| Dan McCabe |
An iconic shot from Top Gun, one of the quintessential action films of the 1980s.
The ’80s Action Extravaganza II: The Quickening plays one day only at the Trylon Cinema, on Saturday, May 24th. Series information is available at trylon.org.
If I asked someone to name ten action movies, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the named films were released in the 1980s. The Terminator (1984), First Blood (1982), Die Hard (1988), Top Gun (1986), Aliens (1986), Red Dawn (1984), Predator (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987), Escape from New York (1981): the names of these movies are well known, and perhaps, more familiar to modern audiences than comparable films from subsequent decades. Why do popular movies from this era endure? My view is that they owe much of their staying power to the medium in which most people experienced them: VHS.
The author still owns a (dusty) VCR.
The VHS tape has a special place in my memory. I remember bringing the box of a beloved video to kindergarten show-and-tell. Obviously, I couldn’t bring the tape, but I suppose in my six-year-old brain, I wanted the other kids to know the joy of opening its shrink-wrapping, putting the tape in the byzantine VCR, and gluing my eyes to the screen. Which movie was this? It was probably a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon anthology, Disney movie, or kids’ show about dinosaurs, but it doesn’t ultimately matter. What’s important is the feeling of owning a piece of what used to only be available outside the home or on television.
The VHS tape came about during a sweet spot in cinema history. While television brought movies home in the 1950s, the whims of local stations or national networks dictated when certain films became available to watch. This system did wonders for mid-century classics, turning films such as It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Sound of Music (1965), The Ten Commandments (1956), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) into annual appointment viewing, even to this day. But home audiences couldn’t pick or choose what movies to watch until VCRs became widely available in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Some of the author’s few remaining VHS tapes.
Now, it’s important to remember that while VCRs and VHS tapes were widely available in the 1980s, both were rather expensive. A single VHS tape could cost $30-$80 in 1980s money, so most people owned rather small libraries of movies. In other words, if you were going to shell out money for VHS in that era, it would likely be for a movie you’d be committed to watching repeatedly. For a kid like me, that might mean an anthology of Donald Duck cartoons. For folks a little older, it would mean a copy of Top Gun that got watched so many times the tape wore out.
Watching the same film over and over creates a unique attachment for that movie’s fans. For example, there’s a scene in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) where a mustachioed gentleman fleeing Bespin Station carries what appears to be an ice cream maker. If The Empire Strikes Back were a streaming movie everyone watched only once, like Netflix’s Damsel (2024), no one would have noticed the ice cream maker. However, fans who watched the movie hundreds of times on VHS certainly noticed, enough that this throwaway prop is now the centerpiece of the traditional “ice cream maker run” at the Star Wars Celebration convention series.
VHS didn’t just change how fans viewed great and memorable films, however. Even if you didn’t own a movie on VHS, your local video store let you rent a movie for the night at a fraction of the cost of owning the physical tape. And wow, were video stores weird places before the rise of the sanitized Blockbuster experience.
The author has still not seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
Independent video stores had style, and they stocked some pretty bizarre movies (and I’m not talking about the cordoned-off area where kids weren’t allowed). I remember walking through the independent video store my family frequented, asking my parents if we could rent movies such as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978) or The Blob (1958). Fortunately they had the good sense not to allow their pre-teen to pick out movies based on wacky or gory artwork (although I did badger them enough to rent Tron (1982) once). Later, I learned that the act of renting these offbeat films from video stores helped make these films “cult classics” rather than “forgotten movies.”
About the only thing Cobra and Die Hard have in common is an action hero star: one is a very good movie; one is a very bad movie.
Imagine this scenario in 1989: A video store clerk, his eyes vaguely bloodshot at four in the afternoon, sees a regular customer. The regular has picked out Die Hard for the fourteenth time, ready to watch John McClane (Bruce Willis) save a brutalist office building from German terrorists. The clerk, seeing that the patron needs to broaden their horizons, might recommend a lesser-known action film, something like Cobra (1986) starring Sylvester Stallone. The patron won’t know that Cobra has a bleak rating on movie aggregators, because there is no internet. They won’t know that critics called the film “queasy” and “barbaric,” because he probably missed the review in his local paper three years earlier. Instead, he’ll check out a movie based on the clerk’s recommendation that it’s “like Die Hard” and stars Rocky/Rambo.
Will the patron enjoy Cobra? Who knows. He and his friends might think its “hero cop with unlimited ammo” is appealing. Or they might give it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment and make joke after joke at its expense. Either way, it’ll be a fun Saturday night, and like it or loathe it, they’ll come back to the video store for more offbeat recommendations.
The culture of watching movies countless times that you owned and discovering cult films at the video store sadly did not last. DVDs allowed movie lovers to create libraries so vast that they had less incentive to rewatch beloved films as often as they rewatched VHS tapes, and streaming gave them even more selection. Blockbuster drove many independent video stores out of business and went bankrupt itself when Netflix offered a cheaper, more convenient way to rent movies. And while streaming initially allowed audiences to discover thousands of classic cult films, it has evolved to a place that prioritizes the new and the often forgettable over extensive back catalogues. Finally, the recommendations of the local video store clerk have been replaced by an internet hive mind represented by aggregator scores.
However, the fact that there was a brief period when great films got examined from every angle and cult films got discovered by potential fans based on personal recommendations still resonates. Just ask Paramount, whose sequel to Top Gun made roughly a zillion dollars a couple of years ago. Or, ask the folks at Cult Film Collective, whose second iteration of the “80s Action Extravaganza” is coming to the Trylon on May 24, 2025. After all, there are reasons why it’s not the “2010s Action Extravaganza.” Examining VHS culture can answer why we remember these films so fondly four decades later.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon