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John Hughes's first “adult” comedy (without teenagers) is outwardly full of goofy slapstick humour, but inside it can be surprisingly sensitive and moving for even the most hardened cynics. When grumpy morose Neal (Steve Martin) tries to get home to Chicago from New York for Thanksgiving, he's stuck with pushy, carefree Del (John Candy), whose zest for life drives him crazy. What's more, their journey together is a fierce demonstration of Murphy's Law in action. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Hughes throws sticks at both characters' feet in an ingeniously relentless and unpredictable manner, resulting in a string of comically absurd yet believable situations. More important than the humour are the characters, who underneath all the wacky antics undergo significant development and with whom we can easily sympathise. This is something Hughes has always been good at, and something that doesn't appear much in comedies today (with a few exceptions).

Another variation on The Most Dangerous Game, this time set in a closed shopping mall where a psychopathic cop chases naughty teenagers. But don't expect your typical slasher flick. The main villain doesn't behave like a typical slasher killer. Instead of systematically slaughtering one character after another, he spends most of the time just running around the mall, screaming madly and trashing everything around him, occasionally even knocking someone out. The chaotic plot corresponds quite well with the film's wild video clip aesthetic, which, from the moment the teenagers break into the mall, feels like a circus parade of 80s cinematography trends set by MTV and Blade Runner. But the explosive, colourful light show with disorientating editing unfortunately leaves no room for suspense or horror. An interesting watch in its own way, but purely for hardcore seekers of unknown “ozploitations”. For Stephen Hopkins, however, it was a ticket to Hollywood.

A predictable monster horror movie that, despite being full of horror clichés, so delightfully subverts the way horror movies treat pets. So that scene in which one of the characters leaves his poodle alone in a house with the monster hiding in the cellar will stick in your mind. For a few minutes, the dog becomes the main character we are really worried about, because we know that by all genre conventions he has it all figured out. But to our surprise, he repeatedly manages to narrowly escape death. We don't see the monster most of the time, which is a good thing because he looks ridiculous. But as long as he stays out of the picture, instead of letting the viewer's imagination work (as Jaws does so well), the film just feeds us cheap subjective shots from the monster's point of view, in which the cameraman “throws himself” at the actors. And that's pretty boring. What a shame the poodle didn't get more space.

On the one hand, a lot of B-movies blatantly rip off their A-list counterparts, but on the other hand, they are sometimes an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Trancers is a shining example of this. On the surface, it may copy Blade Runner (a hard-boiled whodunit that starts in a neo-noir future) and Terminator (a villain travels back in time to the 1980s to kill the ancestors of his adversaries), but inside it all, it manages to create its own world and infuse it with a heavy dose of previously untested ideas. For example, you travel back in time by being transported into the body of your ancestor after being injected with a drug. The main villain attacks using hypnotized people. And the action scenes are slowed down by special time-manipulating clocks. Sure, we've seen all of this in later A-grade movies, but I wonder where they got it from? The plot overall doesn't make much sense, and the main draw is the aforementioned small ideas that the film plays with in a very funny way. For example, when the police chief from the future goes to the past, he is transported into the body of an eight-year-old girl in pajamas, who then comes to shake the main character down at night with a Dirty Harry look on her face. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that are obviously not meant to be funny and are unintentionally so. But thanks to a great central cast (Tim Thomerson is hard-boiled to the bone and the chemistry between him and the likeable Helen Hunt works as it should), it's a fine entertainment that, at a modest 76 minutes, passes by perhaps a little too quickly.

A minimalist spaghetti western that doesn't actually feel much like a spaghetti western. It was also directed by a Frenchman, Robert Hossein, who is known to us as Count Peyrac from Angélique, whose actress appears alongside him. This time, however, it won't be a romance, but a heavy downer in which not much is said and where you will have to read most of the plot (whether the characters' shared past or important plot twists) from the actors' faces and their gestures. It's an interesting experiment that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Unfortunately, the characters aren't interesting enough to draw you in with their cold tale of revenge in which the heroes don't behave much better than the villains.

In this mishmash of 50s monster horror and 80s teen comedies, Fred Dekker makes it very clear from start to finish how big a fan of B-grade sci-fi horror he is. But rather than playing more with genre conventions, he just piles one film reference on top of another, and sometimes it's too much (every other character here is named after a horror director, etc.). For fans of horror films of the time, though, it's a nice throwback.

When in today's flood of zombie movies someone can still come up with something fresh, it's very gratifying. All you have to do is combine a zombie film with the wordless post-apocalyptic subgenre of last man on earth, lock the protagonist in an apartment building and watch the zombie apocalypse purely from his limited perspective, through a window. And as is the way with last men on earth, they gradually get bored. So the hero is fighting boredom and loneliness most of the time rather than zombies (at one point he even tries to befriend his zombie neighbor). While there are moments when the boredom gets to be too much and we start to get a little bored with him, most of the time we enjoy the refreshingly minimalist concept full of off-the-wall ideas that we don't normally see in zombie movies. The zombies themselves are a little different here than how we know them. They don't make any sounds. They are completely silent, which is not only chilling, but also interestingly corresponds with the fact that this is actually a silent film for the most part.

Back when comic book team-ups weren't "in" on screen, an android (called a mandroid in the movie), a sexy engineer, her robotic pet, a treasure hunter and a ninja team up to stop a mad scientist who wants to transform into a cyborg and take over ancient Rome. But first they must battle lake pirates, deranged rednecks and Neanderthals. Eliminators are far from The Avengers in their disparate make-up and are more reminiscent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And if The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are The Avengers of Victorian England, Eliminators are the Avengers of the 1980s VHS era. This B-movie masterpiece from producer Charles Band is a perfect encyclopedia of the clichés of the time and an entertaining mashup of all sorts of adventure and science fiction subgenres that, in its overwroughtness, beats even The Legend of the Golden Pearl. The charmingly nonsensical way in which Eliminators combines a huge number of then-popular action movies is reminiscent of the sight of a child playing with action figures collected from various shelves and inventing the most unlikely situations for them. At the same time, there's no shortage of occasional self-ironic adult commentary (“This is all some kind of weird-ass science fiction thing, right?”). The epitome of all this is the central mandroid (a sort of precursor to Robocop and Daniel Radcliffe from Swiss Army Man), who is made up of all sorts of interchangeable parts and tools that can turn itself into, for example, a tank or a jet ski. Come to think of it, the Eliminators would make damn good action figures.

Nostalgia for the 80s can be felt in any film today, but the way The Strangers: Prey at Night approaches it is not something you see right away. After the mandatory routine exposition, and after exhausting all possible slasher clichés, the film unexpectedly morphs into a wonderfully abstract, visually bloated almost-musical that ironically combines 80s pop with violent scenes. What's more, the whole thing begins to feel as if the director threw away the script in the course of filming and decided to remake John Carpenter's Christine instead of making a sequel to The Strangers. From the car radio of a pickup truck of a trio of masked assassins, driving slowly inside a deserted caravan park, there is a constant 80s pop that sends shivers down your spine. The story may be set in the present day, but the titular psychopaths seem to have styled themselves as 80's slasher killers who can't do without 80's tunes even when they get out of the car. Highlights of the film include a fight scene in a neon-lit swimming pool, with “Total Eclipse of the Heart” playing, or the heroine being chased by a burning car to the accompaniment of “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All”.

A bizarre piece from the “Australian Hitchcock” Richard Franklin, where you don't know whether to be scared or laugh. The gradual transformation of a cute and playful chimpanzee into a murderous psychopath is strange indeed. His pyromaniacal appetites start innocently enough (smoking cigars and heating phones in the microwave) and culminate in setting the whole house on fire. The primate's initially innocent-looking glances then start to look quite chilling in the context of the upcoming action, for example when he's stalking a showering Elisabeth Shue, but at other times you can't shake the impression that he's still the same cute and playful chimpanzee, hilariously running around the house (sorry, it's actually an orangutan dyed black). Also Jerry Goldsmith's oddly chosen music, like something from a circus attraction, makes it rather grotesque in places. In any case, the finale is visually executed to perfection. But it's not up to Franklin's Roadgames.