The Ten Most Polarizing Films of the 1980s
The 1980s gave us big hair, bigger shoulder pads, Rubik's Cubes, MTV, the birth of the VCR, and Reaganomics — plus, of course, movies that people are still fighting about decades later. Whether you thought they were totally tubular or a total bust, the 1980s served up plenty of films that nobody could just shrug their way past.
According to the Criticker Community, these are the ten most polarizing films of the 1980s. Did you think these were gnarly? Or where they totally bogus, like gag me with a spoon?
How was this calculated?
For every film with at a certain number of ratings, we calculate the percentage of people who loved it (percentle greater than 75%) and hated it (less than 25%). The "contentiousness" score is the lower of those two percentiles.
Consider the most contentious possible scenario -- an equal number love and hate it, with nobody in between. That would be 50% - 0% - 50%, for a score of "50". Let's say another film has a "love/ambivalence/hate" ratio of "38/30/32". That gets a score of 32: still extremely polarizing!
But a movie that almost everyone hates? Let's say a breakdown of 4/35/61. That's a score of just 4, which means it's not very contentious at all.
#10.
Steel Magnolias
20.39% High
"A fairly subtle mix of comedy and drama providing one fairly convincing view of the southern states of America. Whitty and touching with Shirley MacLaine stealing many of the scenes with total ease. A great feel good movie." - bellamyr
19.74% Low
"I'll admit I've never watched all of this, but I've seen enough to know it's utter unfunny, annoying characters, total bullshit." - metalhank
#9.
Hellraiser
19.87% High
"Ah, the glory era of horror, where horror was actually scary and the monsters weren't some combination of three common tropes: zombies, vampires, or serial killers." - amerigo
20.69% Low
"I was very underwhelmed. The designs for all of the Cenobites are admittedly cool, and there are a few frightening scenes towards the end (anything with the Cenobites) but most of the film is plodding and slow, mostly about old people fucking. It is a totally trashy film that thinks its serious (which is not the same as a trashy movie pretending to be serious) so it ends up not being scary enough to be a "proper" horror movie, but not bad enough to be silly fun. It's really just not worth it." - getmoney
25.13% High
"Who knew scrapping last year's toy line and bringing in next year's toy line could profoundly affect a generation of youngsters? Optimuuuuuuuuuus!" - caocao
19.92% Low
"Tiring, noisy and confusing cartoon does make you wonder if the Michael Bay films were really *that* bad! - outside of the quagmire, perhaps most notable for its eclectic voice cast and as a swan-song for Welles, whose voice can be heard buried somewhere under all those electronics! Looks (and sounds) like an extended TV episode (along with commercial fadeouts!) and about as enjoyable for a 30 something not raised on the TV show." - glumpy_99
#7.
Inferno
21.26% High
"Argento lets narrative melt into dream-architecture here, turning rooms, stairways, mirrors, and water into elements of a vast occult delirium. What makes it transcendent is its absolute surrender to sensation - color blooming like poison, music moving like a curse, death arriving with the grandeur of a fairy tale gone infernal. This is horror as enchanted disorientation, where beauty itself becomes the doorway to ruin. 10/10 - nightmare baroque glowing in blue, crimson, and fire." - erenwatching
20.46% Low
"I take no joy in disliking an Argento film from his peak period, but this one combines all of the nonsensicalness of "Suspiria" with none of the style. It's a turgid slog of a movie with a fairly unremarkable score from Keith Emerson." - doyler29
#6.
The Beyond
24.47% High
"Beautifully shot and wonderfully paced. Evokes a lot of nostalgia for the level "The Parish" from Left for Dead 2. I think the sfx budget is about enough to buy a package of microwave ramen." - Pickle_Man
21.14% Low
"If you like a good dose of gratuitous gore packaged in the depths of cheesy-awfulness, then this movie is highly recommended. Enjoy abysmal acting compounded by abysmal dubbing. Random highlights include a head baddie called 'Shpike' (from what I can tell), a quick glance of a guy reloading his revolver by dropping a bullet down the barrel, and morons unloading guns into zombie torsos when it's shown repeatedly that only head shots kill them." - Jimmy Suede
#5.
Heaven's Gate
25.95% High
"Like Coppola, Cimino is very much taking cues from the European masters, particularly Visconti, but the underlying sadness that eventually engulfs the film is reminiscent of Ford. So you have both a cynical melancholy view of the old West combined with a sense of tragic inevitability: a near perfect marriage. Cimino/Zsigmond's work here is truly astonishing, like a series of gorgeous impressionist paintings brought to vivid bloody life. Flawed but brilliant." - Yiannos
21.95% Low
"Gorgeous cinematography and production values at times, but overall it's an uninteresting, unfocused, overlong, overindulgent mess, with a dose of melancholic nihilism that doesn't sit right with me. The movie's constant attempts at profundity fall flat nearly every time." - matthagen
23.65% High
"For some reason I've always been in love with this movie. I watched the DVD three times in a row when I first got it (it's also the first DVD I ever bought). It never fails to crack me up and make me happy." - pilgermann
22.12% Low
"How did I ever like this crap? Oh yeah, I was like...7 years old." - MontyCircus
#3.
Miami Connection
23.69% High
"My all time favorite B-movie. It's got everything you ever will need in a shitty action flick: martial arts, cheesy ass poprock songs about ninjas and friendship, ninjas on motorcycles, awkward monologues - ooooof, you just really have to watch this. Just do it. FRIENDS FOR ETERNITY LOYALTY HONESTY" - Pfightmaster
31.13% Low
"The movie equivalent of someone who's never set foot in a kitchen before, trying to make the best fucking sandwich the world has ever seen... Also, he might be high." - FrederikA
#2.
Vampire's Kiss
27.17% High
"Cage in an early crazy role destroying everything in sight, he goes berserk even by his standards. Its like a late 80's take on 'American Psycho' that has an insane script and filled with terrific yet highly strange scenes. Darkly comical and it also features a couch coffin. In other words, it was AWESOME." - omgfridge
24.89% Low
"Impossible to conventionally rate, but deserving of its cult status as a kind of earlier, weirder, worse version of American Psycho. The plot and presentation are dull; the casting of and performance by Cage are misguided at best, though his enthusiasm is infectious. One late scene genuinely hits the mark: after an hour and a half of hamming it up, the illusion collapses and our protagonist becomes just another pathetic, mundanely mad lost soul on the street." - janus
#1.
Liquid Sky
