Someone else planted this seed in my brain somehow and my apologies for not remembering who you are but somehow you convinced me to use the phrase "bad 80's fantasy films" in a google search to see what the internet people think wasn't good back then.
I was kind of alarmed to find out that many of the films that were on the lists I saw were actually favorite films of mine in that time period.
Since I have learned my lesson recently with the A-Team I am not going to go back and give these films a re-watch lest they get relegated to the crap category in my mind. Remember folks, sometimes the memory you have of something is better than the thing itself.
Ladyhawke
Apparently it was nominated for 2 Oscars as well and yet it is still on the list of bad fantasy films for an entire decade. How can this be? The story is a unique one, where a curse has been put on a pair of lovers where in the daytime the man is a man and the woman is a hawk and at night she is a woman and he is a wolf. Yet they are always at one another's side. Matthew Broderick is some criminal who broke out of prison that helps them or something... lol, I don't really remember a great deal about the film.
I do recall that the cinematography and settings were all done really well and that the story had me captivated. I wonder why this ended up on the list? The number one reason I hear or have read about was that people didn't like the soundtrack and I guess that is a reason... not a good one, but a reason nonetheless.
Clash of the Titans
Now I think they are just being mean to this film because it looks really dated as far as the effects are concerned. What the hell else were they supposed to do in 1981? If you want to see something much worse using the extremely limited technology of that time period go and see Jason and the Argonauts. I film that was made 2 years after this one.
If COTT is so bad, why did it warrant a remake in the 2000's that was actually much much worse than the original? As it turns out it maybe isn't the lack of CGI? That remake was during the time when studios would just crank out anything with a crapton of CGI and then call it a day. Whether or not the acting was actually good or not didn't seem to much matter to anyone.
Medusa is entirely claymation or stop-motion because we didn't really have computers back then and if we did they were larger than your house. This scene though, was absolutely epic and stuck with everyone at the time. How dare they go and say that this is a bad film? This film was absolutely epic when you consider that video games at the time consisted of various sized squares running around a single screen shooting smaller squares at the other squares at the other side in a game that never ended and barely knew how to keep score.
I completely disagree with this assessment of this being one of the worst 80's fantasy films.
I liked it so much and my family agreed to the point where we ended up having a mechanical owl replica in our house as a paperweight or something. It was always on display in that room in our house with the good furniture and carpet that was only used when company came over for dinner.
There were some other films on the list that I absolutely do agree with being called really bad though and they included
- Willow (how did Warwick Davis ever get past this?)
- Krull (it was nonsensical and very under budgeted)
- Time Bandits (silly film that was so bad they also made a remake of it)
- Red Sonja (they made Conan a side character in his own storyline and his love interest actress from The Barbarian refused to play the role of Sonja so she instead had another role in the film which makes no sense since it is clearly the same person playing opposite roles with different names.)
I think that a lot of the time that these lists end up getting made so that someone has something to talk about, just like I am doing now. The reason why it made me upset is because it wasn't just one article, a lot of lists have both Ladyhawke and Clash of the Titans on it and if those are the worst, what are the best? Legend with Tom Cruise was a financial flop although I loved that film and why the hell isn't Conan the Destroyer on these lists? That film was so bad that it killed the plans for the trilogy and perhaps beyond. They waited so long that Arnold was no longer a viable hire for the lead and of course the remake was absolute trash despite having Jason Momoa in the lead role.
Fantasy films were few and far between in the 80's because of the prohibitively high cost of even attempting one. I find it really frustrating that what I consider to be two of the best somehow managed to make it onto several "worst" lists.
Did you see these films? Did you think they were bad? By the way to NOT go back and watch any of these. If you want to see what I consider to be the best fantasy film ever made go see Conan the Barbarian because it stands up today just fine even though it is more than 40 years old.