15 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies Of The 1980s

This masterpiece of paracinema may not have arrived until the 1980s were almost over - but this could be a case of the best being saved for last, in the guilty pleasure stakes.

Directed by the gloriously-named Rowdy Herrington, Road House casts Patrick Swayze as Dalton, a uniquely intellectual/philosophical nightclub bouncer who's said to be the best in the business. He's hired to help clean things up at the Double Deuce, a down-'n'-dirty roadside joint overrun by crime and violence - but it soon transpires the chain of corruption goes way beyond the walls of the road house, and Dalton has a whole town to clean up.

Filled to bursting with ultra-macho posturing, gratuitous nudity, cartoonish fight scenes and endlessly quotable trash talk, Road House would surely have been a great bad movie under any conditions. But it's the central performance of Patrick Swayze, who seems to be taking it all far more seriously than he should, that really elevates it to the upper echelons of trashiness.

Crucially, it only gets more ridiculous as the time rolls along, until we've gone from an initially somewhat grounded, character-based drama to a movie in which monster trucks destroy car lots, and bad guys roar, "I used to f*** guys like you in prison!" before getting their throats ripped out.

Once again, the line between awesomeness and absurdity is very thin indeed, and Road House, like all the best guilty pleasure movies, is happy to stagger wildly between the two. For this, trash connoisseurs can be very grateful indeed.