10 Things About 80s Movies Everyone Misses Today

3. Top-Notch Practical Effects

Honey I Shrunk The Kids Rick Moranis
Universal Pictures

When talking about practical effects in cinema, the film that usually gets all the praise in Jurassic Park.

Granted, those dinosaurs looks fantastic, even after all these years. However, that movie (which came out in 1993) wouldn't have been nearly as successful were it not for its forerunners in the previous decade.

The titular home-phoner from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was created by Oscar-winner Carlo Rambaldi. So much care and thought went into the design that producer Kathleen Kennedy even visited a scientific institute to get more information on how to create the creature's eyes.

Horror was also having a whale of a time with regards to practical effects in the '80s. The Xenomorphs in the Alien movies, the makeup on Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, the thing in... The Thing.

And don't even get us started on Scanners. We'll be having nightmares for months.

Modern cinema's overreliance on CGI is a regular gripe, and quite rightly so. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was two hours of Paul Rudd standing in front of a big brown splodge. As we've said in this list already, can we just go back to movies feeling real again? Please?

 
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Contributor

Jacob Simmons has a great many passions, including rock music, giving acclaimed films three-and-a-half stars, watching random clips from The Simpsons on YouTube at 3am, and writing about himself in the third person.