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.

A buddy cop/renegade cop film that feels like it's written and directed by people who utterly despised both of those things. William Petersen and John Pankow are two secret service agents who obsessively go after a counterfeiting operation headed up by a not yet famous Willem Defoe. I don't want to talk about the plot much, because it really goes places, but trust me when I say that this is one of the best neo-noir films I've seen.

Does it count as style over substance if style is the substance? Walter Hill basically took all the stuff he thought was cool when he was like 10-13, biker gangs, duels for honor, cool guys getting away with shit because they're just that cool, combined it with the presentation of MTV back when that was about music videos, and made one of the most distinctive films of the decade. It takes place in "another time, another place," which feels part 1950s, part 1980s, all neon, and somehow rather cyberpunk despite the fact that there isn't a single computer in the film. The soundtrack is emphasized to the point where I've heard people call it a musical, but I feel like it's more of an extended music video with long segments between the music than anything else. Anime fans, this is where Bubblegum Crisis got a lot of its style from. It's far from the most meaningful film here, but of all the movies I've watched for the first time in the last several years, this is the one that put the biggest smile on my face. I love this dumb, wonderful film.

William Hurt plays a psychopathologist who has lost the religious faith of his youth, and when he starts running experiments with psychoactive chemicals and sensory depravation tanks, he becomes obsessed with using that to find meaning. A messy, buckwild, often deeply uncomfortable film that goes between things like showing the protagonist turn to dust and blow away over several minutes and a segment where he's literally turning into an ape in real life and terrorizing people. It really defies genre. I don't think I've seen anything else capture the feelings of losing faith like this, and the film seems just as terrified of the idea of the mystics being right as it is of them being wrong. Nothing else is quite like this.

Altered States, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are all movies I own on DVD that I've been meaning to get on Blu-ray for a while. Love Altered States and Baron Munchausen, but haven't seen Brazil in years and need to rewatch it.

As for In the Mouth of Madness, I did have an old Warner Brothers blu-ray, but when I tried to play it a few months ago, it wouldn't read! I inspected it only to find the data layer was bubbling up around the edges of the disc, rendering it a coaster. I have never seen this happen to a Blu-ray before. But it was a good excuse for me to pick up the more recent Scream Factory release that has way more special features!

The two Criterion discs (Brazil and Munchausen) and the Scream Factory disc (Mouth of Madness) both look great as to be expected from those labels. The Altered States disc, however, is a Warner Brothers joint from 2012. Hastily tossed together (it has that Stock Blu-Ray Menu, you know the one), the only "special feature" is the theatrical trailer in an explicably butchered file that reports itself being 59.94fps interlaced but is in fact 29.97fps progressive with every 4th frame doubled since the trailer was done on film, and the trailer also has two identical English AC-3 tracks, for no discernible reason. It speaks to the overall quality of the release.

Either this movie has been DNR'd to hell and back, or they took the same master they used for the old DVD and upscaled it or something, because man this movie is smoothed over like cream cheese on a fucking bagel. I've included some full-res unaltered screenshots taken from VLC. The colors and exposure are accurate, as far as I can tell, but there's almost no grain in the picture - for a mid-budget film from 1980? - and in its place is a general smeariness that makes some shots looks straight up fake. It's not terrible in every shot - sometimes you can even make out the details of the actor's faces! - but it's never good.

There was apparently a shadowpost on blu-ray dot com a few years back indicating this movie would get a Criterion release - it never amounted to anything. Man, I wish it would. I wish anyone would give this movie the treatment it truly deserves, because this disc is just pitiful.