10 Underappreciated 80s Thrillers You Must Watch
Thrilling movies from the decade of excess.
The 1990s might have upped the ante on dark, stylish and violent thrillers, but the '80s were arguably even more important for the genre.
That decade took the move to character-driven realism that emerged in the '70s and started to bring more elaborate plot and stylish film-making to the fore. Thrillers attracted big studio money and a-list name - films such as The Untouchables and Scarface proved hugely popular and retain lasting legacies as classics of the decade.
The films in this list are all great in their own right and show the breadth of the genre as it hit its stride in a decade of huge films. Like other films in the history of the thriller genre, they are taut, suspenseful and leave you sometimes breathless, questioning what you have seen and rooting for the underdog at times.
In each case they have been underappreciated, sometimes unfairly overshadowed by lesser films that somehow gained more popularity. Some of these films were underrated by critics and others have simply been forgotten by general viewers. Either way, they deserve a second look...
10. Blow Out
It would be difficult to justify any kind of list concerning the thriller genre without including the work of Brian De Palma – he directed two of the biggest movies in the '80s in Scarface and The Untouchables. He also directed a number of other thrillers throughout which could have made this list. Blow Out has always been underrated in that it is an unbelievably good thriller by any standard, which deserves much more acclaim and popularity.
Blow Out is based on the 1966 movie Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni and stars John Travolta in a stand out performance. Travolta plays a sound-effect artist; he is out recording one night when a car plummets from a bridge following a blow out. Travolta rescues Nancy Allen’s Sally from the river but the driver dies.
The driver turns out to be a presidential candidate and on listening to his recordings, Travolta becomes convinced he has recorded a gunshot. From here the plot thickens and twists in exceptional ways. There are some excellent sequences throughout and much of the film’s execution is deliberately reminiscent of Hitchcock and Argento.
This is an absolutely first-rate thriller by a director at the very top of his game.