The 10 most bodacious '80s movies — and where to watch them
A list of the best movies from the 1980s and where to watch them now.
Cowabunga, dudes and dudettes! Let's slide on our favorite scrunchies and some totally tubular leg warmers and, like, head to the mall to veg out with a new movie!
Oh, wait. All of the malls are now decrepit shells where only the rats live? That's not so cowabunga. Well, we'll make due with this bitchin' list of movies from the 1980s that can currently be found on streaming. Just don't forget those leg warmers. They always come in handy.
1. The Breakfast Club
As Andrew McCarthy's recent documentary Brats (now streaming on Hulu) made extremely clear, you can't make a list of 1980s movies without including ones that star The Brat Pack and/or were directed by John Hughes. Of course, The Breakfast Club fulfills both of those criteria with flying colors. Setting into stone the high school archetypes that every high school movie since has been grappling with in, The Breakfast Club showed us what happened when "The Jock" (Emilio Estevez), "The Nerd" (Anthony Michael Hall), "The Basket Case" (Ally Sheedy), "The Criminal" (Judd Nelson), and "The Princess" (Molly Ringwald) all stopped being polite and started getting real while trapped together in Saturday detention. As they slowly learn to see one another's common humanity beyond the roles that they've found themselves pigeonholed into, the film is achingly sincere — just like most high school kids are. Just ignore the world's worst make-over sequence (justice for Sheedy!), pump your fist in the air, and don't you forget about them.
How to watch: The Breakfast Club is now streaming on Netflix.
2. Heathers
The yin to The Breakfast Club's yang, director Michael Lehmann's darkest of dark comedies riffs on all of the types that the John Hughes movies defined, only with any lingering sincerity torn asunder by blistering satire. As the proto-Mean Girls, Heathers sets itself right within a clique of the school's most popular girls — the titular Heathers — who are so vicious they could've made "tough guy" Judd Nelson curl into a ball and weep in ten seconds or less.
Winona Ryder stars as Veronica, who at the film's start is circling the periphery of the Heathers, not quite sure she belongs. She is named Veronica, after all. Because, yes, the Heathers are all named Heather; there's Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), and savage queen bee Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), the illustrious wordsmith behind immortal lines like, "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw."
Enter bad boy J.D. (Christian Slater doing his absolute best Jack Nicholson), who turns Veronica's indecision into action — specifically the action of homicide, as he begins offing the Heathers and their dipshit jock boyfriends one by one, with savagely hilarious results. We often (somewhat facetiously) say that they can't make movies like this anymore, but it truly is difficult to picture a mainstream comedy about teens murdering one another now that the gun lobby's allowed our schools to turn into actual Battle Royale recreations. So, go enjoy this one!
How to watch: Heathers is now streaming on Prime Video.
3. Something Wild
Vastly underrated within director Jonathan Demme's impressive oeuvre, this 1986 arthouse favorite stars Jeff Daniels as Charlie, a snooze of a New York investment banker who desperately needs to undo his tie and let loose a little. Enter the most manic of manic pixie dream girls, a black-bobbed Melanie Griffith as Audrey, who lightly kidnaps him, jumps his rattled bones, and takes him on a wild road trip across Long Island. (Long Island? Seriously? Yes, just Long Island.) Turns out Audrey is sort of, kind of being hunted down by her sinister ex Ray (a very scary and also hot Ray Liotta). And somehow Demme threads together light screwball comedy with genuine thriller elements, and still sticks an improbable landing. Sexy, funny and legitimately wild stuff.
How to watch: Something Wild is now streaming on Tubi.
4. Cruising
Set in New York City's gay leather scene, William Friedkin's 1980 serial killer thriller drew understandable controversy when it was released, as it riled those understandably hungry for positive gay representation in cinema. However, in today's post-Will & Grace world, there's been plenty of gleaming-teeth positive gay representation. So it's a little easier to see beyond Cruising's seediness to its visceral virtues. Friedkin crafted one heck of a scary ride with Cruising, which sees Al Pacino play a detective going undercover into NYC's BDSM scene to catch a crazed maniac who's brutally — and I do mean brutally — murdering gay men.
Cruising is fully immersive in its time and place, immortalizing bars like the Eagle's Nest and the Hellfire Club forever; save pornography, nobody was peering into these places circa 1980. Where else were mainstream audiences learning about the hanky code, much less fisting? The tension between terror and desire comes across palpably by Friedkin; the film feels less homophobic to me than it does a dissection of homophobia. It's very much a portrait of its exact moment's mindset. And the eeriness of it immediately presaging the AIDS crisis adds yet another level of darkness.
How to watch: Cruising is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.
5. 48 Hrs.
While Eddie Murphy's other '80s buddy cop movie, Beverly Hills Cop, turned out to be the more successful franchise, financially speaking — indeed, 2024 has a fourth entry on tap, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F — I've always been Team 48 Hrs. myself. Directed by genre legend Walter Hill (Warriors) and co-starring Nick Nolte at his hilariously gruffest, 48 Hrs. sees San Francisco cop Jack Cates (Nolte) forced to team up with fast-talking convict Reggie Hammond (Murphy) in order to catch Hammond's old partner in crime, one bad dude named Ganz (James Remar).
Considered by most to be the buddy cop movie that invented (or at least popularized) the genre still going strong today, Nolte and Murphy share a monstrously infectious chemistry in these roles. Hill delivers a genuinely action-packed vehicle that gives Murphy free range to flex his comedic chops, turning it into a simultaneously comic romp for the ages. It's the perfect mix.
How to watch: 48 Hrs is now streaming on Paramount+.
6. Working Girl
Mike Nichols' effervescent 1988 romantic-comedy stars Melanie Griffith (her again!) as Tess, a Staten Island Gal Friday who's tired of being used and abused by the high-powered Manhattan execs that she toils under. Quitting one job because she keeps getting manhandled, Tess thinks she's struck gold when she lands a gig working for a woman; unfortunately, that woman is the ruthless climber Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver, brilliant), whose betrayals manage to cut even deeper.
When Katharine breaks her leg on a business skiing trip and is trapped overseas while she recovers, Tess takes over in her absence and works her own damn way up the ladder. That the big shot Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford at peak hotness) just happens to be standing at the top of said ladder is a bonus I think none of us could or would refuse. With stellar support from a sleazy hot Alec Baldwin and an epically hair-sprayed Joan Cusack, Working Girl tackles and tears apart the corporate world that was at the heart of so much '80s culture with a zany vengeance.
How to watch: Working Girl is now streaming on Hulu.
7. Die Hard
While the subject of whether or not Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie has proven to be an annual conversation in and of itself, its role as a definitive 1980s action classic has never been in dispute. But in 1988, there was actually a lot of uncertainty surrounding the concept of Bruce Willis as an action star. That smirking dude from Moonlighting? Really? That point of view seems impossible to imagine after decades of Willis proving he's an ace at action, but this was the age of those big lunks Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Then Bruce came along and changed all of that, so now our action heroes could be human-sized and funny. And thank goodness.
For the first out of what would end up being five turns, Die Hard sees Willis as John McClane, an NYPD detective who finds himself trapped inside the Los Angeles skyscraper where his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia) works after it's been taken over by a gang of terrorists. The leader of said gang is the man, the myth, the legend Hans Gruber, played by the man, the myth, the legend Alan Rickman, with his own malevolent smirk for the ages. And so McClane fights to save his wife and defeat the terrorists, all while director John McTiernan shoots the claustrophobic hell out of it. And lo! Unto us was born a (Christmas) action classic.
How to watch: Die Hard is now streaming on Hulu.
8. Beetlejuice
You can't talk about the 1980s without including Tim Burton, who burst out of the gate in 1985 with the comedy classic Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and then went and invented the superhero blockbuster as we've come to know it with his Batman movie four years later. Nestled in between those two is what feels much more like a definitive Burton film — perhaps even The Definitive Burton Film — 1988's weirdo afterlife masterpiece Beetlejuice.
Winona Ryder (her again!) stars as Lydia Deetz, a teen goth girl who's just moved out of NYC and into a small town fixer-upper with her artistically inclined parents Charles and Delia (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O'Hara, the one true god). The only problem is the place is haunted by its former tenants, a desperately sweet couple named Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who recently met their sad end in a covered bridge-related car accident.
Adam and Barbara want these awful people out of their house immediately, but they don't have much luck haunting them out on their own. So they decide to summon a feisty poltergeist by the name of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who's supposedly really good at this sort of thing. Unfortunately for everybody, Mr. Juice has plans of his own, and soon enough all Hell and its stripey sandworms are breaking loose. Awash in strange and surreal Burton-esque lunacy, Beetlejuice is totes the ghost with the most.
How to watch: Beetlejuice is now streaming on Prime Video.
9. Manhunter
Five years before Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs would slurp up all of the 1992 Academy Awards with a nice bottle of chianti, director Michael Mann first introduced us — cinematically speaking — to the cannibal psychiatrist to end all cannibal psychiatrists in this 1986 film. And while I can't and don't want to knock Lambs, Manhunter is a beautiful and scary beast all its own.
Based on Thomas Harris' book Red Dragon (which would get adapted into another movie in 2002, as well as play out across a season of the TV series Hannibal), Manhunter stars William Petersen as FBI agent Will Graham, who is on the hunt for a serial killer nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy." And much like Clarice Starling would eventually have to do, Graham is forced to use the skills of the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (played by Brian Cox, aka Daddy Succession) to help him work the case.
Only Mann's third feature film, after Thief and The Keep, Manhunter is a tropical terror show; it feels as if a nightmare has descended upon an episode of Miami Vice. Bonus points for Tom Noonan's creeptastic turn as serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, one of the scariest ever committed to celluloid.
How to watch: Manhunter is now streaming on The Criterion Channel.
10. RoboCop
If we're talking about definitive 1980s directors, there's no way we can't carve out a space for Paul Verhoeven, who saw right through the glitz of this money-obsessed American decade into its blackest of hearts. Of course, giddy, over-the-top filmmaker that Verhoeven was and still is, he packaged up this messaging in a hilariously mordant satire called RoboCop, a brutal excavation of the decade's copaganda streak that never stops kicking unholy amounts of ass along the way.
Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy, an upstanding family man and cop whose goodness gets him blown to literal smithereens while out patrolling the streets of dystopian Detroit. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your perspective) for Murphy, the police department has been outsourced to a tech corporation called Omni, and he wakes up not dead but kinda stuffed into a robotic body, which they're now testing out as a new way to police the streets.
Hyper-violent as they come, RoboCop takes all its ideas to such gore-soaked pop extremes that it's easy enough to find yourself bludgeoned into acquiescence while watching it. But make no mistake, this is a lacerating satire, one that only feels more terrifyingly prescient with each passing year. (Check those robot dogs now patrolling most major cities as the lights in our libraries flicker off.) Like Leonard Cohen, Paul Verhoeven also saw the future, baby, and it was murder.
How to watch: RoboCop is now streaming on Max.