Nightman’s Least Favourite Movies Of 1982

Annie

It should go without saying at this point, but for those at the back I’ll say it again; I don’t like Musicals. Outside of your Disney animated features, there are only a handful of Musicals I can say that I truly enjoy, and a few more I can tolerate. In general, the genre does little for me. When you throw in a central child character, or several of those, it makes matters even less enjoyable for me. Still, those aren’t the main reasons why Annie is on my list. No, there’s a little story behind this one. It’s not very interesting, but read on anyway.

In Primary School, every so often we would get to watch a movie. Typically towards the end of a term. The whole class, or the whole year would be cramped into one of the non-classroom rooms, made to sit cross-legged on the floor, and we would wait with feverish anticipation for the old 22inc TV to be wheeled into the room. There was a few films we would be forced to watch over and over, but that was fine because anything was better than actual work (unless they made us watch old re-runs of Geordie Racer). On one occasion, the teacher in charge whipped out a copy of The Witches. Yes! Finally, we would get to watch something with a bit of guts, something maybe a little scary even, something with an edge – plus, I was a Roald Dahl fan and I hadn’t seen the thing yet. We watched – I loved it – that is until we reached the infamous transformation scene. Some of the girls in the room got a little, shall we say, upset by what was on screen and the VHS was immediately popped out. WTF is this, I probably exclaimed. I watched in horror as a new VHS appeared in the teacher’s hand, one adorned with an overly grinning redhead child. It was in that moment that I vowed to become a serial killer, slaughtering anyone who dared to replace a horror movie with a musical. Or something. I didn’t like the movie, get it?

Friday The 13th Part 3

I don’t have much against this film – it’s just that by this point in the series it had already run out of ideas. I’m not a huge fan of the franchise, but the selling point here is the 3D. It’s hilarious spotting all of the crafted for 3D shots and how bizarre and obvious they look in 2D. It’s an 80s slasher, so beyond the technical shenanigans it does nothing original and what it does have, it does more or less adequately.

Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch

Before anyone goes off on me – yes, I KNOW the original plan for the Halloween franchise was to have a self-contained story in each entry, and I KNOW that people complained that this one was unrelated to the others and so they centred every other entry on Myers. I don’t care that this movie doesn’t have Myers – in fact, this was the first Halloween movie I ever saw. It’s on my list because it’s shite. It’s always been shite. I enjoyed it as a kid – the whole countdown jingle, the Seasonal vibe, even some of the cast and gore. But it’s just a poorly made, poorly acted film which I can’t help but notice its flaws the older I get and the more I watch. It’s a curio to be sure, and I don’t hate it, but it’s easily the worst in the franchise even if it does get points for trying something different.

Honkytonk Man

I could have populated this entire list with musicals this year, but in truth I don’t really hate any of them. I don’t particularly about any of them. This makes the list because there isn’t a lot I dislike in 1982, only making the cut because when I see Directed By Clint Eastwood and Starring Clint Eastwood, the only things I want are guns and snarling grimaces. This would be a much more enjoyable movie for me if it was anything other than Country music.

Grease 2

It’s Grease 2. It’s like the first, but rubbish.

Let us know your least favourite movies of 1982 in the comments!

Nightman’s Updated Favourite Films Of 1982!

10: Q (US)

I love me a good monster movie, and this was one of my favourites while growing up. Anything with dinosaurs or mythological creatures or stop motion beasties – sign me up. This has the added bonus of Michael Moriarty skipping about the place, you’ve got Shaft doing his thing, and you’ve got Bill from Kill Bill killing stuff. It’s great.

9: The Wall (UK)

The Wall is one of the few albums that tells a coherent story and which you can easily visualize playing out in your own mind. My head canon version looks nothing like the official version, with its walking hammers and grotesquely, monstrous obese types. It’s a great album but a hard listen. This is a great movie, but a hard watch.

8: Poltergeist (US)

While I’m by no means the biggest Poltergeist guy on the planet, it’s such an effective little shocker that its iconic status is well merited. It has some great scares and is one of those films which always seems to hold up with every new generation.

7: Creepshow (US)

The next batch of five films on my list are all equally beloved as massive favourites, but they’re not quite on par with my top two. Creepshow takes a bunch of my favourite things – Horror, Comedy, Comics, Anthologies, Icky Stuff, Stephen King, and George Romero, and shoves it all together in a wonderful little gruesome package. Lots of little stories, self-contained and with their own casts, each with a little Grimm’s Fairy Tales style moralizing, and they’re all lovely. Watch it.

6: 48 Hours (US)

Possibly the best buddy cop comedy movie of them all – though Lethal Weapon usually takes the credit.

5: Blade Runner (US)

It’s Blade Runner – you know it, and if you don’t, you’re probably on the wrong site.

4: Rocky 3 (US)

The third Rocky, is maybe the weakest until part 5, but is still damn good.

3: First Blood (US)

Peak Stallone, all stealthy in the woods.

2: The Thing (US)

Covered in my Top Movies Of The Decade post

1: Conan The Barbarian (US)

Covered in my Top Movies Of The Decade post

Let us know your favourites in the comments!

Q The Winged Serpent – Get Rekt!

Greetings, Glancers! Today I run a more critical eye over my tenth favourite movie of the year 1982, seeking to ignore my bias and provide a fair score based on the 20 criteria I feel are most important in the creation of a film. Today’s movie is Larry Cohen’s low budget Q: The Winged Serpent, a Godzilla-esque tale of an ancient gargantuan creature looking for victims in New York City.

Sales: 3. I could be showing my bias with this one. I’m torn. It’s more realistically a 2, and some could even go with a 1. It only made back a quarter of its budget at release. But I have to think it’s made some money over the years thanks to TV replays, VHS, and DVD releases. Let’s just say I’m being very generous with a 3.

Critical Consensus: 3. I can afford to risk the 3 on this one. Contemporary critical response was average, more negatives than positives, but enough positives that it wasn’t completely dismissed. That consensus has improved over the years and it’s not seen as one of Cohen’s best movies.

Director: 3. Cohen has a lot of fun with quite a large playground – New York City. Lots of cool POV shots, Q is seen sporadically through the movie, the story flies by leaving its surprises till the end, and the satirical and topical material is not battering you in the face.

Performances: 3. When you have Michael Moriarty in a lead role, you know what you’re going to get. He’s a lot of fun, crazed, hamming it up, and alongside him you’ll find Richard Roundtree, David Carradine, and Candy Clarke enjoying themselves.

Characters: 3. Three is the ceiling here, and it only reaches there because of Moriarty’s scheming Jimmy Quinn who tries to use the monster’s appearance to make him rich. Elsewhere it’s just cops and gals and victims.

Cinematography: 3. It’s all about the sweeping shots of the NYC skyline and streets below. There’s something about the 70s to 80s shooting of US cities which is so appealing to me. Maybe it’s because I had not experienced anything like it, coming from a small Country. Maybe it’s because it’s such a clear and semi-modern vision of a time already lost. It looks better than a B movie with this plot has any right to.

Writing: 3. You know there’s going to be something underneath the story. Cohen always sets up an outlandish story so that he can talk about something else. In Q, he’s mocking the police and politics of the era, the various types of people you may find in NYC, and even B movies themselves. It’s not his most acerbic writing, he’s having fun. As such, the dialogue is light and campy.

Plot: 3. It’s a film about a giant flying monster attacking modern day New York. It’s also a Detective story. It’s also a story about a small-time crook trying to exploit a unique situation for himself. It turns out the monster is also an ancient, resurrected God being brought back by a whack job. If any of that appeals to you, this is likely a 3 score for you.

Wardrobe: 3. Nothing of note.

Editing: 3. All good.

Make up and Hair: 3. Nothing of note.

Effects: 3. It’s difficult to be objective with this one, so I’ll go right down the middle. In terms of modern-day effects, it’s crap. Even for 1982… not that great. But it’s a much lower budget film than those of the era which did look better, and the creature design is cool. Until the climax, most of the effects work is fleeting and hidden, the eggs and babies are neat, and I always enjoy stop motion. It’s a 2 or a 3, unless you’re being extremely harsh.

Art and Set: 3. Cool use of the rooftop scenes and everything within the Chrysler building set, doubling as Q’s den.

Sound And Music: 3. Lots of nice, guttural roars and beasty sounds and the soundtrack is serviceable if forgettable. Lots of creepy crawly violins – standard horror stuff.

Cultural Significance: 2. It had an impact on me and likely many other little horror nerds like me who saw the movie young. But unless those guys went on to make other movies, Q’s impact is minimal. Even in the B-movie, Monster Movie, and Larry Cohen movie world, it’s hardly the most famous, notable, or culturally significant.

Accomplishment: 3. Shooting anything in NY, or in general, is difficult – even more difficult with a small budget. But Cohen pulled together a strong cast and managed to make a cult film which a lot of people have a great degree of fondness for.

Stunts: 3. There’s plenty of action towards the end, but it’s nothing you won’t have seen before. A 2 or 3.

Originality: 3. Another 2 or 3. Giant monsters rampaging in New York isn’t original, but the monster itself and the other nuggets Cohen spices up the stories with are enough to push it into a curio bucket rather than the mainstream.

Miscellaneous: 3. If there’s nothing worth mentioning here, I go with a 3. It’s a little sneaky, but what are you gonna do?

Personal: 4. I’d be tempted to go 5 because I always have a fun time when I watch this. But there are other stop-motion and monster movies I enjoy more which I reserve a 5 for.

Total Score: 60/100

Let us know your score in the comments!

Best Art Direction: 1982

Official Nominations: Gandhi. Annie. Blade Runner. La Triviata. Victor/Victoria.

A solid list of nominations with no real surprises, as period pieces and musicals are represented as the regularly are in this category. Blade Runner is perhaps the unusual choice given it’s a Sci-Fi movie, but it was so visionary that it couldn’t be overlooked. Let’s be honest, Blade Runner is going to be my winner. Gandhi picked up the official win – an epic in every sense and one which would have been considerably less impressive had they not nailed the look.

Annie is a musical – we all know the story, the songs, the red hair. Musicals have exactly two things going for them – music and visuals. The songs are mostly irritating yet catchy in Annie, and it looks okay. It’s hardly a standout visual treat. Victor/Victoria fares better on the visual front while La Triviata puts a lot of stock in its interiors but can be dismissed as a 1983 release.

My Winner: Blade Runner

My Nominations: Blade Runner. Conan The Barbarian. The Dark Crystal. The Wall. Poltergeist. The Thing. Tron.

While it’s a foregone conclusion that Blade Runner is sweeping up here, there are a number of notable also-rans to consider. Tron was every bit as revolutionary as Blade Runner yet aged much more quickly and lacked the narrative quality to warrant anything more than a brief nod in awareness of its existence. The Dark Crystal too deserves a mention, given the amount of dedication, talent, and effort involved in creating its world. The Wall brings together all manner of chaotic art styles in its smorgasbord of debauchery, while Poltergeist takes its suburban setting and wrenches every ounce of dread out of it as any Haunted House movie has in the past.

Conan The Barbarian suffers from looking cheap in comparison to some of the other films on the list, but excels in its world-building in a time of brutality, while The Thing uses its edge of the world setting in just as claustrophobic a manner as its long corridors and shadow encrusted rooms do.

My Winner: Blade Runner

Let us know your winner in the commenrs!

Best Costume: 1982

Official Nominations: Gandhi. La Triviata. Sophie’s Choice. Tron. Victor/Victoria

Gandhi is the official winner and the obvious choice. Victor/Victoria is obvious too if you only consider the subject matter and the fact that it’s a Musical. There’s a lot of money and attention thrown at the clothing.

Sophie’s Choice is partly a historical film so ripe for a nomination here, but it feels like a proxy nomination – you’ve got all these big nominations so have this one too. La Triviata looks great on all fronts, while Tron crucially tries to do something different – in this category I tend to go with imagination over historical accuracy – what another or a future world could look like over what we know the world did look like. Tron is dated now, but manages to be iconic too.

My Winner: Tron

My Nominations: Tron. La Triviata. Blade Runner. Conan The Barbarian. The Dark Crystal. The Wrath Of Khan.

Only two make it over to my list, joining a bunch which never stood any chance of being nominated in reality. Blade Runner was likely the closest to a genuine nomination, but it makes the conscious decision to stay as close to contemporary fashion versus anything overly outlandish. It’s all in the coats, from Dekkard’s to Rachel to Pris, it’s difficult to separate the character from the outfit.

Conan The Barbarian is the best of all the sword n sandal movies of the era and as such doesn’t look as cheap as others. The costumes aren’t on par with any of the actual nominees, but again they fit the environment and the world of the film wonderfully – you can’t imagine how else the movie should look. The Wrath Of Khan goes several steps further than the original Star Trek movie on all fronts, including costume design. My controversial winner is a movie where there aren’t even any humans to drape costumes over – Dark Crystal setting a new precedent for puppetry and story-telling. I get the sense that costumes are even more important to bring life and character to puppets over people. The attention to detail seems heightened, and the fact that each creature has their own unique look is enough to be a worthy winner for me.

My Winner: The Dark Crystal

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Writing (Original) – 1982

Official Nominations: Gandhi. Diner. ET. An Office And A Gentleman. Tootsie.

Gandhi picked up the official win, the key moments of his life brought to life for mass modern consumption, through the Hollywood lens. For such a sweeping and sizeable movie, the screenplay tells the historical story of non-violence in an effective way – but I don’t think it’s something I would ever pick for the win.

Diner isn’t the first or best ‘friends hanging out’ movie, but it was one of the most respected and brought credibility to an oft overlooked type of story. While cemented in a time and place with a specific group of characters, its humour and charm has nevertheless remained universal and timeless, with plenty of witty observances on friendship. Its mixture of these set observances along with off the cuff improv in a vignette style would become a hallmark of this type of film for years to come.

ET is the icon here – phone home and all that. If we’re going purely for memorable lines, this is your winner.  An Officer And A Gentleman has notable one liners too and while wrapped up in a love story like a thousand others, it is presented in a more contemporary way, setting up a tonne of imitators in the 80s.

Finally, Tootsie is more than just a dude looking like a lady. It still doesn’t do much for me in terms of its humour, but it’s unquestionably a fast-paced and witty look at life as a struggling actor in an industry which doesn’t necessarily reward talent. I’m not sure we can really have it nominated here due to it still being based on a story from MASH creator Larry Gelbart.

My Winner: Diner

My Nominations: Diner. ET. Tootsie. 48 Hours. Veronika Voss.

I add a mere two newbies to my list. 48 Hours is the first smash buddy cop movie of the era, setting up all of the touchstones which other movies would follow while also laying the groundwork for much of the action genre of the decade and beyond – the wise-cracking hero, the fast-paced action interspersed with faster dialogue, the machismo. It wasn’t the first film to do any of this, but it was the first movie to bring it all up to the modern day 80s, while also selling Eddie Murphy as a huge star. While Lawrence Gordon is credited with the overall premise of the movie, it’s the team of Walter Hill, Steven E De Douza, Larry Gross, and Roger Spottiswoode who defined the vibe, mood, style, and the humour. It’s not surprise that some of these guys would go on to write a sequel, Streets Of Fire, Commando, The Running Man, and Die Hard.

Finally, Veronika Voss is a tragic and tragically prophetic version of Sunset Boulevard loosely based on the life of German actress Sybille Schmitz who embarks on a new relationship even as the last glints of her fading star begin to die away thanks to a cocktail of aging, neurosis, and addiction. It’s a nihilistic story which leaves no happy endings where the most notable pieces of dialogue revolve around cynicism, darkness, and defeat.

My Winner: 48 Hours

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Make-Up – 1982

Official Nominations: Quest For Fire. Gandhi

Quest For Fire is a deserving winner, but it’s a 1981 movie and doesn’t need to be here. My default winner therefore is Gandhi. 

My Winner: Gandhi.

My Nominations: Basket Case. Conan The Barbarian. Creepshow. ET. Swamp Thing. The Thing.

Does an animated, puppet freak deserve a nomination? I guess so, given some of the bigger films coming later in the 80s. Basket Case is a weird movie, but Belial becomes a character through the skill and grotesque artistry of his creation. If we nominate Basket Case, then we have to have the more impressive, expressive, bigger budget ET.

Conan The Barbarian has its fair share of creature make-up too, but more impressive is the gore work and paint work, particularly seen in the stealth attacks on Thulsa Doom towards the end of the film. My final three picks are all creature-effect heavy; Swamp Thing may be a dude in a suite, but it’s several levels more impressive than what you think of when you imagine a dude in a suit, largely down to the film’s setting and the facial make-up allowing us to see the actor’s emotion. Creepshow is a smorgasbord of Make-up treats, vignettes just as the film’s stories are vignettes, with Tom Savini leading the group of expert artists letting their imagination run wild.

But lets be honest; there can only be one winner here, with Rob Bottin and his team’s ground-breaking work on The Thing remaining awe-inspiring to this day. It’s not only a movie of Visual Effects, but of make-up – the two working hand in hand in an era when practical application meant the two art forms were more intrinsically linked.

My Winner: The Thing

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Foreign Film – 1982

Official Nominations: Begin The Beguine. Alsino And The Condor. Clean Slate. Flight Of The Eagle. Private Life.

Not the most thrilling line-up this year, although Spain picked up their first win with Begin The Beguine. It’s fine, you don’t need to ever see it, but it’s a story you’ve seen any number of times before following a man returning home to reconnect with his past. There’s a political background, there’s the added twist of the guy being sick, but it’s par for the course. Alsino And The Condor is the best of the bunch, a coming of age war story set in Nicuragua as the US becomes involved in the Sandanista/Contra conflict. Dean Stockwell stars as an American Military pilot while Alan Esquival is the titular Alsino, a boy who believes he can fly but who is increasingly horrified by the war and violence on all sides.

Clean Slate is a little longer than it needs to be, an adaptation of an American Hard-Boiled Crime novel, transposed to a small African town. It’s funny, violent, but ultimately bleak, emboldened by the great Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert. Flight Of The Eagle similarly features a familiar face in Max Von Sydow, starring in the biographical tale of three men attempting to reach the North Pole in a hot air balloon. You can guess how that went. Finally, Private Life is your typical Soviet drama – a man forced to re-evaluate his life and position after being forced to retire.

My Winner: Alsino And The Condor

My Nominations: Alsino And The Condor. Flight Of The Eagle. Gandhi. The Dark Crystal. The Wall. Passion. Tenebrae. The Year Of Living Dangerously.

I carry two over from the official list, and add a bunch of my own picks. Gandhi. It’s an English film. It won Best Picture. Of course it should be here. In fact, Great Britain makes up the bulk of my picks, with The Dark Crystal’s unique story and vision taking up a deserved spot and The Wall with its excellent music and iconic imagery grabbing another.

We hop over the Channel to France and Jean Luc Godard’s Passion, the story of a director’s struggles in creating an obscure Art film. That’s what Godard does. I’m not remotely the most qualified person to discuss Art, but I’m fairly literate when it comes to Film – while much of this was lost on me, the central themes of creation and the balancing of the love of creating versus physical human love with another person, are handled with Godard’s usual intense lens, and it’s bolstered a strong lead in Radziwilowicz and support from Isabelle Huppert. It’s pleasingly swift too.

Tenebrae is Argento’s follow up to Inferno, offering a more traditional Giallo but with plenty of his trademark artistry. It lacks the complexity of his previous couple of films, but his experiences in making those films honed his knife mystery story telling skills and could be called his best straight slasher. Of course, it’s clinical, garish, and super violent – but that’s what we expect from Argento.

Finally, Australia’s The Year Of Living Dangerously has a taste of neo-noir, a dashing of war intrigue, but is of course a taut romance. You don’t get many of those these days – it’s all Rom Coms or Tragedies. Weaver is great, Gibson is great, Hunt won the Oscar. Great film.

My Winner: The Wall

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Writing (Adapted) – 1982

Official Nominations: Missing. Das Boot. Sophie’s Choice. The Verdict. Victor/Victoria

Das Boot is out – not a 1982 movie. That leaves us with a Legal Drama written by David Mamet, a turbulent movie with flashbacks to the Holocaust, a biography dealing with the search for a missing journalist, and a Blake Edwards musical. Victor/Victoria is a remake but also a musical coming in a post Cabaret world – it’s the same vibe as Cabaret but a more light movie. What was it with cross dressing this year? It’s fine, but forgettable for someone like me who’s not into musicals.

Biographies tend to be hit and miss for me, unless I’m interested in the subject. Missing is set in the aftermath of the Pinochet Dictator led and US backed overthrow of the Socialist Chilean government, leading to countless deaths and atrocities. Costa-Gavras adapts the book, detailing the disappearance of an American Journalist, but chooses to focus on the relationship between the journalist’s father and wife as they come from political opposites. It’s good, but doesn’t go deep enough in its pointing of fingers.

You can’t go wrong with David Mamet – he raises the quality of whatever he’s involved in, and rather than being a typical dull courtroom drama, we get the personal touches and sparkling one-liners regarding an alcoholic lawyer who develops a personal relationship with a malpractice suite involving the Catholic Church – his closing speech of the case is among the best you’ll hear in this sort of film.

Finally, Sophie’s Choice is an unflinching look at the long-lasting damage of the Holocaust on a woman who managed to survive and continue her life in the US. Everyone knows ‘that moment’, but the film is a series of such moments both in flashback and present day form which suggest that no amount of time or distance can free you from the past’s most decisive moments.

My Winner: The Verdict

My Nominations: The Verdict. Conan The Barbarian. The Thing. Blade Runner. Creepshow. Fast Times At Ridgemont High. The Wall.

A world away from the serious tone of the Official Nominations, my unlikely picks are a lot more fun. Along with ET, Fast Times is one of the movies which defined what the 80s was, early in the decade. Adapted from Cameron Crowe’s book in which he famously pretended to be a high school student (he was 22) and went back to school for a year to detail the lives of the kids he saw everyday. It’s a loose coming of age movie which deals with the always/never changing problems of teens as they cross into adulthood, given that LA gloss by Amy Heckerling.

The Thing is more of an adaptation of Who Goes There? than it is of the previous movie – albeit one which John Carpenter was a massive fan of. It doubles down on the paranoia of the story, sharing just enough of the characters thoughts that we learn about them but never enough to trust them – of course it helps that there’s a few great one-liners in there. Blade Runner features some of the most famous dialogue of the 80s and does arguably the best adaptation of any Philip K Dick story while The Wall is a visual extension of both the album and live show of the same name, adding more transparent detail.

Creepshow… probably doesn’t qualify as a true adaptation, but it still features stories written for another medium rewritten for the screen. Good enough for me. The stories come thick and fast, they get straight to the pulpy point from first frame and waste no time with periphery gubbins – you have the story, the characters, then the comeuppance. In a similar vein is my winner – not only an adaptation of the character and short stories of Conan by Robert E Howard, but also a story of individual strength in overcoming as written by Oliver Stone and John Milius, and again featuring some of the best cinematic one-liners and soliloquies of the decade.

My Winner: Conan The Barbarian

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Best Cast – 1982

My Nominations: Creepshow. Blade Runner. Diner. ET. Evil Under The Sun. Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Gandhi. The Thing. The Verdict. Conan The Barbarian.

You know me; I love a good ensemble movie and I love a good ‘small team against the odds/Dirty Dozen type movie. We have both of those this year – Fast Times perhaps being one of the first and finest examples of an up and coming ensemble forming a formless slice of life coming of age format – Judge Reinhold, Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Nic Cage, Forest Whitaker, Brian Backer, Anthony Edwards, Eric Stoltz, Amanda Wyss, Robert Romanus, Ray Walston, and Vincent Schiavelli all pop up.

Diner follows a similar group of youngsters in another part of the US, a group a few years out of school but also on the verge of a shift in their lives. Steve Guttenberg, Micky Rourke, Paul Reiser, Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, Ellen Barkin, and Tim Daly star. Looking back to a more established ensemble is Evil Under The Sun, an Agatha Christie tale featuring Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Sylvia Miles, James Mason, Jane Birkin, Colin Blakely, Roddy McDowell, and Diana Rigg.

With a massive cast, albeit perhaps featuring less well known stars, is Gandhi with Ben Kingsley, Edward Fox, Candice Bergen, John Mills, John Gielgud, Martin Sheen, Trevor Howard, Rohini Hattangadi, Roshan Seth, Nigel Hawthorne, Daniel Day Lewis, Pradeep Kumar, Ian Bannen, Amrish Puri, Richard Griffiths etc etc.

It’s not all large casts though, with The Verdict relying mainly on Paul Newman, James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, and Milo O’Shea, while ET introduces Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas alongside Dee Wallace and Peter Coyote. Blade Runner features some of the most iconic casting of the year – Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, and Edward James Olmos. Creepshow is an anthology with little to no crossover between stories – those stories featuring Ted Danson, Stephen King, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Harris, Jon Lormer, Viveca Lindfors, Leslie Nielsen, Gaylen Ross, Hal Holbrook, and EG Marshall.

Finally, The Thing sees Kurt Russell lead an increasingly threatened and paranoid team of snow boys including Wilford Brimley, Keith David, TK Carter, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, Thomas G Waites, Joe Polis, Peter Maloney, David Clennon, Richard Dysart, and Charles Hallahan. It’s one of the greatest single location movies ever and it wouldn’t be that way if the cast and characters were not all likeable and relatable.

My Winner: The Thing

Let us know your winner in the comments!