc for the first time. Usenet was created by a couple of college students who were either very bored or very smart. Perhaps both. I might remember 1979 as a particularly drab year, but change was clearly afoot. And how was that reflected at the cinema, you ask? Let’s find out.

Only four movies appear in both lists this year, which again demonstrates how our tastes change in retrospect and when marketing hype is removed from the equation. To be honest the biggest surprise to me is seeing Moonraker in the IMDB top ten as I didn’t think anyone remembered that entry with great fondness. That said, the suspiciously high showing for Nosferatu does have me continuing to question the IMDB algorithm, Otherwise I think we have a pretty good spread of movies here, showing which titles had people queuing up at the box office in 1979, and which of those have stood the test of time.

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I’m doing a personal review of the top ten (more or less—usually more) movies from every year since the one I was born. This week … it was the year we all believed a man could fly. Or perhaps you didn’t. Perhaps you weren’t even born then? Meanwhile, these days we have movie characters flying off left right and centre. It must all seem so perfectly normal. Well, if either of those are you, come with me, grab your Superman crotch popcorn bucket and let’s take a walk through the past with a recap of the top movies of 1978.

Let’s kick off with a few changes to the format. Firstly, I’ve tweaked the IMDB listing to only show movies that have a certain number of ratings and are above a certain score. I’m still not sure how IMDB calculates ‘popularity’ but this modest filtering will hopefully prevent the Swedish Nympho Slaves scenario from happening in future.  

Second: given this is a personal reflection I’ve also opted to shuffle the way I list the movies below to vaguely reflect how significant they are to me (previously the order was roughly aligned with the chart listings). It’s never going to be as straightforward as my favourite movie being at the top and my least favourite at the bottom. Movies can be important to me without necessarily being titles I’d watch again and again. Nevertheless, you can view my ordering as a vague indication of preference.

Anyway, let’s go!

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It was the year of Star Wars and The Sex Pistols—two pop culture phenonema that couldn’t be further apart which but had a lasting impact on film and music. It was a year that encapsulated escaping from things past and launching boldly into whatever was going to come next. Even NASA was playing the game, launching various test flights of its new, future-facing space shuttle. It was the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee and the UK went crazy for it; I remember street parties and celebrations. I remember my Mum dressing me up as a cavalier (cool costume!) and we went to Windsor for what I assume was the lighting of the bonfire at Snow Hill on June 6. It was also the year that I started going to see movies at the cinema.

And what was Hollywood up to …?

This marks the first year that I can finally access global box office stats. As such I won’t be using the North America box office top ten any more. While I expect the majority of the films that appear in the top ten will still be US-produced, I’m far more comfortable having a list that comes a little closer to reflecting what people around the world were paying to see at their local cinemas. However, there is also something a bit wrong in the IMDB top ten … which will be made plain if you inspect the number six entry up there. Given the ‘best films of the year’ is always going to be highly subjective, I think the IMDB list is as useful a barometer as any even if there’s something a bit skewiff with its algorithm. Either way, using both list allows me to see how the most popular contemporary films of the year relate to the most popular retrospective films of the same year.

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1976 was the year of the big summer heatwave in the UK, which I have a vague memory of as “that one time we actually got summer”. I expect I spent a lot of time in my paddling pool. It was also the year that Apple Computer Company formed and released its first computer (handy, given their name) and a space shuttle called Enterprise was unveiled. Like the real Enterprise it couldn’t actually go into space, but it was a cool bit of publicity all the same. Meanwhile, the UK and Iceland ended that third cod war, much to the relief of political superpowers across the globe.

For a while there I thought 1976 might be the year I finally saw some of these movies in the cinema: I distinctly remember watching King Kong and The Pink Panther Strikes Again on the big screen. However, given both of these movies were released on Boxing Day 1976 in the UK I very much expect I wouldn’t have seen them until the subsequent year (remember, movies hung around a lot longer back in those days!)

While neither of those movies are particularly memorable, it was otherwise an exceptionally solid year for cinema—just look at that IMDB top 5! And plenty of quality picks lower down in the list too. Let’s get into it. 

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It’s the hump year of the seventies, the year that Bill Gates and another guy [Paul Allen: let’s give credit where it’s due] founded a company called Micro-Soft and the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon. Meanwhile, the UK and Iceland, obviously thinking there weren’t enough wars in the world, began their third war over cod. Finally, actor Pedro Pascal, best known for his bit part in a season 5 episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, was born. Also, some films came out. Let’s talk about those.

I can’t recall the very first time I visited the cinema. I do remember going to see various Disney rereleases (such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and I do remember my local Odeon doing a Saturday morning cinema thing. There was at least one occasion where I decided it was more fun to run up and down the aisles than to watch the film, much to the annoyance of some of the other cinemagoers. Hopefully the fact that I remember this moment means I quickly took it to heart and was less disruptive at future screenings.

All of that’s just a roundabout way of saying that 1975 might be the year I first went to the cinema but it also might not! That said, I can definitely confirm that I didn’t see any of the movies we’re about to discuss in the year of their release. Let’s move on.

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