There is a spectre haunting movieland. It’s a terrifying hybrid monster mercilessly built from a rag-tag collection of shoulder pads, talking cars, oil barons, dual-purpose robots, tough-talking coppers, pint-sized investigators and high-kicking amphibians. It is, of course, the Eighties.

The briefest glance at upcoming movie release schedules reveals an industry that’s worryingly in thrall to a decade often viewed as, well, culturally bereft. A new big-screen version of that irritating kiddie staple Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, out this week, will be followed in July by Michael Bay’s blockbusting adaptation of the champion nerd-fest Transformers — a movie based on a cartoon series based on a toy. There is also a Knight Rider movie on the way, plus a big-screen adventure for The A-Team. And don’t forget Gurinder Chada’s upcoming Dallas adaptation or a new outing for pint-sized TV investigator Nancy Drew.

So what is happening here? Has everybody in Hollywood gone simultaneously insane? Are the corridors of power wholly populated by men of a certain age with Optimus Prime dolls on their desks, A-Team box-sets in their bags and David Hasselhoff pictures on their walls? Or are we simply witnessing a savvy marketing trend that knows how to snag a swath of financially solvent former Generation X-ers, and their kids?

“There is finally enough distance between us and the Eighties to make it seem nostalgic rather than just embarrassing,” says Archie Thomas, a trendspotter for the industry bible Variety. “These movies were green-lit a couple of years ago when the Eighties began to be perceived as fashionable again.”

BACKGROUND

• Transformers

• Robots are just foreign policy in disguise

• The 50 best movie robots

• The Transformers: The Movie

• They're back: the revenge of the '80s

Transformation is complete

Shia LaBeouf trashed a director’s office to prove that he was no longer a ‘Disney kid’. Our correspondent asks what drives him

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

The period Thomas is describing is when bands such as the Strokes, the Killers and Bloc Party began wearing their Eighties musical references on their sleeves, and when reality TV began plundering the Eighties for source material and stars. The likes of Brigitte Nielsen and Flavour Flav had a chance to be famous again. Most recently, the original Eighties A-Team star Dirk Benedict proved to be a hit on Celebrity Big Brother.

No surprise, then, that film producers sensed a consumer appetite for The Dukes of Hazzard, Miami Vice and even Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. And yet, despite this taste for cheesy nostalgia, the movies themselves seem uncertain about being standard bearers of naff Eighties style. Films such as Miami Vice and Transformers eschew the essence of

They’r their source material – a sense of naive Eighties camp — in favour of a deadly earnestness and decidedly modern sincerity. Even the Ninja Turtles have ditched most of their comic signature lines (“Cowabunga dude!”) for a darker postBatman Begins feel.

Listen to Shia LaBeouf, the 20-year-old star of Transformers, on the demands of this emotionally intense project. “It’s a serious movie,” he explains. “For me it’s like honouring my past, and something that I was thoroughly in love with as a kid . . . So, yeah, the movie is serious. It’s deadpan and it’s done in such a real tone that it’s possibly the coolest movie I’ve been a part of.”

Deadpan? A real tone? Dude, this is a movie about a truck that turns into an oversized Tin Man with a thyroid condition — how real can it be? Similarly, just as the big-screen Miami Vice rejected the original’s wind-flicked Duran Duran look in favour of grizzly digital framing and convoluted narrative, so we can only imagine the type of esoteric interpretations to come in the A-Team and Knight Rider movies. The former project, for instance, is simply riddled with lugubrious plot possibilities (Howling Mad Murdock as a genuine schizophrenic, B. A. Baracus as a former pimp), while the latter will no doubt cast original Hasselhoff hero Michael Knight as a leather-clad former junkie in need of personal redemption. Johnny Depp, anyone?

And yet, to expect remakes of Eighties products to embody Eighties cultural values is naive, says Thomas. Instead, he says, unsurprisingly, the Eighties revival is not about movie style but about target demographics. “The key teenage movie audience has become notoriously difficult for movie-makers to get a handle on,” says Thomas. “And so the audience profile for Eighties products like Transformers is going to be a lot easier to market to from a business point of view. And look at the likes of Rocky Balboa. It showed the studios that there’s a new market for young dads who want to take their kids to the same movies they grew up on.”

Thomas adds that the biggest movie of the summer is also an Eighties revamp, but one that doesn’t appeal only to action-obsessed dads and their sons. “ The Simpsons Movie is, in some ways, the ultimate Eighties movie [ The Simpsons began in 1987 as an offshoot of The Tracey Ullman Show]. It is what they call a ‘four-quadrant’ movie — it will catch everyone from kids to grandparents.”

In the meantime, however, the potential to do gangbusters at the box office will be the deciding factor in whether the Eighties revival continues at full pelt or disappears quietly into the cultural night. If Dallas or The A-Team are hits, the nostalgia machine will be cranked up, suggesting some soul-shuddering creative possibilities. How many of us can happily contemplate the idea of a big-screen version of The Fall Guy? Or The New Adventures of T. J. Hooker? Or Metal Mickey: The Movie?

TMNT is out now. Transformers is out in July.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010