15 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies Of The 1980s

15. Megaforce

Revered stuntman Hal Needham broke into directing in a big way with 1977 hit Smokey and the Bandit, and continued his winning streak with 1981's The Cannonball Run - so hopes were clearly high that when he ventured into sci-fi adventure territory with 1982's Megaforce, the results would be similarly successful.

No such luck, as the $20 million movie (a huge price tag at the time) co-produced by 20th Century Fox and Hong Kong's Golden Harvest bombed on release. But all these years later, it stands up as a prime example of the kind of bananas filmmaking that could only have come out of the 1980s.

Megaforce are a futuristic super-army equipped with state of the art weapons and vehicles, sent out to resolve a conflict between two fictitious desert nations. Heading them up is Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick, best known as Brad in The Rocky Horror Picture Show), a grinning, white-teethed warrior clad head to toe in spandex with a headband and a flying motorcycle.

If it all sounds rather like a toy advert, that's no accident: Mattel were heavily involved in the production, including the designs. Tie-in toy lines were launched, no doubt in the hope of replicating the success Kenner Toys had recently enjoyed with Star Wars. Again - no such luck.

Still, Megaforce is a thoroughly endearing oddity, blending camp humour with large scale, fuel-injected battle scenes on the kind of scale we wouldn't see again until the last few Fast & Furious movies.

And in its own way, Megaforce was ahead of the curve: high-tech military vehicles were the focal point of several hit TV shows in the years ahead, most notably Airwolf and Knight Rider.