The big shock of watching this 1983 adventure again is noticing that the vigorous buccaneer you saw as a kid is none other than… Tommy Lee Jones? Yup, that’s TLJ with hair (looking bizarrely like Dennis Miller) and boots and the puffy shirt from Seinfeld, steering a galley and having swordfights with villains. He plays Nate, Hayes is some other dude (Michael O’Keefe); one is a cheerful rogue and the other is a priggish aristocrat about to get married (to Jenny Seagrove), they’re friends and, I guess, supposed to be a delightfully odd couple of mismatched heroes. There’s also a nasty bad guy (Max Phipps) who used to be Hayes’s partner but now wants to see him hang. Even as a kid, I could tell this was a total rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with evil Germans (it’s set in the 1800s, but you still can’t shake the feeling that the characters are on the run from Nazis). And then there are human sacrifices out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but then you realize that this one came out a year before the Spielberg movie and wonder, “So who’s ripping who off?” Incredibly, this was written by John (Breakfast Club) Hughes, during his snarky-pirate-adventure phase. This has no right to be as thrilling as it, yet behold, it’s a blast. The pace is rollicking, the cliffhangers pretty exciting, and it’s just surreal to see Jones so loose, complete with a really broad Southern accent. It’s fairly obscure (in fact, the only clip I could find was of Siskel & Ebert slamming it), but it’s become something of a cult favorite ever since it started playing on cable about four times every day.

Horror movies were verboten when I was growing up, but once in a while I’d manage to sneak in one. I had heard about An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’s 1981 horror thriller, from friends, and the title alone was enough to make me borrow a fellow movie buff’s tape. So, by the time David Naughton and Griffin Dunne appeared on screen amid the sheep in the back of a truck, I was crazy with anticipation. The movie didn’t disappoint. Its mix of visceral frights, bizarre anxiety and smart-ass humor is still great. So two Yanks go to England and are attacked by a werewolf; Dunne is gruesomely slaughtered, but Naughton is just wounded. It’s only a matter of time before the beast inside him breaks loose once the full moon is out, and when it does it really is horrifying (props to the make-up folks, whose handmade work puts today’s facile CGI to shame). The surprise, however, is the clever ways Landis keeps subverting the material, giving it a darkly comic spin. Remember Dunne’s ghost putting in increasingly grotesque appearances? Or the quick shout-out to The Muppet Show? Or the many songs that had the word “moon” in them? To a kid who had never seen a horror movie, this was heady stuff. (Jenny Agutter, who plays the cute British doctor who falls for Naughton, was my first movie crush.) And I always loved the callous abruptness of the ending, with a raucous version of “Blue Moon” blaring right after the tragic final shot. I have to confess that, if I had to pick just one werewolf movie, I’d choose The Howling. But this one nevertheless has a special place in my (ripped-out by claws) heart.

Walter Hill is a criminally underrated director, getting little love I guess because he’s an action filmmaker. Granted, that’s not a vast canvas, but within his limits he’s a true master. I have a particular fondness for Streets of Fire, his 1984 “rock ‘n’ roll fable,” which I used to watch over and over when I was growing up. In its own very stylized way, it’s almost like Hill’s one attempt at an “art film.” Michael Paré (who’s since fallen off the face of the planet) strides into town with Army fatigues showing from under a trench coat, and needs to rescue his ex-girlfriend (Diane Lane), a torchy singer who’s been kidnapped by a gang of ‘50s-style bikers led by the one and only Willem Dafoe. The screen just hums: Hill can’t let a single shot go static, so he plays up the smoky rhythm, the popping colors, the movement, and the vibrancy of the music. Sometimes it goes a little over the top, as when Paré and Dafoe face each down in a duel with huge hammers. But overall the movie manages to be both an unmistakable product of the Eighties and a fairly timeless fairy-tale. Diane Lane in that short dress must have been the inspiration for Jessica Rabbit, but as a kid I was more drawn to the tomboyish Amy Madigan, who steals the show as a scrappy sidekick saddled with a masculine name (“McCoy”). And, just to prove that this is the Eighties, Rick Moranis is around, being a smartass. Absolutely deserves the cult following it’s developed over the years.

The remake of the Eighties box-office phenomenon Ghostbusters has been one of those odd, revolving-door projects that never seems to settle. At one point, there was talk of a new version starring the likes of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and whoever else sucked at the Apatow teat; now, there’s talk (at least on IMDB, so take it with a grain of salt) of a new version, scheduled for 2012, starring the three original guys, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis. I kept thinking of the recent, sagging, deadpan Murray from Rushmore, The Life Aquatic and Broken Flowers donning the old proton pack and going after Slimer, and I gotta admit it wasn’t a pretty picture. But it gives me a chance to go back and re-watch the 1984 original, which, as with many folks my age, was a part of my childhood. Let’s call this the Nostalgia Corner.

To my relief, Ghostbusters still stands up nicely. Bill Murray, back when he still moved his facial muscles, is awesome from the very start, a sort of Reagan-era Groucho Marx. His Peter Venkman understands the Ghostbusters HQ for the National Lampoon frathouse it is, and reigns supreme with leer, schnapps, and wisecracks. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) are genuinely fascinated by science and apparitions and the spiritual weirdness of America in the Eighties, and are pretty much straight-men to Peter’s goofing. Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddmore is what would seem now I guess as the token black guy, but in reality he’s the voice of pragmatic reason amid the special-effects. Ah, the special-effects. Even before we get to the skyscraper-sized Marshmallow Man, there’s Rick Moranis being chased by that Ray Harryhausen-type gargoyle, Sigourney Weaver in a sexy-crazy spoof of The Exorcist, the evil-looking swirl of clouds above the heroine’s possessed building… (Slimer I sort of put up with, though at least he’s not as annoying as in the cartoon.) “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” I could go on and on. I love this movie. Its combination of fright and fun shows how much coarser comedies have become since.