I feel like it's hard to make 1980s film recommendations to millennials, who I'm pretty sure make up the vast majority of people who'll see this. We grew up with a lot of these films, we got recommended them by our parents and older relatives, and even a lot of the decade's bombs, like Blade Runner, The Thing, and Labyrinth, are now widely considered classics. So this top 10 list is going to be films that I rarely hear brought up or at least recommended. Not all of these are top tier stuff, but I think they're all worth watching.

And for those wondering why I'm skipping the 1970s, in my effort to finally build up my film literacy, that's a decade I still don't feel like I've explored enough to make a good list yet, but it's coming eventually.

Director John Boorman was six years old when the war began. By the time he was 8, his father had left to join the army, and the Blitz began to destroy the world he knew around him. In the 80s, he was an experienced director, and he decided to finally tell the story of what that was like in the only way that made sense to him: as a comedy. This film is an exploration of war through the eyes of someone old enough to think destruction is cool and exciting, but not quite old enough to understand its horrors, of what it's like to see a world you didn't like very much in the first place be torn apart, and what it was to live through the second world war when you weren't really fighting, but weren't separated from its consequences. A unique war film that doesn't feel like any other I've seen.

I feel like for some people, Urusei Yatsura begins and ends with the second film, Beautiful dreamer, which turns the wacky sitcom franchise into a one of the weirdest, most experimental animated films of the 1980s. But Mamoru Oshii had been directing Urusei Yatsura for quite a while before that, and his execution of that strange, wacky sitcom about the pervert guy accidentally engaged to an ill tempered alien princess gained a following for a reason. While they didn't yet give him the freedom he wanted with this film, this shows off exactly why this franchise was popular in the first place and why they'd trust Oshii enough to let him have complete free reigns with the follow up. It's not a meaningful movie, but it's a damn fun one.

A disfigured Nicholas Cage has returned from Vietnam and has been sent to try to help the recovery of one of his childhood friends, played by Matthew Modine. Modine's character was drafted, and the psychological trauma from the war has left him thinking that he's in fact a bird, or at least acting like he thinks that. At least half the move is flashbacks to their high school days, where Cage befriends the weird kid at school, who gets more and more obsessed with birds, to the point where he starts trying to be one. On one hand, I feel like large parts of this are executed like you'd expect an Oscar bait coming of age or war trauma movie to be. On the other, this is still a movie where Matthew Modine dreams of being a bird, you get a first person sequence of flying that's set over an original Peter Gabriel song, then Modine wakes up to realize that he jizzed himself. An often completely bonkers film with queer subtext. I'm not even sure if I'd call this a good movie, but it's a damn interesting one.

The apocalypse has happened. The old countries are ancient memory, and humanity lives in small isolated communities, struggling to get by. But this isn't about that. This is about football. Or at least its descendent, where two groups of a five people, most of them armed with weapons, struggle to take a dog's skull and shove it on a spike. I feel like it's basically taking the setting of a Mad Max style post-apocalypse and mashing it together with a fairly normal sports movie formula, but that odd mix makes it feel original. This feels like the kind of film that'd have a devoted cult following, but the only reason I ever even heard of it was that I got a copy with my laserdisc player and played it on a whim.

A sleezy, often comedic neo-noir film about forensic accounting that was a big hit in Japan. Nobuko Miyamoto plays a tax investigator whose job it is to investigate and uncover tax cheats. After successfully taking down a corrupt pachinko parlor, she gets entwined with the much more complex scheme a bunch of love hotels are involved with, and in the process, gets a weird sort of...respect? Rivalry? For their owner. A solid, distinctive film that's worth seeking out.