The Worst ’80s Movies, According to Letterboxd

I love Letterboxd, the social network site and app for movie lovers. I use it to log the movies I watch, keep lists of titles, and to see what my friends are up to (cinematically speaking, of course). And I also like to use its database to see what films are popular and unpopular with users.

For example, with just a couple clicks, it’s very easy to sort every single movie on Letterboxd — all 791,369 titles and counting — by year of release, their rating, popularity, genre, or even by streaming service availability. Want to know what’s highest-rated horror movie on Letterboxd? No problem. (It’s John Carpenter’s The Thing, by the way.) Wondering what comedy is the most-despised? You got it. (That would be Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.) You could spend hours exploring this stuff.

I recently took a deep dive into ’80s movies on the site. According to Letterboxd, 49,330 films were released in the 1980s. The highest-rated title out of all of them is Elem Klimov’s Come and See, followed by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Eduardo Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue, and the Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense.

And then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, are the films below; the 15 lowest-rated movies on Letterboxd released during the 1980s, ranked from the best score (well, best relative to the rest of this disasters) to the worst. The titles include notorious sequels, bombs starring some of the 1980s’ biggest film and television stars, and some extremely obscure sci-fi films. This list is a useful tool when trying to figure out what ’80s films to avoid — or maybe to track down if you’re planning a bad movie night with friends.