6 strange ’80s movie rip-offs you didn’t know existed — here is a clear breakdown of what happened and why it matters right now.
The details below put the news in context: the key points first, the background after.
The 1980s saw a plethora of revolutionary movies, such as Aliens, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Halloween, to name a few. Thus, the decade also produced numerous oddball movies to replicate the success of those more serious cinematic productions.
While there are many strange 1980s movies out there, there are even more rip-offs floating around in the cineverse. These are some of the most blatant rip-offs found throughout the 1980s — some you didn’t even know existed — and the top pick is the most notorious example of rip-off success.
After the 1984 success of Gremlins came Ghoulies, which, thanks to its infamous VHS cover that depicted a creature emerging from a toilet, recouped its budget and then some before video sales of the campy horror comedy were even taken into account. Like fellow mini-creature features Munchies and Critters, it’s easy to tell what movie inspired them all.
While it is perhaps a bit too focused on the occult to be a monster movie like Gremlins, Ghoulies features plenty of silly-looking monstrosities. It also marks the film debut performance of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s Mariska Hargitay. True story.
One year after directing Gremlins, Joe Dante came out with Explorers, which feels like an attempt to replicate the success of E.T. It features friendly aliens of an unnamed species, but instead of them crash-landing on Earth, a group of teenagers crash-lands on an alien planet after they construct a spaceship of their own design. In that sense, the movie functions as the reverse of E.T.
Explorers is an ideal companion piece on any double-feature night, and its cast members — including Ethan Hawke in his first movie role, as well as the late River Phoenix — are just as likable, if not more, than Henry Thomas is in E.T.
Though rather poorly constructed, Mac and Me is an oddly sweet movie that is a blatant rip-off of E.T. If you watch it, you’ll quickly notice parallels, including comical similarities in tone, story beats, and imagery. As such, the movie became one of the most talked-about imitators of Spielberg’s smash hit.
Whereas E.T. showcases a fair amount of product placement, Mac and Me amplifies it to a hysterical degree. It trades a Reese’s Pieces reference for copious amounts of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s products, with a ridiculous, extended dance sequence occurring at one of the latter’s locations. Ronald McDonald himself even makes a brief cameo.
On the heels of Conan the Barbarian’s popularity came Ator, the Fighting Eagle. The sword-and-sandal fantasy narrative follows a warrior who has just learned his true heritage and attempts to save a kidnapped princess from the spider-worshiper.
The notorious low-budget Italian rip-off mirrors Conan’s tone, aesthetic, plot beats, and protagonist’s journey. It even goes so far as to mimic the hero’s shirtless, muscular physique, but there is no comparison to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Jason Momoa’s limitless physique.
Clearly modeled after Predator, the Italian action movie Robowar is about a military team being hunted in the jungle by a powerful enemy. In this case, the enemy is not an alien but — wait for it — a rogue, State Department-funded robot killing machine.
The shameless, blatant rip-off copies most of Predator’s plot, characters, and setting, going so far as to feature creature point-of-view shots rendered as heavily pixelated, heat-signature, thermal-vision images. It even heavily lifts narrative elements from another 1987 classic, Robocop.
While Friday the 13th became a commercial success, it was critically despised at the time of its release. In fact, Gene Siskel hated the movie so much that he ruined the movie’s twist ending in his review for the Chicago Tribune.
The rip-off slasher movie might be the best example of a flagrant copycat giving birth to a horror movie franchise whose place in cinema history is almost as significant as the thing it knocked off—that is John Carpenter’s Halloween. Both Cunningham and his screenwriter, Victor Miller, have freely admitted to stealing from Carpenter’s trailblazing horror film. Fortunately for them, Friday the 13th was such a financially successful trendsetter that it revolutionized the slasher subgenre and has been ripped off just as much as Carpenter’s classic.
Clearly, there are numerous other strange 1980s movie rip-offs floating around out there, such as Alien 2: On Earth, which is unrelated to Alien but mimics its premise; Lady Terminator, which mirrors The Terminator’s concept; and Warriors of the Wasteland, which replicates the post-apocalyptic setting, vehicle combat, and lone warrior structure of Mad Max 2. This excludes the countless slasher rip-offs that also exist.
While some of these titles didn’t even come close to rivaling the quality or box office success of the movies they ripped off, some did become classics for underground movie lovers. For general audiences, they offered a whole new window into cheap filmmaking in a bygone era.
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