Bad ’80s Movies That Got Great Reviews

In the early days, movies were not conceived with future audiences in mind. Moving pictures were primarily cheap, disposable entertainment. A film played in a theater for a couple of days or a week or two, only to be replaced by a new film for another week or two. Before the advent of repertory theaters, when a movie left circulation, it was essentially gone forever.

Later, television created a second market for older titles, with local broadcasters licensing tranches of film libraries to fill in the gaps in their original programming. After that came home video, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming, and a world where many films never vanish from sight or from our collective consciousness.

That, in turn, creates a dichotomy: Between how a film is first received and how its reputation evolves over time. Some movies grow in stature through the years; a film like John Carpenter’s The Thing, for example, was a flop with both critics and audiences when it opened in theaters in the summer of 1982. Today, it’s widely considered one of the very best horror movies of its decade, and maybe in the entire history of cinema.

Then there are those movies that shrink in esteem over time; the films that get great reviews — and even occasionally win an Academy Award for Best Picture — that don‘t look so great to modern eyes. Rotten Tomatoes allows us to look back at some of those films, and to see how critics rated them back in the day. The 12 movies listed below all came out in the 1980s, and all earned “fresh” ratings — a score of 60 out of 100 or better — from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Today, these films are not necessarily so highly regarded.

Iif you still like ’em, more power to you. Maybe in another 30 years, you can write your own piece saying how back in the day ScreenCrush got these movies wrong.

READ MORE: Good ’80s Movies That Got Bad Reviews