The top 25 underappreciated films of 1989

Ah, 1989. The year the Berlin Wall came down and Yugoslavia won the Eurovision Song Contest. It was also a big year for film, with Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade topping the box office and Batmandominating the summer with its inescapable marketing blitz.

Outside the top 10 highest-grossing list, which included Back To The Future II, Dead Poets Society, and Honey I Shrunk The Kids, 1989 also included a plethora of less commonly-appreciated films. Some were big in their native countries but only received a limited release in the US and UK. Others were poorly received but have since been reassessed as cult items.

From comedies to thrillers, here's our pick of 25 underappreciated films from the end of the '80s...

25. An Innocent Man

Disney, through its Touchstone banner, had high hopes for this thriller, which was supposed to see Tom Selleck play in heavier fare. Helmed by Peter Yates, it's an entertaining thriller, although it carries nowhere near the weight you suspect it was supposed to.

The plot follows a pair of cops who frame Selleck's holier than thou character for a crime he inevitably had nothing to do with. As such, he gets sent to prison, and transformed into Hard Man Tom Selleck, who soon finds himself on the path to revenge.

You could, in truth, sit and pick holes in abundance at An Innocent Man. But then it's got a core of being really entertaining to it. It helps that F Murray Abraham pops up as a prisoner with the necessary sage advice, but also, Selleck has an everyman presence to him, and a fantastic moustache. These things matter.

24. Who's Harry Crumb?

Few times in the late John Candy's career did it feel that he was appearing in material that was, for want of a better way of putting it, worthy of him. For every Planes Trains And Automobiles or Stripes, you didn't have to search hard to find something like Deliriousor Wagons East.

In truth, Who's Harry Crumb?isn't necessarily vintage Candy either, but it's still a lot of fun, and gives him a title role that he clearly enjoyed. Harry Crumb is another bumbling comedy private eye, in this case tasked with a crime he's not supposed to be able to solve. You don't have to stretch your mind too much to fill in the blanks, but the joy of when Candy gets a decent role is you know, even while watching it, that the fifth time around will be as much fun as the first. So it proves here.

23. Lock Up

1989 was clearly the year for movie stars to go to prison, after their absolute innocence had been established. So it is that the script to Lock Up makes it abundantly clear that Sylvester Stallone has done nothing wrong, before promptly sticking him in chokey and basically throwing away the key.

His particular nemesis - and this really helps make the film extra fun - is Donald Sutherland as the prison warden for the final few months of Stallone's stretch. "How much can a man take... before he gives back?" went the tagline. Like we all didn't know.

Shamelessly '80s,Lock Uppulls a better than usual performance from Sly, but it's also the cast around him that help lift this to cable TV gold. Danny Trejo? John Amos? Tom Sizemore? That'll do.

One thing, though. Remember that Adam Sandler film, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, where Sandler played a man who pretended to be gay? And to offset that, he wrote himself scenes with naked women in to make it clear to the audience that he liked girls really? Well, Lock Up is a bit like that with Stallone's innocence. He is an innocent man, friends, and that he was locked up at all is an outright scandal.

Tsk.

22. Meet The Feebles

Before he established himself among the Hollywood firmament, Peter Jackson made a series of gross-out movies in his native New Zealand, among them Bad Taste, Brain Dead and, perhaps the weirdest of them all, Meet The Feebles. A scatalogical, risque puppet-based musical,Meet The Feebles is a very strange, unpredictable horror comedy. For a generation who only know Jackson for his Tolkien movies, the lo-fi grotesquerie on display inMeet The Feebles might come as a shock.

21. The Fly II

A sequel was always going to suffer in comparison to David Cronenberg’s almost perfect 1986 body horror, The Fly. But to be fair to director Chris Walas (the effects artist on Cronenberg’s film), his Flyfollow-on doesn’t even aim for the philosophical drama of the previous movie, and instead exists as a delightfully splashy B-movie, complete with a 50s-style “son of the monster" plot. This time, it’s Eric Stoltz’s turn to undergo a hideous mutation, stricken as he is by the same insect DNA as his late father, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum, seen here briefly in unused footage from the first film).

As you might expect from a movie by an effects artist, The Fly IIgoes heavy on the prosthetics, monsters and gore, but there’s actual pathos beneath all that goo. Stoltz’s performance is an unexpectedly heartfelt one, and Walas is careful to properly introduce his characters before pulling out the buckets of claret.

20. Vampire's Kiss

Here's an early example of Nicolas Cage operating at the jazzier end of his acting scale. Playing a literary agent whose behaviour grows increasingly strange after being bitten by a vampire, Cage brings us one of the most bizarre performances of his career - and that really is saying something.

Having watched the film a couple of times, we still can't fathom out what accent he's trying to pull off - we're guessing he's shooting for "upper-crust New Yorker", but he misses it for a mile and ends up sounding like the terrifying hybrid of Eric Cartman and Peter Lorre. Try to count how many times Cage screams "I'm a vampire" in this film. We've included a taster of this gonzo performance above.

Fun fact: director Robert Bierman went on to direct episodes of The Bill.

19. Red Scorpion

After his star-making turn in Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren seemed doomed to be typecast as a robotic Russian ubermensch. Here, he plays a Soviet special forces soldier who ends up fighting to protect an African village against his own people after choosing to defect. Pure trash from Cannon Films, it’s also invested with a certain 80s ramshackle swagger by director Joseph Zito. Lundgren does some of his own (very dangerous-looking) stunts with bikes, trucks and explosions, there’s a rousing shoot-out at the end, and a villain gets to utter the immortal line, “This is such a small room... and this is such a big grenade!"

(NB: Although released in some territories the year before, we've gone by this film's US release, which was 1989.)

18. Communion

Christopher Walken’s characteristically odd performance is the main reason to see this alien abduction drama, based on the book by Whitley Strieber. As the author, Walken experiences a series of visitations from impish beings with black, almond-shaped eyes. Are the beings real, or a figment of Strieber’s imagination?

The creature effects are rubbery, but Walken’s performance cuts through the hokum; his character’s almost as unreadable as his extra-terrestrial guests. A scene where the great actor engages in what appears to be a dance-off with the goblin-like aliens is unforgettably bizarre.

17. Next Of Kin

We miss you, Patrick Swayze. Next Of Kin was the film he made that was sandwiched between Road House and Ghost. It's also a blast.

Here, Swayze plays Truman Gates, the brother of Liam Neeson's Briar Gates, and... yeah, you're right. It sounds great already. There's another brother though who's been murdered, and the hunt is on to find his killer.

That that movie comes from director John Irvin will be of little surprise, when you realise that the same John Irvin directed Raw Dealwith Schwarzenegger in it. But it's also a welcome reminder of how violent, raw, and entertaining 80s action movies could be. Before focus groups, $100m opening weekends and trailers for trailers became a thing.

As a double bill with Point Break, Next Of Kin should adequately fill any evening's testosterone quota.

16. Physical Evidence

At some point, we're going to have to get around to looking at the directorial work of the late Michael Crichton in a lot more detail. Having made Runawaywith Tom Selleck's moustache five years' earlier, 1989's Physical Evidencesaw him recruit Burt Reynolds' facial hair. We'll never know which he preferred.

Physical Evidencehas a bit of a bar napkin plot to it, but it wins bonus points for a strong performance from Theresa Russell, and for sticking a clothed Burt Reynolds into the midst of a courtroom drama. Again, look at it all a bit too closer, and the whole thing begins to fall apart, but Physical Evidence is just content to be a happily entertaining thriller, that's worth digging out of the archives because, well, it just is really. Sometimes, that's enough.

And here's a fun fact: this was apparently first mooted as a Jagged Edgesequel. Spoiler: Jagged Edge is better.

15. The ‘Burbs

Joe Dante directed a string of great films in the 1980s, but with the obvious exception of the hit Gremlins, not all of them took off at the box-office as they should. The ‘Burbs is one of the prime examples: an entertaining, mischievous comedy about the foibles and pettiness of suburban life. Highly-strung suburbanite Ray (Tom Hanks) has his summer holiday at home rudely interrupted when a secretive, spooky-looking family move in across the street.

Ray, along with his neighbours Art (Rick Ducommun) and gun-nut Mark (Bruce Dern) are convinced that something’s not quite right about them. Are the Klopek family a bunch of murderers, as Ray suspects, or just misunderstood?

Admittedly, the plot never quite gets going in The ‘Burbs, but the cast makes it well worth a watch; Hanks is the film’s likeable centre, but Dante’s gallery of supporting players are the real draw: Corey Feldman, Ducommun and Dern make great nosy neighbours, and Henry Gibson is perfectly sinister as Dr Werner Klopek, the newcomer with something strange going on in his basement.

14. Best Of The Best

Could Best Of The Best feature the strangest cast in '80s martial arts cinema? We wouldn’t necessarily have put Eric Roberts, Chris Penn and James Earl Jones together as a bunch of rock-hard fighters (with Jones as their trainer), but we’re glad somebody else thought of it. The plot’s a fairly straight post-Rocky/The Karate Kid sports drama about rival martial arts champions.

It’s all very daft, but that is, as is often the case with these kinds of films, all part of the fun. The 1993 sequel, about an evil underground fighting tournament, is absolutely hilarious.

13. God Of Gamblers

Released the same year as John Woo’s classic The Killer, God Of Gamblers isn’t quite as well known in the west as that film, but it’s nevertheless another great film starring Chow Yun-Fat, who was at the height of his charismatic powers at the time. Taking in comedy, suspense and gun-blazing action, God Of Gamblers is a cracking thriller from start to finish. Incredibly, the movie's so far amassed five sequels in Hong Kong, as well as a multitude of spin-offs.