15 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies Of The 1980s

It's often hard to believe that Sylvester Stallone first came to prominence as an Oscar-nominated actor and writer for 1976's Rocky, as within a decade of that he was synonymous with movies like... this.

One year after he struck box office gold twice with Rocky IV and Rambo: First Blood Part II (both tremendous guilty pleasures in their own right), Stallone teamed up with producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon - yes, them again - for this utterly madcap, yet totally straight-faced blend of hard-boiled cop thriller and slasher movie.

Stallone is Lt. Cobretti, a match-chewing, mirror shades-clad BAMF who takes the cases no one else will, generally solving them with lethal force. To this end, he's assigned to protect a model (the one-time Mrs Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen) who's being hunted by a sinister secret society on a killing spree.

Though based on Paula Gosling's novel Fair Game (itself re-adapted for the screen in 1995, with William Baldwin and Cindy Crawford), Stallone's script reportedly brings over a lot of his ideas from when he was briefly attached to star in Beverly Hills Cop, which he envisioned as something much darker and nastier than the Eddie Murphy movie wound up being.

In common with so much great trash, Cobra is played almost entirely deadpan, with seemingly sincere attempts made to comment on the American justice system; unnervingly, the film seems to endorse an overtly fascistic approach to law enforcement.

But that's only troubling if you take Cobra seriously, which is almost impossible to do once you've seen Stallone's gun with a cobra painted on the grip, and/or his vintage muscle car with the licence plate 'AWSOM 50,' and/or him eating pizza whilst wearing gloves and cutting the crust off with scissors.