80's & Early 90's Action Movie Appreciation Thread
 

As a kid growing up in 1980's I was really grateful that I had parents that didn't care about what I watched. I lived in an area in which I didn't get cable television until 1989. So until then it was always a treat to go to the video store and rent movies over the weekend. When you had CBC as your only television channel you got bored pretty easily.

I loved the fact that any action film my dad rented when I was a kid he had no problems with me watching them. The 80's and early 90's action films I watched with my dad is always one of my best memories with him. Its only recently that I started watching some of these great (my opinion) action movies.

Some of these action movies especially the ones done by Stallone, Segal, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger are so full of cliches like you wouldn't believe, but there is certain positive nostalgia that I have with them and I feel like a lot of these movies stand the test of time because I enjoy watching them now as much as I did as a kid.

I guess the reason why I'm creating a thread like this is I just watched Aliens for the umpteenth time when I was flying back to Alberta today. It doesn't matter how many times I see this movie, I still consider it an awesome action film, and I still love watching Hudson freaking out. "Game Over, Man, Game Over"

I'm no film expert and I consider myself just an average movie goer but when I watch a movie I just want to be entertained, and its probably because of that ignorance that I like a lot of crappy movies.

So to the GFF community what do you consider some of the most entertaining action movies of the 80's and early 90's.

For me there are just so many. I'll try to narrow it down to three.

Big Trouble in Little China

I still love this movie to this day. I bought an action pack of 6 action movies together just to get this film. Its a silly action movie, but I find so entertaining. I just love these guys so much:

http://www.cool-movie-trivia.com/images/Point203.jpg

Lightning was just the coolest one out of them all. I own this film and I still watch it every once in a while.


Predator

This one action film in my opinion will always stand the test of time. I watched this movie as a kid and was scared to watch it for the first time. It wasn't even the predator itself that was scary, it was the haunting jungle music. This is the track that I love from this movie (you can hear bits and pieces of the music in this track):

YouTube Video

It always entertaining no matter how many times I watch it, and I love all the characters and the different traits of each character. I would love to do an av/sig theme for the characters of the first predator movie.


One of my favorite martial arts films from that time is:

http://www.kopictureshow.com/BestOfTheBest1989.jpg

I don't know what it is about this movie that I love so much. Even though there are four movies from this series, the first one outweighs them all. It has a cheesy story but I just love the martial arts at the very end of the film. I thought James Earl Jones was an awesome coach with his intimidating voice, and it follows the vein of all these martial arts movies that came out between 1988-1993 with other martial arts actor such Gary Daniels, Cynthia Rothrock, Jean Claude Van Damme, & many others, but this film holds a special place for being a simple enjoyable yet predictable martial arts movie. I would recommend anybody to give it a shot.

So GFF do you have any action movies from that time that you still enjoy now as you did when you were a kid.