Struggling to work out what decade the film you’re watching is from? If it fulfils the criteria on this list, then it’s probably from the 80s…
Sometimes you’ll get home, turn on the television, and start watching a film halfway through. But even if you don’t know the title, director, or any of the actors involved, there are several very easy ways to tell at a glance whether the movie in question is from the 80s or not. So with this in mind, here’s our handy list of ten tell-tale signs...
Plasma effects
If you wanted to make your audience believe that your movie’s protagonist was travelling back in time, encountering something supernatural or being reduced in size by a miniaturisation ray, there was one special effect to cover any eventuality. Perhaps mimicking those strange plasma globe things that became a popular novelty in the 80s, the animated lightning effect was among the most ubiquitous of the decade, appearing in almost every sci-fi, fantasy and horror movie you could care to name.
Achieved by compositing hand-drawn cels over live-action, variations on this lightning or plasma effect can be traced back to Forbidden Planet’s remarkable Id Monster (animated by Disney’s Joshua Meador), but brought firmly back into vogue by ILM’s lightsaber effects work on the Star Wars movies.
Thereafter, the composite lightning effect appeared everywhere, from electricity bolts hitting the DeLorean in Back To The Future, energy-sucking space vampires in Lifeforce, the sparks on an injured extraterrestrial bounty hunter in Predator, flying missiles on a computer screen in Wargames, and Christopher Lambert receiving the Prize in Highlander (which, now I think about it, wasn’t much of a prize at all).
Although similar effects have been used in the movies since, never have they been quite so prominent as they were in the 80s - and to be fair, they still look really cool.
Montage with upbeat music
An 80s movie just wouldn’t be the same without a montage. Whether it’s Danny LaRusso awaiting his big fight in The Karate Kid (cut to Joe Esposito’s You’re The Best Around), the teenagers of Ferris Bueller exploring a Chicago art museum (to The Smiths), or Balboa training in the Rocky movies (Rocky IV was almost exclusively made up from musical montages), these sequences are quintessentially 80s.
Musical montage sequences weren’t merely the preserve of teen comedies and lowest-common-denominator action flicks, either - even the classic Scarface had one, which saw ruthless anti-hero Tony Montana’s rapid rise to the top of the pharmaceutical distribution profession condensed into three minutes of Giorgio Moroder’s hideous Push It To The Limit. You don’t see stuff like this in gangster movies these days:
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