80s Movies: Week 4

Our month-long special look back at some of the greatest movies of the 80s comes to a close, but there's still time for a carousel of the past seven days' cinematic heroes, if you've got a spare fiver burning a hole in your Amazon account...

80s Movies: Weird Science (1985)

If you watch just one 1985 teen sci-fi movie this year, make it Back to the Future. But if you've had enough of paradoxes and jigowatts and you'd much rather see Kelly LeBrock in her prime, watch Weird Science. She pretty much single-handedly carries this movie in the way that, for example, Liz Hurley doesn't quite manage to do in 2000's Bedazzled.

So much happens in Weird Science that it's hard to know quite what to say about it. This might be one of those movies that you just have to watch - otherwise it's like saying Ferris Bueller's Day Off is about him 'not going to school'. It just doesn't quite encapsulate the full story, does it?

Also, just the briefest of mentions here for Bill Paxton - a muchly undervalued actor who pops up in quite a few of my favourite movies (Twister, in particular) but is often given fairly one-dimensional characters. As Chet in Weird Science, he doesn't exactly buck that trend, but it's still fun to see him playing that numbskull role for which he's become so well known.