After exploding into the public consciousness playing the virtually indestructible cyborg assassin in James Cameron's breakout 1984 film "The Terminator" Arnold Schwarzenegger retreated to his comfort zone, playing the hero in such 80s yawners as "Red Sonja" and "Raw Deal". But just when it seemed safe to deposit him squarely into the 'one hit wonder' category along came 1987's "Predator".

It has to be noted that while all male-buddy action flicks have their share of gay undertones, Predator may be the most overtly gay action movie ever made (not that there's anything wrong with that). Still, if you can look past its bulging homoerotic musculature (if you want or need to look past it) and concentrate solely on the window dressing the film can be enjoyed as a taut, intense sci-fi thriller with an unlikely and truly menacing baddie who's cleverly introduced and gradually takes over the narrative, sending the film in an unexpected and gratifying direction.

If you blink you'll miss the alien setup at the start of the picture where we're given about 10 seconds of outer space shots as a craft of some sort enters earth's atmosphere. (It might be better if you do miss it as it serves only to undermine the suspense later on.) After that we're introduced to Ahnuld's character "Dutch" along with his crew of ultimate bad-asses and after the Gov and Carl Weathers finish admiring each others sweaty biceps we're told that Dutch and Co are being sent on a mission to the central American jungles to extract a diplomat who's been captured by rebels. Of course there is no diplomat and they're actually there to clean up the mess created by the failure of an earlier black ops team, but that's inconsequential because as Dutch's team attempt to extricate themselves from the unpleasantness around them they begin to realize that a bunch of peasants with guns are the least of their problems.

Because a movie with only hunky guys might seem a bit too gay a female character is introduced in the very agreeable (though not to our heroes of course) form of Elpidia Carrillo. She's the only one without a gun (literally, physically and symbolically) and is therefore of no interest to our alien either. Her role is to give young male viewers who might become a bit squeamish (or aroused) by seeing Sonny Landham's character "Billy" sucking on a milk-filled vine something to hang their heterosexual identities on and she fulfills that role admirably.

As they make their way "to the chopper" the boys are picked off one at a time by their phantom pursuer with each incident serving to also reveal a few more details about our bad guy. As the film moves squarely from "Rambo" into "Alien" territory the hackneyed dialogue and jokes about women's anatomy mercifully come to an end and what we're left with is a pretty well done cat and mouse in the jungle picture.

Since Predator's stage is a real jungle it doesn't suffer from being dated by its technological accoutrement. The special effects are limited to Stan Winston's rasta-cyborg and they stand up well, even when viewed today. The supporting cast all do their jobs of playing victims in waiting effectively and John Alpine's cinematography creates a sense of claustrophobic isolation and dread that separate it from your standard guy-flick.

At the end of the reel Predator is a fun, funny, well constructed sci-fi action flick that introduces us to one of the most compelling movie creatures of the past quarter century. Not bad for what could easily have been just another B-movie about sweaty guys admiring each others guns.

"This is Spinal Tap" pretty much invented the modern mockumentary. Released in 1984 it did almost no business at the box office but once it made its way to the small screen it took on a life of its own and has since become recognized as a comedy classic.

Nigel (Christopher Guest), Derek (Harry Shearer) and David (Michael McKean) are a ragamuffin British power trio on the downside of a long music career. (They're a trio because their drummers all tend to die of mysterious circumstances soon after joining the band.) They started life as a folk group in the 60s before going through various marketing makeovers and finally emerging as hard rockers.

Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner, who also directs) is a documentary film maker who has decided to chronicle Spinal Tap's return to touring after a six year absence. Because they're no longer at the top of their game (or the charts) this tour is notable for the rock star accoutrement that isn't there. None of the band members wants to believe they're nobody now and many of the biggest laughs are generated by juxtaposing their desperate belief in their own rock stardom with manifestations of their irrelevance.

These guys are emblematic of what can happen to ordinary blokes in a celebrity obsessed world. Guys with little or no book learnin' can wind up stars if they're in the right place at the right time and that's one of the great egalitarian aspects of modern culture. Unfortunately a lot of people who get caught up in the whirlwind make the mistake of believing their own press and when the spotlight shifts to the next big thing are left flailing about in life unable to understand what happened. When you're riding the crest of the wave its tough to imagine that there will ever be a time when the wave has crashed ashore and left you high and dry. Such is the case with Spinal Tap.

But the film makers never use their movie as a platform from which to launch mean-spirited critiques of their subjects. It's not about tearing them down because they didn't do anything to be torn down for. They simply took advantage of what the world they were born into offered them, even if they maybe didn't quite understand what they were getting into. Its the system that nurtured them that takes the biggest digs in This is Spinal Tap. From the incompetent manager to the ineffective publicist to prop designers to roadies to record company executives This is Spinal Tap forces each to stand bound in front of the bands Marshall amps and turns the volume up to 11.

The rock star documentary itself comes under the same scrutiny. There's a hilarious bit where the band pay a visit to Elvis' gravesite for the mandatory "homage to those who blazed the trail" scene and are at a complete loss for what to do. They wind up forcing out a pitiful 3-part harmony version of "Heartbreak Hotel" before David finally gives into the futility of the moment and declares "Too much f**king perspective!"

He's absolutely right of course even if he doesn't know it and that's what makes the scene so hilarious. This is Spinal Tap takes on every rockumentary from "Don't Look Back" to "Truth or Dare" and leaves no stone unturned in rooting out the innate absurdity of it all. And isn't that the job of comedy? To gently shed light on those aspects of life that we'd rather not discuss because of what they say about us? Of course it is, and This is Spinal Tap does that job incredibly well. In the end, (after you stop laughing), you're left wondering more about yourself and why you ever bought into the PR surrounding this or that band then you are about the band members you helped make millionaires. That's no small accomplishment for a low budget comedy in any day and age.

Here's a few of my favorite Spinal Tap quotes.

David: "Well, I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation."

Nigel: "I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really. It's like a Mach piece, really. It's sort of..."
Marty DiBergi: What do you call this?
Nigel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump".

Derek: "... people should be envying us, you know."
David: "I envy us."

"As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll."

Dune seems to be one of the most inexplicable films ever made. Visionary, frustrating, inspiring, obtuse, thrilling and confusing are just some of the words that have been bandied about to describe David Lynch's cinematic version of Frank Herbert's tale. Lynch leads us down a rabbit hole into a future that might be the future or might be the past (since earth doesn't figure into the story in any capacity why would anyone assume its the year 10,191 relative to our planet?) or might be a dream, and certainly most of the film plays like a dream; narratively disjointed, nearly monochromatic in many places and blurry around the edges. Indeed, in spots it seems to be making itself up as it goes along as would a dream.

Some would (and have) said that these characteristics are a sign of a film maker who's lost touch with the material, maybe even the entire project. But this is David Lynch we're talking about here. If you hire David Lynch and expect to get George Lucas you haven't done your due diligence. Lynch wanted a world apart. Unrecognizable in some respects, nonsensical to a degree yet still 'real' enough to connect on a visceral, emotional level. He reaches back into art history's darkest, most evocative corners for inspiration; Hieronymus Bosch can be seen in the Freemen massing at the imperial gates late in the film, the floating grotesquerie that is the Baron Harkonnen has Francis Bacon oozing from his pustuals. The art direction in and of itself is worth the price of admission. The medieval-modern of the emperor's palace, the carved-from-solid-mahogany-and-covered-in-27-coats-of-laquer look of the Atreides home on Caladan; nothing is done half-way or overlooked for its symbolic potential. Case in point, the shoreline on Caladan is not some tranquil white sand paradise but a roiling, crashing, dimly lit tumult echoing the feelings of Paul and his family as they prepare to walk into the lions den of Arrakis. The Guild Navigator is the baby from Lynch's Eraserhead all grown up. The great hall where Paul declares "Long live the fighters!" is more than a little reminiscent of H.R. Giger's 'shafts' drawings of the 60s which were, interestingly, a record of one of his recurring nightmares. (Giger himself was hired on to help with earlier, unsuccessful attempts to bring the story to the screen and echoes of his hand are faintly felt at various points throughout the film.) Dune is also replete with many of Lynch's recurring themes: appearance vs reality, grinding, steam-belching machinery, mutation either genetic or man-made, the complex and powerful nature of sexuality. Even his semi-infatuation with the post wars years can be seen in the bulbous spacecraft that bring the members of House Harkonnen to Arrakis as well as the Guild Navigator's "tub"; both of which look like the mutant spawn of a 1950s Buick.

Why all this emphasis on the look of the film over the script/storyline? Because in Lynch's reading Paul's journey is not a political one so much as it is an emotional one. Because of this the emotional landscape Lynch creates with his imagery is crucial to telling the story as he sees it. More important, in fact, than fleshing out the back-stories of particular characters or wallowing in hours of exposition in an effort to clarify details of the myriad political intrigues. As a result Paul's life as depicted here is, like ours, nothing if not a series of vaguely connected occurrences that sometimes make sense and often don't and its how he deals with the stew of emotions engendered by these occurrences that will determine what position he rises or falls to within his own milieu. Were he not buttressed by vague yet powerful feelings of a fate largely beyond his control he'd crumble at the task before him. Instead he assembles himself like a grand jigsaw puzzle out of the disparate elements of his emotional life and only when he finally feels his external reality match up with his internal dialogue is he able to proclaim "Father! The sleeper has awakened!" and cast his fears aside. His apotheosis is not the result of outmaneuvering his opponent on the battlefield, but instead of creating an emotional harmony between his internal and external lives.

So focusing on where Lynch may have failed to literally illustrate Herbert's words is, to me, a waste of time. If literal is what you want rent the scifi channel's version from 2000. I take it as a given that Lynch has discarded much of the book's literal narrative in favor of emotional narrative and appreciate the lengths he's gone to to recreate with images Paul's emotional saga. Anyone uneasy with this aesthetic choice will probably be unhappy with the resultant film, feeling he's betrayed Herbert. But film is its own medium with its own possibilities and limitations and Lynch has made a career out of exploring its possibilities. Dune is no exception.

Dune is not a film that requires the viewer to suspend their disbelief. On the contrary Lynch insists that you believe that there are truths which transcend reality lurking in the subconscious of every man and that only a fool ignores them. When the final credits on his expansive, beautiful, unsettling epic began to roll I didn't feel as though I'd reached the end of a movie, I felt like I was waking up.

Roland Joffe's 1984 film was one of those productions that come along every once in a while and are labeled "important" almost from the time they're greenlit. Few actually live up to that title but "The Killing Fields" is one. I've tried for a long time to put my finger on why it works and the best I can come up with is that it goes where no one (in Hollywood) had dared to go before: into the lives of the locals. It's as though "Lawrence of Arabia" didn't follow Lawrence back to Cairo after the fall of Aquaba but instead stayed behind to tell the tale of the Arabs as they struggled to find common cause and inspiration in a victory few of them actually cared about at the time. This is not a knock on Lawrence of Arabia by any stretch. It remains one of the great motion pictures ever made. It is simply to try and make the point that by staying behind after all the white guys left The Killing Fields strays into territory that makes it more than a simple night at the movies. The real story of the tragedy that was Cambodia in the 70s and 80s is not one of drunken journalist from the US and Europe escaping by the hair of their chinny-chin-chins. It's a tale of a revolution gone horribly wrong and the imposition of a modern day reign of terror that made the original French version seem like a walk in the park. This is not a story that can be told by looking through the eyes of Sidney Schanberg or any of the other journalists who were there for the fall but absent for the disintegration.

For the Cambodian people there would be no one coming over the hill to save them for years, (until Vietnam invaded and sent the Khmer rats scurrying back into the jungle). They were on their own against some of the worst humankind has to offer and in that disintegrated world Dith Pran (played brilliantly by Dr Haing S. Ngor), bereft of his western sponsors, is as powerless as any other Cambodian citizen to stop the hemorrhaging. He must forage for compassion, put out the lightest of feelers for spiritual connection and stay strong while those around him do their utmost to tear him down. The Khmer Rouge said they were starting over again with the year 0, and it only seems fitting. What other number would suffice to describe a world shorn of cultural touchstones and family ties, where history and education were dirty words, countless numbers were worked to death and heavily armed children were encouraged to pass snap judgements on people they didn't know. This was nihilism on an institutional level not seen since the Holocaust and Joffe bravely attempts to confront it by following Pran through a largely wordless hell.

It is a story that can only be told effectively through the use of the camera, where minute gestures or facial expressions can spell the difference between life and death, and Joffe seems to instinctively understand this. He doesn't pad out Pran's story with clumsy exposition. The dread is in the silence. Hearing is used only to ingest propaganda or to listen for predators. Speaking is prohibited. If you don't know how to observe your chances of survival are slim at best. So, like the people he's chronicling Joffe observes and we observe along with him and them and in the end we find that words come hard when trying to explain what happened and, more importantly, why and how. Only that it did and that if people hadn't kept their eyes open to the horror unfolding around them and remembered what they saw there's a chance no one on the outside would have ever known what really occurred.

Maybe that's the lesson of The Killing Fields: don't look away. Don't ever look away.

James Cameron was sick. He was lying in his hotel bed in Rome during the filming of Piranha II when he had a fever induced nightmare about a powerful humanoid robot skeleton emerging ominously from the detritus of an enormous explosion. He got up and sketched out what he'd imagined and went back to sleep. Later, after he'd been dropped from Piranha II and was back in California he wrote out the draft of a story based on his fever dream image and "The Terminator" was born. Raw, crisp and with a kinetic energy Cameron would perfect several years later with "Aliens" The Terminator starts with a bang and doesn't let up.

The machine overlords of the year 2029 are tired of fighting the pesky human resistance and come up with a plan to circumvent history. They send a human looking robotic killing machine (a terminator) back through time to kill the mother of the resistance leader; thereby preventing his birth and saving them a huge hassle. Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator arrives in the Los Angeles of 1984 and quickly gets to work, murdering a couple of SoCal punks for their clothes (if you blink you'll miss a young Bill Paxton in this scene) and discovering via the phone book all the women in LA who share the name of his target: Sarah Conner. Shortly afterward Michael Biehn's Reese arrives via the same time displacement equipment the terminator used. His mission: to prevent the terminator from killing Sarah Conner. Given that, in Reese's own words, the terminator "can't be bargained with... can't be reasoned with... doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear (and) absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!" and is virtually indestructible on top of all that it's fair to say that Reese has his work cut out for him.

The Terminator cuts a swath of destruction across LA in his quest to find and kill his target with Reese and Sarah Conner barely a step ahead of him (Cameron's use of chase scenes as platforms for exposition makes it seem as though the film simply never takes a breath). Sarah's initial reluctance to believe anything Reese is telling her gets blown away when the terminator tracks her down to a police station, drives a car through the front doors (after Ahnuld utters what was to become his signature line; "I'll be back") and proceeds to spray wall to wall death and destruction upon the ineffective cops. After narrowly escaping Reese and Sarah find one night of peace together during which time John is conceived but they're soon tracked down again and the chase resumes. After fleeing back toward the city the terminator chases them down and there's the climactic encounter in a factory.

In my opinion the plot wasn't what made this work so successful as a motion picture, though it is a strong script. So what was? Well, to begin with the film looks cool. Cameron creates a Los Angeles that could be the precursor to the LA in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", but more fundamental to the films success is the blissful lack of post-modern irony. Reese is not an anti-hero, he's an old-fashioned hero ready to give his life for the greater good. Schwarznegger's terminator has absolutely no redeeming value or sympathy-evoking root causes for his behavior. He wasn't a good kid who's gone bad. He's death on two feet. He is the void. His job is to kill you, period. In a world increasingly overrun by moral relativity Cameron's simple good vs evil paradigm was refreshing and easy for average movie goers to get their head around. There were no inconvenient pangs of guilt clanging around in the subconscious mitigating your enjoyment of seeing the villian get his comeuppance.

Casting Schwarznegger against type was also a stroke of genius. Ahnuld's agent was against him taking the role, concerned it would ruin his public image, but Cameron knew better. He knew that Schwarznegger's steely tuetonic presence was perfect for the terminator and he was right. Given virtually no lines to screw up Ahnuld was able to make the role his own and his career took off like a rocket after this film. Michael Beihn, Lance Henricksen, Earl Boen and Paul Winfield deliver strong supporting performances with the only weak link in the entire production chain being the in over her head Linda Hamilton. The woman simply can't act. There isn't a moment in the entire film that I believe she is Sarah Conner. When compared to Sigourney Weaver's iconic performance in Cameron's 1986 masterpiece "Aliens" Hamilton's performance here is, frankly, embarrassing (as was her work in T2). That said, the special effects were also first rate for their day and stand as a testament to how well, even at this early point in his career, Cameron understood the craft of film making.

Put all those elements together: compelling concept, easy to understand good vs bad moral structure, career making performances, strong script, deft direction and good special effects and you have a movie worth spending a couple of hours with. The Terminator was not in and of itself a game changer, but it certainly helped push contemporary cinema of the time toward the 21st century.

The Terminator 1984 - trailer

Tim Burton's Batman is a movie I wish I had room for on my Top 10 list of best movies of the 80s. But alas you can't include everything. Still, it deserves a post of its own because it reinvented the superhero genre and was in parts breathtaking to behold.

The casting of Michael Keaton as Batman/Bruce Wayne caused an uproar among the fanboys with Warner Brothers reportedly receiving as many as 50,000 letters of protest. But Burton and producer Jon Peters both felt that Keaton possessed the right qualities to be able to portray the tortured billionaire. Jack Nicholson was brought on to lend heavyweight star appeal to the project but he didn't come cheap. He had a very complicated contract that included his receiving a percentage of the gross. He is said to have earned upwards of $50 million for his three months of work.

The film was shot primarily at Pinewood Studios in England with some scenes utilizing sets that were still intact from the shooting of James Cameron's "Aliens" several years earlier. Anton Furst was hired to design the production and used both Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil" and Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" as inspiration. He's quoted as saying he wanted Gothan City to look like "...what we imagined New York City might have become without a planning commission."

Despite the reservations of die-hard Batman loyalists and luckwarm reviews from a lot of mainstream critics the film became an enormous box office smash earing $251 million during its domestic run ($495 million adjusted for inflation). It created the dark template that most ensuing superhero movies have used and spawned three sequels of varying quality before the franchise went into hiatus and re-emerged under the guidance of Christopher Nolan in 2005.

For my money Burton's Batman can stand its ground against any subsequent superhero movie (including The Dark Knight) and deserves to be recognized for its groundbreaking tone and stunning design.