Bad Movies You'll Remember If You Grew Up in the '80s

Cruising is a thriller about a cop (Al Pacino) who goes undercover to find a serial killer targeting gay men. Despite the star power, “this detective melodrama has something to offend almost everyone,” one critic wrote,

Four teenagers have a night of terror stuck in a carnival funhouse after witnessing a murder. Rotten Tomatoes reviewers didn’t have much fun with “Funhouse,” describing it as “slow, obvious, and repetitive,” “lousy,” and “badly-acted, unoriginal, and dull-looking.”

In this musical comedy a young California woman (Geena Davis) befriends three aliens who land in her swimming pool. Critics described the movie as “messy, silly, and not particularly bright.”

After surviving his encounter with a creepy mortician in the first “Phantasm,” Mike Pearson, just released from a mental institution, sets out to track him down and stop his murderous acts. Movie critic Roger Ebert wondered who all the images of corpses, graveyards, severed skulls, and rotting flesh would appeal to and why.

Michael J. Fox starred in four movies in 1985, so it’s perhaps not surprising that they weren’t all critical successes. In this one, Fox plays an ordinary high school student who discovers he is a werewolf. One critic called it, “determinedly bland and unoriginal.”

Based on the hugely successful Broadway musical of the same name, the movie “Annie” is the tale of an orphan taken in by a millionaire. Despite being directed by Hollywood titan John Huston, who was nominated for ten Oscars over his career, critics described “Annie” as “a sluggish, stagebound mess of an adaptation.”

“Swamp Thing,” based on a DC Comic series, is the story of a scientist who wants to cross plants and animals to create a new species. Unfortunately he becomes the subject of his own experiment and turns into…yes, you guessed it, the Swamp Thing. One critic said it’s short on thrills and laughs, another said it seems like a mix of bits from “The Fly,” “The Incredible Hulk,” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

Coming out a few years after “The Shining,” “Firestater” is also based on a Steven King novel.

In it a young girl (Drew Barrymore), whose parents participated in a medical experiment when they were in college, discovers she has the power to start fires by merely thinking about them.

The second installment in the Halloween series, “Halloween II” picks up where the first one left off, with serial killer Michael Myers following Laurie Strode, who survived his first attacks, to the hospital. One critic called it, “a bad sequel to a good movie.”

In “Red Dawn” the United States has been invaded by the Soviet Union and a group of teenagers band together to defend their town from the invaders. One critic noted, “its sloppy execution is unlikely to win any merit badges for marksmanship.”

A Halloween party at an abandoned funeral parlor gets out of control in “Night of the Demons.” It sounds like a good premise for a horror movie, but one critic said, “those trying to make it through the film will more than likely be bored to death.”

Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play a songwriting duo who travel to Morocco for a job and get mixed up in a CIA plot. Critic Roger Ebert called it “a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy.”

A senior prom turns into a nightmare when a masked killer targets a group of teenagers who were responsible for the death of a classmate some years earlier. Critics described it as “a generic night of mayhem.”

Based on a Marvel Comics character, “Howard the Duck” leaves his home planet of Duckworld for Earth, where he rescues a young woman from attackers, and the two become friends. One critic called it, “wildly overproduced and grievously underwritten.”

In the last entry in the Poltergeist series, the Freeling family sends their youngest child to live with her aunt and uncle in an attempt to hide her from the evil Reverend Kane but, of course, he finds her anyway. Poltergeist translates as “noisy ghost” but this sequel didn’t go bump at the box office — critics didn’t like it and audiences stayed away.