8. Big Trouble In Little China (1986)
I'm actually a huge fan of John Carpenter's B-movie homage
Big Trouble In Little China, though I'm also aware that this probably puts me in a rather small minority, so I'll class it as "mediocre" for the sake of this article. Don't take this one too seriously, though, and you'll find that Carpenter actually manages to craft one of the best tributes to the B-grade serial flick ever committed to celluloid. Seriously! This is made largely possible thanks to the presence of Kurt Russell, who - aside from playing one of the most underrated movie "heroes" ever - manages to inject the movie with the perfect sense of irony. Without him, the whole thing would have certainly come tumbling down in an explosion of cheesy dialogue cues and awful special effects. The plot - somehow razor-thin and needlessly complicated all at once - concerns trucker Jack Burton (Russell), who thinks he's the coolest guy in the world, but is really second to his sidekick, Wang, who does all the martial arts and kung fu movies you'd expect in a flick with such a title. Russell plays Burton like a faux John Wayne (he does a constant, hilarious John Wayne impression all throughout the movie, in fact), and it's great fun to watch. Anyway,
Big Trouble ends with Jack Burton - having, uh, "saved" the day - driving his truck away, talking macho into his receiver, when we pan back to reveal that... oh, no, there's a monster clinging to the back of his vehicle! This perfectly sets up a sequel, of course, and for a time, one was actually in the works (a script is rumoured to exist somewhere). It'd be great to see Jack forced into the fray again, if only to witness Kurt Russell and John Carpenter working their dual magic once more.