Certainly it was the worst decade.
1980s was actually a very confused decade in Hindi cinema in the domain of commercial cinema. Though the art cinema of 1980s is considered the best with actors like Naseeruddin Shah,Om Puri Shabana Azmi ,Smita Patil, Farooq Sheikh,Deepti Naval giving their best performances yet their films did not “represent” Hindi cinema as much as the degraded commercial cinema at this time.
The commercial aspect of the industry worked on stardom and it was confused and was in a transition period between the 1970s(Rajesh Khanna, Angry young man Amitabh Bachchan) and 1990s (rise of the Khans).
There were no newcomers of the level of Rajesh Khanna or Bachchan or the Khans in this decade.
The early 1980s saw various flop films from Amitabh Bachchan and lets not go into the various foolish films made by Rajesh Khanna(he was already down post 1975). Then various older actors like Dharmendra tried their hands in B grade movies and made the situation even worse.
Yash Chopra’s Kabhie Kabhie in the late 1970s was a hit yet a movie made on similar lines,”Silsila” in 1981 was a flop. These were the “good commercial films” of Hindi cinema and Yash Chopra knew how to make good romantic films.
The audience refused to accept anymore romantic commercial films and switched to action films. They also did not like how the “Angry Young Man” suddenly switched to romance and poetry in his films.
What came up next were basically remakes of the worst films from south cinema and adding more masala into them. Vulgar scenes were common and also cheap,double meaning dialogues in films also became common.
Though Rekha did act in some good films like Khoobsurat and Umrao Jaan yet they were very few. Even Kamal Hassan tried his hands in Hindi cinema but was not that popular even after starring in some good films like “sadma”(remake of moondram pirai).
By the late 1980s,Bollywood had degraded to such low levels that even directors like Yash Chopra had to make movies like these to cater to the audience.
Then finally a new era started in 1989 when the Khans made their debut and also when Chandni was released.
Chandni was a major turning point in Hindi cinema as it actually improved the quality of commercial films. It was a blockbuster and Sridevi got a very new identity in cinema,so did Vinod Khanna who was earlier into all these action films.
Salman Khan’s “Maine Pyar kiya” and Aamir Khan’s “Qayamat se Qayamat Tak” were superhit films in 1989 and all these films brought back romance and melody in films. These movies marked the beginning of the “melody era” of the 1990s.
Later SRK made his debut with “Deewana”(1992) and thus this decade became the decade of the Khans.