Backyard Movie Critic’s 1st Annual 50 Word Halloween Horror Story Contest

Dear Substack Friends,

I need your help getting in the Halloween spirit! I love Halloween, but honestly this has been a stressful year. There have been some health things in the family, my daughter went off to college, and just life was life-ing. I’m grateful for much of it, but I need some help capturing the Halloween spirit this year. I believe that, as adults, it’s our job to create the magic of the spooky season.

To that end, please help. I have done this for years on other sites, and it might be fun to do here. I want your 50-word horror stories! I can’t tell you how much fun it is to get a notification of a 50-word horror story on my iWatch! Busy day, rush rush, OOOO 50 words of horror.

I’m honestly not sure what to give out as a prize for this first contest. You’ll get bragging rights, and I’ll restack your articles for a week? We can collab on something? I really don’t know what would be a good prize, but we can work something out. You at least get bragging rights, and I’ll do a note as a big announcement of the winners with links to their substack. .

50 Word Horror Story Rules:

• It must be a horror story.

• No AI ENTRIES!!!

• TITLE: Please title your entries. Title does NOT count in the word count! 

• It must be 50 words or less.

• It must be a complete story.

• Entries must be submitted by midnight on October 27th 2026.

• Enter as many stories as you like!

• Post your story in the comments below.

• Scariest Story Wins.

• I am the final judge, but I will take how many likes the story gets into consideration.

Prizes:

• Bragging Rights

• An Announcement with a link to your page telling people to subscribe.

• Restacks or collab (we can work out something beneficial if you so desire)

I’m doing this for fun! It’s to get us all in the Halloween spirit. I really am a Halloween freak, and I love for other people to share in that freakiness (don’t take it that way)!

Note on AI: Do not use AI, please. It’s 50 words. I understand some people use it for like grammar and spelling help, that’s one thing, but using AI to write a 50 word story is like having a robot do 500 reps of a 10 lbs dumbbell then bragging about how tough you are. I’ll use a detector, but there is also a bit of the honor system here. Please be honorable.

Lastly, I hope this is fun for everyone. I’d like to do one each year; if it bombs, I get it. Also, there is no pressure here. Any negative comment about a story will be removed! I know not all my readers are writers. I will monitor, read and comment daily!

On the flip side, if you see a story you like, please give compliments and likes! Please be encouraging! This is just for fun, so let’s be positive.

So, write a 50-word horror story below. Happy Halloween.

Here is my 50 word example:

God if you save me from this I will sell this mansion, back to the city. Arms and legs are frozen to the bed. She’s in the hall. Hag in the white veil, those boney hands, please god, please. How cold she is now, those eyes.

Lastly,

Also, if you want more fun like this, please subscribe! I also do articles and am working on some live movies. I hope horror movies for Halloween, so subscribe if you want to keep up to date! Also I need to be able to contact you if you win! 

Put your 50 word story below!!!!

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Sept 1 is the official start of Halloween season. It is the meteorological start to fall, and it’s time to put up the decorations. I don’t know who came up with the arbitrary Sept 15th. That is ridiculous. So…Happy Halloween!

How do I find the time to watch all these movies and others? I give up sleep some days, and other times if I miss a day, I have to watch 2 the next day, but this is an earnest attempt. Usually, I do pretty well, sometimes have a few days where I have to watch 2 movies, especially after a busy weekend, but it is still fun. I see people complain that Halloween isn’t like it used to be. Well yeah, now you’re an adult, and it’s up to you to put the work in to make Halloween fun and exciting.

I decorate my house. I dress up. I give out candy, and I watch horror movies! So do the work and watch the movies. Make Halloween whatever you want it to be. I usually have a Halloween Party. I hope this year I can have a Backyard Movie Night with all my friends after Tricks and Treats.

Anyway, here is my list. Yes, it is the Greatest Halloween Horror Movie Watchlist of all time!

September 1: Halloween 3 (1982, dir. Tommy Lee Wallace)
The greatest Halloween kickoff horror movie of all time. It captures the true feelings of Halloween. It was hated when it came out, and some still hate on it, but watch it! I promise it will launch your Halloween spirit.

September 2: Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999, dir. Tim Burton)
Starting out not too scary but fun. Johnny Depp is great in this, and honestly, it has the right balance of creep and high concept. I love this movie.

September 3: Beetlejuice (1988, dir. Tim Burton)
One of the greatest behind-the-scenes horror films of all time. Seeing the afterlife, viewing the world through ghosts is exactly the right tone for the beginning of Halloween. It’s like a light and fun haunted house.

September 4: Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman)
The movie was a phenomenon when it came out. It influenced all of GenX, and it is a warm and fuzzy memory to live. Plus, it’s a lot of fun.

September 5: Gremlins (1984, dir. Joe Dante)
Gremlins is darker than people remember. I was traumatized by the gremlin in a microwave scene. I think everyone was.

September 6: Monster Squad (1987, dir. Fred Dekker)
Again, a really fun movie that puts you in the mood for Halloween with a great cast of monsters.

September 7: Arachnophobia (1990, dir. Frank Marshall)
I remember taking my girlfriend to this movie! I was in high school. I love this movie, but never take a new date to a movie with a bunch of spiders in it. It does not turn them on!

September 8: Young Frankenstein (1974, dir. Mel Brooks)
One of the greatest satires of all time. There is nothing more fun than an early in the Halloween season viewing of Young Frankenstein.

September 9: Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, dir. Henry Selick)
Oh man, what a fun movie I used to watch with my kids. Now they are older, and when I watch it, it makes me think of how much fun we used to have at Halloween. But it also motivates me to keep having fun.

September 10: Addams Family (1991, dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)
Again, saw this at the movie theater, and it was fun in 1991, and it’s fun today. Weird how movies aren’t phenomena like they were back then.

September 11: Van Helsing (2004, dir. Stephen Sommers)
I think this is still my oldest son’s favorite Halloween movie. It is the right mix of fun action and creepiness.

September 12: Dracula 1931 (1931, dir. Tod Browning)
Right about this time of year I need that old-fashioned creepy Halloween feel. Dracula was so big in the 80s. It’s weird how, for coming up on 100 years, this movie still makes you feel the creep.

September 13: Frankenstein 1931 (1931, dir. James Whale)
I don’t know if I love Frankenstein or Dracula more, but I have to say both are still the cornerstones of my Halloween.

September 14: Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Man, this movie freaked me out as a kid. I can remember being very suspicious of the TV after this movie. Again, it is hard to relate how big of a movie this was. It was everywhere, and as an elementary school kid, you were lame if you didn’t see it!

September 15: Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale)
I think this is the all-time best horror movie of the Universal Monster age. It is almost a perfect movie. It is chilling, sad, and wonderful.

September 16: The Blob remake (1988, dir. Chuck Russell)
Man, I would love to put the original Blob on this list, but the remake is just so good! It really has that 80s twang with a side of cheese, but the monster is still scary.

September 17: The Fly (Original) (1958, dir. Kurt Neumann)
I saw this version of The Fly when I was about 10 years old. It was on a cable station maybe on a lonely Saturday night. Man, I was stuck to the screen for it, and now every time I watch it, it takes me back to the night, lonely but full of Halloween. If you are a gothic-souled GenXer, Vincent Price is still near and dear to your heart.

September 18: The Stuff (1985, dir. Larry Cohen)
Man, I love this movie. It is so cheesy, but I can remember the ads for it. It’s also just a lot of 80s fun.

September 19: Nope (2022, dir. Jordan Peele)
There are so many other movies that I could have put on this list. I love Nope, but I know Peele has done better, but in mid-September I’m still craving monster movies, and this is a great one.

September 20: Tremors (1990, dir. Ron Underwood)
Speaking of monster movies, this is one of the all-time greatest cult monster movies. I have seen this movie 50 times and would be happy to watch it 50 more.

September 21: Chopping Mall (1986, dir. Jim Wynorski)
This movie does not get enough love. It is pure 80s slasher/gore love. What could be better than teens locked in a mall being hunted by killer robots armed with head-exploding lasers?

September 22: Piranha 3D (2010, dir. Alexandre Aja)
Look, for me, Halloween is about nostalgia and creepiness, so some of these movies just give me that warm and fuzzy zinged feeling. The first time I saw Piranha 3D, my wife and I laughed through the entire movie. Every time I watch it, I think of that. It’s also a great movie.

September 23: Dusk Till Dawn (1996, dir. Robert Rodriguez)
I love a good vampire movie, and honestly, I saw this one in the theater in 1996, and it blew me away. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is so sharp and slick it’s a great ride with amazing acting.

September 24: A Quiet Place (2018) (dir. John Krasinski)
I have only had this on the list for a few years. I think Krasinski did a great job with this movie. Yes, there are some plot holes, but there is a ton of suspense in this film. It’s fun!

September 25: Salem’s Lot (1979, dir. Tobe Hooper)
The most terrifying made-for-TV miniseries of all time. The blue vampire kept me up for weeks. The little boy scratching at the window is one of the top 5 traumas of GenX kids.

September 26: Carrie (1976, dir. Brian De Palma)
A classic, and I wish I had more Stephen King on this list. Many times I’ll also watch Maximum Overdrive, Christine, Cujo, and others on this same day.

September 27: The Lost Boys (1987, dir. Joel Schumacher)
One of the greatest modern vampire movies. It does make you feel like a stranger in a strange land. So much fun.

September 28: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974, dir. Terence Fisher)
It is the only Hammer Film on the list, but just know I am a Hammer Film freak. I love Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. They are both amazing. I think the movie is the best of all the Hammer films. I remember watching on Big Chuck and Little John (Cleveland’s late-night horror hosts), and I was terrified.

September 28: Obsession (2026, dir. Curry Barker)
Yep, first time I’ve added a movie to this list in a while, but it’s that good. I will be watching Obsession every year from now on. I watched it on opening weekend, and it blew my mind. I’ve seen it a few more times since. It is outstanding.

September 30: Misery (1990, dir. Rob Reiner)
To go along with Obsession, we have Misery. The acting in this movie is amazing, and it is terrifying! I usually have to rewind the foot-smashing scene.

October 1: Late Night With the Devil (2023, dir. Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes)
I think this movie is a new classic. It’s not getting the credit it deserves. It is an outstanding and very scary fun ride.

October 2: Friday the 13th Part III (1982, dir. Steve Miner)
The greatest of all The 13th Parts, Part 3 is basically a period piece now. It’s senseless killing in the early 80s, and you can tell from the cool vans to the haircuts, you are transported to the fun, gritty 80s when you watch it.

October 3: Saw (2004) (dir. James Wan)
It is a classic must-watch.

October 4: Audition (1999, dir. Takashi Miike)
A movie that’s a mix of Obsession and Misery, Audition is the way I turn up the cringe and creep in early October. You can’t look away from this movie. This, for me, kicks off the really scary side of Halloween season.

October 5: Candyman (1992, dir. Bernard Rose)
Tony Todd is so good in this movie. The entire film feels like there is a shadow standing over it. It’s a must-watch in early October. It also kicks off the classics. These are generally indisputable as some of the greatest horror films in history.

October 6: The Return of the Living Dead (1985, dir. Dan O’Bannon)
A hilarious and great zombie movie. I remember watching this with my group of horror-loving friends in middle school, and it blew our minds.

October 7: Re-Animator (1985, dir. Stuart Gordon)
This is 80s cult royalty. It is one of the greatest 80s horror films of all time.

October 8: House (1986, dir. Steve Miner)
Again, one of the funnest horror movie rides of all time. It is indisputable as one of the top comedy horror movies of the 80s.

October 9: Shaun of the Dead (2004) (dir. Edgar Wright)
The friendship in this movie is as important as the zombies! It reminds me of the buddies I grew up and went trick-or-treating with.

October 10: 28 Days Later (2002, dir. Danny Boyle)

October 11: Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele)
Peele really is becoming one of the all-time great horror directors. Get Out is a masterpiece of fear, and I have watched it every year since it came out.

October 12: The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme)
We are getting into indisputable territory. These top movies may be the best horror movies of all time. The Silence of the Lambs is monumental.

October 13: Omen (1976, dir. Richard Donner)
I have to watch this one every year. It freaks me out and is perfect for Halloween.

October 14: Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
One of the all-time greatest psychological slasher movies ever made.

October 15: Hellraiser (1987, dir. Clive Barker)
Wow, I remember watching Hellraiser when it came out, and you could feel the shift in horror from 80s cheesiness to 90s sleek.

October 16: Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven)
An amazing film I have seen 100 times. I could not love a slasher more. Leave it to Wes to bring his full magic powers to this meta-slasher.

October 17: Near Dark (1987, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
Vampires and Halloween go together like chocolate and peanut butter. I have to say this movie does not get the respect it deserves. It is one of the all-time best modern vampire movies, period.

October 18: Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento)
I think this movie is the most visually stunning movie I have ever seen, and that’s saying a lot for a horror film made in 1977. It is hypnotic and classic.

October 19: Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero)
I watched this when I was like 10 years old on regular TV. My parents went to my aunt’s house for dinner, and when they got back I was curled up in a ball on the sofa with every light in the house turned on. A Halloween must for me.

October 20: The Howling (1981, dir Joe Dante)
Easily the 2nd greatest werewolf movie of all time.

October 21: Fright Night (1985, dir. Tom Holland)
Fright Night is easily the best 80s vampire movie. There are not many that can beat it.

October 22: Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
I watch both Alien and Aliens and argue with myself over which one is better. The original, though, is a gritty, gooey masterpiece, Halloween perfection!

October 23: American Werewolf in London (1981, dir. John Landis)
I will definitely say that American Werewolf is the greatest werewolf movie of all time. Nothing touches it.

October 24: The Fly (1986, dir. David Cronenberg)
Let Cronenberg be Cronenberg! One of the all-time great horror movies, period.

October 25: Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir. George A. Romero)
This was probably my favorite horror movie of all the 100s of horror movies I watched in the 80s. It is scary, funny, and says a lot about American society of the time.

October 26: Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven)
I first watched this when I was 10 years old sitting on the sofa with my mom and my dad. Mind-blowing they let me watch it. I was scared for weeks after this.

October 27: The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Arguably one of the top 5 horror films ever made. It is scary!

October 28: Evil Dead II (1987, dir. Sam Raimi)
The movie that changed everything in horror. There are horror movies before Evil Dead II, and then there are horror movies after Evil Dead II. Sam is a genius.

October 29: The Thing (1982, dir. John Carpenter)
A perfect movie.

October 30: Texas Chainsaw (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)
Also a perfect movie that changed how audiences watched movies. Even after 50 years, it’s still terrifying.

October 31: Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter)

I have to watch it every Halloween! You have a wandering killer and the feel of fall, even though in at least one shot you can see the palm trees. One of the greatest 3rd acts in horror movie history.

So there you go. That was a lot to write, but I’ll be watching all of these this Halloween. Again, if you disagree with any of these, feel free to tell me in the comments.

Happy Halloween!

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There was also the POW movement that was everywhere. The flags were everywhere, the protests were on TV, and nobody really knew if soldiers were still being held in Vietnam or not. No one really knew, but there were arguments about it on the news and talk shows daily. My best friend’s dad was in Vietnam, and it was a very hard transition back to the world for him. My friend honestly had a very hard time with a very hard father who had seen far too much.

The war was controversial. It was protested during and after the war. I’m not making light of these films or these traumas. Vietnam really did screw us up. It was hard on the whole country, and being a kid in the 80s you really felt like you were standing in the shadow of something terrible that had just happened. The war did not go well. The soldiers who returned home after fighting for their country were treated poorly, and there were countless wrongs that have never been put right.

Watching these movies devastated people, and so many scenes were put on the big screen that were unforgettable and chilling. Here are ten Vietnam War movie scenes that completely screwed up Gen X. Yes, I remember seeing all of these when I was young. Yes, they were haunting, and many still bother me.

1. The Deer Hunter (1978) | Dir. Michael Cimino

The Deer Hunter was hailed as a masterpiece when it came out in 1978 and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but the movie has not aged well. Anyone who watches it today sees caricatures of the Vietnamese people, and a kind of racism that is rare to display on screen these days.

If it wasn’t bad enough for older Gen Xers to be watching the war on TV every day, the movies about the war started rolling out shockingly fast. Michael Cimino’s vision of the war follows a close group of steelworkers, three of which sign up for duty in Vietnam only to find chaos and a type of hell on Earth. The three men are captured and become POWs.

In the most brutal, and in fact the central event which influences the characters throughout the rest of the film, POWs Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage) are forced to play Russian roulette. The scene is intense and brutal. Christopher Walken won an Academy Award for his role, but all of the actors are so believable in this scene. De Niro and Walken are sitting at a table with Vietnamese soldiers all around them pointing their rifles at them. They can’t understand what the men are saying, but they keep slapping them over and over and making it apparent they are supposed to put the gun to their head and play this game. De Niro starts off defiant. He’s cussing and screams at the men and pulls the trigger and the gun clicks. Walken is crying on his first turn and of course reluctant. De Niro starts crying.

I remember this scene from when I was a kid. The Deer Hunter was a very famous and controversial movie. I remember my parents watching it on HBO. It was one of those times I think I was more playing with toys than paying attention to a movie that I didn’t want to watch. Yeah, that happened in the 80s. Parents just watched shows, and if you didn’t like them you could pound salt. I remember stopping at this scene. I just remember being mesmerized by their faces and their nervous laughter and cussing. It haunted me as a kid.

Michael Cimino’s decision to add this Russian roulette scene and the Russian roulette underground in the movie was completely fictional. The movie drew criticism even at the time. He said it was a metaphor, but in reality it was complete fiction. I was never there, and was too young to even remember the war being on TV, but I do remember how haunting this loss of agency was for the men, the fear of death. Vietnam was a terrible war, and everyone knew it, and this movie made you feel terrible about what had happened, real or not.

2. Platoon (1986) | Dir. Oliver Stone

I would have been about 11 when Platoon came out. It was a hallmark movie of the Vietnam War experience. Oliver Stone, I’ve said before, became kind of a hero to me and my friends who loved serious movies. At the time Stone was larger than life and we wanted to see his vision of what he went through in Vietnam. Platoon is still hailed as one of the most accurate war movies of the era. It is sad and intense.

If you don’t know, Platoon is Oliver Stone’s masterpiece about the Vietnam War that follows Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a college dropout who signs up to serve in the war. He is mentored by two sergeants, Barnes (Tom Berenger) and Elias. Both represent different and conflicting approaches to war, so Sheen is torn between the two. It is a philosophical and psychological fight for his soul. The movie does an amazing job of showing the blight of war on the mind and on the character of the people fighting and trying to survive. It’s not a tidy tie-up of ideas and philosophies, it’s a journey of pain.

The scene that I think haunted everyone is when they go into the village and a soldier terrorizes the villagers. Charlie Sheen confronts a disabled young man. The man only has one leg, but he is also obviously mentally disabled. He is smiling at Sheen. Sheen had given the young man directions and he did not listen and Sheen was furious. Of course all the soldiers are furious because some of their friends have just been killed. Sheen starts shooting into the ground telling the man to dance, while the young man hops on one leg and his mother stands beside him screaming for his life. She is crying and wailing. In the end Sheen steps away but Bunny (Kevin Dillon) comes forward and yells at the man, he turns around to leave and then bashes the man in the head repeatedly with his rifle. He looks back to Sheen and says, “You see that head come apart? I’ve never seen brains like that before.” Sheen is crying and the other men in the hut are standing speechless with blood splattered all over them.

The first time I watched this movie I watched it with my movie-loving friend Joe. Joe was probably the smartest guy I have ever met. We both just sat in silence after seeing that. I think we actually paused the movie. Whereas The Deer Hunter was showing the brutality the Americans were inflicted with by the Vietnamese, Platoon shows the chaos and heartbreak of war. The psychological impacts are not one shocking event, it is all the events. You can understand why Sheen is so upset, so tortured during this scene. Platoon is one of those movies that sticks with you. I don’t think I watched it until high school, and it certainly changed the ideas of the heroics and romanticism of war.

3. Full Metal Jacket (1987) | Dir. Stanley Kubrick

In high school, this was our movie. I was 13 when it came out, but it was big in video stores and on HBO. I remember watching this with a group of my friends. When we were skating, or walking out to go street skate for the day, one of us inevitably would say, “This is my stick, there are many like it, but this one is mine.” It was the rally cry for getting ready with a little irony mixed in. That scene is also one of the most devastating scenes in the movie, and I think it messed us all up in some ways.

If you’ve never been around a bunch of skateboarders in the 1990s, we were a little bit like what you saw later on TV. There are some key features to our group back then. We were antiestablishment. We were cynical, and we were pretty full of ridiculous angst. Up until 1991, we were also looked down on and told we were dirt. After 1991 we were well liked but kept a big chip on our shoulders. The chip on our shoulders matched the darkness of Full Metal Jacket and the character of Joker to a T.

If you don’t know, Full Metal Jacket is a war movie that follows Joker (Matthew Modine) through basic training and into the field and fighting in Vietnam. The battle scenes are not sweeping, they are grinding. Director Stanley Kubrick wanted to take the glory and romance out of war, and this movie does it on every level. The most devastating scene, of course, is the Full Metal Jacket scene that happens at the end of basic training.

Basic training, even though it follows Joker, seems to focus on Leonard Lawrence, nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey). Leonard is played by Vincent D’Onofrio. R. Lee Ermey gives a brutal and highly accurate portrayal of a drill sergeant in basic training. The character is now infamous, but D’Onofrio’s character is obviously in some way neurodivergent. Ermey and the course of basic training, and repeated failures, take their toll on D’Onofrio. He slowly sinks into what you can see on film is darkness and madness. It’s a fact that the drill sergeant seems to miss until the end. One night while Joker is on guard duty he walks into the bathroom of the bunkhouse and finds D’Onofrio sitting on a toilet with his rifle. He then says the famous line, “This is my rifle…” You can see on D’Onofrio’s face and in his eyes that he has totally succumbed to the pressure and depression. Joker, the smart one of the group, the skater at heart, sees that D’Onofrio is far out there and approaches with care, asking him to go back to bed and saying they will be in a “world of shit” if the sergeant finds them. D’Onofrio loads his rifle and goes into full military performance, being loud enough to wake everyone including the sergeant, who confronts him with his usual charm and demeanor by screaming that he is worthless in his face. Joker warns the sergeant that the rifle is loaded with a “full metal jacket.” This does not deter him, and he goes on to ask D’Onofrio what’s the matter, didn’t his mommy give him enough hugs. At that point D’Onofrio shoots the sergeant and turns the gun on himself. He lets Joker stand their and watch him blow his own head off.

It feels like the cynicism of the 1990s in an 80s movie. It’s the cold and madness that was happening at the time and is still happening today. It was not lost on us as a group. I would let this movie play in the background while we were hanging out in my room sometimes. We could talk through the whole movie, being that we’d seen it 100 times, but that scene, we’d all stop and watch. It is devastating. It was devastating like we felt coming. School shootings and mass shootings in America go way back. The 1966 University of Texas Tower Shooting is the one that gets credit for being the first big school shooting, but they were happening all the time. The culture just didn’t acknowledge it until a string of shootings in the 1990s, and finally of course Columbine in 1999 changed the national awareness completely. Kubrick’s message in Full Metal Jacket to us was saying the caller is inside the house. We felt what was coming. We saw how dark things were before everyone else, the ones still distracted by the neo and glam of the happy facade of the 80s. Joker knew too.

4. Apocalypse Now (1979) | Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Yep, more madness from war in this movie. It’s based on the 1899 Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness. A few in my group had read this in our early high school years, so we all talked about it. If you have ever read the book you know it’s about sinking into a type of madness and hopelessness. The movie captures those feelings and those thoughts. It’s odd how much influence the Modernists of the early 1900s had on 80s and 90s culture.

Apocalypse Now, if you don’t know, is the story of Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), who is a burned out special forces officer they send to kill rogue Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz in the movie, like in the book, has killed his way through the jungle and then set himself up as a prophet or a god. Willard’s mission is to “terminate with extreme prejudice.” The movie is a dark journey into madness and hopelessness. Willard travels up the river looking for Kurtz and witnessing the atrocities and chaos of war.

The scene that is most pointed to in this movie, the one one of my friends quoted all the time, was when they attack a Vietnamese village with helicopters blasting “Ride of the Valkyries” and Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) stands on the beach after the village and people have been incinerated by napalm, a devastating and cruel weapon, and says the very famous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning, smells like victory.” The scene is sickening and a display of heartless indifference toward human life. It also represents the twistedness of someone who basically kills for a living.

Apocalypse Now was one of those movies that set a standard for filmmaking in the 70s. Its influence was felt in a lot of movies of the 80s and 90s, and my group was aware. This too was one of those movies I would play on occasion in the background. I think as teenagers we related to this movie’s descent into madness. The 80s felt like madness. You were growing up in a world that was kind of tearing itself apart. Gen X was of course the cynical ones. Our parents had seen Vietnam and Watergate and JFK’s and MLK’s assassinations, and we were going to deal with the ramifications. We were living in a country that was waking up to its own problems, problems that it didn’t have before or didn’t acknowledge before. We were made exceptionally aware of it when we watched this movie. In a little way it’s like going into the madness of adulthood. “I don’t know what to tell you kid, that’s the way it is.”

5. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) | Dir. Oliver Stone

I saw this movie on a double date. It’s not a double date movie. It’s not a date movie. Born on the Fourth of July is an Oliver Stone movie based on a true story about Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), a patriotic young man who runs to enlist in the Marines during the Vietnam War. In Vietnam there is a friendly fire incident, and Ron comes back in a wheelchair. It is basically his awakening to how everything he was taught about patriotism and serving his country and the romance of war all run counter to how the country saw the troops and what reality really is. He spends the movie struggling against alcohol and with a system that does not give him adequate healthcare or support for its soldiers. Eventually he begins to take a different path and speak up for the injustices of soldier treatment. Ron Kovic ended up speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1976, becoming a voice against the war.

There are several devastating scenes in this movie, but the one that sticks out for me, the one where my girlfriend at the time looked away, was the hospital sequence. The men were dealing with rats. The staff is inadequate, the hospital is a cesspool. At one point Ron breaks his leg trying to walk, and they put him in traction for days. He is immobilized, staring at his own puddle of vomit on the floor, and he hears the machine stop. He knows if it doesn’t continue he will lose his leg, and it is just heart-wrenching. He prays, and in the end the machine starts and his leg is saved, though he is paralyzed below the waist.

The movie opens with apple pie parades and JFK talking on TV, the height of America’s love for itself. The hospital scene is the transition into the reality of how America was treating its soldiers, at least from Ron’s perspective. It’s a type of hell he has to pass through, and it changes him. Stone sets you up perfectly. You go from the bright colors and the band playing down main street to a man lying in his own filth praying a machine doesn’t quit on him. It’s one of the most effective one-two punches in any movie on this list.

I think all Gen Xers were seeing that change in our country, the slide into cynicism. We were being taught a hollowed out version of 1950s and 1960s America the great, about hometown values and apple pie and all that stuff, but by the time the 80s came around it was very thinly veiled. Our dates didn’t like the movie, but it was exactly the kind of movie our group needed to see.

6. First Blood (1982) | Dir. Ted Kotcheff

We all know the scene. First Blood was a kids’ favorite in the 1980s, believe it or not. I’ve talked about having the lunchbox. My lunchbox had Rambo with a rocket launcher on the front of it. It was great to take to elementary school. They even made a cartoon based on these movies, which is just bonkers. First Blood was the first in a long line of Rambo movies that set the tone of 80s action blockbusters.

In 1982, there was nothing bigger than First Blood. It is more serious than the rest of the movies in the franchise. The movie of course follows John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in his return home, looking for an ex-special forces buddy he finds has died of cancer. Rambo walks into a small town and is arrested on vagrancy by an arrogant sheriff played by Brian Dennehy. Both Stallone and Dennehy are amazing in their parts in this movie. Rambo is arrested then escapes jail and runs to the local woods. The rest of the movie both the local sheriffs and the National Guard take on Rambo and are basically defeated over and over. Rambo makes his way back into town where he blows up pretty much everything and shoots up the local police station where the arrogant sheriff is hiding out. He kills the sheriff and then is confronted by his old commander, Colonel Samuel Trautman (Richard Crenna). Trautman wants to talk Rambo down. There are hundreds of state troopers and National Guard outside and Rambo flies into one of the most devastating and over-the-top emotional venting scenes in any 80s movie, and that’s saying a lot. Rambo tells the story of him and a friend in Vietnam, and a shoe shine boy who rigs his box with a bomb and blows his friend to pieces, and at the height of his breakdown, Rambo says he wanted to take his friend home but “I can’t find your legs.”

The “can’t find your legs” line became a thing in the 80s, and it was way over the top, though very effective at the time in the movie. I can tell you as an 8 year old kid watching this movie I was completely out of my mind at this point. Here was this tough, larger than life, special forces war hero breaking down and blubbering like a baby, and honestly I really just wanted to run and hide from the scene. It was so terrible and shocking and devastating I was like, nope. That is the best thing I can say to emotionally relating to the Rambo character as a kid. Nope. After this, Rambo goes on for several movies and just blows things up, and I think every 80s kid was fine with that. No more sharing emotions, Rambo, too much dude, too much.

7. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) | Dir. Barry Levinson

I saw this one at the theater with a date! I was so excited. I mean it was only 13 years after the war had ended and there were already 50 movies about the war, but this one had Robin Williams as the famous Adrian Cronauer, the voice of Vietnam. It had to be a comedy, right? I mean Robin was Popeye (let’s not talk about that), Mork, who was the best alien to ever grace the small screen, and his comedy specials were off the charts funny. Hey, if I could watch Eddie Murphy do his thing on stage, I could watch Robin, though most of the time he was talking about drugs or sex. Anyway, this had to be a great comedy!

Yeah it really wasn’t. Good Morning, Vietnam was a great movie, but it’s not a comedy and I don’t recommend taking your 13 year old date to it. Yes I was 13. Yes my parents dropped me off. Yes the street lights coming on is when I came home and I drank from a garden hose. None of this is made up. It all happened. I’m still working it out, ok. GenZ stop asking, yes it really happened.

Anyway, Good Morning, Vietnam was about Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) on the radio in Vietnam, doing funny bits and being his ridiculous Robin Williams self with the troops to raise their spirits. Robin is great in it of course, but he was great in everything. He befriends a young Vietnamese boy in the movie who gains his trust. The boy is Tuan, played by Tung Thanh Tran. The boy gains his trust, turns out to be a notorious terrorist who has been bombing local hangouts of American soldiers, and Cronauer gets kicked out of the army for it. The movie is a lot of rolling jokes and fun, but you have to be reminded in the end that it is a war and people are dying and maybe having fun and games with Robin Williams in the middle of it isn’t really all that necessary. I liked Good Morning, Vietnam, but it was a real downer for my date. Yes it ends sad.

8. Hamburger Hill (1987) | Dir. John Irvin

Hamburger Hill is a devastating movie. I remember watching it with my parents and just thinking, what the hell did I just watch? The movie follows a platoon of U.S. Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division as they are ordered to take Hill 937 in the A Shau Valley of Vietnam during May 1969, a fortified position held by the North Vietnamese Army that has no real strategic value beyond the enemy’s presence on it. I won’t go into great detail here, I could spend 10 pages on this movie, but basically over ten days the platoon tries to take the hill. They are turned back repeatedly, many of them die and are replaced. They keep fighting, and there is one battle after another until they reach the top of the hill, finally at the end of the movie.

I remember all the men you have watched and followed, liked and disliked, sitting at the top of this hill. There is no celebrating. They are not cheering or happy to have taken the hill or finally won this battle. They just sit in the mud and look at each other in a chilling way while their radios go off saying basically they will be moving on from the hill. They fought for worthless ground. It was completely meaningless, and the movie achieved its goal with me at like 14 years old sitting and watching this with my mom and dad. My dad never went to war. He was too young for WW2 and too old for Korea or Vietnam, but he always respected soldiers. At the end of the movie I can remember him saying something like, “What a waste.” It was exactly what I was thinking. Gen X kids, who all watched as many Vietnam War movies as they could, as far as I could tell, were taught how ridiculous war was. War changed from the romantic war of WW1 and the hero war of WW2 for us. We got senseless wars and senseless battles, and if you really watch Hamburger Hill you really feel how senseless wars can be. It is a hard watch and a kind of devastating revelation.

9. Casualties of War (1989) | Dir. Brian De Palma

Ok, I’m not going to go far into this movie. It is based on one of the most disturbing true stories of the Vietnam War. After losing men in a Viet Cong ambush, the squad’s commanding sergeant, Tony Meserve (Sean Penn), leads his men to a nearby village where they kidnap and repeatedly sexually assault and abuse a young Vietnamese girl named Tran Thi Oanh (Thuy Thu Le). Pfc. Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) refuses to participate and tries repeatedly to get the men to rethink what they are doing. Eventually it ends with Fox bringing the incident to light and the men are court martialed.

It is a devastating movie. I remember watching this one terrified night on HBO. I’m not going to go into the horrific scenes or the many things that haunted me about this movie. Many young Gen Xers saw this movie, and we didn’t talk about it. I don’t know what others thought of it, but I know the whole movie was basically traumatizing for me. It was a shock because you never expected Michael J. Fox, star of Family Ties and Back to the Future, to be in a movie this dark and devastating.

10. Jacob’s Ladder (1990) | Dir. Adrian Lyne

Oh man, Jacob’s Ladder is an absolutely bananas movie that frankly screwed up so many Gen Xers. There are some crazy and horrific scenes in this movie. It feels like you are watching a dream, and you are. If you haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder stop reading here and go watch it. I’m about to spoil the movie.

This movie is mind bending to say the least. Jacob’s Ladder follows Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), who is killed at the beginning of the movie in a bayonet attack, but the movie flashes forward to him living in New York. The entire movie takes place while he is dying in those few seconds, so really the movie is the nightmare of Jacob letting go of his life. You don’t realize this until the end of the movie. He remembers the attacks in Vietnam, and there is a lot of demonic-like visuals of weird movements, and a scene with his girlfriend at a party where she is dirty dancing with what must be some kind of demon that completely wrecked me. I watched this movie with a group of friends. We rented it, and it was just like putting your mind in a blender, bonkers. Jacob’s young son Gabe died before Jacob went to Vietnam, and the movie covers him trying to cope with that death while seeing all these surreal and chilling images. His barber tells him, “If you are holding on to life you’ll see demons coming to tear your life away, but if you’re ready to die, the demons will be angels coming to take you away to heaven.” It was a line my friends and I would say when we were about to do something really stupid and dangerous on a skateboard.

In the movie, as I said, it turns out Jacob is really just dying in the mud in Vietnam and imagining what it would be like to have lived the rest of his life. I think living the rest of his life would have been fine if it wasn’t haunted the whole time by demons and weirdo figures that rapidly move in very uncanny ways.

The movie is a true Vietnam terror movie. Most of it takes place in New York, but even with this you can see how out of place the soldiers who returned felt, so much so that if they died in Vietnam and then returned in some type of nightmarish dream, everyone believed that reality felt that way for them. The dance scene alone is enough to make your skin crawl. It’s a great horror movie about dying in Vietnam and then returning to a world in some sort of purgatory dream. Gen Xers were certainly screwed up by this movie, and many have told me they were.

A Final Word

Vietnam wasn’t a joke. Some people in the 80s and then in the 90s made it out to be that way, but it was traumatizing and terrible. The movies on this list and the scenes I talked about are just some of the ways the country processed Vietnam. I can’t imagine what the men who fought there felt about these movies. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to be faced with those images 20 feet high on a movie screen, sitting in the dark with a bucket of popcorn like it was entertainment.

I can only talk about my own experiences. I was a young kid. I watched all these movies growing up, and every one of them was disturbing and mixed with the reality of people dying and hurting, never coming home or coming home to a horrible reception. It was all very hard to deal with. I don’t know if I really ever thought about how hard these movies were to watch until I started writing this. I think maybe I’ve been avoiding thinking about them for a long time. Some things you file away and don’t open again, and for a lot of Gen Xers, I suspect Vietnam was one of those files.

What about you? Did you watch these growing up? Did any of them leave a mark? Did someone in your family serve and was it hard getting them back? Let me know in the comments.

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I am so happy to join the Scarestack Society, for Spring of King! It was a blast reviewing and analyzing Cat’s Eye! So proud to join the Scarestackers on Stephen King adaptations. Special thanks to Mr. Thriller and Chiller Kyle Ryan for putting this together.

Two caveats before I get started. First, I have some heavy-duty stuff going on in my life right now, so if my writing feels a little flat or too serious, bear with me. I’ll be back to my zany self very soon!

Second, I’m going to write this without spoilers. I hope it entices you enough to go watch this film. If you have seen it, leave a comment and tell me what you think of my reading, or share your own theory.

Cat’s Eye is a 1985 anthology movie that is lost in the sea of 1980s horror films. It is set in those times, and honestly I’m not sure that fans really know what to do with this movie. It has 3 episodes that are only connected by a cat running into and out of people’s lives, but if you look a little deeper, you see that King has created a movie that makes much more commentary on 80s culture than one might believe at first glance.

The first time I saw Cat’s Eye was on HBO of course. It ran often, like most 80s movies on HBO. If you missed it last night, don’t worry it will be on tomorrow, and the next day and this weekend. I was pretty young when I saw it, I remember relating to Drew Barrymore. She’s only about 7 or 8 in the movie. The movie eventually ended up being one of those films that I recorded on VHS, wrote the name in my sloppy handwriting on a sticky label, and stuck it on my shelf with all the other 1000 plus movies I had recorded or ordered from Columbia House. My mom passed away in 2008. I think she was still a little angry at me about all the times I signed up for the movie club. Oops. Fill out a form, send a penny, they send you 10 movies! How can you resist that? Anyway, Cat’s Eye was lost in my never ending shelves of VHS tapes just like it’s kinda lost today.

It’s a shame though. I think it’s one of Stephen King’s most grounded horror movies. The film is set in the 80s and deals with 80s issues. I mean it’s not unheard of for him to write his stories set in current times. Children of the Corn, Thinner, and Carrie are all set in what would have been their current times, but all of those movies have a type of magic dream-like quality to them. I mean Children of the Corn doesn’t really feel like you’re in a midwest town. You’re disconnected because He Who Walks Behind the Rows has taken over. Carrie is pretty grounded but really goes magical at the end. You get the idea. I think more than any of his other movies, Cat’s Eye is set in what was current times, real world and is talking about bigger themes of those times. Man, that’s a lot to explain. Are you still awake? Usually when I go on like that people fall asleep. WAKE UP, this is interesting I promise, just follow me for a bit.

So you have to understand a little bit about the 1980s if you really want to fully understand this movie. Now relax, you can enjoy it if you don’t know these things. The movie rates a 17 on my Entertainment scale, so you’re good, but to understand King’s broader message with this movie, you need a little context.

At the heart of the movie Cat’s Eye is power and control, and the 1980s were really predicated on power and control. They were shaping behavior and culture with the media. Subliminal messages were all the rage. Say No to Drugs was on posters in every classroom, and Tipper Gore was in congress telling them that rock stars were putting hidden messages in every song, pointed out by the Satanic Panic. Where power and control is concerned, it was wild times.

The government and network TV were really just coming fully into their own, and they were flexing these crazy theories and ideas in the media. Can you control people with hundreds of drug commercials per day? No. Can you educate kids with TV? Well, a little. Can you get the masses to listen to you if you blasted it across every network? Probably. Anyway, the powers that be were trying to get their airwaves synced up with people’s brainwaves to get them to behave. It didn’t work. But it was all the rage.

We need to talk about this cat a little bit before we get into the segments of this anthology. The cat starts the movie by outrunning Cujo and then almost being killed by Christine. Yes, both make appearances in this movie referencing King’s work. Then the cat is caught by the Quitters crew. It’s then captured for the Ledge segment and then it finds a home with Amanda in the General segment.

King is working with the term Cat’s Eye here. If you have a cat’s eye you see what goes on in the dark, you have good eyes, like this cat you see everything that is happening. The cat serves as witness to each story. In folklore a cat’s eye is supposed to be able to see between different worlds, which this cat does both in witnessing different lives and in the end perceiving something the people of this universe cannot see. But the cat does more than this in the movie. It doesn’t only observe the lives of the people it gets entangled with, it is part of these stories. In each story it plays some role in changing the course of the people’s lives, all the way up until the end where it actually becomes the hero. King’s message here seems pretty clear. If you have the power of observation, and you can see with a cat’s eye these things that are happening, you have the power to affect the outcome. You can resist all control with understanding, basically.

This is important in understanding the message of this movie. All 3 segments are about power and control of different kinds, and the cat represents the biggest struggle people were having. The 2 main branches of thought in the 80s were that nature had a big hand in your development, left over from the 70s behavioral studies, and the Empowerment Movement which more or less gives us the self-help movement of the 2000s. Yeah they are all related, but don’t be shocked that people had very different ideas in their heads back then about how they were helpless in the face of their past. People called it victimization culture. So you had these 2 fundamental systems of thought fighting against each other all through the 80s. They played out just about every day on daytime talk shows. Tony Robbins was pushing empowerment in the 80s. Don’t look to Oprah here. She and all the other talk shows mostly displayed the victimization culture all through the 80s. It wasn’t until really around 1994 that she made the hard pivot to empowerment.

It’s really difficult to give all the context here, but you can see it in the slogans of the time. Army’s Be All You Can Be, Nike’s Just Do It, L’Oreal’s Because You’re Worth It, Just Say No, Winners Don’t Use Drugs. These were all slogans and movements that were directly taking on victim culture.

I say all of this to say that Cat’s Eye is a reflection of all of this. Unifying them is power and control. It is set across 3 segments.

Quitters

Quitters follows Dick Morrison (James Woods) who is trying to quit smoking. He joins Quitters, Inc. which turns out to be a tyrannical and bananas crazy organization that uses brutal tactics to get you to quit smoking. They will be watching him day and night. If he smokes, the first offense they put his wife in an electrified room. They demonstrate this with the cat. The 2nd offense they will bring his young daughter into the room. The 3rd offense they will send someone to rape his wife, and the 4th offense they give up, and he is shown a gun. So it’s a happy fun time full of suspense. It really is a good segment.

Quitters Inc. exhibits its power over its clients like the government exhibits power over its people. Do this or face ever escalating consequences. This was very much what was happening in the 1980s with laws and the beginning of incarcerating more and more people. The numbers are actually pretty staggering. When Reagan took office there were just over 300,000 people in prison. Over his 8 years in office, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act gave 5 year minimums for crack cocaine as it did for 100 times more of the powder form. This resulted in the prison population doubling, dramatically increasing the number of non-violent offenders in prison. Just like Quitters Inc., the government had steep penalties for not quitting, not staying clean. Just say no.

The Ledge

The next is The Ledge where Cressner (Kenneth McMillan) wants Johnny Norris (Robert Hays) to walk a high ledge all the way around a building in a bet. Basically if Johnny can walk all the way around the ledge of the building and he gets the money and Cressner’s wife. Cressner has set Johnny up, so either he agrees or he goes to jail. Cressner uses the cat to demonstrate going out on the ledge. There are 2 forms of power in this segment. The first is the crazy power we see that men want to exhibit over other men. We will call this performative power, where one man can get another to do what they want them to do. The second form of power is the power that addiction has over people. Cressner is hopelessly addicted to gambling and instead of just killing Johnny or going through with sending him to jail he has to turn it into a bet.

Both of these are prevalent in 1980s culture. Machismo was a big part of 80s culture. Men wanted to exhibit their power over others no matter what level they were on. The 1980s was a revolving door of domestic abuse. This was back in the times where the woman had to press charges before the man could be prosecuted. In 1985 there were no real formal laws against domestic violence. Just like in Quitters, there were no meaningful rape laws all the way through the 70s. It was the crazy wild west out there. If you were a woman and you got beat up, or a man was killed for messing with another guy’s wife, and Johnny is messing with Cressner’s wife Marcia, then if no one pressed charges or witnessed anything you walked free. It wasn’t until 1994 that The Violence Against Women Act was passed making domestic violence illegal. So understanding the power in Cat’s Eye needs that context. Watching it with today’s eyes, you might not realize that Cressner, the guy with the most power, was heavily favored in the courts. Johnny is certainly betting against the house in this segment.

General

General is the last segment of Cat’s Eye and it’s based around folklore. Amanda, played by Drew Barrymore, appears in every segment, but in this segment she is a child with a father named Hugh and a mother. They find the cat and name him General and bring him into Amanda’s room. The segment hinges on an old folklore story about how cats steal children’s breath in the middle of the night. What King does is turn the real threat into a troll that comes out of Amanda’s wall and starts taking her life force. The cat, which is interwoven through each story, comes to the rescue and drives the troll away.

The control in this segment is fate. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS. No one understood it. It wasn’t until the late 80s and early 90s that a massive groundbreaking study showed that infants sleeping on their stomachs had much higher rates of SIDS. So the folklore here is connected to this fear and how people were powerless over it. King makes the cat the unknown powerful force in this segment. I have heard claims that the anthology breaks down here and goes into a fairytale. Hooey! King is using a folktale to demonstrate how even people in the advancing society of the 1980s are unaware of some of the powerful forces around them. It’s kinda fun to think about.

In the end the movie demonstrates some of the worst kinds of control people have over each other, but the twists at the end never really work out the way you think they will. These are all pulled from King’s short stories and they are pretty well thought out. As a whole the movie represents the power and control of the 80s, against forces like the government, against ourselves and against our past, and if you are able to observe it, you can understand it, be part of it and overcome it.

The 80s were a turbulent time, but it was turbulent because of ideologies. Even though no large wars were going on, the USA was still struggling with losing Vietnam, Nixon, and HIV. Many people felt powerless in the face of these times. Cat’s Eye has a clear message: witness what’s going on and change it. It’s unusual for a King movie. Most of the time his themes are much more embedded in fantasy or horror, but this anthology is pretty clear and it is a clear reaction to the bonkers times it was written in.

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Look at these amazing Scarestackers. I mean they are awesome. Look at them. Go read their stuff, it’s amazing really. You have to go check them out. I dare you click one, just click it. You’ll be scared. I bet you will. Just click ‘em. Do it. Seriously these guys are amazing:

The Scarestack Society’s Spring of King:

5/1 It miniseries - Sahar Khan

5/2 Pet Semetary - JHong

5/3 Pet Semetary 2 - Horror Hangouts

5/4 Cujo - Kyle Ryan

5/5 Creepshow - B-Movie Tea

5/6 The Outsider - Sean Mo

5/7 Gerald’s Game - H. H. Duke

5/8 The Mangler - Timothy Atkinson

5/9 Maximum Overdrive - Yanni Hamburger

5/10 Salem’s Lot 2024 - Meat Head Media

5/11 Silver Bullet - George R. Galuschak

5/12 Creepshow 2 - Thehumangaze

5/13 Carrie - Hellish Views - Harry Evans

5/14 Christine - Emma

5/15 Big Driver- Molly O’Blivion & Stand By Me - Matt Cyr

5/16 The Shining - Jamie B.

5/17 The Long Walk - Decarceration

5/18 King Of Home Video - Jean-Pierre Diez

5/19 The Langoliers - Beverley’s Horror Corner

5/20 Sleepwalkers - Brandon Rae

5/21 The Running Man - Stevie Duffy

5/22 Misery - Skyla

5/23 The Night Flier - Bryan Wolford

5/24 The Shawshank Redemption - Genevieve Brock

5/25 Dreamcatcher - Kimberly B🌴👻🌴

5/26 The Mist - Cedric

5/27 The Dead Zone - Stephen’s Offscreen Screams

5/28 Cat’s Eye - Backyard Movie Critic & Graveyard Shift - Liam Palmer

5/29 Rose Red - Kristen (Blood,Blush ,& Guts) & Storm Of The Century - Adam Hunter

5/30 It Chapter 1 - That Horror Lesbian

5/31 Dolores Claiborne - Kimberly Ramsawak & The Lawnmower Man - Mike smith

So this weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the movie Curry Barker’s Obsession. You know when people are putting the name of the director before the movie title, it’s a great movie, and indeed Obsession is one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in the last 10 years. The movie is both universal in experience and addresses themes of control and agency. Honestly, I may put this on my top 10 horror movie list of all time, but I want to sit with it a little longer.

Obsession is the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), who uses a “One Wish Willow” to make a wish that Nikki (Inde Navarrette) will fall in love with him more than anyone else in the world. Bear is obsessed with Nikki. They both work at a music store together, but Nikki does not seem to return the feelings at the beginning of the movie.

Now I know this sounds like a Fatal Attraction scenario, or other love stories gone wrong, but it is not. The movie has a supernatural and chilling element that runs through it. I want this to be a spoiler-free review, so I’ll at some point in the future write a deeper dive into themes and motivations and characters and such.

I will say it is clear that yes, Bear is the villain of this movie, but I don’t mean that the way many Gen Zers are throwing the term villain at this guy in the movie. Bear has a universal problem that many younger men go through. Love is about maturity. When most people start to love, they do not know what love is. They think love is something else entirely. It might be obsession, it might be “puppy love,” but it isn’t adult love. Bear is far too old to feel this way, and there is no excuse for it, but it seems obvious his inexperience with women, and probably with dating and being in love, is what makes him still carry this distorted view of love. He may have other mental issues, but at the very least, his view of what love truly is sits very far from healthy.

This is the crux of the movie. When Bear wishes for Nikki to love him on the One Wish Willow, he’s not asking for her to love him. He’s asking her to be irresistibly obsessed with him, the way he is with her.

As I said I’ll go more into these themes in a later piece.

Entertainment Value 20/20

Obsession is off the charts on entertainment. The creep value is high. There are a few jump scares. There is a lot of tension, and I haven’t had this much fun in the theater watching a movie in years. It was just a blast. If you have ever had anyone obsessed with you, or been obsessed yourself, you’ll probably giggle out of anticipation in some parts of the movie. A giggle that says, “Oh boy, he’s in for it now, he doesn’t even know what’s coming.” The movie goes to a very dark place, but it has such a great mix of supernatural and psychological fears. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie this balanced before. Most movies lean into the psychological or the supernatural. This movie does both. It really is an achievement. I was blown away by how fun and entertaining this movie was. There are creepy dark room shots and absolutely over-the-top, bananas violence that is shocking. I was shocked. I was scared, and honestly, with all my years of horror movie watching, it is very hard to get me with a jump scare, but there are a couple in this movie that made me really bolt up in my seat. I felt like a rookie!

Rewatchability 20/20

Yes, I want to watch this movie a few more times. I am thinking of going again. There is a lot in this film, and it is well put together, so I have to say I’d love to watch it again. When I can get regular access by buying a copy, I’ll add it to my forever collection and watch it every year. Yes, it is that good. Just the build of this film, and the many very subtle details, make me feel like a rewatch will give me a fuller picture of everything the director was doing or trying to do. I don’t believe there are any inconsistencies, which is amazing for a first-time director. There is one over-the-top scene with money falling from a ceiling that the movie earns with its build to insanity, but I would really like to view it again to take in all the details. This will be a backyard movie watch with friends when it comes out.

You know a movie is great when not only do I want to rewatch it for myself, I want to rewatch it with friends and family and sit behind them and observe their reactions, because it is just so bonkers at times.

Acting 20/20

I don’t know how Curry Barker found four amazing young actors who haven’t really been in much before this, but Michael Johnston as Bear (Baron Bailey), Inde Navarrette as Nikki Freeman, Cooper Tomlinson as Ian, and Megan Lawless as Sarah do an amazing job in this film. It reminds me of when I saw Rob Zombie talking about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and saying something like, “Who is this director and where did he get a bunch of amazing actors out of nowhere that no one has ever heard of before?”

Inde Navarrette as Nikki absolutely puts up an award-winning performance. She is very versatile and chilling in this role. There are parts where her face is doing several things at once. Other times her body is doing oddities without her mind’s consent, and it’s displayed in her expressions. On top of all that, she has controlled screams and creepy phrasing and tone that, honestly, if she did it wrong, the movie would not work. Everyone is saying what a great job she did, but what they are not saying is that if she missteps in this part, if she comes off hokey or too over the top, or even just misses the mark with her choices just a little bit, this entire film comes crashing down. She had to thread the needle to get all of this to work, and she did.

Michael Johnston as Bear also puts up an amazing performance in this movie. He is so restrained, so tortured, so trapped inside himself and unable to act, he absolutely makes you hate him. I have a lot to write about Bear, and I will in the future. I don’t want to give too much away, but he has some fatal character flaws. It doesn’t seem like he is an evil person in the sense that he’s not stalking or harming Nikki within his own obsession at the beginning of the movie. His wish is very immature, as I said before, but without the supernatural currents of this film, Bear probably never takes action against Nikki. He probably just moves on to another crush. He is a character of inaction, and it’s infuriating in this situation.

Story/Plot 18/20

The story is, as I said, a universal story of what people might initially think love is. Bear really is obsessive over Nikki in the beginning, but there is much more to this movie than just the universal questions of love versus obsession. There is also the question of what you control and what controls you. How do you deal with power dynamics in a relationship? What is ethical and what is not? What do you do if someone really becomes obsessed with you, even if it is what you always wanted? The supernatural aspects of this movie are bonkers. I’ll be honest, I’m kind of obsessed with thinking about how all of it works. What the hell was that guy on the phone, the one letting Bear talk to something? How does all this work? What is the “One Wish Willow” really? There are subtleties in the supernatural underpinnings of this movie that could be talked about and explored for hours.

The only problem I have with the story is what Curry Barker himself pointed to in an interview. This “One Wish Willow” really couldn’t work this way, or everyone would have their wishes fulfilled and the world would be chaos. It doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a further explanation as to why this works for Bear but not others, or how rare this wishing device is, but it’s not told in the movie. I think that makes it a talking point, but I would have liked just a little bit more to sharpen my discussions of this plot device.

The story starts strong in the cafe, but you can see the fingerprints of a young writer on it, where there is that massive breath and holding back before we get to the crux of the movie. It feels like a new writer issue, just that cobbling together of explanations before we rush into what the storyteller really wants to get to. Sometimes writers fall into this and “write for the ending.” It’s not terrible, and it’s only a very short segment of the film, but it is a bit listless. It does not distract from the overall movie.

Directing 17/20

First let me say, for a directorial debut, this movie is amazing. The cinematography, lighting, and camera angles sell this movie. That’s what makes it scary. There are some amazing shots here that put you in the suspense and build tension. For a first-time director, it is astounding. As I said before, Curry Barker embarrassed me in the theater, making me jump at a few scares that I don’t normally react to in movies. The build in this movie is intense. Almost everything about this film’s direction is perfect.

The biggest problem I have is with pacing at the beginning of the movie. I said this in the storytelling section, but the movie is just the slightest bit clunky to start. It does not take away too much from the film. Once we get to the wish, things really start moving. The opening of the movie is done well, but the establishing of characters, the little bit of showing their relationships before the wish, just felt like the director was trying to pull some things together and explain maybe a little too much. It’s not too noticeable, but there was a point where I was a little worried. I thought, “OK, are we going to move this along or not?” It felt, as I said, a bit clunky.

Overall 94/100

I know I haven’t put up a lot of bad reviews on movies, but it is rare for a movie to fall into my A list. I was really surprised by this movie. Longlegs a while ago had this much hype, and it does not get high marks in my eyes. I thought Longlegs was terribly plodding, but Obsession is the first hyped horror movie in years that is getting much-deserved praise. I really do think this is a new horror classic. I hope that Curry Barker is a new John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper. I hope we see many more horror films from him.

You will not be disappointed with Obsession, and you will walk away talking about the movie and probably wanting to see it again. I have this weird thing where I’m a little obsessed with it right now, watching reviews and interpretations, and that only happens to me with great films. This is a movie I want on my watch list every Halloween. I don’t know what more praise I can give it than that. If you’ve seen Obsession, let me know what you think in the comments. I’ll be writing a spoiler-filled essay later, probably by the end of the week, and we can talk spoilers there. For now, just let me know what you thought of the movie.

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In the 80s the power of love was a curious thing. It would make one man weep and another man sing. It was tougher than diamonds, rich like cream and harder than a bad girl’s dreams. It was strong and sudden and really cruel sometimes, but it was just the power of love and that’s the way it was. It was coming for you, and you were absolutely helpless in fighting it off. You really had no choice in who or what you fell in love with.

Love was the most powerful force in the universe in the 1980s. At one point the Fonz even beats the devil with it, that happened on a multitude of TV shows. I’m not saying it isn’t true today. I’m not saying that love isn’t the most powerful force in the universe anymore, but if you lived in the 1980s, you knew, and everyone knew that it was stalking you, and if you fell in love with a fish, or an alien or a robot or even a duck, you were just completely screwed and looked at weird. Those who knew the situation, though, understood it was the power of love.

Here are the 10 Romance Movies that Screwed up GenX and Made us Fall in Love with Anything.

1. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972, Woody Allen)

Not really a romance movie, really, more a sex movie, kinda. I don’t know how to describe it. Woody Allen being Woody Allen, I guess. So if you haven’t seen Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), it’s a 1972 anthology comedy based on Dr. David Reuben’s bestselling sex manual. If we’re honest there aren’t a lot of movies based on manuals, especially sex manuals. Not saying it’s a bad thing, but rare. The movie has 7 comedy segments ranging from a medieval jester trying to win over the queen to a mad scientist who falls in love with a beast terrorizing the countryside. Yeah, it’s a crazy exploration and comedic adaptation of a sex manual, why not. It’s Woody Allen. The movie is hilarious.

Now if you’ve seen this movie you probably already know the segment I’m going to talk about. In “What Is Sodomy?” yes, that’s its name, Dr. Ross played by Gene Wilder meets a farmer’s sheep and falls madly, madly, madly in love with it. Wilder is hilarious in the sketch, like he is in most movies, because he plays it 1000% straight, like it’s really happening, this is not a joke, he is fully head over heels infatuated with this sheep and even dresses the sheep up in lingerie at one point.

I think I was about 11 years old when I saw this movie playing on HBO one afternoon, and I was completely and utterly confused by everything that was being talked about and happening, and the sheep thing was like, what is going on? Now this is an outrageous comedy obviously not meant for children, but it kinda kicked off something in the 80s. The message would later become you can fall in love with anything. I mean anything. In the 80s the power of love was everywhere, it was the most powerful force in the universe according to all movies and TV shows, it overcame every problem, and you were completely defenseless against it when it happened to you.

So falling in love with a sheep wasn’t Dr. Ross’s fault, it just so happened that love struck him at that moment, and oops, you’re in love with a sheep.

At 11 years old, after seeing this, I wanted to be in love, but I was really afraid love was sneaking up behind me making me do things I didn’t want to do, being someone I didn’t want to be. I was curious about love but becoming ever more concerned.

2. Young Frankenstein (1974, Mel Brooks)

Here is another example of someone falling in love with something that has never really been loved before. I mean, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s classic novel, survived from 1818 until 1974 without anyone deeply and meaningfully falling in love and doinking the monster. Mel Brooks had to put a stop to that.

If you don’t know, Young Frankenstein is a parody of the Frankenstein story, particularly Bride of Frankenstein, where Frederick Frankenstein, or Frankensteen, played by Gene Wilder, is called back to his grandfather’s castle and takes up the mantle of recreating the monster his grandfather failed at. This movie is a classic. It is amazing. I love this movie, but Frederick’s icy and aloof fiancee (Madeline Kahn) isn’t much into the Doctor, but once she comes across his creation, The Monster played by Peter Boyle, she kinda falls madly in love once he wins her over with his “enormous schwanzschtücker.” It’s outrageous. It’s hilarious, but it certainly teaches you not to judge. Also, again, the power of love is ravaging Kahn here, and though she is preppy and stuck up and above everyone else in the world, she is completely powerless in the raging waters of passion and cupid’s arrows. Defenseless against its power, she has to support her monster man.

Yes, the power of love is coming for you, and you have to surrender to it whether you like it or not. It will bring you to your knees until you relent and marry the very “handsome” and “articulate” Peter Boyle.

When I saw Young Frankenstein, I was really young. I might have been 8 or 9. It’s rated PG, and highly coded, which just means that every time they talk about sex in the movie, I was completely confused by why people were laughing so much. I wasn’t yet afraid of the power of love, but constantly puzzled about it, and what the hell is a schwanzschtücker anyway?

3. Splash (1984, Ron Howard)

Man, my girl cousins were crazy for this movie. I remember them coming over and watching this one night. Not only did it get the name Madison started as a girl’s first name, but it also gave a big boost to Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah. If you don’t know, Splash is the romantic comedy about Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) who falls overboard off a ferry near Cape Cod and is rescued by a beautiful mermaid (Daryl Hannah). Well, he drops his wallet in the ocean and she uses it to track him back to New York City. It turns out when mermaids dry themselves out, they grow legs. They really don’t explain that part in the mermaid legends. Hannah just shows up with long hair and long legs, basically naked on the beach, and she’s so pretty it was a buy-in moment for most guys back then.

The idea that you might accidentally fall in love with something, again the power of love, you don’t need money you don’t need no fame, you just fall in love and whatever happens happens. Well, with Splash it takes a while. At one point she is exposed as being a mermaid and captured by, I guess, the military to be studied. Look, it’s an 80s romantic comedy, it doesn’t have to make sense. All I know is when Hanks sees that she’s a mermaid he basically freaks out and rejects her. I mean, yeah, she’s half fish. I think that’s gotta be a rare kink, but no one is judging, I guess. Anyway, once he realizes she was the perfect fish-girl and it was the perfect relationship, he decides he can live and love a fish and goes back to save her. Not judging, I’m not judging.

Splash was a smash hit, I love saying that, and it helped Hanks transition from TV shows to movies. It also showed in no uncertain terms that the power of love could make you love anyone or anything. At the end, Hanks goes to live at the bottom of the ocean with her. I don’t know the proper pronoun for a fish or mermaid. Don’t come at me! So if cupid shot you with his arrow in the 1980s, and it so struck you to fall in love with a fish, no one would judge you! See how different the world was back then? See? Anyway, yeah, he leaves his life as a business owner in New York to go live in the sea. You don’t need no credit card to ride this train! I guess.

4. Starman (1984, John Carpenter)

I love the movie Starman. It’s a movie about aliens, kinda. It might be a romance about a woman who lost her husband recently and she falls in love with an alien who has cloned her recently dead husband’s body to inhabit. Yeah, that’s it. That’s what the movie is about, and I’m a die-hard John Carpenter fan, and John obviously knew the power of love in the 1980s. I mean the first time she felt a little love for this alien it might have made her sad, and the second time I think she was a little mad, to be honest with you, but she didn’t have a choice.

The movie stars Jeff Bridges as the Starman, recently cloned Mark, and Karen Allen as Jenny. She is at first afraid, but within the 3-day window traveling to get him back to his spaceship, before he is left on Earth to die, they fall in love, some physical lovemaking, and then he leaves her behind in a 3-day wham bam thank you ma’am of a movie, but it’s not Jenny’s fault! In the 80s it was said all in love is fair and you don’t care, but you’ll know what to do when it gets hold of you. Jenny knew what to do. She fell in love with a clone of her husband from outer space and then got left behind to take care of his baby. It was love at first sight, dang it, even though it was the sight of her ex-husband. Look, I can’t explain it. She fell in love, whaddya gonna do? Alien babies were all the rage in the 80s, and honestly, it didn’t seem like she took it as a bad thing.

5. Teen Wolf (1985, Rod Daniel)

So, funny story. The flip side of the power of love is that you could be hopelessly, helplessly in love with someone who does not love you. Then you might kinda follow them around like a puppy dog for the whole movie. If you don’t know, Teen Wolf was the 1985 smash hit of a movie starring rising superstar Michael J. Fox, who plays a high school teenager, Scott Howard, who transforms into a werewolf right in the middle of a basketball game. He then of course goes from a nerdy, unliked kid to the most popular kid in school. It turns out the wolf can party better, play basketball better, and do everything better than Scott can as himself. So the town and school love him.

The story is a coming-of-age story about how to handle changes in your life. The romantic thread running through the movie is that Boof (Susan Ursitti) is in love with Scott. She’s been best friends with him since they were little, but Scott, the bonehead that he is, has stuck her in the friend zone all these years. He spends most of the time completely confiding in her and taking her advice and leaning on her while completely ignoring her as a possible love interest. He spends the movie chasing after the glamorous, popular Pamela (Lorie Griffin). He does get with Pamela in the movie, but it is sort of an on-again-off-again thing, where he is just trying to prove himself better than her hunky boyfriend.

Boof, however, spends the whole movie longing for Scott, obviously trapped by the powerful, unbreakable forces of love, and though he dismisses her and treats her like a throwaway friend through most of the movie, finally at the end he runs to her and hugs her, and because of the power of love she has to forgive him and be overjoyed that he has finally stopped being a bonehead jerk and has now come to his senses. I mean Boof doesn’t care that he is a wolf or a jerk.

I really loved Teen Wolf the first time I saw it. I remember watching it with my cousins and they were all googly-eyed over Michael J. Fox, but I couldn’t understand why he didn’t like Boof, and I kept saying she’s so much prettier than Pamela, what’s wrong with him? She was the hot one. She was the one who supported him. She was the one who was awesome. I was only like 10 years old, and even I could see that, and thought my female cousins were all “awwww, he loves her now.” I thought, man, I think she should slap him right in the face, but again, I guess it was the power of love, yes it’s true it’s strong and it’s sudden and it can be cruel sometimes!

6. Once Bitten (1985, Howard Storm)

So yeah, the power of love showcased people falling in love with Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, and even vampires in the 80s. This one was a bit of a twist. It is a long tradition in horror movies where women fall in love with vampires. I mean, it’s part of the whole vampire-is-suave-and-dark-and-handsome thing, but this one is a bit different. It’s kinda Mrs. Robinson meets Revenge of the Nerds, a little. So Mark Kendall (played by a young Jim Carrey) is frustrated that his teenage girlfriend Robin (Karen Kopins) will not have sex with him. He’s a virgin and catches the eye of an ancient vampire countess, Lauren Hutton. She needs to feed on a virgin 3 times before Halloween to keep her youthful beauty.

She seduces Mark 2 times, biting him both times. Now they don’t do the vertical mambo, of course, because she needs a virgin, but that’s not for lack of trying on Mark’s part. I mean, I’m not sure about you, but if your boyfriend gave himself over to an older woman 2 times, and only by the graces of her being a vampire they didn’t seal the deal, wouldn’t you still be pretty upset? Well, Robin, Mark’s girlfriend, was obviously again hopelessly stuck by the power of love and caught in a trap and unable to break free of Mark’s geeky allure.

Robin swoops in as the hero at the end and has sex with Mark so the countess cannot bite him a 3rd time and turn him into a vampire. I mean, if you’re going to give it up for a cheater, I guess it’s best to do it to save him from an eternity of drinking blood. Also, being that she is overcome by the power of love, she seems very happy about it. They even do the deed in the countess’s coffin, which, power of love or not, is a weird place to have your first time, right?

I guess the power of love made a bad one good, mmm, made a wrong one right, the power of love kept Robin home at night.

I was a little older when I saw this on HBO one night. I thought it was cool. Lauren Hutton was absolutely gorgeous. I could see how she could seduce Mark in this film. I remember saying, “Man, I don’t think it would be a bad thing to become a vampire,” and I got punched. I was watching with my then girlfriend, and she was not a fan of the movie. Lesson learned, the power of love is still all relative.

7. Howard the Duck (1986, Willard Huyck)

Not all romances are traditional, dammit. Everyone can love people or things that they never intended to love, and that might make some people uncomfortable. In the movie Howard the Duck, a 3-foot-tall alien duck comes down to Earth from Duckworld and lives with a musician named Beverly (Lea Thompson). Thompson was one of those gorgeous 80s rising stars, and yeah, in this movie she loves a duck. It’s not her fault. She is struck by the power of love. She doesn’t have money or fame or credit cards, but she really wants to ride his train. Oh, that was terrible but I couldn’t resist. Beverly is obviously very into Howard in this movie. He is a very cool short duck, and there is at least one point in the movie where she tries to seduce him, but Howard backs off. He’s not as into her as she is into him, ya know what I mean.

Man, this is the heartbreaking part of 80s movies. Sometimes there is rejection when you’re in love, and it hurts. Even if you really want them to love you, sometimes they don’t, but in the end, if love is real, it will win over anything, of course. Howard does stay in Cleveland at the end of the movie and becomes the manager of Beverly’s band, so there is a good chance she can hook up with this duck at a later time.

I thought Howard the Duck was funny! I watched it and yeah, was a bit creeped out by the beautiful and amazing Lea Thompson being obviously attracted to and forward with a duck, but it was the power of love and we didn’t judge people back then. Like I said, anyone looking into the world could kinda understand why the person was helplessly pulled in. I mean, Howard was cool. I remember being at a video store with a girlfriend in high school, picking up movies, and I held up Howard the Duck to her, and she said “Ew.” So I have only seen it when it ran on HBO.

8. Mannequin (1987, Michael Gottlieb)

If you can fall in love with a duck, an alien, a fish, and the universal movie monsters, you can fall in love with a mannequin, right? Yep, one of the biggest and mostly untalked about romance movies of the 80s was Mannequin. I often think GenX doesn’t really like to talk about all the kinky, weird, ahem, I mean power of love movies we were exposed to in the 80s. It’s not something GenXers wear on their sleeves, but it did happen, and this movie was very popular. It ran seemingly daily on HBO.

Mannequin, if you don’t know, is the story of Jonathan Switcher (Andrew McCarthy), who is an aspiring artist who gets fired from every job because he is too much of a romantic and not enough of a worker. He puts too much love and time into his creations. This particular creation is a mannequin that he basically sculpts with his own hands. Then he is fired and it’s shipped out to a department store. Feeling a strong attraction to this mannequin, he gets a job at the store to be close to her. Yeah, he was kinda in love with the mannequin before the weird stuff happens. Well, he gets a job at the store and when he is alone with his creation, she comes to life. Obviously, outside of the fantasy world of this movie, he needs serious medical and mental intervention, but hey, it’s the power of love, right.

Anyway, she wakes up nightly and helps him do window displays in this department store. GenZ, if you don’t know, department stores used to be the lifeblood of downtown big cities, bringing in shoppers, and a good window display could get you noticed and even on the cover of magazines. In this movie, Switcher becomes someone famous in the city from his creative window display masterpieces, which are really his creativity shaped and channeled by the mannequin. Now in today’s world it would just be that this guy is having real mental health issues and we’d get him support and some self-help books to bring him back to earth, but in this movie the mannequin is actually inhabited by an ancient spirit of an Egyptian princess. If you think of the power of love from her side, she’s been traveling through eras of time seeking her Mr. Right, so this hasn’t really been a picnic for her either.

Either way, in the end they fall in love and she comes to life and they live happily ever after. There are more twists and turns than that, but hey, it was 1987, they were in love and there really wasn’t a chance for another outcome.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw this movie. I almost unwillingly watched it. It was on so much it just felt like if you turned on the TV, there it was, and I don’t remember ever sitting down and making an effort to see the whole movie. That’s something that can’t really happen to you GenZers. You’ll never know the brain’s mysteries of watching a movie 20 times but never really intending to, or learning all the words to a song you never really liked or chose to listen to. But as I said, Emmy and Jonathan didn’t need any credit cards to ride their train. (I know I ended on it, but this song is relentlessly playing in my head).

9. Making Mr. Right (1987, Susan Seidelman)

So this one is a bit confusing, but hey, love is confusing sometimes, right. Basically, John Malkovich plays 2 roles in this movie. He is supersmart scientist Dr. Jeff Peters who builds a robot that looks just like him to go on a deep space mission. The problem is the robot doesn’t understand humans and can’t communicate with them well. Why the robot needs to be socialized is a little wrinkle in the premise of the movie, but basically he has to communicate effectively with people on the ground and he might run into someone out there and have to represent humanity. Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but sometimes love doesn’t make sense, buddy, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Anyway, they bring in Frankie Stone (Ann Magnuson), who is a Miami image consultant, to socialize the robot. Hilarity and hearts abound as, yep, you guessed it, Frankie is struck by cupid and falls in love with the robot. I mean, she doesn’t like or get along much with the Doctor, so I guess it’s like her only choice, and again, the power of love is coming for you, it’s a curious thing, like I said, it makes one man weep and the other man sing, and in this case the other man singing is the robot.

Yes, they seal the deal again, and the relationship between Frankie and her robot friend, a pupil only a few weeks old, becomes very romantic. She can’t let him go, and he has developed feelings for her too, obviously. I mean, if love can overcome the devil in sitcoms it can make this android feel something for a woman, even though he was never designed or programmed to do that.

In the end, the very antisocial, analytical Dr. Jeff Peters mans the mission to deep space and the android stays on the ground with the love of his life. Didn’t see that coming, did ya? Well, if you would have lived in the 80s you would have. You know that android isn’t going into space without his girl and he can’t leave her, it’s the most powerful force in the universe, dang it!

When I first saw the end of the movie and realized the live doctor Malkovich was the one they launched into space, my mouth dropped open. Yes, I was cultured by the 80s and I understand what those poor characters were up against, but I thought maybe they’d scrap the mission or, I don’t know, build another robot? Good grief. No, they send the human and leave the android on earth. I too watched this with a girlfriend who said, “I don’t like this movie.” Don’t come at me about the girlfriends. I dated a lot in middle and high school, and I loved movies so they watched them with me. It was better than roller skating, which I sucked at.

Yes, this movie flopped at the box office but got a following in rental markets.

10. Earth Girls Are Easy (1988, Julien Temple)

A few of the movies on this list were smash hits, but Earth Girls Are Easy was moderately successful and found more success as a cult classic. So we’ve seen our protagonists fall in love with fish, robots, mannequins, and even aliens, but the alien in Starman looks human. I mean, he is a clone of the protagonist’s dead husband, so, you know, it’s kinda understandable, but not in Earth Girls Are Easy. The beautiful Geena Davis breaks up with her cheating boyfriend only to have a spaceship crash into her pool. Three aliens emerge and they are furry, and I mean like they look like red, purple, and yellow lemurs. I mean, they are real aliens when they are furrified. They come in, explore, eat the fish out of her fish tank, and of course the power of love is driving her decisions and they decide to shave all the hair off the aliens.

These aliens are not well socialized. Let’s say they are shockingly awkward. The three aliens are Mac (Jeff Goldblum), Zeebo (Jim Carrey), and Wiploc (Damon Wayans). Once they get all their fur shaved off they are pretty handsome guys. I mean, we saw Goldblum in The Fly with Davis before, but of course she loved him. He turned into a fly AFTER she got with him, but in this movie she has to gradually fall in love with Mac, who looks great but has like a 12-inch frog tongue. Doesn’t have to be a bad thing, if we’re honest, and remember, we didn’t judge in the 80s if we knew the situation. I should say, we didn’t judge if they convinced us through movies and tv, otherwise, yes we judged. Davis gets struck by a love arrow and of course she’s going to fall head over heels for the purple alien. I feel like shaving that much fur would be a problem, and if the hair grew back just a little, did he get a tint of purple?

Anyway, I digress. Davis ends up getting back together with her cheating fiance Ted and they are about to run off to Las Vegas to get married when Ted finds the spaceship. Davis tries to keep him quiet, but in a last moment of clarity, she realizes Mac is the one she truly loves and wants to be with and gets on the spaceship and goes off into the great unknown vast reaches of space to live and love this purple alien.

Yes, yes, yes, I watched this movie with a girlfriend in high school, and she thought it was a little sweet but pretty stupid, from what I remember. What did she know? Obviously the power of love wasn’t keeping us together, so maybe in the future this love for a purple alien would speak to her, I don’t know. Either way, this was one of those movies that proved that with a little help from above she felt, say it with me, the power of love.

Roll Credits

So there you go, young GenZers, love in the 80s, like I said, was a curious thing. It was everywhere! Many of these movies were huge hits and we all accepted our fate that love was coming for us and there was nothing we could do about it, and if you fell in love with an alien or a fish it’d probably turn out ok, but if it didn’t, you just lived with it. Love wasn’t fair. You just got what you got with little choice in the matter, so be happy today that they tell you to make good choices. They just tied keys around our necks and sent us walking home. No one ever said “make good decisions” Also, did I ever tell you about Jack and Diane, 2 American kids growing up in the heartland? Nevermind, I’ll save that for another article.

Let me know what love struck you in the 80s, or if you didn’t live in the 80s, explain how love is today. Is it still the most powerful force in the universe to GenZ or GenAlpha? I feel like the most powerful force is like video games or Taylor Swift or maybe some kind of AI. I don’t know, tell me in the comments. GenX I hope you found the loves of your life no matter who or what they turned out to be. GenZ many of you have your whole life in front of you, if you haven’t found love maybe you need to look in some unique places. Maybe a mermaid or a werewolf is just waiting around the corner to be your person. Either way, someday love will stalk you and trap you and you’ll live happily ever after!

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The catch is you just can’t watch any movie you want. Don’t be selfish. You need to watch a movie with your mom and let her talk about the times she had growing up. I highly recommend this. It is the number one gift my wife loves from our kids, especially once they are older. Let your mom pick a movie. She may already know one she wants to watch, or you can ask if one of these movies would be fun. If you watch these with her, listen to her. Let her talk about the stories she has to tell. Every movie is a story. Who was she with when she watched it? Did she see it in the theater? Did her friends talk about it? Be curious. Did she rent a video every Friday night? Did she like the rental store? Did she watch movies on sleepovers? These are important questions, trust me.

I lost my mom about 10 years ago. I was very fortunate to grow up watching movies with her, and those memories have become more and more important to me. I got to hear her stories, and it was amazing. At the time I hardly noticed, and thought it was somewhat interesting, but now I feel like I got to know who she was by the movies she loved. So watch a movie with your mom.

Also, I’ve picked movies that GenX moms tend to really love. Every mom is different, so ask first if she doesn’t have a movie she grew up with in mind. If she doesn’t, suggest these. None of these are really romances. The last thing you really want on Mother’s Day is to watch a romance with your mom. These are comedies, really easy and fun to watch, and I promise she’ll love them.

1. ET (1982) — Steven Spielberg

If you haven’t seen this, you have to watch it with your GenX mom. This movie is the classic of all classics, and every kid who watched it in the 80s has memories of where they were and what they were doing when they first saw it. There is an excitement for GenX and Millennials when we talk about movies. Back in the 80s so much hype swirled around them. They were huge events. You’d go to school and everyone would be talking about it. So make sure you ask questions. Trust me when I say someday the answers will be precious to you.

If you don’t know, ET is the story of Elliott, a boy who finds an alien in his backyard and takes care of him until the government shows up and causes havoc, and ET has to make a run for his arriving spaceship. Elliott has a little sister, Gertie, played by Drew Barrymore. Barrymore was kind of the avatar for a lot of little girls of the early 80s. I mean that some little girls really put themselves in that role. Many who were the same age really felt like Gertie represented them, in ways. If you watch this one with your mom, ask her if she felt like Gertie was like her.

ET was a phenomenon, and if you haven’t seen it, you have to watch it with your mom. Ask questions. Did she go to the movies to see it? Did she watch it with her family? I promise there are some good stories to be heard, and through the memory of the experience of movies, we can learn things about people that they might not even know themselves. Trust me, if it unlocks a memory, you’ll see your mom’s eyes light up. It’s a great experience.

2. The Goonies (1985) — Richard Donner

Oh man, the all-time kid fantasy movie of the 80s. You get to go on a treasure hunt and save your buddy’s house. If you haven’t seen The Goonies, it is about a group of kids who go on an adventure to find the treasure of One-Eyed Willy, and it stars some of the biggest kid stars of the 1980s. Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, and Jonathan Ke Quan fill out the ensemble cast. It’s a fun watch with pirates and escaped convicts chasing the kids. Well, the pirates don’t chase them, they are dead, but it’s all part of the story.

The Goonies is one of the cornerstone movies of GenX. If your mom grew up in the 80s, it may be one of her favorites, trust me. It’s a movie filled with kindness and kid adventure, and it takes you back to a time when things were just so simple. It is not only childhood, but the 1980s, and GenXers love both. If you watch this with your mom, again remember to ask questions. Most of us have a story about when we first watched The Goonies and who we were with. Ask about her group of friends. I was with a group of friends at the movie theater, and it was such a fun watch. We went home and wanted to go on an adventure. The next day at school everyone was talking about it. Remember to ask your mom about that, about how when a big movie like this came out, did everyone talk about it? The stories you get from watching the movie will be so worth it.

3. Back to the Future (1985) — Robert Zemeckis

I might have gone with Ghostbusters over this movie, but I don’t know. Back to the Future was huge, it was everywhere, and I think there is a lot of sweetness in the family connection and the characters in this movie that moms might have connected with. It’s also a very fun ride. If you haven’t watched Back to the Future, you’re missing out on one of the best adventure movies of the 80s.

Also, as I said, this movie goes easy on the romance. Yes, there are some love interests, and awkwardly Marty’s mom kind of falls for him as a teen, but it doesn’t get all that weird. I promise it’s more funny than cringy, and if your mom is a fan of the movie, she’ll think it’s funny. A lot of people saw this in theaters when it came out, so ask her. Talk to your mom. If you are a teen or whatever age honestly, you’ll enjoy this movie and your mom can share her memories. It’s a win-win.

As I said, she won’t always be with you, and someday you’ll look back on this Mother’s Day when you watched a fun time-travel comedy, and it might be a really great memory for you. Don’t be a bonehead. Now, a little warning here. Don’t just go watching this movie because you want to. Let your mom pick the movie. You can show her this list or make suggestions. Maybe you’ll get lucky and this will be the one she picks.

4. Steel Magnolias (1989) — Herbert Ross

Ok, this one is right in the middle for GenX moms. A lot of moms love this movie, but some aren’t big fans, and that’s ok because you’re letting your mom pick, right? This isn’t about you. My wife loves this movie. I think it’s her favorite. I bought it for her a couple of times in different formats and she’s watched it with three of our four kids. The movie has some big names of the 70s and 80s including Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, and Tom Skerritt. It’s about a group of women in a small Louisiana town whose friendships are tested by joy, humor, and tragedy over several years. It centers on the bond between a mother and her daughter, who has diabetes and risks her health to have a child. The movie is a tearjerker, but it’s one of those movies your mom might have watched with her own mom. It’s full of laughter and sadness, and many GenX women just love this movie.

Ok, I know I keep saying this, but I’m probably addressing GenZ here, and I know that while you’re reading this you’re probably also scrolling, playing a video game, and listening to music. So for the love of pete, listen. Watch this movie for your mom, not for you. It’s a wonderful movie, you might enjoy it, and it’s a real emotional experience to share.

5. Three Fugitives (1989) — Francis Veber

Here is another heartwarming, popular-for-its-time but much-forgotten film about a father, played by Martin Short, raising a little girl. Short tries to rob a bank to get money for her, but it goes ridiculously wrong. Nick Nolte is fresh out of prison for robbing banks and gets caught up in the mayhem.

The movie is one of those movies that were only made in the 1980s. It’s sort of a screwball comedy with heart, and honestly they don’t really make them like this anymore. Some people love this movie and some people were really turned off by it. I put it in here because I know more than a few GenX moms who are crazy for this film, and the film itself doesn’t get enough attention, so I’m kind of hitting two Mother’s Day birds with one stone. The movie is full of heart and hilarity, and if your mom is a fan she’ll flip that you offered to watch this with her.

Ok, young Gen Alpha or Gen Zer, like I said, remember to ask her for her stories that go along with this movie. Find out why she likes this film. It may shock you.

6. The Addams Family (1991) — Barry Sonnenfeld

If your mom is one of those moms who loves Halloween, or is just a bit dark sometimes, and maybe she doesn’t show you that side, she might like The Addams Family. This movie was big when it came out, and many GenXers, and this seems to be especially true for GenX women, are absolutely bonkers for it. I know it’s more of a Halloween thing than a Mother’s Day thing, but trust me, if your mom has a special place in her heart for this movie and you don’t know it yet, you have to offer to share this with her. You won’t regret it.

Oddly, more than any other movie on this list, this movie fills GenXers with joy like you wouldn’t believe. It was a fun and poppy release that was everywhere. If you don’t know, The Addams Family was a TV show in the 1960s that was fairly popular, and in the 90s they remade it into a movie about an odd and dark family with an upside-down set of values who live next door to ordinary people. It’s harder to explain than I thought, but basically the Addams like to torment each other, dig graves, and do everything dark and gloomy, but in a light and fun way. If you haven’t seen it you should. It’s great to watch every year at Halloween, but some GenX moms would be overjoyed to have their son or daughter watch this with them on Mother’s Day.

Does your mom have a dark side? Does she love Halloween? Do you know anything about this dark side? Feeling uncomfortable yet? Well, guess what. Parents have very full lives before their kids come along and make it all about them, so you can spend at least one day making it about her and learning things you might be shocked to find out. I know a lot of shocking things about my kids. Deal with it.

7. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) — Jon Avnet

I put this movie on here because it may get your mom talking about your grandma. Maybe you have grandma over for Mother’s Day and you can all watch this one together. It is a fun movie about the unlikely friendship between Evelyn, a timid housewife in the 1980s, and Ninny, an elderly woman she meets at a nursing home. Ninny tells her the story of two spirited women, Idgie and Ruth, who ran a cafe in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Their story, full of friendship, courage, and dark secrets, inspires Evelyn to transform her own life. It touches on themes of female friendship, racism, loss, and personal strength.

The 90s were a lot about women who, even though they had had breakthrough freedoms in the past decades, were now starting to assert themselves in new ways. Women in the 80s were pretty put upon and still boxed up in a good amount of prejudice, but in the 90s they started breaking through some of that and were much more in your face. This is one of those movies that displays that forceful pushing back on the male ego and sexism.

If your mom was coming of age in the 90s and breaking through barriers of her own, and honestly most women were back then, they may love this movie. Also, there are a lot of flashbacks to older times through the stories told in the movie, so your grandmother may love this too. If not, you may just connect with some old memories of how your grandma grew up. Either way, it’s a win-win for you in learning about your mom and her family. Again, don’t be a bonehead. Let them pick. But if you offer this movie as an option, they will be shocked. Trust me.

8. The Sandlot (1993) — David Mickey Evans

What The Goonies was to the 80s, The Sandlot was to the 90s. Basically it is a movie about a group of kids growing up in the summer of 1962 and playing baseball. The movie became a touchstone for many of the younger GenXers. Lines from the movie like “You’re killing me, Smalls” are still being uttered to this day.

Yes, GenX dads love this movie, but GenX women are crazy for it too. I promise. It’s just a joyful kids film and they don’t really make movies like this anymore. They were pretty common in the 90s, and baseball movies were big, but this one is about growing up, and there is a certain magic in this film that, like I said, all younger GenXers love. I think it captured a lot of what our childhood was like. Though we didn’t all play baseball, we were all sort of left outside to find our own way much of the time.

Our friends were our support system, and we probably looked after ourselves better than our parents did anyway. So you should ask your mom if it was like this growing up, because even though the movie is set in the 1960s, a lot of what you see on film, when it comes to kids being kids, is kind of exactly what GenXers experienced in the 70s and 80s.

If you’re younger, like below the age of 13 you will really enjoy watching this movie with your mom. I promise.

9. Benny and Joon (1993) — Jeremiah Chechik

You know how your mom is wearing that Nirvana shirt all the time, or Red Hot Chili Peppers? Well, she’s probably an alternative mom. Yeah, she might not share this with you, but there was a lot of crazy stuff happening in the 90s. The music and culture did a quick 180 turn, and shifted in the early 90s, and everything changed, including movies.

This movie is loved, and I mean really loved, by alternative GenXers. It features a young Johnny Depp as Sam, maybe an autistic young man trying to make his way in the world, and Mary Stuart Masterson as Joon, a young woman who is certainly neurodivergent. The 90s were really the first time this type of difference started to be celebrated and seen as an asset instead of a hindrance.

The movie is about Joon, an eccentric young woman who lives under the care of her protective brother, played by Aidan Quinn. When he loses a poker bet he is forced to take in a quirky, slapstick-obsessed drifter named Sam. A romance blossoms. The movie is both dramatic and comical, and it has a nice balance to it.

Some GenX moms absolutely love this film, and if they do, you have to ask them about their alternative concert-going days and such. This is a much-forgotten gem of a movie, and your mom will be really impressed that you suggest it. If she isn’t interested, pick something else, but if she is interested, you’ll probably see a funny and quirky side to your mom you might not have known was there. Also, the romance in this movie is pretty subtle, so you won’t feel all awkward watching it with her.

10. Mother (1996) — Albert Brooks

Ok, this wasn’t a popular movie, but it is one of the all-time best movies about mothers. Honestly, I put this on the list because your mom’s mom, or your grandmother, is probably more like this than your mother, but if that’s true, your mom is going to roll on the floor laughing. My mother was Silent Generation, and man does this movie hit it right on the head. If your grandmother is like this, you and your mother will die laughing. I promise. There are so many little details and arguments in this movie. It’s just hilarious.

Mother is a ridiculously dry comedy from director Albert Brooks, who also stars as John Henderson, a middle-aged science fiction writer who, after his second divorce, becomes convinced that all his problems with women stem from his complicated relationship with his mother. He moves back into his childhood home in the suburbs to live with her, played by Debbie Reynolds in a perfectly deadpan performance, hoping to understand her and finally work through whatever psychological damage she caused him. Oh, little GenZ or Gen Alpha, you may not be old enough to fully understand this movie, and indeed some of it might not land for you, but to your GenX mother who suffered through a Boomer parent, they will recognize some of the patterns right away. It’s not for everyone, but if your mom was close to her mother, it might be worth a watch.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Again, this movie gives you the perfect opportunity to ask your mom what it was like dealing with her parents. You might be shocked at some of the answers. Was your mom a latchkey kid? Did she stay outside playing in the woods all day? Oddly, I promise there is a lot about your mother that you do not know.

In one of my favorite books of all time, A River Runs Through It, the author says that we can never really know the ones we love the most. I have found this to be true about parents, and especially mothers. Parents want to show you their best side to keep you safe, and sometimes they don’t show you their problems because they are embarrassed. You don’t have to go digging into things, but movies, and especially talking about the experiences around movies, can open up doors and let you see things about your mom that maybe you didn’t know. These things don’t have to be scandalous. Did she crowd-surf at Lollapalooza? Was she lonely a lot? Were movies special to her? Was music her refuge? We didn’t have social media, so you honestly felt lonely a lot. Music was a big thing for us, and some of us were able to find comfort and companionship in great movies.

As I said, my mom passed away in 2008. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I saw her. I was very lucky when I was young to sit around and watch movies with her. It was more incidental than intentional, but I look back and think how lucky I am and how much I loved that time I got to spend with her. Trust me when I say don’t give up the time with your mother so easily. When I was in my 20s I was always in a hurry. I was always running out the door, and if I could go back, I’d linger a bit. I’d ask more questions, and I’d probably ask if she wanted to watch a movie.

Anyway, let me know what you’re doing for Mother’s Day. Please let me know in the comments what movies you love for Mother’s Day, or just what your favorite thing to do on Mother’s Day is. Most sincerely, I want to say to all the moms out there, GenX or otherwise, Happy Mother’s Day. You are a bright light in the world for all of us. Thank you.

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Dust Bunny and Journey to the We

I recently watched the film Dust Bunny, and it was a treat. The movie is a fun and exciting fantasy action movie seemingly heavily inspired by the Chinese folk novel Journey to the West. There has been a lot of talk by critics and message boards about the symbolism in this movie, and the most obvious answer would seem to be this most famous Chinese folk novel written in the 1500s by Wu Cheng’en.

Dust Bunny is a highly stylized film that follows Aurora (Sophie Sloan) who has a dust bunny monster living under her bed. She’s on her 3rd foster family, and all of them have been eaten by this thing. She wishes on a falling star for a protector who can defeat the bunny. Enter the Neighbor, Mads Mikkelsen. He’s a hitman who lives next door. Aurora sees her falling star and it identifies him as her possible protector. She then follows him one night and watches him fighting off other assassins and seemingly slay some dragons.

The movie is basically seen through the eyes of Aurora, who is about 10 years old. She thinks she can see the truth about the monster living under her bed, and her lens is high fantasy. Basically she needs Mikkelsen to protect her, and after her newest set of foster parents are eaten by the monster bunny under her bed, she steals money from a church collection and offers it to Mikkelsen to protect her.

The movie matches Journey to the West closely on some of these points, though it is not a retelling. Journey to the West is a sweeping story of the 81 trials of the Monkey King. There are some clues here. Dust Bunny is highly stylized as I said, it feels like a Wes Anderson film, and circles are everywhere. In Journey to the West circles also abound. They are the key to magic in the novel. There are protective circles, the staff is a circle, the headband is a circle, and hell is made up of circles, plus much more.

Journey to the West, as I said, is sweeping, but in one of the 81 trials in the book, the Monkey King Sun Wukong begins by not believing in his journey, just like Mikkelsen in the movie. In one of the trials he fights the powerful Jade Rabbit who lives in the moon. The movie shows halos and the moon. As a matter of fact, the dust bunny forms in the moonlight. The Jade Rabbit is thousands of years old. Its story is of sacrificing itself to feed the emperor and being rewarded. It’s a little like Mikkelsen’s selflessness in the movie, but in Journey to the West the Jade Rabbit is a shapeshifter and fights Sun Wukong the Monkey King in an epic battle. Even the Monkey King cannot defeat her, but she does basically run away.

I’m not going to go far into the story of Journey to the West. It is probably the most beloved folk novel in Chinese literature, but there are many similarities between the movie and this story. I wouldn’t say the movie is a retelling of this trial in the book, but it is at the very least heavily influenced by it.

Today, movies are quickly turned into star ratings and left behind. I didn’t see a lot of advertising about this while it was in theaters, and that’s a shame. It’s also a shame people don’t really spend the time breaking movies down and digging for their influences like they did in the past.

I think this movie is absolutely gorgeous, it’s fun, and it’s amazingly thought provoking. The folktale as an influence makes it incredibly interesting.

Entertaining 18/20

Yes, this is a highly stylized action movie in the vein of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It’s not that comic booky, but Dust Bunny is steeped in highly complicated fight sequences spaced between the situational irony of the audience knowing the monster is real and all the other characters being blind to it. In Journey to the West, the Monkey King can only see through the Jade Rabbit’s disguises with his Fiery Golden Eyes. There are many little tidbits of this movie that seem to relate to that folktale.

The movie keeps you both intrigued with mystery, fascinated by the unfolding of who the characters are, and absolutely riveted by the action scenes. It’s a delight.

Rewatchability 16/20

Yes, if you just want the story you can certainly watch it and have a really great conversation about it, but if you want to go deeper into the movie you’re going to have to watch it over and over, and I can see myself just watching it once every now and again because it’s so interesting and fun. The motif of the movie is basically circles, but the inside of the apartment seems to be like a Wes Anderson high color Norwegian decorating homage, and the outside is the fantasy land of China and all its bright colors and beautiful backgrounds. I can see people rewatching this movie just to try to decode the deeper meaning and the little things happening in the background.

Acting 18/20

Mads Mikkelsen and Sigourney Weaver are two of the lead roles in this movie, and I don’t think either has ever put up a bad performance. Mikkelsen is always amazing, and he’s amazing here, a bit dark and moody, but he has a light side here too. He’s not fun and cheery by any means, but in this role he puts more heart into it than I’ve seen from him in other roles. Weaver too is amazing. She is very menacing in this movie. She always plays a strong and powerful role, but as one of the main antagonists, she’s fun to watch. Sophie Sloan, as Aurora, the girl who sees the truth and no one believes, does not miss a beat in this movie. She never seems awkward or out of place anywhere.

Story/Plot 16/20

We’ve seen this story before, but here it seems heavily influenced by Chinese folktales. The story is very simple: girl is in trouble with monsters, girl seeks out a protector, protector is doubtful and protects the girl until he comes to understand that her fears are true. The movie does follow Joseph Campbell’s hero plot structure, which is always fun and interesting to see. There are a few twists and turns, but I would have liked to see a little more from the script. The dialogue is pretty good though, carried by some excellent actors. Unless you’re a critic you’re not going to have a whole lot of trouble with the script. It’s adequate, but with all that went into this movie I was hoping for it to be punched up a little bit. It’s a lot of what you’ve seen before, but done in a pretty new and interesting way just by the characters and style. It is a fun watch and listen. It looks like a Wes Anderson movie but it doesn’t have the hilarious moments in dry dialogue that maybe it could have. I’m nitpicking here, but again the movie is done so well on so many levels, I just wish the script would have brought the same game as the set design and direction.

Directing 19/20

Bryan Fuller pulls out all the stops in this movie with his directing and production. There are some really creative camera and pacing tricks in this movie. You see some dolly zooms and other camera tricks, flipping upside down to make you feel like you’re in the fantasy. There is even a little vignetting at times that adds to the feel. The set design of this movie is off the charts. You really do feel like you are in a fantasy world as seen by the young protagonist. It’s fun and really is great to look at. Between Chinatown having an interesting dreamlike quality and an apartment building decorated like an old Norwegian palace, the director put it all on the table. This is an A effort, and it really does help to immerse you into a world you are both feeling and seeing. I can’t praise the directing, set, and costume designs enough in this movie. They are wonderful.

Overall 87

So yes, this was a fun movie that gets you thinking. The added influence from Chinese folktales is extra to look at and wrap your brain around. It’s a fun movie to talk about, and Fuller placing circles everywhere and interesting set pieces just makes it a lot of fun to look at and think about. You know the story, you’ve seen the hero story many times, but all the influences he’s calling on makes it a fascinating brain teaser to work out. Of course circles are always big in folklore across cultures. They are a universal symbol of magic and protection. The folktale influences are sort of dripping from the screen in this movie, and Fuller just wants the audience to collect the raindrops and stare into their patterns.

Just as a sidenote, it was listed under the horror category when I selected it last night. There are some pretty intense scenes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it horror. The monster has some horror elements. I recommend you check out Dust Bunny, you’re not going to be disappointed, and if you do it on a date night, it makes for a great conversation after the movie.

Have you seen this movie? Let me know what you thought in the comments. Any other movies it reminded you of? Are you a modern day folktale fan? Let me know, I’m always dying to hear from you.

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So I’ve been talking about GenX lately like they said bad things about my mother. I’m kidding. I kid because I care. I’m GenX so what’s a little ribbing? Now I get to talk about the millennials. Millennials here are born between (1981-1996). They were like younger brothers and sisters to us, annoying and kind of whiny. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. So yeah, millennials had their own traumas to deal with. A lot of them latchkey too. Many of them were born in the early 80s and saw that circus, and they were also high-schooled in the 90s and early 00s and had cellphones and computers. They even had PlayStations as kids basically. I’m a big fan of millennials. I think they are just about as rough and tumble as GenX, they like the right music, most of them, and some of them are even the children of Gen Xers. So all of that is a good thing.

To cover the spread of the generation I have picked movies that span from the mid-80s when the oldest millennials were 5 or 6 all the way to 2004 where the youngest millennial would have been 8. The oldest would have been 24. It’s not my fault how time works here, don’t come after me.

So I have done some research, asked some millennials I know, and also scratched my own memories of the most traumatic horror scenes to haunt young millennial eyeballs. I had a few millennials contact me about the screwed up GenX list and say, “Hey, we’re screwed up too,” so I decided to be fair and do a list just pointed at the dawning of the millennium generation.

I’m not sure how these generation things work really. Someone is just making this stuff up right? A generation is 15 years? Do they just arbitrarily start and stop? I don’t know, I digress. Without any more babbling, here are 10 Horror Movie Scenes That Screwed Up Millennials. Oh, and these are in order of year, so you know, jump to the one that works for you. Tell your therapist, they can help. Wait, do millennials go to therapy?

1. The Fly (August 15, 1986) — Dir. David Cronenberg

Oh Cronenberg, you body horror loving devil, you just had to go and do it didn’t you. Yes, The Fly, if you haven’t seen it, is a remake masterpiece of a classic movie starring Vincent Price. The 1986 version stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in outstanding roles. Goldblum could have won an award for this role, but they didn’t believe in doing that for horror movies back then.

Anyway, the movie is about a scientist who has created a teleportation machine that he can’t quite get to work yet, and he invites a journalist to observe him and write about the process and they fall in love. Aww, dang, it’s so romantic and sweet until old Doc sends himself through the machine and accidentally merges himself genetically with a house fly. Ick. Of all the creatures in the world, being mixed with a fly would suck. The only worse thing to be crossed with is one of those slimy things that attach themselves to the bottom of the ocean, or maybe another bug. I mean, it would suck to be crossed with a lot of things I guess, but a fly is up there.

So yeah, he goes through the machine and is superman at first. He feels great, is strong, all kinds of fun stuff. One scene he snaps a guy’s arm in a bar arm wrestling, which is high on the ick trauma factor, but the scene that I think is the worst, that I’ve heard more than a few millennials lament having seen it so young, is the popping of the end of the finger and nail scene like it’s a zit.

Yes, Goldblum goes through a transformation into an almost full-on fly in this movie, and it’s a slow disintegrating process both mentally and physically. At one point his bulbous finger is just feeling a little ripe apparently, and he points the end toward the mirror and pop, goo shoots out the end onto the mirror, and then he rips his own fingernail off! Yep! If you were under the age of 10 and saw this scene you were no doubt out of your mind.

Really, the movie in the body horror department is pretty brutal. I saw it around the age of 12 and it still gave me the heebie-jeebies. I remember watching this with my horror friends on a Friday night pizza sleepover and of course one of my friends, with a full mouth of pizza, goes, “Look at that dude!” Ugh, Jim, didn’t you have to point that out right now.

The scene does stick in your head. Of course there’s that scene where he pukes on a donut to show her how flies eat. Maybe it’s the whole movie? Yeah, let’s just say a lot of this movie traumatized millennials.

2. Child’s Play (November 9, 1988) — Dir. Tom Holland

Haha, my nephew is a millennial and this movie scared the crap out of him for a particularly funny reason to me. I’m about 5 years older than him, and one night this movie came on, and at the point where Chucky gets a hammer and smacks his babysitter in the face and she flies out a 4th story window blasting through the ceiling of a car parked on the street blowing out all the windows, my nephew ran screaming out of the room. He was inconsolable.

If you don’t know, Child’s Play is the 1988 horror film where serial killer Charles Lee Ray used voodoo to transfer his consciousness into a “Good Guy” doll. The doll is about 3 feet tall and animatronic. Animatronics in the 80s were really a novelty, but a few things were starting to have this feature at the time. So the Chucky doll is evil and of course goes on a killing spree. It’s a great movie as an adult, but to some young millennials this movie freaked them out for a very particular reason.

My nephew, the poor kid, a couple of Christmases before this had received a “My Buddy” doll. The doll, according to some, was the inspiration for Chucky. It was a 3-foot-tall doll in overalls and a baseball cap. My nephew was a bit of a lonely kid so my sister got him a creepy friend! If you lived in the mid-80s you of course will remember the tune, “My buddy, my buddy, my buddy, my buddy,” going back and forth, “My buddy and meeeee!” It was a relentless toy jingle that would haunt your dreams at night.

Anyway, when my 8-year-old nephew saw that doll running around the apartment then whacking that babysitter with the hammer, he was done! Apparently that doll was still sitting at the bottom of his closet, and he’d never told anyone he was basically too afraid to get rid of it! Oh, to be young and see a doll you are already afraid of, who lives in your closet, killing people on TV. Yeah, that would do it for me too. He’s not the only one. The babysitter scene freaked out a lot of millennials, and if they owned the doll it’s no wonder.

Today I still have people say they can’t take scary doll movies. High trauma on this one. I feel like the people who made and designed the doll had to know it was creepy as hell when they made it. Anyway, I digress.

3. Misery (November 30, 1990) — Dir. Rob Reiner — The Hobbling Scene

Oh how I love Misery. I saw it in the theater for the first time. What a great watch. Kathy Bates is amazing in this movie. I was about 15 and I think immune at this point to childhood trauma. I was moving on to adult relationship trauma. Of course the oldest millennial at this time would have been 9, so this movie would have blinked their lights for sure.

Misery is the 1990 award-winning movie based on the Stephen King novel. It stars Kathy Bates, who won an Academy Award for her role, and James Caan. The story is about a writer who finishes his novel in a secluded cabin and begins to drive home, wrecks due to the weather, and when he wakes up he is in the loving care of a superfan. Yeah, that’s Kathy Bates and she’s a bit much. She seems sweet and helpful but let’s just say she is very obviously emotionally unbalanced.

Anyway, after he crashes and wakes up in her guest room with her looking after him, they are snowed in, and as a thank you for saving him he basically gives her the blessing of reading his new unpublished novel. She doesn’t like the ending and basically makes him write a new one. Fun, huh? Seems terrifying. If I ever have fans I know this is exactly what’s going to happen to me. So yeah, she keeps him hostage saying it’s the weather until he finally tries to get away.

This is about where the fun and very traumatizing scene starts for you young millennials. Bates comes in the room in a rage, Caan is basically incapacitated in bed but wide awake. She puts a block of wood between his lower shins and takes a sledgehammer and whackeroo, makes that foot twist like it’s a rubber tube filled with Play-Doh. It’s right there on screen in full cringe glory, and then she goes and does the other foot! Oh man, how stomach-churning that scene is. To the best of my knowledge it is one of the most cringe-inducing horror scenes of the 1990s.

So yeah, millennials, if that scene screwed you up, I’m sorry for describing it in so much detail. I saw it in the theater, like I said, and some lady two rows in front of me started gagging like she was going to throw up in her popcorn. I don’t know if she ever did.

4. The Silence of the Lambs (February 14, 1991) — Dir. Jonathan Demme

This movie was the way in high school I knew I would probably get along with my wife as a girlfriend. I mean she is very pretty so I was already interested, but she wasn’t a skater or a horror fiend or anything, just very pretty and normal, not alternative at all, but we had a conversation about this movie and she asked to borrow it. When she returned it she said how much she loved it, and I knew right then we’d get along. Been married 30 years.

If you don’t know, Silence of the Lambs follows Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), an FBI trainee assigned to get information from a notorious serial killer and cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in hopes of catching an active killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). Lecter, brilliant and devious, uses the naive Starling to orchestrate his own escape.

The movie was highly successful both at the box office and in critical reception. There are many scenes that gave millennials nightmares, but the one that has become synonymous with serial killer terror actually comes from Buffalo Bill. Bill has captured the daughter of a U.S. Senator and is keeping her in an old well in his basement. He plans on skinning her and wearing her skin, so he needs her to rub lotion on herself. At one point he lowers a basket into the well and says the creepy and infamous line, “It rubs the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again.” It’s chilling and stuck in the heads of oh so many GenX youngers. The scene captures maybe a second of terror of what it might be like to be held captive by a madman, and millennials grew up with much of the stranger danger awareness and abducted kid milk cartons, so it was particularly timely.

5. Se7en (September 22, 1995) — Dir. David Fincher

Se7en was one of those real alternative movies that had the sheen of a 90s horror and police drama pic. It was critically acclaimed and part of a new and different kind of film that really was the hallmark of 90s cinema.

The film follows detectives William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and his new partner David Mills (Brad Pitt) in their attempts to catch a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who is killing people in the vein of the 7 deadly sins: gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, envy, and wrath. Each of his victims are being killed in creative ways that represent one of these sins. For instance, the gluttony killing: he makes a man eat himself to death.

A lot of people point to the chilling ending of the movie, called the “What’s in the box?” scene where the young detective gets a surprise package. I’m not going to spoil the movie by saying what’s in it, but though most of the killings are gruesome, the most shocking is the sloth killing. Spacey has tied a man to a bed and force-fed him for a year, barely keeping him alive. The man is almost unrecognizable as being human. The detectives believe the man to be dead and are standing over him talking. In a scene that will make you absolutely come to god, the man bursts up with a giant gasp of breath and starts shaking his head. He is so wasted away he looks like a zombie come back from the dead. I saw this movie in the theater and about jumped out of my seat at this moment. You just don’t believe this guy can be alive, and when he is and he starts moving around it fills you with dread. It’s a scene that gave nightmares to many young millennials.

6. Scream (December 20, 1996) — Dir. Wes Craven — Drew Barrymore’s Opening

Yep, good old Wes Craven, one of the kings of terror, revived horror movies in the 90s and brought them out of their slump with a meta-horror slasher film for the ages. Scream is a well-crafted, smart, and fun horror movie about a serial killer, Ghostface, killing teens in the small rural town of Woodsboro, California. The movie follows Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), but the opening of the movie, in an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, begins by following the beautiful Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore). Barrymore was mega-famous at this time, and most Gen Xers and many millennials who had good taste had a giant crush on her. I may or may not have had a crush on her. I feel like I’ve outed myself about scream queens too much at this point, so you know, she was pretty, yeah, pretty. Anyway, the opening scene has Barrymore in a house out in the country by herself popping some popcorn for a movie and then getting a creepy phone call from the killer.

Now at this point no one believes the director is going to kill Barrymore in the first 10 minutes of this movie. She’s too famous. She has to be the star, but after a chilling and terrifying sequence of events where the killer toys with her, disembowels her boyfriend on the patio, and comes after her in the house, she makes a full sprint across the lawn in an effort to escape. Ghostface chases her down and comes around from behind with a giant butcher knife, and in one of the most gruesome and terrifying stabs in the history of horror, you see him clearly and directly drive the knife into her chest. It is so realistic and so shocking that it’s almost like you can feel yourself being stabbed. I too saw this in the theater with one of my youngers, a nephew, and man did he freak at this scene. I think he was about 13 at the time, and it put him off from horror movies for a while. He still doesn’t like talking about it.

7. The Sixth Sense (August 6, 1999) — Dir. M. Night Shyamalan

Oh, the phenomenon of this movie. It was everywhere. Every talk show, commercial, radio host was talking about it. The big secret! You didn’t know unless you watched the movie, you just knew this little kid in the movie said, “I see dead people.” The movie launched M. Night Shyamalan into the stratosphere. Everyone wanted to know the secret.

If you don’t know, and I won’t spoil this movie, it’s about child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) trying to help a young boy Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) who says that he can see dead people. The movie is a slow burn up until the shocking twist. I can’t tell you how big this movie was. It was in the zeitgeist. Anyway, at one point Haley Joel Osment is of course really being haunted by ghosts, and as a scared child he adapts in all sorts of ways, being that no one believes him. One night he is sleeping in the tent he has made out of blankets to protect himself. You see that suddenly his breath is visible in the air, and he knows they are coming. Quickly he fixes up the tent with a sign that says “stay out” pinned to the side.

He gets in the tent, turns on his light, and the clothespins start popping off the outside. When he pans the light down, there is a girl a little older than him with vomit coming out of her mouth. It is the all-time holy-crap jump scare of the movie, and when I saw it in theaters I can remember every person in the room jumping. Oddly, there were a lot of kids at this showing. I think being that it was rated PG-13 and it had a kid as the star of the movie, parents just thought this is fine. I can remember a little girl in front of me that was probably about 10 years old rolling around in her seat with her hands over her eyes. Poor little millennial, it was about too much for her to take. The movie hits a lot harder than a PG-13 movie, and I have to say from that angle, seeing that little girl’s terror, I can’t understand how boomer parents dragged their kids to these things. It was horrific, and she was obviously terrified.

The “vomit girl” scene, as it’s become to be known, surely haunted millennials for years to come.

8. Final Destination (March 17, 2000) — Dir. James Wong

James Wong puts together a kaleidoscope of kills in this movie. As horror films go it’s not really deep, but the waters are still turbulent. There are a lot of jump scares in this movie. As a matter of fact it’s basically all shocking jump-scare kills.

I too saw this movie in the theater and yes, there were some younger kids there. It’s odd that even at the dawn of the millennium you were still seeing boomers and some young Gen Xers bringing kids to these movies.

Final Destination follows high school student Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) who, while boarding a flight to Paris for a class trip, has a terrifyingly vivid premonition that the plane will explode shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. He panics and gets himself and a small group of classmates off the plane before it departs. The plane does explode and the group cheats death. Being that their time was up and they should have died, death itself basically stalks them through the entire movie. It’s a novel concept that some people really loved. It spawned 4 sequels.

Anyway, the problem with watching a movie like this as a kid is how quickly and out of nowhere the deaths come from. The first really shocking death is Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), who is the second death in the movie, but it is so sudden and shocking. She is in mid-sentence basically arguing with the rest of the group when she steps off a curb and is splattered, and I mean pulverized, by a bus. The group is splattered with her blood. You don’t know it’s coming, and that old trick of covering your eyes during the scary part won’t work here.

The second gruesome and shocking death I want to highlight is actually number 5 in the movie. The group is now aware that death is after them and are actively trying to fight or at least avoid it. There is one point where the kid’s car gets stuck on the train tracks and then the doors lock and they have to fight to get out of the car. They do, right before it is smashed into pieces, of course. Then Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott) is talking and standing by the tracks when a piece of metal on the ground is blown up by the wind of the train and takes his head right off. It is shocking, and being that it hits him just below the nose and cuts off the top of his head rather than at the neck, it’s particularly gruesome. I was old enough and well-versed in horror films and this scene still sticks in my head.

I remember seeing this one in the theater too, and there was a young family, basically what looked like young 20-somethings, and they had a little girl with them. I think the little girl was maybe 8. I remember looking over at her and at some point, I believe it was this one in the movie, she turned around in her seat, up on her knees, and faced away from the screen. It was her only defense, and I honestly felt sorry for her. I’ll always remember that.

So I know at least one little millennial who was traumatized by this movie.

9. The Ring (October 18, 2002) — Dir. Gore Verbinski

As a horror fan, The Ring was amazing. It was a great concept and done pretty well for a horror movie at that time. Horror, though revived in the 90s after the 80s home video downward spiral, was still struggling a little, and films like The Ring were helping it get back on track. I have to tell you I was so excited to see this movie, just bonkers for it. It lived up to about half of the hype and excitement.

The movie follows Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), a journalist and single mother who investigates the mysterious death of several teenagers. The teenagers seem to be dying 7 days after watching a mysterious unmarked videotape. Yes, at this point VHS tapes were still everywhere. When she watches the tape, filled with a series of bizarre and surreal images, she gets a phone call that says “7 days.” To heighten the drama and suspense, at one point Keller catches her 8-year-old son watching this tape in the middle of the night. Now they are both doomed! At this point you’re pretty creeped out by the idea that you could accidentally watch a video and see something that’s going to come kill you in 7 days. It is a methodical and intense wait while this journalist tries to unravel the mystery and save herself and her son.

She basically finds that a little girl, Samara, has been abused, studied, and killed. I won’t ruin the movie. Samara is the creepy long-dark-hair-in-the-front ghost girl who shows up on the video. At one point in the movie, Noah (Martin Henderson), Keller’s ex-boyfriend who is helping her investigate, hits the 7-day mark. By this point you think everyone is safe and the mystery is solved, but you soon find it was only a half measure. His TV comes on and there is Samara coming out of the well. You are yelling at the screen: RUN! STOP WATCHING! GET OUT OF THERE! But Noah, like a bonehead, is locked in on the image of Samara coming ever closer to the camera, and in the shock of early 2000s horror, she crawls right through the TV screen and into real life. It really is a crap-your-pants moment in film. My young nephew, who was always curious about horror, about Buffy, about Angel, about Resident Evil, watched this movie when he was 8 years old, and it was reported to me he wanted to take his TV out of his room. I don’t think he slept well for a while after seeing this movie. Curiosity killed the cat who did the final jump scare right before the ghost lady comes out of the TV. It really is a low blow to make the horror actually crawl out of the TV set. “It’s just a movie, kid!” hits differently for millennials who developed a fear of this film.

10. Saw (October 29, 2004) — Dir. James Wan — The Reverse Bear Trap Scene

There are a lot of scenes in the Saw movies that screwed up millennials, but the first I believe is always the best.

Heavy hitter James Wan directed the movie that follows two men, photographer Adam (Leigh Whannell) and oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes), who both wake up in a disgusting public bathroom chained to toilets with a dead guy on the floor between them. They figure out through the course of the movie they have been captured by the Jigsaw Killer, and he has set up an elaborate puzzle for them to free themselves from in order to survive. The later Saw movies (there are 13 in total) went deeper and deeper into bloody torture porn, but this first Saw isn’t as bloody or gory as people remember. There is one scene, the cold open, where Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) is trapped with a reverse bear trap on her head. The contraption is jutted into her mouth and is a large and powerful spring-loaded device that will pop open and rip her head apart if she doesn’t get the key that is inside a dead man’s stomach lying across the room.

The scene is high-pressure and high-suspense. She is under an extreme time crunch to get this thing off her head. She is moments away from dying and she knows it, and has to cut open and dig through this dead man’s body to find the key and unlock this death trap. Any kid under the age of 12 viewing this scene isn’t going to be quite right pretty much for the rest of their lives. Even though Saw 1 isn’t the torture porn its successors turned out to be, this scene is suspense-filled, horribly bloody, and absolutely wrenching. Oh, those poor young millennials. The youngest millennial, born in 1996, would have been 8 years old and terribly traumatized by this movie and these scenes.

Well, there you go. Now I’ve written one of these about how screwed up millennials are. Maybe GenX can give me a break for once. Stop telling me how they sat all the way through The Exorcist while drinking a beer when they were 8 and they’re just fine now. At least millennials aren’t in denial. They can go to therapy and admit to having some pain or trauma, I think. Anyway, I’m not a millennial but I have a lot of millennial friends and family.

I hope I got some of these right. They are truly chilling and traumatic scenes that I witnessed with my own eyes, but let me know the ones I missed. Tell me what scenes really messed you up as a millennial kid. GenZ, some of these could have zapped you too. Just anyone can tell me any scene from horror that really messed you up. I love these things. I honestly write these because I love writing them so much. I can’t explain it, but they are fun. I guess I’m weird like that.

Anyway, thanks for reading. From the Backyard, I’ll keep the fire burning and the movies going until you get here.

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Antoine Fuqua’s Michael is an understated and subtle masterpiece of deep feeling that is connecting with audiences while being completely misunderstood by critics. The movie is, stated simply, about the most famous man in the world loved by millions, but who is completely incapable of making any meaningful human connections. It may be one of the only movies in history where the main character, the rising superstar, the man people are dying just to meet, does not have a single deep relationship. It is as understated as a Hemingway novel, well crafted and extremely restrained. Michael hides his pain.

Ask the Lonely

When the movie opens, we see young Michael looking out the window at other kids playing. His father Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo) calls him back to practice with the Jackson 5. It’s one of very few times in the movie that we see Michael’s longing to be with other kids his age. He spends all his time with his brothers practicing and trying to please his abusive and demanding father. The only time he seems to really connect with anyone, or feel any connection at all, might be on stage, though the movie never states this. It leaves it implied for the audience, subtly shown in Michael’s interactions with his fans.

Later he gets a monkey, Bubbles, and talks deeply and warmly to a llama, but never to a real person, never to anyone in his family. Even his relationship with his mother is shown only in the two of them watching movies together. You never see them hug. You never hear them say I love you. Throughout the movie there is a deep pain running inside Michael. The one person who Michael may have been close to in his real life, Janet, someone he seemingly had a good relationship with at times, is not in the movie. Other complicated relationships are not mentioned either. Their absence deepens the emotional pain. Every omission adds to the devastating loneliness at the heart of this film.

He is clearly a genius. He makes his own way without his family for Thriller and writes the songs in solitude. Though he may have had help in real life, the movie shows him in complete isolation building the album and creating. It’s chilling, and he never shows his pain. There is only one point in the movie where he even tries to make a connection with his older brothers, asking them to play Twister, and they all laugh at him and say they have dates and are going out for the night. They are in their late teens and twenties. It shows how different, how innocent, how disconnected Michael was. Though he was a musical genius, someone who could see problems in the world and address them through performance, dance, and music, he could not find a way to have close relationships.

Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’

The movie makes much of Michael loving Peter Pan, the forever boy, implying Michael doesn’t want to grow up, but it’s a red herring. Peter Pan was also extremely lonely and isolated. Much has been made of how Peter Pan traded his connections for freedom, and Michael is doing the same.

I believe critics missed this. They missed the deeper meaning of this movie, though it is thrown in your face repeatedly. Michael loves to create, loves being on stage, and he understands he’s not a child. He just can’t find anyone like him. At one point in the movie, his mother asks him if he would want to make real friends. This is when he’s still a child, and he says they don’t treat him like a normal kid. Even then, when a young boy wants more than anything to have friends, Michael knows he’s different and unable to connect.

The Rotten Tomatoes critic score, as of this writing, sits at 38%. The audience score sits at 97%, and the film has earned 217 million dollars. I don’t buy the falderal that critics were magically watching some other movie, or that they judge films differently simply because they watch a lot of them. I have two degrees in writing, including a master’s degree. I have analyzed academic and literary texts at a graduate and professional level, and I see the message and theme of Michael clearly on the screen.

How’d they miss it?

The Way You Make Me Feel

At the same time, Fuqua uses the musical numbers to get the audience to connect emotionally to Michael. The nostalgia is thick in this movie, but it’s more than that. The music moves you, it’s full of emotion. It’s Michael Jackson. At one point I looked over at my wife watching this film, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She rarely cries at movies. I was moved several times as well, but not just by nostalgia. It was the kindness and caring of Michael that got to me. He never shows his pain, but whenever he meets fans or children, he is deeply kind and caring, and it comes from such a seemingly heartfelt and honest place that you can’t help but like him. Showing his kindness humanizes him. It makes this very quiet and aloof superstar seem like someone who cares for everyone.

If you lived in the 80s you know this is who Michael was. He was often with kids and people in poverty, with gang members, it was on tv all the time that he had visited the hospital. This isn’t the movie trying to make him look good, it’s just really who he was. He was that generous and that giving.

Leave Me Alone

Much has been made of Michael’s break from Joe Jackson as the central conflict of this film. It really isn’t. It is a subplot but not main conflict. When Joe is teaching him to perform as a little boy, he keeps telling him to look at him, but Michael doesn’t want that connection. His father does beat him and does try to control him, but by the third act Michael has already fired Joe and made Thriller, yet he goes back and lives in the same house with him. He says he’s not ready to move out, but if you were terrified of someone and had fired them and had all the money in the world, wouldn’t you get your own place? He doesn’t. I honestly can’t tell if Michael hates Joe or simply feels deeply sorry for him. It’s very hard to tell with how understated all of this is. It’s actually very beautiful. Michael is shown as a deeply empathetic person. I can’t imagine how much it hurt him to have to leave his father. Critics are always complaining about movies telling them too much, this one just shows everything and walks away.

In what some critics have called the climax of the movie, Michael boldly tells his audience that it is his last show with the Jacksons. His father is furious, having told people backstage they will be touring the world. In this moment, Michael does exactly what his father told him to do when he was little: he looks at him, from the stage, while saying it. That is as much of a connection as he ever seeks with his father. When confronted backstage, he walks right past Joe, pushes past him, and ignores him. This isn’t some great climax. It’s just another connection Michael is not willing to have. It’s a subplot and not what the movie is about.

Human Nature

At the end of the movie we are at the Bad tour, and Michael is on stage in all his glory. Jaafar Jackson looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like Michael Jackson at this point, and the final scene is Michael holding his arm up over his eyes, hiding his connection even with the audience. Then it says: Michael will return. My guess is that when and if we get a part two, we will see how Michael further disconnects from his audience, and how his eventual, more painful attempts to seek connection lead to all the trouble we know he had.

The movie works hard to humanize things about Michael Jackson that I had wondered about my whole life. I watched Michael when I was little and was a fan, but in high school I was into grunge. Michael was undeniably great, but I wasn’t watching or listening at that point. The animals make sense now. He had a monkey because he couldn’t connect. He had a llama and a python and a giraffe because he was unable to build relationships. This movie demonstrates that in a very deep and meaningful way, and I feel much closer to Michael knowing that.

When he does the Pepsi commercial and is of course terribly burned, he never shows the pain. Fuqua uses this to demonstrate without question that Michael is often in pain but never expresses it, and it’s genius. He never winces or acts like he is hurting, having become so good at hiding it his whole life. At one point he’s talking to his manager and says he’s still in a lot of pain, but he never acts like it. It’s a key moment in the movie, a turning point, but also a very clear demonstration that this character is hiding his emotion and who he is.

It’s a devastatingly sad movie, and Michael showing so little emotion is like when a comedian never laughs on stage. It lets the audience feel the emotions. I hope we get a part two. I would like to know more about Michael and see if he ever makes any real connections, and whether they are painful for him. Like the scars from the burns, are they muted and distant, like phantoms?

Thriller

One of the ways that you feel closer to Michael in the movie is through his musical numbers. This movie has the most amazing musical performances of any biopic in history. They focus so closely on the performance that you feel like you are really there, backstage, seeing something that happened so long ago, and it leads me to one other amazing point about this movie. It is immersive. It puts you in the songs. It puts you in the videos and in Michael Jackson’s life, which takes a ridiculously high level of craft. I’m astounded by this. It is truly the most impressive musical display in any music biopic in history. It doesn’t make you feel like you are watching the story of Michael, it makes you feel like you are THERE watching Michael. It truly is thrilling.

You Know I’m Bad

So yes, I think the critics got this movie very wrong. All their complaints aside, I have not seen one review that states the most obvious thing about this film: most of the conflict is inside Michael, and it is still growing in 1987. I can’t wait to see what Fuqua does with this next.

I don’t usually explain this much in my reviews, but I felt this movie has been so misunderstood that I had to offer a longer explanation and a defense. Audiences are obviously enjoying it, not just for the music, but because they feel closer to Michael and understand something deep and complicated about him that they never understood before.

Beat it

So whenever I do a review you all know I have to use criteria. This isn’t a gut reaction, let’s go by the numbers. Here is my numbers review of Michael.

Entertainment: 20/20.

Endlessly entertaining and deeply moving. This movie moves, the musical numbers are electric and they are the best performances I have ever seen in a biopic. Jaafar Jackson brings Michael to life in a way that no other actor in a biopic does. You can’t help but sing or dance, tap your feet.

Rewatchability: 20/20.

Yeah, I want to go back and see it again. Many fans are seeing it multiple times, but this is a movie that I’d like to study. It’s so subtle, I want to see any details that I missed. I can also see myself playing it at parties and certainly a backyard showing or two.

Acting: 20/20.

If I could go higher I would. Colman Domingo and Jaafar Jackson are amazing in this film. No one else on the planet besides Jaafar would make you believe Michael Jackson is standing on stage in front of you, and that is 100% a necessity with this film. Where other biopics can get away with showing you momentary, fleeting performances, this one puts it right in your face. It’s one of the main ways you connect with Michael.

Story/Plot: 18/20.

I’m giving it an 18 only because I think more of it is coming, though I’m conflicted about this. Stories do not have to be tied up in a bow. They do not have to have a climax or a resolution. Some stories just linger so that you feel what the character felt, and I honestly think Fuqua did such a great job here. This is why the critics were so frustrated. They couldn’t connect with what is actually masterful filmmaking.

Directing: 20/20.

Fuqua is masterful in his understatement and his subtleties. Though its protagonist can’t move forward, the movie still does. It keeps you aging along with Michael and entertained, and the excitement grows in the foreground while Michael’s pain grows in the background, just like in real life.

Overall 98/100

Audiences have made this the highest grossing biopic of all time for a reason. I agree with them. You see them dancing and crying, a lot. I think maybe having big emotional reactions to a film is a dead giveaway for it being artful. We want movies to move people and we want them to get audiences to the theaters, and this one is doing both. They are not just crying over nostalgia. They are crying at the loss of Michael Jackson, how much he meant to them, and how much closer they feel to him through this film. It made me understand things about him that I never understood. That’s everything a biopic should do, and I think critics need to revisit this movie. They need to see what they missed.

I tend to be pretty hard on movies, but this one deserves to win a lot of awards.

For GenX, this is required viewing. It will transport you back to the 80s for sure. What is your first Michael Jackson memory, tell me in the comments, or I’d love to hear your thoughts on the movie.

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Dear Internet,

For the love of all that is holy, could someone please help me. I have been over on the social medias and the review sites seeing people talk about this new Michael movie. Yes, Rotten Tomatoes critics first rated it at 27% and now it’s hovering around 39%. Audiences have it at 97%. Oops. The number one complaint I’m seeing about this movie is that critics do not feel like they “learned anything new” about Michael Jackson. Oh, to the great depths of my soul that is groaning over this. For the love of Pete, you should not be getting any information, anything at all, or believing anything that you see in a biopic.

Let’s start with the fact that biopics are fiction. They may have some true events, and some real people in them, but for the most part those people and places are highly fictionalized. People over on the TikTok are talking about how they loved What’s Love Got to Do With It, the biopic about Tina Turner, because they learned so much about her from it. Tina Turner hated this movie! Much of it was false. It dramatized her life and made her, in her words, seem like a victim, and she wasn’t. She told Oprah she couldn’t even finish watching the movie. It got so many things wrong. You can go through every biopic out there and most of them are highly fictionalized. Please don’t get your information about a real person from a movie. That’s like saying you can’t believe Luke Skywalker turned out so well in spite of his father.

They also cite the Jackson 5 miniseries The American Dream as teaching them so much about the Jacksons. This movie got so much wrong it even gave the year of Michael Jackson’s birth wrong. Not learning new information is the number one reason critics are giving for not liking this movie. That’s like saying, please lie more to me.

Critics and young people, and I get this real feeling that maybe young people just don’t know that biopics are fiction? Maybe it’s just people who don’t like this movie? Anyway, there are a lot of them, and it’s a bit shocking to hear people saying they learned so much about a celebrity this way. I saw What’s Love Got to Do With It at the theater, and I remember that controversy. I remember how upset Tina Turner was, and I went into the movie knowing anything I saw was probably not true.

If you want to know something about a celebrity please watch a documentary. They get it right about half the time. So you can get some information from books and some from documentaries, but the truth is real life does not translate well to text or film. It just doesn’t. This is why people say don’t trust what you read in the papers or on the internet. It gives you a very skewed view of reality.

At any rate, just please sit down with your loved ones, children and spouses and explain to them that they should not try to learn facts about people from biopics. Biopics are fiction.

I’ll be posting a review of Michael later this week. The movie is breaking box office records, or so it seems. They are projecting it to have a 150-200 million dollar opening weekend. This is an event movie. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s entertaining. People are always complaining they don’t make event movies anymore, and here it is. The biggest pop star in the history of the world and it’s not attacking him, it’s telling a positive story about his life, and RT critics are going to have to go sit in the corner on this one. They are grumpy and wanted to learn more fictitious stuff about MJ, I guess. Anyway, go enjoy the movie. I can’t wait to finish my review.

Sincerely,

Backyard Movie Critic

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I hear this complaint and see it exemplified on TikToks and YouTube Shorts that fashion is going grey, or that people dress the same now as they did in the early 2000s. Well, duh. They traded our culture for money. MTV wasn’t invented because it could make money. It was part of cable, and cable as a whole made the money. Nothing like that could exist today. MTV wanted to bring us music and affect the culture, and that’s exactly what it did. Yes, it made money, but that wasn’t the sole purpose.

I mean, if we’re all honest, each and every one of us Gen Xers got caught up in the hype somewhere. Don’t try to tell me you were immune. Not buying it. Some trends might have been ridiculous to you, but others sucked you right in like the rest of us. When I look back now, I’ll admit it, I feel a little ridiculous. I had parachute pants. Yes I had a Michael Jackson jacket at one time. Yes I tried to breakdance. The trends were, well, some of them were just embarrassing, but hey, we were kids. I think the current generation could do with a little more embarrassment and a little less status quo, if I’m honest. Anyway, there are more of these, but here are 10 music videos Gen X took way way too seriously.

1. Thriller (1983) — Michael Jackson

Oh man, to the younger generations, if you think Taylor Swift is big, you have no concept of the magnitude of the mass hysteria that can swell around a pop icon. Michael Jackson was it. There isn’t even any way to describe this phenomenon unless you were there. Imagine going to school, and Gen X, you don’t have to imagine, just remember the mad chatter that went on in your school about the premiere of this video. Cable didn’t keep great ratings numbers, but their estimates say the video had 5 to 10 times the normal viewership, which would put the broadcast of this little 14-minute video at 10 to 20 million viewers. You also have to know that not everyone had cable, so I know friends who went to other friends’ houses to watch it. It is estimated over 50 million people saw the video within the first couple of weeks. The album sold a million copies the week following the airing of the video.

So we were all bonkers for Michael at this time, and that exploded into about the craziest mess you can think of. Now we all know that pop stars don’t really dress like everyday people, right? I mean, let’s say at least some of them rocketing to fame might want some attention and they might be a little eccentric. After this video, the jacket that Michael wore was everywhere. Yes, a leather jacket with zippers all over it was the baseline and apex of fashion. After “Billie Jean,” many people went so far as to wear the glove. Michael wore one white glove with rhinestones on it. People started doing that! Yes, you could go to school and some guy would be wearing one white glove, and you didn’t even give it two thoughts. It wasn’t like, that’s weird. It was like, man, I wonder where I can get one of those.

I remember I begged my mom to get the cable package so I could watch MTV for the Thriller video. She called and got it hooked up that week. My cousins came over and it was an event. We were all locked on our TV for the big premiere.

Red leather jacket, single white glove, zombie choreography. Every kid owned a knockoff version of that jacket within six months.

Michael Jackson was truly the King of Pop.

2. Physical (1981) — Olivia Newton-John

Let’s get physical, physical. This song and video came out when I was in 1st grade and it would not go away. There were girls in my high school who still wore leg warmers and headbands. Yes, let’s review, shall we? This was basically a workout video with Olivia Newton-John doing a workout in leg warmers, a leotard, and a headband, and the next week girls were wearing this outfit to school. Their response wasn’t to go to the gym and work out. They dressed up like Olivia and went to school, and you just, we just, everyone just accepted it. Yep, I had a few Olivia Newton-Johns in my school. They were pretty hot, so who was going to complain?

Just the idea of this, though, doesn’t exist in this form today. I just had a long conversation with my 12-year-old. I explained that living in the 80s was like living on another planet, and I asked him if there were any kids in his school that were in groups, like in the 80s. He basically said there were the “furries” and everybody else.

Anyway, people were nuts for Olivia. She was great. I think kids today need more of this, but man did we take it way too seriously. Again, Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or whatever pop stars are out there today have nothing on the 80s mega-craze. And that’s what they were. They were a craze. We called them that because they were a form of mass hysteria where we had all lost our minds. It played on MTV relentlessly. As I type this I can hear the lyrics to this song blasting in my head. I hope it doesn’t stay like that all day.

3. White Wedding (1982) — Billy Idol

Ok, so I’m not trying to suggest that Billy Idol was the first punk rocker. Yes, I know the Sex Pistols and the Clash and blah blah blah. I can hear all the punk fans complaining about this, but in ‘82 when “White Wedding” came out it was so big, punk hit the masses. I shouldn’t say it was punk. It was everyday people dressing like punks. Idol mainstreamed this.

Mainstreamed punk aesthetic into suburban America. Spiked hair, leather, and eyeliner went from dangerous subculture to high school hallway fashion overnight.

Idol came out of the original British punk scene, but by the time his music and videos passed through all the filters and got to MTV it was a watered-down punk rock for sure. Don’t come at me. I’m just saying it was not the Sex Pistols or even The Clash. Idol had more pop in his punk than most, and this song’s popularity exploded. I was only in the 3rd grade when this song came out, and man, even kids at my elementary school were coming in with their hair spiked and an earring and a jean jacket with punk patches on it. “Oh, that kid looks like Billy Idol,” I thought. I mean, even at that age I knew what was up because I would watch MTV. Also, again, these songs saturated your life. There was no escaping them.

4. “Buffalo Gals” by Malcolm McLaren (1982) / “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock (1983)

I’m going with two here. “Buffalo Gals” was the first video on MTV to feature breakdancing, but “Rockit” was a smash hit the next year that probably busted it into the mainstream. It’s wild how popular breakdancing was in the 1980s. Yes, people really did have breakdancing dance-offs with each other in the streets. I’m explaining this because I don’t think people from Gen Z could possibly believe this.

First, everyone had a boombox, and many people carried these big heavy things with them. You think your wireless speakers are fancy? Try carrying a giant boombox with a tape player in it. Mine took 16 D batteries. That’s like 8 lbs right there. Some people literally carried it right next to their ear. Yes, a guy walking down the street with a giant stereo pressed against his ear. We also carried cardboard. Yes, cardboard boxes that we would spread out on the ground, mostly on the concrete, so we could breakdance on it. Yes, this is real. Yes, I did this. Yes, my friends did this. I tried to breakdance but was terrible at it. I still tried, though.

There were also movies and a fashion that went with this. Yes, you dressed a certain way and wore certain pants, usually pegged at the bottom, and maybe even an earring. Parachute pants came into fashion around this time and was part of the movement. See Turbo from “Breakin’” as the example. Dear Gen Xers, if I didn’t explain this they wouldn’t know what I was talking about and they wouldn’t even believe it. I believe Gen Z denies Gen X culture like flat-earthers deny that the earth is round. I don’t know about flat-earthers, and I’m not looking it up.

Anyway, if you all remember correctly, not only did you have a Michael Jackson in high school and several Olivia Newton-Johns, there were always a few breakdancers in there somewhere.

On one hand you have to ask yourself why we did this to ourselves. On the other hand, you have to acknowledge how glorious it really was. It was great. The oddness of the 80s was amazing.

5. Cum On Feel the Noize (1983) — Quiet Riot

Quiet Riot mainstreamed heavy metal with their “Metal Health” album. It was massive, and it even took the top spot on the Billboard charts from Thriller. It played morning, noon, and night on MTV. Remember, in the early days of MTV it was just music. They didn’t create shows so much as they just played videos. They had VJs. These were people who just introduced videos and they became superstars. It wouldn’t be until 1987 that the illustrious Headbangers Ball would come out. Quiet Riot also brought the term headbanging to the masses with their song “Bang Your Head.”

None of this was new. Of course the 70s were rich with heavy metal like Kiss and Judas Priest and other massively popular bands, but Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize” was a breakthrough that bridged to the next generations. It was not intended for children, but I have vivid memories of begging my mom to buy this tape from K-Mart. I went home and put it in my boom box and blasted it for weeks. My little nephew was staying with us. He was about 3 years old. I have an image of him swinging on a tire swing out in our front yard, just singing “wild, wild, wild” as loud as he could in the most distorted little-kid voice you could think of. If you think songs are earworms now, they were pandemics in the 80s. You just heard them so many times and in so many places it was like you were being haunted by them. So weird how that has changed.

6. Like a Virgin (1984) — Madonna

Oh man, was there a woman in the 80s who had more sex appeal than Madonna? Every time a new album came out she reinvented herself, and every single time all of her devotees changed with her. I remember going to school after “Like a Virgin” came out and thinking, what happened to all these girls? Why are they all dressed in fishnets with their hair all teased? Madonna really started a kind of sex rebellion among women and girls of the 80s. It was half pop, half punk in many ways. She put sex on full display.

“Like a Virgin” shot to number 1 on the Billboard 200 and the album sold over 10 million copies. It’s so strange, if you just say “Like a Virgin” I can hear Madonna singing this song. I can’t even guess how many times I’ve heard it. In 1984 it would have been playing on MTV 20 or more times per day. It would have been blasting out of car stereos, in the stores, pretty much anywhere you went you heard this song. That’s how it was in the 80s and no one who didn’t live through it could really understand it. We were blasted by media. Madonna would later release a best-selling album and a book called “Sex” (1992). She blew the top off the 80s, and then she dominated until the late 90s. Anytime you see a female pop star doing their thing today, or since, they are emulating Madonna. Period. So not only did women of Gen X take her so seriously and dress like her and even act like her, all pop stars from then until now have taken her very seriously, and for good reason.

Yes, on occasion I would listen to a Madonna song on the radio on my boombox. GenX guys have never admitted that to the woman of GenX, but I’m coming forward now, all these years later to say, yes on occasion I listened to Madonna and I know many macho Gen Xers who would let her play when she came on the radio. No, I didn’t seek her out. I didn’t have a favorite song of hers, but yes I listened and didn’t turn the station on occasion.

7. Jump (1984) — Van Halen

This is where heavy metal and big hair kind of split. David Lee Roth on stage in spandex and big hair was the template for all future glam rockers. “Jump…and might as well jump,” again these songs are the worst, just blasting in my brain. I hope you hear them too. Writing this article is like flipping through radio channels of the 80s in my head. Which brings me to my point. There is no way for Gen Z to have any concept of how important radio was to us. If you didn’t have the album, usually on cassette tape, you had to find it on the radio and record it.

The pipeline worked like this, and it’s perfect for “Jump” because I think this is one of the first songs I recorded off the radio. First you’d see it on MTV. It would become a thing, and “Jump” hit number one like a rocket and Van Halen became instant superstars. The look, looking back, was ridiculous, but how many people tried to emulate it is just mind-boggling. You’d be driving down the street and see a guy dressed like David Lee Roth. Roth’s personality and stage performance was explosive, so if you lived it, you know why he was so cool.

I digress, back to the music pipeline of the 80s. You would see it on MTV and then just want the song, get your boom box out that night after school, and sit there waiting for sometimes hours for them to play it. I think “Jump” was the first song on the first mix tape I ever made. I don’t know if I can explain to Gen Z what a mix tape is. I know, I know, it sounds simple, a mix of songs on a tape, right? No. This was a labor of love that you spent days or even weeks putting together, and yes when you gave it to your girlfriend it represented a lot of hard work dammit! She loved you for it, or that’s what you told yourself. Couple of those mixtapes for girls came back to haunt me, but I don’t want to talk about it!

“Jump” inspired all of glam rock. From 1984 on, if you saw someone in a glam band, especially on a local level, they were wearing spandex and giant hair. Also, just as a sidenote, the ozone layer was a giant deal in the 1980s. It was quickly deteriorating and we were all going to die. I mean there were so many things we were about to die from. Yes, the sun’s rays would crisp you in 20 seconds. Did glam bands destroy the ozone layer? I know it was all the hairspray. The chlorofluorocarbons in propellant hair spray were destroying the ozone layer, but just think, Americans were making their hair so big we almost destroyed the planet. It is absolutely wild. I won’t blame that on Van Halen, but they certainly played a role. Did the ozone layer fix itself or did we just give up on it?

8. Karma Chameleon (1983) — Culture Club

Wow, ok, so this was something. Boy George was the front man of Culture Club, and really the first to bring gender-bending to the mainstream. It’s crazy how this went. “Karma Chameleon” was a massive, and I mean massive, hit. It hit number one in 20 countries and stayed at number one for 3 weeks, which is crazy for the time. I remember sitting in my sister’s car. She said, “Does this sound like a girl or a guy.” I wasn’t sure I was like 8. “I’m not sure.” Then she showed me a picture of Boy George, and said “Does this look like a guy or a girl?” and I said, “I don’t know.” Then she told me how weird she thought it was.

The best way to say it is that Boy George was an androgynous dresser. You didn’t see this much in the 80s. With all the bullying and all the machismo of men, androgynous dressing was risky at best, but Boy George brought this to the forefront and suddenly, here and there, you’d see it. He inspired more gender fluidity at a time when gender was very rigid, and of course he helped the gay community. His style came right to the masses. You’d see girls and guys on TV dressed like Boy George. It really was everywhere. Today it’s amazing in my mind how quickly those things changed. At the same time you had macho Burt Reynolds on TV strutting and racing cars and chasing women, you had this movement that created an opening for something completely different. It should be noted that many people who dressed like Boy George were not gay or trans. They just loved the style. He of course influenced many pop stars of today.

It was the weird thing about the 80s. Even though there were groups of people, maybe in some ways very tribal, there was kind of room for everyone. You just expected them to do their thing and you to do yours. I’m not saying they liked each other, but there was space and distance.

I know I’m making jokes about the impact of some of these songs, about the fashion or about how people changed their behavior. They were very powerful. I like the jokes and the fun, and I don’t want to write some serious analytical piece on 80s culture, so just know, I understand many of these songs were important to people, and I’m just trying to make this fun and get people to read it.

9. U Can’t Touch This (1990) — MC Hammer

Once we hit the 90s things started to waver a little bit, and I think of MC Hammer as sort of the last exhale of real 80s culture. Oh man, I can’t tell you how this hit my high school. I was 15 years old and hip hop exploded in just the oddest way. MC Hammer was sort of the mainstreamed version of rap, sort of. Maybe we could call it pop rap, maybe hip-hop pop. A lot of people were listening to rap music, but this was different. Later Vanilla Ice would come out with “Ice Ice Baby,” and I’ll talk about that in another article, but “Can’t Touch This” came out, people changed overnight. It was a wave of hip-hop pop hitting the mainstream. They went from just dressing like a normal kid to wearing those ridiculously baggy, giant pants. Ugh, the fashion of the 80s was something. There is no way to describe it.

Imagine going to school or work today and the guy next to you looks like a normal guy, and the next day you come in he’s dressed in a baggy jumpsuit with giant pants and chains. It is unbelievable how odd this was. Walking through the school parking lot, “Can’t Touch This” was blasting out of car windows, people were dancing to it in the parking lot. MC Hammer exploded like a fashion and attitude bomb. You think a Swiftie wearing a bracelet is something? Imagine a bunch of girls at your school coming in tomorrow looking like Swift on her Eras Tour in those bodysuits.

It didn’t help that MC Hammer was on MTV and the radio every single second of every single day, and on top of that he got brand deals and did the music for “The Addams Family,” and this guy was everywhere. It was a massive shift in culture and it primed the 90s but was still so 1980.

10. Smells Like Teen Spirit (1991) — Nirvana

This is where everything changed. The culture shifted in a massive way from the 80s to the 90s, but the effect was kind of the same. So you still had all the remnants of the 80s in your high school. You had the occasional Olivia Newton-John in leg warmers. You had a couple of Michael Jacksons. You had a group of glam rockers, and of course the headbangers, and the hip-hop breakdancing rappers. Some punks. It really was a circus of styles in 1991 before Nirvana came along. Some of these groups were hardcore dedicated to their styles and some felt like it was played out.

When Nirvana hit TV it was like everyone knew it was the new thing. Grunge was new and it just fit the culture and the time. Suddenly, overnight, a lot of those 80s fashions disappeared and beards and grungy hair and flannels were everywhere. It really did define the 90s. Gen X wasn’t a generation fighting a war. Yes, some of us had seen Vietnam on TV every day, but what we were dealing with was MTV culture, government corruption, corporate takeovers. Unlike other generations we were apathetic, and that’s exactly what grunge was. If you see that teenager today who just doesn’t care, blame Gen X. If you see a Gen Xer, they probably still don’t care. It’s kind of the hallmark of Gen X and this song was the first time we really admitted it to ourselves and the world.

The culture change was seismic. Anyway, to describe how overnight skateboard culture and apathy swept through high schools and even colleges is very hard to explain, but it was the beginning of the 90s and everything changed. Did we take it too seriously? I don’t know. If we did we still are. I think for younger Gen Xers and millennials 1991 was the year that defined a big part of what the generation became. It was still just a song dang it! We didn’t have to just up-end all that 80s fashion. I’d love to see an occasional Olivia now and again or a Michael Jackson or Madonna or even some MC Hammer pants. I mean we really need to liven things up around here.

Finish It!

So yeah, MTV was the cornerstone of 80s and early 90s culture. It didn’t last. They started changing to program-based programming in the 90s, and I can’t tell you how many episodes I watched of stupid “Remote Control” hoping to see a music video. Ugh. We need another MTV. People are still dressing the same as the early 2000s for god’s sake. It was an amazing time, and these songs changed things in our culture. I say that Gen X took these songs too seriously, but what I mean is the world changed and evolved around these amazing pieces of music. The world realized something new about itself every time one of these amazing songs hit the charts. It is a testament to the power of music and the power of shared experience which we don’t have enough of.

Yes, yes, I know I didn’t do every song from the 80s. There are so many more, but I just wanted to walk down memory lane and maybe even tell some of this to Gen Z or Gen Alpha who can’t possibly have any concept of what those times were like. It just doesn’t happen today. Something going viral does not compare to your entire culture changing overnight. One day you come in and the guy next to you looks like a normal guy, and the next day he’s wearing a white glove and a leather jacket with zippers and looks like Michael Jackson ready to moonwalk. We were so used to it we hardly even noticed. Meh, that’s about what we said about it.

There is a lot more to this story. I know I didn’t capture everything, and I want this to be an ongoing series, so please tell me the big changes you remember from those times, the influence you saw if you grew up then. Millennials are in this too. They had the same experience in many ways. They might have been a bit younger, but they got a taste of rapidly shifting culture based on whatever showed up on MTV. If you’re younger and you didn’t live through any of it, what changes do you see now? Is there anything drastic that happened in your youth that just seemed to shift whole groups of people? Please tell me in the comments. I really am dying to know.

So yeah, when you think about giant cultural shifts based on what music video was popular on MTV, I would say maybe Gen X took these songs way too seriously.

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2010: The Year We Made Contact

A straightforward review of a straightforward 80s science fiction film

So I’m doing retroviews of movies that either have a lot to say about today or that I feel have been overlooked. Much has been made of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in focusing on that masterpiece, people often overlook its sequel, 2010: The Year We Made Contact. No, 2010 is not the directorial masterpiece that its predecessor was, but it is an outstanding science fiction film.

I’m just doing a plain review. No tricks this time. Just like 2010 and its accessible storytelling, I’m going to keep this review straightforward and not use any tricks. It might be a little overshadowed by my They Live review, my Terminator review, or even my The Thing review, but some people will still like it. Maybe. I think. Come on, dammit.

If you haven’t seen these two movies, 2001 is the story of a voyage to Jupiter aboard the Discovery One, crewed by Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, helped by the AI computer HAL 9000. The mission is secretly tied to a mysterious black monolith that has appeared to mark key moments in human evolution. HAL begins to make fatal decisions to save the mission, and the crew begins to have to fight for their lives.The movie is a masterpiece, there is no arguing it.

2010 is the follow-up to this film and is a more straightforward adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s follow-up novel, where a joint American-Soviet crew returns to Jupiter aboard the Leonov to investigate what happened to the Discovery One and HAL 9000. The movie more clearly ties up some of the mysteries of the first film and culminates in a spectacular leap for the solar system itself.

I’m a big fan of 2010: The Year We Made Contact. It’s a very well done science fiction film. Even though it’s not on the level of the fantastic and somewhat cryptic Kubrick classic, it’s still a great movie and a lot of fun.

In 2010 you are launched into space with the two crews of the Leonov and sent to solve several mysteries and inspire world peace. Simple story, right? Fun, right? With the crazy divisions in today’s society and all the division between people around the world, yes, I know some are losing hope, movies like 2010 are a must watch in these crazy times. It’s always been envisioned that times might get tough, or close to the brink, and great fiction has always had stories that inspired us to be more than what we are, to come together, to have hope.That’s the message of this film.

If you don’t know these movies, you should know one of the key mysteries is the monolith. It is a black rectangular block that seems to appear at the time when humanity takes a great leap forward. In 2001 they find one on the moon and then one out by Jupiter. In 2010 they believe it has something to do with the failure of the Discovery One mission. Dr. Heywood Floyd and his team have been able to study it (the one from the moon), and they feel like it was left by an ancient alien race. Now they see something is happening to Jupiter.

Entertainment Value 18/20

The story starts on Earth, where they can see that something is happening on Jupiter. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States are running high, and Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) knows that it is paramount to go see what is happening out there at the giant planet. They also want to recover the Discovery One and see what went wrong with HAL-9000. The advanced and very important AI malfunctioned, and no one knows why. The movie is so well done that it never gets the credit it deserves for being such a high quality science fiction film right in the middle of the 1980s.

There is a lot of high drama all the way through this film. Even though the special effects are 40 years old, they still look great. The story that Kubrick played out in 2001 is all here, and it’s a continuation, but much more digestible. There is very little mysticism in this movie. The science and space exploration are compelling. The dangers are felt, and the relationships built among the crew are fun and feel real. If you like movies like The Martian or Project Hail Mary, 2010: The Year We Made Contact is right up your alley.

Did an AI kill the crew of Discovery One? What happened out there nine years ago? What is happening on Jupiter, and what force in the universe is controlling these events? They know the Monolith is out there.

Rewatchability 15/20

I’m taking some points off here because there is a big reveal at the end that you can never unsee after the first time you watch it, but it’s still a very rewatchable movie. It’s not one you will want to watch seasonally or a couple of times per year, but it’s certainly a movie you can revisit every once in a while. There is a lot in this movie. The space dangers, mysteries, and relationships hold your attention, and there are some details so subtle that watching a second time is probably a must. It’s a fun watch that leads to a very triumphant and meaningful change to our reality. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it. Some people will watch it again and again, but others will just enjoy it the first time.

Acting 18/20

There are six main characters in this movie. Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider), Dr. R. Chandra (Bob Balaban), and Dr. Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) make up the Americans on the Leonov. Scheider puts up an amazing performance with some great voiceover work, and Lithgow is just so damn watchable in this film. He’s funny and fun. These two are the backbone of this movie, and their high level performances carry the show. Balaban also does a great job in his supporting role. On the Soviet crew, Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren), Vasili Orlov (Dana Elcar), Maxim Brajlovsky (Elya Baskin), and Dr. Katerina Rudenko (Madolyn Smith) all put up very good supporting performances. There are no clunky moments from the actors that pull you out of the action. They really do an excellent job, especially for an 80s sci-fi flick.

I have to mention that the relationship between Elya Baskin and John Lithgow in the movie is particularly well done. It’s a Soviet and an American at the height of a time when they hated each other, and their humor and humanity shine through. It’s a really well written and performed relationship that means much more to the movie.

Story/Plot 19/20

On Earth things are falling apart, but they know something odd is happening on Jupiter. It is hoped that the joint mission will help calm some of the tensions between the two superpowers. It’s hard to tell everything that is happening in this movie without giving away the big reveals, and I don’t want to do that. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch. The movie is full of tension and dark fears about humanity, but it is also hopeful. There is a very hopeful message that plays out through the entire film. In times like today, I think it’s particularly relevant. Maybe the enemy isn’t the Soviets anymore, but this is a movie about humans, an AI, and some other intelligence working in the universe. It’s a great mystery. I think I actually like the story and the unfolding of this film even more than 2001. I know I might get flak for saying that, but in reality the film isn’t cryptic with its message. It’s not played out through high level directing. It’s told to you and, as I said, is full of hope.

The relationships among the crew, the relationship between humanity with itself, and humanity with the universe are all playing out. There are a lot of great subtle and straightforward details in this story that ultimately culminate in waking up humanity to see more to the universe than what they know.

Directing 18/20

This is a well directed movie, but unfortunately the directing stands in the shadow of one of the greatest directed films in history. Peter Hyams directed and wrote the screenplay, and he took a hard right turn when compared to Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick, of course, puts art on film. He left a lot unsaid and a lot to talk and think about in 2001, but Hyams makes this story and message much more accessible. It’s a very competently directed film with a lot of moving parts. In the face of any other movie, I would say the film is in very skilled hands. All the pieces are put together well. The story is told straightforwardly with just a little mystery, but the mysteries are wrapped up, mostly. There are some really great technical and practical effects in this movie, and it looks great. It is not on the level of some of the other classic science fiction movies of this era, like Blade Runner or 2001, but I think it does as well as a movie like Back to the Future or The Empire Strikes Back. It may not be as complex as Empire, but all the parts of 2010 are well put together and adequately controlled to keep you in the movie and interested in the story.

Overall 88/100

I put 2010: The Year We Made Contact at a B+. It’s a fun science fiction movie with a great message. It pulls you in with high drama, suspense, great relationships, good performances, and a great message. If this movie were a standalone and not in the shadow of the great 2001, it would have been a classic or even a cult film for sure. But how can you hold this up as a cult film with 2001 looming there, with so many great sequences, camera techniques, and technical and storytelling achievements? It shouldn’t take away from this movie, but in many ways it has to.

I think people need to watch more movies that are positive and hopeful for humanity, and we need to make more of them too. 2010 is certainly that. It reminds us that we are all human and that maybe there are more similarities than differences among us. The monolith in this film represents change, change that we all want, that we all know we need, but that larger forces in society, government, and business stop us from making. Maybe it will take something big to wake us all up, but until then, I think movies like this, small ones that are often overlooked, carry a message we all need to hear and hope for.

If you are looking for a science fiction movie from the 80s, or you are just a science fiction fan, give 2010 a try. It’s a fun watch. It’s on par with The Martian and Project Hail Mary, but maybe not at the higher levels of Interstellar or Blade Runner. Still, it’s entertaining and really fun..

Wow, I wrote a clean, sorta straightforward movie review and didn’t muck it up with a bunch of speculations about the director being from the future or how humanity didn’t listen to the dire warnings and messages of an ’80s film. Yes, some of my other reviews, fancy ones, with tricks of wording and interwoven speculation might overshadow this one, but I’m patting myself on the back for this. I didn’t even digress into the story of how or where I watched this film. It was on HBO, I think, and then me and a buddy had a long debate about how this movie wasn’t crap, and he said it was ’cause 2001 was so great, and I said, “Shut up, dude, that doesn’t even make sense,” and he said, “You suck,” and I said, “Dude, it’s a good movie.” See, I left all that out of the review. It’s that great? I’m making progress, dammit!

Anyway, if you have seen 2010, let me know what you thought of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it and let me know. I’m dying to hear your thoughts on this movie.

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The generation who suffered through the best and worst in horror has to be, without question, Gen X. I’m writing this piece for Halfway to Halloween, so it’s just for fun. Don’t get all cranky, Boomers. Your Dracula and Frankenstein were okay, and don’t tweak on me, Gen Z. You have had a couple of decent frights, but the all-time kings of kids being scared to death by horror films is Gen X, hands down.

The movies were terrifying. Real life wasn’t much better

Night of the Living Dead — George Romero, 1968

Starting early in the generation we see the advent of modern day zombies. It was almost 60 years ago and we’re still using the same template George set down in this extremely indie horror film shot in black and white. That means Gen X was the first generation to grow up with modern day zombies. AH HA! Beat that, Boomers.

Oh, I remember that fateful Saturday when my parents left me home to go visit my aunt and uncle, and I happened upon this black and white film just staring back at me, with creepy music in the background. I was maybe 10 or 11. My parents would be gone for a few hours, so I could watch whatever I wanted! No one could stop me! What’s the harm? How scary could it be?

I locked in on Romero’s masterpiece and didn’t even leave to go to the bathroom. When the movie was over it was dark, my parents weren’t home, and I was terrified out of my damn mind. The idea of zombies surrounding my house was so horrifying that I closed all the curtains and sat with every light on in the house until they got home. I remember the still shots at the end of the movie absolutely haunted me. It was so visceral and so real, and I was dying for my parents to come home. No cellphones back then to save me, so I sat there for a couple more hours on guard. When my mom asked, “Everything okay?” I nodded and went to my room and never spoke a word of it to her. Came to love the movie later, but it scared me the first time I saw it.

In real life I watched this movie and had to stay home alone, a key feature of GenX.

The Exorcist — William Friedkin, 1973

You think the mummy was scary? You think Dracula was creepy? I don’t care what anyone says. Sinister? The Conjuring? Not even close. The Exorcist is the all-time heavyweight champion of horror films. Hereditary? Pfft, give me a break. The Exorcist put people in the hospital. If you were flipping through the channels in the 80s or 90s and this movie was on late at night, you flipped past it freaking fast. You did not want Linda Blair’s pasted-up, cracked, demon-possessed face in your head right before you went to bed. Gen Xers know exactly what I’m talking about. You can lie and say horror movies don’t scare you until you’re up at 1 a.m. about to go to bed and those green glowing eyes and scared face flashes across your screen.

The Exorcist is of course about a little girl who becomes possessed by a demon and has to be exorcised by a priest. The movie was a rite of passage for Gen Xers. You were a wuss if you hadn’t seen it, which led to me being like 12 years old, in broad daylight, hiding in my room watching this movie. I don’t know why I didn’t want my parents to know I was watching it. They took me to horror movies when I was 4, but in my not-yet-developed brain, it would be my cool secret and I could go to school and finally hang out with the cool kids who knew and talked about such terrifying things. Yeah, I about crapped my pants watching this movie. I remember not being able to sleep for a few weeks after. But I still have this badge of honor, I saw The Exorsist when I was 12.

In real life, on TV everyday you saw an evangelical telling you, you were going to hell if you didn’t do what they said. The Satanic Panic was real and invasive. It was all around us.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — Tobe Hooper, 1974

Yes, the second greatest and scariest horror movie bestowed onto humankind is another gem from the dawn of Gen X. It kicked off the modern day horror film. Yes, Mr. Boomer, I know when you saw Dracula in the theater when you were 15 it scared you for a month, but TCSM is a balls-to-the-wall, scream at the top of your lungs, “Oh my god did he hang her on a hook,” film that shocked generations. Yes, it is still listed as one of the scariest movies of all time. Tarantino called it a perfect film. Funny how nothing out of the 40s, 50s, or 60s really ranks among the top scare films, but everything out of the 70s and 80s absolutely dominated modern horror lists. This is for my Gen Z readers: no, I’m sorry, Sinister isn’t going to cut it. And I know, Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch. Um, no, they aren’t going to cut it up against a guy who wears another human’s face on his face and chases you with a chainsaw.

TCSM not only has a horrifying premise, based on a real life serial killer, it is also extraordinarily well done. For a movie made by amateur filmmakers and actors they are punching way above their weight class. If everything was fair and right in the world, Marilyn Burns would have received an Academy Award for this movie. She puts up an amazing performance. TCSM is creepy. It’s visceral. It’s heart-pounding.

I remember the excitement of bringing this film home from the rental store with my crew of regular horror fans. We could not contain ourselves. This was a rush to the VCR, we’ll grab the pizza later, and get this movie going. We all sat completely mesmerized. From the beginning with the monument of corpses, to the Hitchhiker, to Franklin getting the saw to the chest, our eyes were rolling around in our heads like we’d just blasted a gravity bong with the delusion and high that you can only get from being zinged by a heavy-hitting horror film.

“Dude, that’s wild,” I remember Jim saying when Grandpa was trying to kill her with the hammer. I’ve talked about the falling into feathers scene, but the scene we all wanted to see when we watched this together, the one we were all so excited about was the girl going on the hook. This was a legendary scene in horror. You could go out and meet some new kids and they’d find out you liked horror movies, and someone would always say, “When he hangs her on the hook, dude...” You just knew you were real horror fans.

In real life it seemed that serial killers were running wild. I don’t know how many there were out there, but every day there was something about another serial killer on the news. Go ahead, walk home from school alone, it’ll be fine.

The Omen — Richard Donner, 1976

Talk about a terrifying movie. Go ahead, watch it by yourself and see what happens. The evil of this movie just seeps right in. You’ve got Gregory Peck, who is a massively talented actor. I don’t even think they have actors like that anymore. I think it’s illegal to be an actor like Gregory Peck. Hardnosed, gruff, gentlemanly. He really could play anything and he sells The Omen.

The Omen is of course about a cult that wants to bring about the end of the world by giving a devil child, the Antichrist, to the U.S. Ambassador to the UK. Peck’s child dies at childbirth, so he agrees to take this kid. Potato, potato, I guess. As the child grows up, terrible things begin to happen.

The scene that sticks out, and again this would have been a Friday night pizza movie sleepover watch (I think I had one of these every weekend for like 4 years), involves one of the servants who, in order to demonstrate her loyalty and love for Damien the demon child, goes up to the top of the five-story house on his birthday, calls out to him, “For you, Damien,” and leaps off with a rope around her neck. The realism of this scene is so shocking, and the way it’s shot, you almost feel like you thud at the end of the rope with her. That’s the terror of this movie. It’s not monsters chasing you. It’s the slow, terrifying, unsettling creepiness of knowing this child will end the world. Great scenes and it’s full of atmosphere and terror.

In real life there was talk of the antichrist and the end of the world on TV. People were sure things were ending in the year 2000. It was over! Nothing you could do about it, go to school, kid, hide under your desk, it’ll save you.

Halloween — John Carpenter, 1978

This movie launched a thousand copycats and ten sequels. There is nothing in Gen Z or in the sad, tired Boomer horror that even comes close to this film. Don’t even try it! In 1978 all of horror was transformed by this movie. We went from Vincent Price and Christopher Lee as Dracula to the monster being in your house, across the street, killing your babysitter.

What makes Halloween so great? How does it pull off being terrifying without spilling a drop of blood? It does it with its slow build to the greatest third act in movie history. When Laurie takes a walk to the house across the street, where you know Michael has killed everyone, where you know he is waiting, where even Tommy has seen him carrying bodies, you are screaming, “Don’t go in that house!” She goes in and finds a tombstone and her friends’ bodies falling out of closets. From that point on it’s a dead run and fight for survival and you don’t think she has a chance, but she proves herself to be a badass babysitter. It’s one of the best Gen X horror movies, and little or nothing in the last 50 years has compared to it.

I was of course way too young when I watched this movie, but it was bonkers and scary, and later it became an almost title card movie for our movie nights. Meh, this movie is boring, pop in Halloween. Oh nothing to do on a tuesday, let’s watch Halloween. Sometimes just sitting around talking in my room, Halloween played in the background while we all talked about skateboarding. It is the face of horror

In real life we were lucky to have a babysitter, but we all knew they were the first one going on the chopping block. Most of the time though, you just stayed home alone.

The Amityville Horror — Stuart Rosenberg, 1979

The house even tells you to get out, and it kills priests with fly swarms. It was also the time when a maniac went from room to room of a house killing his whole entire family, and a few years later we were all watching a movie about how haunted the house was. You can say what you want, but The Conjuring is nothing compared to this.

Basically while we were watching this movie getting scared shitless, the family was on talk shows telling us what really happened and how it was even scarier. The amount of hype that came with this movie is unreal, but there are some really terrifying moments in it. When the priest tries to bless this haunted house he is attacked by flies and basically chased out of the house by slamming doors and evil spirits. The movie is a slow burn, atmospheric pressure cooker with very few jump scares, done the right way.

In real life the people who ran screaming from this house were touring the country and telling you that evil spirits were probably in your house too, so stop complaining kid and go to bed dammit.

The Shining — Stanley Kubrick, 1980

So when you say atmospheric pressure cooker, this movie is bound to surface. Always listed as one of the scariest movies in history, and if you were 10 years old and flipping through the channels late at night in the 80s, trying to go to sleep, this movie was bound to be playing.

The Shining is of course the story of writer Jack Torrance, who takes his family up to the Overlook Hotel to be caretaker for the winter, where they will be snowed in. As it turns out, the hotel is hopelessly haunted and possessed, maybe even by the devil itself, and it basically drives Jack mad. Hhe tries to kill his family like other caretakers in the past have done. You’d think they’d mention that in the job listing.

The best and most terrifying scene is the woman in the bathroom. Jack goes and sees this beautiful woman, and when he starts to make out with her she’s really a very old, rotted-away hag. It is a brain-twisting, terrifying scene unlike anything in any other horror movie. Really, The Shining is completely unique in its scares. It’s all creep and feeling and mood. It’s what you are afraid is there, and not what you actually see, that is the real terror. Some movies have tried, but no movie has even come close to the fear embedded in The Shining.

I believe the first time I saw this it was a ABC Friday Night Movie of the week. I watched with my parents, terrified, and I’m pretty sure I was 8. Thanks mom!

In real life it seemed like child abuse was rampant. It was on the news all the time and dads were scary. Some of my friends’ dads were scary. Boomer dads in the 80s were no joke..

Friday the 13th — Sean S. Cunningham, 1980

Friday the 13th is just different than other horror movies. Even the first movie had this amazing commercial that counted down the number of kills, throwing up a big number on the screen for each person being stabbed or beheaded. This movie is the marker of where slasher movies became what I call a celebration of horror. Slashers are horror movies, but they are really more than horror movies, and this started in the 80s. All great things horror started in the 70s and 80s, and Gen X had to endure it, like it or not. I think we were lucky.

Slashers are about the number of kills and the way people die. Seems twisted, but it’s really a celebration of life, kind of. Horror scares us on screen and teaches us how to deal with our real fears, but slashers, generally all jump scares, are made to simply enjoy the dance of death on screen. Friday the 13th was really the first time this happened with a wider audience. If you’ve seen Scream II, all those people wearing Ghostface masks, running up and down the aisle of the theater, partying, laughing, joking, probably drinking, that’s the slasher celebration that started with Friday the 13th. It’s put on full display in that movie, a bit of meta like all Scream movies are famous for. (Horror fans don’t come at me, yes I know Psycho and yes I know Black Christmas was the first blah, blah, blah. I said “wider audience”).

In the later iterations of this movie we got the full-on fun of real slasher movies. It all grew out of Friday the 13th. You didn’t care about the body count in Halloween, but by the time we were watching Friday the 13th Part 2 and then the wonderful and glorious Friday the 13th Part III, we were dying to see people die and scream on screen. A lot of people don’t realize that slashers are a completely different breed than other horror genres.

In 1989 me and 3 friends snuck into a theater to see Friday the 13th Part 8 Jason Takes Manhattan. By that time slasher films were at a fever pitch. We used that old trick. Being that we weren’t old enough, we bought tickets for a different movie and just ducked into this one. It was one of the best, most fun, most laughing, celebratory movie viewings I have ever been to. I’ve seen hundreds of movies at the theater in my lifetime, and this one is way up there on the fun scale. When Jason shows his face to the street gang to scare them all away, we cheered. When Julius almost punches him off the roof, we were going nuts: “He’s gonna do it, dude!” And when the sewer flooded and washed Jason away, we were honestly a bit sad to see the fantastic, albeit ridiculous, movie end. Slashers are the best. They are best seen with friends.

In real life do you want to go to haphazardly put together summer camp with adults who don’t pay too much attention? Go ahead kid have fun, remember to write home, or not.

Evil Dead — Sam Raimi, 1981

Evil Dead was the Thunderdome of demon possession before Thunderdome even existed. The first time I saw this movie on a sleepover rental pizza night, the whole group almost lost our minds. This movie was a touchstone of what low-budget horror movies could do. It wasn’t perfect, but it was scary and it was fun. The chaotic and brutal nature of this movie just made us horror fans freak out. Then Evil Dead II came along and set the standard for dark horror comedy. But the first Evil Dead was a dark, gritty nightmare of demon possession and terrible deeds.

Evil Dead II was bonkers fun, but in Evil Dead prime, Cheryl goes into the forest and is sexually assaulted by possessed trees. It’s one of the most notorious moments in horror. The distributors were taken to court in England over this film. It was restricted, censored, and parts had to be cut out. I remember even my crazy horror group was completely shocked by this scene. It was a “Dude, what did we just see?” moment, and we moved on.

The shock value of movies was just higher back then. To my knowledge no movie has done anything this shocking since 1981. The Exorcist is more shocking overall, but Evil Dead is a hurricane of horror and demons and possession and Bruce Campbell being Bruce. It’s an amazing film.

In real life, demonic possession seemed to be happening every day. Tonight at 11, see a child exorcised in real life, then the weather.

A Nightmare on Elm Street — Wes Craven, 1984

So I watched this on HBO with my parents when I was 10. I remember sitting on the sofa next to my mom and her trying to make it even scarier by saying she hoped no one ever tried to kill her in her dreams. Gen Xers know we grew up in a very different time. Most people wouldn’t let their 10-year-old watch this now. I think 16 is the minimum if the kid is ready, but that’s just the way parents were in the 80s. Yes, I stayed out all day, drank out of the garden hose, and came home when the street lights came on. Yes, that is all true. I understand that to Gen Z it sounds like some kind of alien planet, and Boomers are in complete denial that they did this to their children, but that’s the way it was. Deny it or disbelieve it all you want. Yes, Gen X lived it.

Anyway, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a masterpiece of filmmaking that captures the feeling of a nightmare in one scene after another. Running in mud up your stairs, sinking into your bed, going out your front door only to find yourself in your basement. One camera and editing trick to disorient you after another. There are so many great scenes in this movie, and I’ve seen it at least 100 times. Of course it is the story of some Elm Street children that deceased child murderer Freddy Krueger haunts in their dreams and kills. It is a bonkers movie that spawned 7 sequels and a remake. Freddy in the 80s was a “craze.” This movie was terrifying and had some amazing filmmaking techniques in it, but Freddy Krueger blew up and became the wise, one-liner-cracking hero of horror fans. It’s what I said before, slashers are really a celebration of horror.

Say whatever you will, but Freddy is a truly unique monster. There is nothing before him like him, and there really hasn’t been anything like him since. He’s in your dreams and killing. The most terrifying scene when I was young was the blood geyser coming out of the bed, but there are many terrifying scenes in this movie. Tina in the body bag. Nancy running down the alley. Much of the final act is just bonkers scary. It’s a great movie and there is nothing today that answers this type of terror. Hollywood doesn’t make icons anymore. They just seem to repackage them over and over, and they don’t do it well.

In real life, at school you would hear, and I heard it a 1000 times, “Did you know if you die in your sleep you die in real life!” It was a fun thought when you were drifting off to sleep.

Roll Credits

So I could probably go to 50 on this list. I’m so conflicted at stopping at 10, but I’m not doing 100 pages on this subject. I left off The Thing, The Fly, An American Werewolf in London, Hellraiser, Alien, Aliens, Jaws, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Poltergeist, Suspiria, The Hills Have Eyes, Child’s Play, The Howling, Fright Night, Videodrome, Don’t Look Now, Possession, Black Christmas, Magic, Phantasm, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Creepshow, Christine, Cujo, Predator, Scanners, and so many more. Those are just the groundbreaking amazing films that changed the face of horror. They are truly scary and most are better than most horror films made in the last 25 years. If I were a Gen Zer I would be angry there haven’t been more amazing horror films made in the last 20 years.

On the other hand, as a Gen Xer I’m overjoyed by what that time gave us. It was amazing, but coupled with the fact that our parents didn’t mind us watching just whatever on TV, many Gen Xers saw these terrifying movies far too young. I wrote an article on it.

Anyway, even though the 80s, both on film and in the news, scared me out of my mind, it was a fun decade. As a Gen Xer I saw these movies with my parents and later with my friends. Yes, my parents took me to the drive-in to see scary movies when I was 4. That’s not an anomaly, it’s a feature of Boomers raising Gen X. It was pretty normal in my experience, but more to the point, we also saw them at random on late-night TV while flipping through the channels. You really never knew when they were going to pop up. Regardless of how some people want to try to rewrite history, Gen X grew up with the most terrifying and badass horror movies that still have not been recreated or surpassed.

GenX is the horror generation made up of mutants and slasher kids. We stayed out late and were told not to talk to strangers. We walked home alone and got home to an empty house, and yes if we watched a scary movie, we were afraid to be alone sometimes, but we did it anyway because the movies were so damn good. We were never safe, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

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Now I’m not arguing to censor these movies! I love these movies, and it even makes me mad that Roger Rabbit got the digital makeover from Disney Plus. Yes, and The Adventures in Babysitting no longer says “Don’t f#$$ with the babysitter,” it says “Don’t fool with the babysitter.” What? What are we doing now? So I don’t agree with that. I don’t want them edited or censored, but these movies are windows into how much of GenX was raised. If you grew up in the 80s you knew these things were acceptable.

The most shocking thing I see over and over is putting sex right next to or around children. This is completely unacceptable in our day and age, but back then it seemed ok. It’s ok to have a sexualized 14-year-old running around on a desert island, or have a 12-year-old in a roundabout way have sex with a grown adult. My brain is screaming right now, what what what? Looking at these movies through adult eyes in 2026 is pretty shocking.

A lot of the movies on this list were mentioned again and again in the comments of my other articles. Animal House, which so many people talked about, is on this list. The movie is rated R. In these articles I’m arguing that GenX saw these as kids. Most of these movies were very popular and many of them, I don’t know anyone who didn’t see them. Some of these movies, it’s questionable why this was the subject matter. Why does there have to be an abortion subplot running in the back of Dirty Dancing? Why in Big does Josh have to sleep with Susan? I don’t know, but we saw them when we were kids, and to be honest I was confused most of the time. The 80s was a confusing time for sure.

Some of these are pretty tame and others are absolutely outrageous. Now if you’re a consenting adult I don’t think there is a problem with watching these. Adult brains, well some adult brains, can process these movies, but not kids. Also, I would say some of these movies had a larger impact than anyone expected. I’m trying to keep these a little shorter, so let’s go.

1. Dirty Dancing (1987) — Dir. Emile Ardolino — PG-13

I had a girlfriend in 8th grade who made me watch this movie every day for like 2 months. I said, “Sure, I like it,” but I wanted to scream, “Oh god, oh no, not again, not again,” but I didn’t.

Dirty Dancing follows 17-year-old Frances “Baby” Hausman (Jennifer Grey), a sheltered young woman vacationing with her family at a Catskills resort in the summer of 1963. She stumbles into the world of the resort’s dance staff and becomes captivated by the charismatic dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). Johnny is in his mid to late 20s as a character. Swayze was actually 35 when he played the part. When Johnny’s regular partner needs emergency surgery to have an abortion, Baby steps in and learns all the routines, and Johnny and Baby fall in love.

It’s a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old girl falling in love with a 30-something while an abortion subplot runs in the background. The movie is rated PG-13, but I know oh so many people who saw it long before they were 13. Part of this, remember, is that abortions were still illegal in 1963, so they have to have a seedy doctor do this and keep it quiet. Baby’s father is a doctor and has to save the girl from a botched job. So if you want to explain a backroom abortion to your 13-year-old, go ahead and watch it with them.

The scene that every girl loves, or at least all the girls I’ve watched this movie with, and in high school there were many who for one reason or another always wanted to watch this movie with me. Yes, it is a romance, and me being somewhat aware, I never said no. The scene every girl loves, and I never questioned why, was the ending. They put on the big ending dance in front of the entire resort. The routine was going to be canceled, but Johnny comes back to keep the tradition alive, and he walks up to a very sad Jennifer Grey sitting in the corner by her father, and Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Like 8 out of the 10 girls I watched this movie with cried when he said it, and then they perform the big number and the magical “lift” she could never master before with him. I always thought she ran off with Johnny at the end. I think it’s a little ambiguous. I haven’t seen this movie in a long time, and I’m not going to watch it again for this article, no thank you, but I always felt the implication was that Johnny and she ran off together. I don’t know.

Either way, if I’m a well-to-do doctor I really wouldn’t want my daughter running off with a guy who just got fired from his dance instructor job and is more than 10 years her senior. Also, when her dad Dr. Houseman finds out that Robbie, the clean-cut guy who everyone likes, actually knocked up Johnny’s partner, he basically gives Swayze permission to date his daughter. Um, no. As a father now, I don’t care how well a late-20-something can dance, I don’t want him dating my 17-year-old daughter.

I will say that every girl I watched this with in high school was extremely starry-eyed after watching this movie, that’s why I never said no. I’m not going to be too hard on Dirty Dancing being that it’s still such a favorite movie of GenX girls, but I was surely traumatized by how many times I had to view this ridiculous movie. It also seemed to teach girls that the bad boy was the good guy, and that was fine with me.

2. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) — Dir. John Landis — R

The second most mentioned movie in all my comments from the last 2 articles has to be National Lampoon’s Animal House. The movie follows the misadventures of Delta Tau Chi, the rowdiest and most disreputable fraternity at Faber College in 1962, as they wage war against the uptight Dean Vernon Wormer and the snobbish rival fraternity Omega. The movie is a series of sketch comedy scenarios that are ever escalating in chaos, from a Black bar trip to a disastrous toga party to the spectacular ending where they sabotage the town’s homecoming parade.

The movie is filled with hazing and drinking to excess and just plain debauchery. Many people blame this movie for mainstreaming fraternity shenanigans. I had several comments where people said college was almost intolerable because of people trying to emulate this movie. It appealed to the lowest common denominator. I don’t know if you can blame the movie for this, but it certainly sensationalizes those behaviors. Having gone to a fraternity-heavy party school, I know exactly what people are talking about. It was hard to find anyone in college who was actually interested in anything other than being a blockhead and partying. Yes, I enjoyed the parties, but there is something about glorifying ignorance and downplaying intelligence that I just don’t understand from people who are enrolled in college. What’s the point? You’re too tough to learn anything? Ok.

Many scenes in this movie have aged in very complicated and just plain bad ways. The one everyone points to of course is where Pinto (Tom Hulce) is in bed with a passed-out girl with a devil and an angel on his shoulder debating whether he should assault her or not. He ultimately doesn’t, but the whole scene is played for comedy, and it does not address the bigger implications in any way. It almost feels like if Pinto did have sex with her, that would be ok too. It’s a terrible scene that makes it seem like it’s normal for someone to contemplate this behavior.

The movie also handles race horribly. It treats the Black fraternity like a joke, or worse than a joke, and of course there are a bunch of scenes where guys are finding ways to look at naked girls without them knowing.

Now I saw this movie when I was probably 12 years old. It was on HBO I think, and yeah I just sat down and watched it. I think I was confused by some of it, and later I can remember thinking, is that what college is like? I know most of my graduating class kind of expected this experience from college.

Animal House was the gold standard of screwball comedies in the 80s. The movie was a monster hit. On a 3 million dollar budget it turned 141 million in profit. Everyone saw this movie, and yes kids watched it too. Unlike other films I’ve talked about, yes Animal House was mythologized by other kids. It was a rite of passage to watch it, but it was not marketed to kids.

3. The Bad News Bears (1976) — Dir. Michael Ritchie — PG

Yes, a 1970s movie geared toward kids that is full of cussing and a lot of racial slurs. I don’t want to get way into this one. The biggest thing in this movie is that the kids on the team have very foul mouths and there is a bit of kid drinking in this movie too. The movie is a classic underdog sports comedy starring Walter Matthau as Morris Buttermaker, a washed-up, hard-drinking former minor league pitcher who is hired to coach a ragtag Little League baseball team of misfit kids in a Southern California suburb. The team is a collection of misfits, outcasts, and troublemakers who can barely play the game. After some bad losses in the beginning of the season, he recruits 2 stars: Amanda Wurtlitzer, a pitcher who is the daughter of his ex-girlfriend, and Kelly Leak, a teenage delinquent who can really play baseball.

The boys are not kind to girls, Black kids, Jews, or any other race you can think of. Bad News Bears was a little before my time. It was a hit, and it reran all through the 80s, but I believe the only time I watched this movie was on regular TV where much of the cussing and racial slurs were cut out. I do remember the kids drinking a little. This movie is a kids movie from the 70s that is no longer a kids movie today. You don’t want to pop this movie in with your 8-year-olds in the room. One comment I got about this movie was that the kids were watching it on a road trip and the mom had to end the movie and find something else. This is one of those movies where your memories of it will not match up with the reality.

Also, for GenX it was very much a model of what was ok to do and think. These were “kids being kids.” All kids drank beer and said racial slurs, right?

4. The Cannonball Run (1981) — Dir. Hal Needham — PG

I was shocked to find that this movie was PG. Someone told me I should put this in my last article, and I just shrugged it off. When I went and looked, sure enough, made for kids! The movie is a star-studded action comedy based loosely on the real-life outlaw Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an illegal cross-country road race. Burt Reynolds leads an enormous ensemble cast including Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jamie Farr, and many others, all playing various eccentric competitors trying to drive from Connecticut to California as fast as possible while evading police.

The entire movie is madness. It glorifies women as sexy objects and high-speed police chases, and Burt Reynolds, think Smokey and the Bandit. There is so much in this movie. Many racial slurs again, and women are mostly objectified. Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman wear skin-tight silk jumpsuits while driving a Lamborghini. They use their sexuality to get out of tickets. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. play characters who stay drunk through the entire race while driving and womanizing. Every time a girl is seen or talked to in this movie it’s about sex.

The movie did not age well, and it certainly isn’t for today’s kids. I can remember watching this in the early 80s and not really even having any questions about it. Yep, those guys are drunk. Yep, Burt seems to go off and have sex with every pretty girl, and as I said, a lot of stereotypes and racial slurs. It was all very normalized in the 80s. I guess it was normalized because of movies like this.

Again, if you are an adult and want to give Cannonball Run a try, go ahead. I’ve seen both 1 and 2 about 50 times, but don’t watch them with your kids.

5. Soul Man (1986) — Dir. Steve Miner — PG-13

Wow, was this movie a bad idea. If you haven’t seen Soul Man, and it wasn’t a box office success so many people have not seen it, then you missed out on one of the most awkward movies ever made. It stars C. Thomas Howell as a rich student going to Harvard but his parents won’t pay for it. He finds that if he is Black he can get in on a scholarship, so he takes experimental tanning pills and gets a perm to pass for Black. What? What? WTF? Who came up with this idea?

Of course the movie was sold as a journey in racial learning, but what it really is is a crapshow of racism and ridiculous messages. What this says is that if a white guy experiences racism then people might understand it. If a white person who looks Black sees the racism then it exists? What about everyone who experiences it on a day-to-day basis? They don’t count as people?

I remember catching this movie on HBO. I watched it in shock even back then. It didn’t do great at the theater and was protested, and since C. Thomas Howell has said it was a mistake, I don’t know how they didn’t figure that out in the first place. The scene I have in my head, and I have not watched this movie since the late 80s, is when Howell is in blackface and driving and a cop tails him, basically showing what driving while Black would be like. I remember thinking back then, why don’t they show a real Black kid going through this? It didn’t make sense to me then and makes even less sense now.

The 80s were filled with this kind of pseudo bridge-building that was really just ignorance masquerading as positive lessons.

6. Police Academy (1984) — Dir. Hugh Wilson — R

It’s hard to relate how popular Police Academy was when it came out. It made 149 million on a 4.9 million dollar budget, but it blew up in the rental market and on HBO. It was played again and again. Every kid I knew saw it. It spawned 6 sequels and an animated Saturday morning cartoon. Anytime anything became a Saturday morning cartoon, every kid in the 80s knew about it. You didn’t have to have cable to watch NBC, ABC, or CBS. It was 3 channels, you were a kid, you watched cartoons on Saturday morning, period.

Police Academy, if you don’t already know, is about the misadventures of Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), a wisecracking slacker who enrolls in the police academy to avoid jail time, joining a misfit crew that includes the towering and gentle Hightower (Bubba Smith), the soft-spoken gun enthusiast Tackleberry (David Graf), the perpetually terrified Fackler (Bruce Mahler), the loud and fearless Jones (Michael Winslow) who can make any sound with his mouth, and many more. They are a set of misfits who have signed up to become police officers. The movie is full of hijinks and of course an adversary trying to wash them all out, Lieutenant Harris (G.W. Bailey).

This movie has every 80s sex and racial gag joke in it you can think of: the big-chested woman, the implied sex, the accidentally-sent-you-to-a-gay-bar full of leather-wearing, biker-looking guys that will trap you and make you dance with them whether you like it or not, and of course whenever Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes) gives a speech there’s a girl under the podium ready to give him a BJ.

To tell you how young I was when I saw this movie with my cousins, I was so confused by the girl being under the podium, and when everyone burst out laughing I just pretended to laugh. No idea what was going on. The guy seemed happy, I guess that’s why it was funny. There is a response to racism in the scene where Hooks runs over Copeland’s feet with a squad car and he calls her a slur. Hightower comes and flips the car over in anger.

I’m going to get flack for saying this, but yes this movie was meant to draw in children. I know it was rated R, but again they created a Saturday morning cartoon modeled on the show because it was so popular with children. They had a kids’ lunchbox that was Police Academy. So yes, everyone saw it, and most people wanted to be able to do what Jones (Michael Winslow) could do with his mouth making sound effects. I was 9 when this movie came out. In elementary school I remember kids trying to make all kinds of noises with their mouths like Jones. It was annoying, but that played against all the peeping tom stuff and everything else. Being a peeping tom in elementary school was a joke. I just thought everyone when they got older tried to look at people through holes drilled in the shower walls. I was like, well that seems to be the thing when you get old, maybe it will grow on me.

7. The Blue Lagoon (1980) — Dir. Randal Kleiser — R

Wait, what? You can get stranded on a desert island and have kids with your cousin? What is going on right now? I was about 8 years old when I watched this with my parents and had the most awkward moments ever during the sex parts and the giving birth parts. Did she even know she was pregnant in the movie? I was like, wait, she’s gonna have a baby, what happened, and why am I watching this?

My mom was locked on this movie though. She loved a good drama and was fascinated by the idea, I guess. She did that thing where if I asked her a question she’d say, “I didn’t hear ya? Whaddya say...” and then snap out of her trance and get mad about answering the questions. “Just let me watch the dang movie.”

Brooke Shields was 14 when she did this movie. I remember Brooke Shields was like a superstar after this movie. Brooke Shields’s story really should blow everyone’s mind. She was in the movie Pretty Baby when she was 12, playing a prostitute. She then became the spokesperson for Calvin Klein jeans, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” at 12 to 14 years old, and the face of a brand selling sex. And this was so common in the 70s. Jodie Foster was 12 as a prostitute in Taxi Driver (1976). Linda Blair was 12 in The Exorcist (1973). Kristy McNichol was in very adult roles all over the place, and of course Nastassja Kinski was 15 when she began her relationship with Roman Polanski and built a career through sexual films featuring teenagers. Everyone acts like these things didn’t happen. They did. This is what Gen Z can’t understand and GenX so often either makes light of or pretends didn’t happen: kids weren’t really treated like kids. We were expected to look after ourselves and walk home alone, do all the things like good little ladies and gentlemen, but we didn’t really get much say in anything.

Now I’m not saying it was all bad. I loved growing up in the 80s. I loved having the freedom, but it was dangerous. I got myself into some situations that were pretty questionable. Do I think kids today could use a little more independence? Yes, absolutely. Do I think they should be exploited on TV for sex or money and then have an entire generation deny it happened later? No, no I don’t. We should acknowledge it and move on. Wow, was that didactic or what? I fell into preachiness. Shoo, I feel a bit queasy. Anyway, not a big Blue Lagoon fan.

8. The Toxic Avenger (1984) — Dir. Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman — R

I love the Toxic Avenger. If you read my Substack at all you know I do Movies that Made Me Love Horror Movies, and The Toxic Avenger is one of them. Now the Toxic Avenger wasn’t a big movie when it came out. Created by Troma, a New York indie film company that creates ultra-low-budget B-movies, Toxie made it to theaters in 1984 and few people noticed. It was a little movie, but over the next 5 years the movie circulated at grindhouse midnight showings and slowly gained a cult following. It also made it to the rental markets. When Part 2 released in 1989 it started to become a phenomenon, and by 1991 it even got its own Saturday morning cartoon named Toxic Crusaders.

The Toxic Avenger, if you don’t know, is the story of Melvin, a scrawny janitor who is often bullied and falls into a barrel of toxic waste in a tutu. I can’t explain to you how popular toxic waste was in the 1980s. It was a thing. It was like quicksand and clouds of acid rain, which I could never figure out, but Melvin is reborn as a hideous, large, and super-strong creature, Toxie, and he uses his mop to dispatch bad guys with extreme gore and prejudice.

The Toxic Avenger became a craze. If you think something going viral today is a big deal, those are nothing compared to this. I’m writing another article about 80s crazes, but we called them crazes because everybody had lost their damn minds. I don’t know why, but something would gain momentum and suddenly there was like a run on the merchandise, the movies, the TV shows, the lunchboxes and beach towels, and yes, Toxie had lunchboxes and beach towels. It was huge. It’s hard to explain this to people today, it just doesn’t really happen. Depending on the temperature of the craze, generally people could even become violent, see The Cabbage Patch Christmas. Watch it on TV, talk about it, look like it, and make sure you buy everything with this ugly face on it at the store. Why? No idea.

So the Saturday morning cartoon and all the hype got kids to go to the rental store and beg their parents to rent the movie. Many parents said yes, rented the movie, popped it in the VCR and walked away, which is pretty common for 80s parents. So yay! Mom rented me the Toxic Avenger. I’m so cool!

What did they see when they popped this beautiful low-budget splatterhouse movie into the machine? Attempted rape, naked women, girls half dressed, and the terribly deformed Toxie running around killing people in the most gruesome ways you can think of. Again, I love love love this movie today, but it is in no way for kids. Never ever ever show this movie to your children. If you even have someone with a soft stomach who is easily offended, don’t let them watch this movie.

The scene that is most pointed to in this movie, and really it could be any one of about 100, is early in the film where a group of guys and their girlfriends, egging them on the whole way and cheering them on, are hot-rodding into the city. They have an ongoing game where if they hit people they get points: points for old people, walkers, kids. They pass a boy on a bike. They turn around and hit the kid. This probably 12-year-old starts crawling all bloody back to his bike when they throw it in reverse and run over the kid’s head. His head basically explodes and then the girls get out of the car and take pictures of the mess.

I remember my cousins came over with this movie one night and they popped it in and we watched it. Now I would later rent this with my friends and love it, but at this time I think I was about 10 or 11 and not full-on into horror yet. My mom watched that scene from the doorway of the living room. She looked at me and said, “Do you really want to watch this?” I shrugged and said sure, and she went back into the kitchen. That was as much pushback as I ever got about watching violence on TV. I really didn’t want to watch it, but I wasn’t going to tell my older cousins that.

Anyway, this movie is a ridiculously over-the-top B-horror movie from a splatterhouse production company that is known for this kind of filmmaking. As an adult I can appreciate the movie, but never would I ever let young children watch this, and I wouldn’t have bought them lunchboxes and beach towels and made a Saturday morning cartoon out of it. WTF.

9. Big (1988) — Dir. Penny Marshall — PG

I resisted putting Big on this list because I love this movie, but I have to say, what? What? If you don’t know, Big is the 1988 comedy-drama about 12-year-old Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks) who makes a wish to a fortune-teller machine at a carnival that he would be big. He’s mad at his parents and just wants to be independent. Every 12-year-old kid has this wish at some point in their young lives, and he becomes big. He goes from 12 to a fully grown Tom Hanks at the age of 31. That’s how old Hanks was when he played this part. Josh runs out of his house, finds his way to the city, gets a job at a toy company, and starts living his life. He’s better at life than most of the adults, which makes you wonder about Boomers, right? How is this 12-year-old kid kicking ass and taking names at his job, at living his life, and at dating even? It’s a great premise for a movie. GenX kids understood life better than their Boomer parents. I had to yell at my mom to roll the windows down when she was smoking in the car, so maybe not too far-fetched.

As for the theme of the movie I understand that it seems logical that all of us adults need a little more inner child speaking to us. Hey, don’t take those bills and that crushing rejection at work so seriously, just be a kid. Watch cartoons, jump on a trampoline, hang out with your friends. That’s all fine. It’s a great message.

The problem comes in, and you know where I’m going with this, in the dating. Josh is 12, and he meets Susan Lawrence (Elizabeth Perkins). She is a late 20-something to 30-something professional working at this toy company. Josh is constantly seeing through the dregs of business and corporate BS and is able to predict what real kids would want in toys. Makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Susan and Josh start a relationship. They seem to fall in love in about 1 to 2 weeks. In total Josh is only an adult for maybe a month, maybe a little longer, so their relationship goes incredibly fast, and one night Susan, who is very hot for and in pursuit of Josh, goes to a party with him, goes back to his place, they start kissing, fade to black, and they wake up in bed together! What? What? What am I watching? Where did my life go so wrong in the 80s that this movie is telling me that not only are 12-year-olds better at doing life and business than Boomer men, but they are also better in bed? When you say it in words it sounds very wrong, and it is. Again, love this movie, didn’t want to talk about this, but hey, this is what this series is for, right? Should we not point out that the 12-year-old boy is sleeping with the 30-year-old? Should we not question what exactly is going on in 80s movies that they have to find a workaround for adults sleeping with kids?

I remember watching this movie with my mom and my dad. It’s rated PG of course, and it has so many funny and great scenes. Tom Hanks in the 80s was hilarious. The dancing piano scene is great, but I remember when we got to the scene where they slept together my mom said something: “Oh, goodness, they slept together.” She didn’t discuss it any further than that, but now I know what she was thinking. No way my mom could have known they were going to slip that into the movie, and I still don’t know why they did. Why raise the stakes like that? Was that for shock value? There is no need for them to sleep together, Josh is already killing it at life. Shortly after this he goes back to the carnival and changes back into the 12-year-old, waves goodbye to Susan. Susan has to go home and take a shower and rethink her life after this scene, she had to, there was no other option for this character, though all of that is off screen.

What were they thinking? It’s a great movie, why do that?

10. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) — Dir. Robert Zemeckis — PG

Ok, this would usually go on my trauma list for movies. So many people have pointed to it and said they were screwed up by the eyes in this movie popping out and the reveal that Judge Doom is a toon. Yes, the scene is very disturbing for children. There is also the cute little shoe dip, where Doom puts the shoe in the Dip and the poor little thing reacts in horror and dies.

Ok, let’s be honest with this movie for a minute. Ms. “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” aka Jessica Rabbit, was a little much for like 12-year-old boy brains of the 1980s. What is it with kids movies and sex in the 80s? I don’t get it. She could have been half as sexy, voluptuous, and alluring and the movie would have been just as good I think.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a 1988 live-action/animation hybrid set in a 1947 Hollywood where humans and cartoon characters called “toons” coexist. Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is a private investigator hired to find out if Jessica Rabbit, wife of Roger Rabbit, is cheating on him. Roger becomes the prime suspect when the man she’s suspected of fooling around with turns up dead, and he begs Eddie to clear his name. Best premise for a kids movie ever. Also there is the evil Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) who is a toon dressed in human skin. He has come up with a Dip to destroy all of Toontown.

Ok, so if you watch this movie you really can’t help but be attracted to Jessica Rabbit. Look, toons are not on my kink list, but yes she is attractive and the way she is animated and played is pure sex. Don’t be judgy, I was young when I saw it, and my reaction was the same as everyone else. Go ahead and lie. I don’t care, but we all know the truth, you were attracted to her too!

It brings me to the car crash scene. Jessica is in a car accident and is thrown spinning out of a taxi and lands on her butt in the grass. Now when I saw the movie I was probably 13, maybe 14. I didn’t go see it at the movies. At 13 I was maturing out of cartoons a bit, so it seemed like a kids movie, but then one of my horror friends insisted we rent it on one of our horror sleepovers. Are you out of your mind, dude? What about Prince of Darkness? We are renting that kids movie over a horror movie? “I heard she’s naked in it,” and he held up the VHS cover and pointed to Jessica on the back. Ok, fine.

So yes, I was one of those young boys who would later find himself sitting in front of a TV rewinding the VCR over and over trying to see if Jessica Rabbit was wearing any panties when she flies out of the car. There were like 3 or 4 of us debating this. I’m pretty sure they disappeared. Josh was skeptical. Jim was like, no way dude. It’s not a moment in movie-watching history that I am proud of, but hey, it was a GenX thing, right? Plus VCRs back then were so crappy with the pause you couldn’t see anything. Get out of the way, fuzzy lines, I’m looking up this cartoon’s dress!

I think many of us, like me, who believe that her panties did disappear have recently been validated with Disney editing the version that is on Disney Plus to make the flinging-her-out-of-the-car scene less provocative. It’s a kids movie, why was it provocative in the first place, and why did you have to change it? HA!

Roll Credits

So there’s my rant on Movies that Screwed Up GenX Part 3, or whatever. I’m running another series now, Movies GenX Took Too Seriously. People seem not to want to kill me over those. Please remember I’m not arguing for censorship on these, especially arguably the worst movie on this list, Toxic Avenger. I love that movie. I just don’t think kids should watch it.

Overall though, the 80s were a pretty weird time. We were all outside unsupervised much of the time, and then when we were inside it wasn’t like people were really paying attention to us all that much. I’m ok with that. Someone said it was worse when your parents were disappointed than when they were angry. Ok, my dad got disappointed, my mom was a screaming, yelling crazy person who was flailing with her arms and legs, so I think I preferred her not paying a lot of attention to what I was doing. I was ok with that, so I don’t want it to sound like the 80s were bad. In so many ways they were glorious, fun, and honestly I think good for us. I do think they should have paid a little more attention to where we were and what we were watching, but hey, no generation is perfect.

I don’t know why Boomers always had to put sex-adjacent content next to children in many of these movies. That’s a question I guess only Boomers and those particular filmmakers can answer. It was a very different time though. They call that the Overton Window, and it shifted greatly from 1985 until 2025, for sure. I think people who did not live at that time, if you took them back in a time machine, would be forever and constantly offended and confused by the norms of 80s culture. If I’m honest, I think it would be kinda hilarious, but maybe that’s the 80s in me talking.

I hope you enjoyed this little series. I don’t know how many more of these Screwed Up GenX pieces I’ll do. Like I said I have other ideas, but if you have suggestions, or just want to yell at me and throw virtual rotten fruit at me in the comments, go ahead. Oh, and I still love hearing personal experiences related to movies, so let ‘em rip.

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Terminator Review

Disclaimer: I freaked myself out with this review. Just know if you are freaked out, you were warned.

Yes, I still watch The Terminator a few times per year, and of course, these days it becomes more relevant every year. I think it’s important to frame reviews of movies in two ways. One, they have to be judged with criteria, which I always do, and two, at least one of the themes of the movie should carry the review. I am bananas for this movie, of course. If you want ‘80s nostalgia, here it is: the hair, the clothes and cars, the ultraviolence in the streets, the dystopian back alley scenes.

I saw it for the first time on a free HBO weekend with my parents. I was way, way too young to watch it, but I had an Atari and a Commodore 64, and I guess my parents knew how much I loved technology, so it was an exciting Saturday night, sitting on the sofa right next to my mom, who always locked in on movies like they were about to spring forth some magic that no one else was aware of. After watching this movie I had nightmares about a metal skeleton hunting me for weeks, but ya know, #worthit!

Much has been written about the technology and Skynet and about Sarah Connor and the female protagonist in science fiction, and I think those are both important themes of the movie, but over time, as we all know with movies as they age, the relatively obscure themes become more paramount. Yeah, I sound serious here, it’s just a movie!, right? Is it? Every day I hear some expert talking head on the news or a podcast mention the “Skynet” or “Terminator” scenario, and all those nightmares of metal skeletons come rushing back.

If you don’t know, The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction film that follows a human-looking cybernetic assassin, the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), sent back in time from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Sarah will give birth to a resistance leader who will eventually defeat the AI intelligence Skynet, which has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The resistance has managed to send back one soldier, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). The Terminator does not sleep or eat. It only hunts for its targets and it is nearly indestructible. Sounds like a good time, right? Sounds like a fun watch, if it doesn’t come true, dammit!

The message buried deep in this movie, and much overlooked, is becoming ever more important day by day. It’s not that AI is coming and inevitable, or that women will be as important as any man in the resistance. Those are both true, but the deep-down message here is that corporations and governments will aid and build and nurture the AI until it is way too late, and the only resistance to the inevitable outcome is unplugged human, and more specifically, working-class human resistance. Uplifting review, eh? Look around you right now. Are you ready to leave your fate to the everyday people you meet on the internet?

Entertainment Value 19/20

Oh, The Terminator is endlessly entertaining. It’s an amazing, albeit low-budget film that punches way above its weight class. The pacing of this movie is great. You start slow and controlled. James Cameron is just stretching his director’s legs here a little. He shows you the future in some snippets and then you’re in 1984 seeing the Terminator be electrically transported into that time. Then Reese, and you know they are looking for someone. Honestly, it just pulls you in and builds suspense and action through the entire film. Each encounter with the cybernetic killer in the film becomes more and more intense, and the battle most of the time seems pretty hopeless. The between action scenes can be a just a beat too long in a couple places, but not too bad. Everything in this movie works. The pacing is good. The setting is great. The characters are all believable, and nothing pulls you out of this film.

Governments and corporations are racing to beat each other in developing AI today, not in 1984. Most people in the government couldn’t work a calculator. If you ask them now, they will tell you they cannot and will not stop. They will also tell you that jobs will be eliminated, power will be consolidated, and there is no stopping it. They are saying this to our faces at the same time they are saying they don’t know if this will mean the end of humanity. What? What, you might kill us? You might destroy humanity, ok, well doesn’t sound good. I remember seeing The Terminator the first time and my mom just scoffing at the idea that humans would ever do this to themselves. Oh, little did she know what was coming.

On the flip side, if you ask people, especially working-class people like delivery drivers and truck drivers, they will tell you they don’t want this. Much like my mother, why would we do this to ourselves? Why take the risk? Even if it turns into a utopia, most would say it’s not worth it. I mean, there are a whole bunch of people I know that don’t want their cellphones but can’t get rid of them because, well, they are hopelessly addicted to them, and some other excuse like needing them for work. All-knowing, all-powerful, all-controlling AI doesn’t really sound fun to me or these people. I mean, what are we shooting for here, right? Every day I hear the news saying alarm bells are going off about AI, and then the next story is about how great it will be when we all lose our jobs and let the computers do everything. What? I thought the 1980s were unhinged, but 2026 is truly a time of madness.

Rewatchability 20/20

This movie has become more and more watchable over the years. At first it was just the value of the movie that gave it rewatchability points. You know, when you’re banging out code on a Commodore 64 to get that stupid balloon to bounce across the screen, you’re not really worried about Skynet taking over, but when we have self-driving cars and AI programs lying about blackmailing their creators so they aren’t deleted, maybe it’s time to give a rewatch to this movie.

Yes, those damn metal skeletons are crawling ever closer to me these days, and rewatching this movie isn’t really a comfort, but more like a requirement. You watch to see how much computers have changed, how close we’re getting, but you also realize how much people have changed!

The more you watch it, the more you realize that the heroes of this movie are just regular people. Sarah is a waitress. Reese has lived underground most of his life. It’s strange how the movie feels like it’s becoming more of a cautionary guide rather than just a film.

Sarah Connor wouldn’t have voted for AI. Reese would have been working construction or may have been in the military, but he wouldn’t have wanted AI either. We see that in the news every day. The people are saying we don’t want this change, and the government and corporations just continuously tell everyone how great it will be.

So the question of why would people do this is being answered in real time every day. So if you’ve seen The Terminator before and you haven’t watched it in a while, go watch it, see if you can fill in the blanks on how this happened, and then watch it again next year, see how many of your questions are being answered each day. It’s wild!

Acting 16/20

The acting in The Terminator is good, but I wouldn’t say it was great. All of these actors were a bit inexperienced at the time, but their performances are helped greatly by Cameron’s directing and editing.

Linda Hamilton is excellent as Sarah Connor. She has some real shock and surprise moments that feel very real and are right on character. There are moments where she fades a little into the tiniest bit of overacting. Again, she was getting her start in film, but nothing pulls you out of the character or the movie. She is meant to be 19 years old and the future mother of the savior of the world.

My daughter is 19. I don’t want to count on her to build the resistance and raise a child that will save the world. My daughter is an excellent person, studying to be a nurse, but she’s 19, for crying out loud. I’m not saying she’s not up to it. Well, I don’t know. Look, I believe in my daughter, but let’s not let humanity ride on her future decisions. Makes me a bit nervous. Maybe a lot nervous.

Cameron’s message about resistance says it’s not going to be the politically savvy or the well-connected who save us. It’s the people who are unplugged and disconnected. The government and corporations stand to benefit from it. The only ones who can rise up against the machines are the ones far outside of the system. Hamilton does a great job playing this character.

Michael Biehn does a good job in this movie. Most of his scenes are action oriented and the scenes where he is speaking directly with Linda are adequate. He plays the part pretty level and jaded, like he would be if he came from the future, but there are moments again where his timing is a bit off and he is a little over the top. It’s an over-the-top pulp action movie, so it’s to be expected, but for me the tones clang just a little. Again, it’s nothing that’s going to pull you out of the movie or the character, but it’s not Academy Award level either.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is great in this film. He is robotic. He walks and talks like a cybernetic assassin would, but again, there are moments where he is just a little off in his timing. I’ve always had a little problem with Arnold’s portrayal of The Terminator. Yes, it is iconic. Yes, he’s great, but why does a machine move kind of clunky when it’s just walking around talking to people, turning his head slowly and being robot-like, but as soon as the action sequence starts his movements are smooth as butter and he whips his head around like it’s on a swivel? They say the Terminators should be able to pass for human, but he looks pretty inhuman to me. There are very few guys walking around my town who look like Arnold. Isn’t that a dead giveaway for being a Terminator? Anyway, I understand what went into this part. I’ve seen countless interviews, but I never understood why he was trying to act like a robot but pass for human.

It’s a small point and a nitpick, I know, but just something that always bothered me.

We see the robots being built. The corporations and governments are working to replace us. It’s funny that in organizations of people, the larger they are the less human they are, and honestly, it seems like they would rather have a machine run them than humans anyway.

It’s right in front of our eyes, and the only people who seem to have a problem with it are the working class or even middle-class humans, the resistance according to the film. On our timeline, and not the Terminator’s, we are marching ever closer to the self-awareness of Skynet. We are actually racing toward it every day. The movie and the world are bananas.

Story/Plot 20/20

What a great story. To predict, all the way back in 1984 or earlier, that humans would march themselves into the arms of AI slavery or even extinction. It’s crazy, right? It blows my mind that a movie from the 1980s is becoming more and more true. You can’t say that about very many ‘50s, ‘60s, or ‘70s movies. You just don’t see the kind of prophetic storytelling in those times, but in the 1980s, movie after movie calls out the future. I reviewed The Thing recently, and They Live, and both movies seem to be prophetic. The Terminator, though, may be one of the most prophetic films, if not the most prophetic film, in history as of 2026. Everything that it said would happen is starting to happen. We all know it! That’s the oddest thing, that an AI expert on CNN would be warning about the “Skynet” takeover or “The Terminator” scenario. This is an option? The machines will become paranoid, perceive us as a threat, and try to exterminate humanity? What? Damn metal skeletons.

Here is where this review of a movie becomes psycho bonkers, but fun, so stick with me. So what happens if this movie is right? AI takes over. It becomes self-aware, which as I said seems to be the overall goal of the current AI developers. What do we say then? Wow, what a story to predict the exact thing that is going to happen to end humanity? It wasn’t nuclear war with each other, or the lack of water, or an asteroid hitting the earth. It was AI. Would we look to the movie as some sort of guide then? Are we looking for a John Connor? If the future Skynet has already sent back a cybernetic assassin to hunt down the mother of a future leader, would we even be aware of it?

The deeper you go into this film the more bonkers it gets, and if I was reading an actual prophetic text I would look for the messages that are set there to save humanity, and those messages seem to be that the working class and normal, everyday, not-plugged-in people not even paying attention are the only ones who are going to save us. I mean, not me. I am obviously paying attention and would probably be taken out first. And wouldn’t a computer work that way? The ones who are paying attention would be targeted first? That makes sense, right?

So, told you, psycho bananas. Is the message of this movie saying don’t pay attention? That the disconnected, half flat-earther, half moon-mission-denier on TikTok has a better chance of saving the world than any of our best military or scientific minds? What? What? I am telling you that’s what this movie is saying. You can argue it if you want in the comments, but maybe it has something to do with the more human things you are preoccupied with, the better chance you have of surviving. I don’t know, but if you’re reading this review you’re probably in big trouble.

The more I think about the hidden message in this film, the more I am afraid. A 19-year-old waitress just interested in dating and going out with her friends is our only hope. Also, John Connor would have been a millennial? Or is he Gen Z? Are we saying Gen Z are going to be the ones to rise up and save us? Chilling, just chilling.

I really wanted to take a point off the story for being far-fetched, but...

Directing 20/20

The directing in this movie shines. It established James Cameron as the powerhouse he has become today. Cameron hasn’t had very many misses. Really, the only movie he directed before this one was Piranha II: The Spawning. I think he was fired from that film, but anyway, a director who had no experience put up an incredibly well-directed, well-written, and well-shot movie. The action sequences are tight and on a budget. The special effects are cutting edge for their time, but used so sparingly they are perfect. The actors you can see are saved again and again by his direction. Cameron’s mastercraftsman skills show here early.

You’ll think this is more bonkers, stay with me. Maybe it’s the director who traveled back in time to make this movie. How else could a young man who had never really directed anything pull this off? Look at Avatar. Look at Titanic. I hope James Cameron wouldn’t just come back from the future, predict the future, and then go on to have a cushy, lucrative Hollywood career saying, “Well, if they don’t listen it’s their own fault.” I mean, that’s what I would probably do, but that’s a bridge too far, right? Right in the middle of a review to speculate that the director came from the future. See: bonkers.

Anyway, yeah, the movie is a 20/20 for directing. The pace is about perfect. The cuts are about perfect. The blocking and the sparing use of special effects, the resisting of going too far with the action. It’s all so well balanced. James, if you are from the future, just come out and say it, dammit. I don’t see any missteps in the directing. I can’t point to a single frame of this movie where it runs too far or Cameron gets wrapped up in the cool things happening on screen instead of making them service the story. The directing and the story are what make The Terminator a classic.

Overall 95/100

If you are paying attention, and you probably shouldn’t be, The Terminator story is marching toward fulfillment. It’s a great A-level movie. The acting has a few missteps and there is just a little bit of timing issue, not so much in pacing but a little timing that makes you take too long of a breath in a couple of the non-action scenes, and I shaved a point off of the entertainment section, but overall this movie is banging. It is rare for me to give a movie over a 90. I know it doesn’t look like that from the movies I have reviewed, but I promise it’s true.

Anyway, if we are going to rise up against the machines, we are probably going to have to depend on a waitress who is working at an Applebee’s right now. When she was a millennial I was thinking we’d be okay, but I’m not sure now, her being Gen Z and all. What if it’s Gen Alpha? That would be my 12-year-old. He doesn’t even like movies, dang it. If the fate of the world rests on my 12-year-old, we are probably all doomed. There, I said it.

The message of the movie is that we can only be saved by the working class, maybe even the disconnected, but maybe we will get lucky. If we get much further into the generations, maybe Skynet won’t see us as a threat anymore. I mean, not Gen X. Obviously Gen X is so jaded we’re kind of a threat to everything. I think Skynet might eliminate us just for being so grumpy, but maybe, just maybe, we can keep ignoring the warnings of this movie and Gen Alpha, or whatever comes after it, will be no threat to Skynet at all. Skynet isn’t going to eliminate people who are distracted by their phones 23 hours a day, right?

I’m just shooting in the dark here. It seems like the goal of the current governments and corporations of the world is to not only ignore the warnings of this movie but to make them come true. I got nothing on that front.

If a metal skeleton shows up at my door here shortly in the future, the only thing I’m going to say in my own defense is that Boomers go first.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Is it bananas that this 40-something-year-old movie about the destruction of the human race becomes ever more possible every day? Did you have that on your bingo card in 1984? Also, is James Cameron really from the future? I’m wondering, I’m wondering. Anyway, I hope we all survive. If you haven’t seen the original Terminator, go watch it. It’s great.

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Anyway, this series is dedicated to the power of movies, yay! It looks at the movies that GenX took ridiculously too seriously. I mean, no one can get mad about this, right? Taking Karate lessons because a movie shows a kid from New Jersey breaking all the rules and bullying the locals, nothing can go wrong with that, right? Yes, movies are powerful, but the generation that doesn’t ever seem to overreact to anything routinely overreacted to cartoonishly silly movies. Hmmm, yeah, I’m gonna get more hateful comments. Yes, I rode in on this horse, but you don’t have to make it feel bad for bringing me here. Anyway, this is a look at movies that GenX took too seriously. Were you afraid of going in a swimming pool after seeing Jaws? Be honest. Did your parents dressing in disastrous disco ever ruin any of your family events? If you shared in the tortures and triumphs of these movies, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Am I saying GenX might have overreacted to these movies? Yeah, kinda. Am I saying these movies are ridiculous in their influence? Probably. Am I saying movies are powerful forces in the world that go out and do things we don’t expect? Absolutely. So don’t get all bent out of shape about these facts and observations, ok. There is no reason to throw rotten verbal fruit at me in the comments. Anyway, I hope you enjoy 10 movies that GenX took way too seriously.

1. The Karate Kid — Directed by John G. Avildsen, 1984

What a movie, eh? It came back as a Netflix series after 40 years. We really can’t let this kid from New Jersey go. The movie was a “sleeper hit,” meaning Hollywood didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. It scored 91 million dollars on an 8 million dollar budget. That’s big for 1984. The movie was a smash hit but was still the 5th highest grossing movie of the year behind movies like Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, and Beverly Hills Cop, so it was in good company.

If you have been living under a rock for the last 40 years and haven’t seen The Karate Kid, it follows Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio), a teenager who moves with his mother from New Jersey to Los Angeles and immediately runs into trouble with a gang of karate-trained bullies led by Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka), a student at the ruthless Cobra Kai dojo. LaRusso is beat up a few times until he is saved by Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), who is a highly trained martial artist who, in order to keep the peace, trains Daniel to fight in the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament. Yep, it’s one of those movies. It’s over the top and filled with Karate.

The movie has a lot of heart, and it is well acted and has a great over-the-top triumphant, full-of-cheese ending. Yes, the movie is cheesy, let’s admit it. The training of LaRusso waxing on and waxing off was way more integrated into our lexicon than I was ever comfortable with, but hey, it was a nice little twist in the movie.

I can remember when it came out. I went to the theater and saw it, and by about mid-summer me and the neighborhood kids were having Karate tournaments in my front yard. I remember one particular time where this kid Chris and my buddy Jim were “sparring” (none of us knew Karate, we were just kicking each other and falling down). Chris kicked Jim in the shin and broke his big toe and cried all the way home. That was something I guess they taught you in Karate class, how to not break your toes on people.

Well, this brings me to taking this way too seriously. Like fighting in our front yard wasn’t enough, several of my friends signed up for Karate. They weren’t the only ones. Kids went bananas over this movie. If you were being bullied, the best thing to do was learn Karate. Josh signed up. I wanted to, but wasn’t allowed. U.S. martial arts schools reported 30-50% increases in new students between 1984-1986. The American Taekwondo Association (ATA) roughly doubled in the mid-1980s, growing from about 40,000 to over 80,000 students. The YMCA reported karate class enrollment tripling. Everybody really was Kung Fu fighting over this movie.

So yeah, watching a kid learn Karate by waxing cars and sanding the deck made an entire generation of kids take lessons. I never took Karate, but man I really wanted to.

2. Jaws — Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975

Yes, I love Jaws. No, I don’t think Jaws is a perfect movie. It was the first summer blockbuster though, and it’s one of the best directed movies of all time. It was so well received that there was a surveyed 25% drop in beach attendance. Beach towns reported that after the movie opened, tourism went through the floor.

So beach vacations dried up a around the time of Jaws. If you don’t know, Jaws is of course about a shark attack in a New England town, where the town sheriff wants to shut down the beaches but the mayor refuses, and you get people dying in shark attacks. There’s more to it than that, but you get the idea.

I can remember being afraid to go in a swimming pool or a local river after Jaws. Yes, I was one of the many who took this movie way, way too seriously. I don’t care that there are no sharks or fish in that pool, I’m still going to be eaten when I get in it. I was freaking terrified to go in the lake. Yes, I grew up a short 15 minute drive from the lake, and I have some memories of sitting on the beach and looking at the water and refusing to go in because I had seen Jaws. If I’m honest, anytime I go in the ocean to this day, it always occurs to me that a shark may be just inches away.

Just as a sidenote, I’ve noticed that the Jaws fear in the water, even the lake or a pool, that one that jumps up inside you just for a second, even as an adult, seems to be the same exact fear that you get when you turn the lights off downstairs and then have to run up the stairs for no reason because whatever wasn’t there in the light is now going to kill you. Have you ever noticed that? Anyway, I digress.

I would say there are people who are afraid to go in the water every year since the movie was made, but we might be taking this movie too seriously. You are 1,200 times more likely to get struck by lightning than bitten by a shark. You have a better chance of being killed by a cow collapsing in a field than being attacked by a shark. Deer kill 25 times more people than sharks do. Think of that. You have a better chance of being killed by Bambi than being attacked by Jaws.

So yeah, we might have overreacted a little bit, might have taken it way too seriously, but if I had gone in Lake Erie when I was 11 years old a shark would have surely eaten me, and there isn’t anything you can tell me that will change my mind about that. Yes, the power of movies is strong with this one.

3. Indiana Jones / Raiders of the Lost Ark — Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1981

Every GenX kid loved this movie for good reason. Raiders of the Lost Ark not only was an amazing film, it launched a franchise of some of the best, and as of late, worst films about tomb raiding. I mean, that’s what they are doing, right? Indiana is a tomb raider. He’s breaking into ancient places and taking stuff and putting it in museums. Let’s forgo the argument here that Indiana plays no role in this movie. Yes, everything would have worked out exactly the same if he wasn’t in it. That doesn’t matter. As a kid, this movie was it.

We loved this movie. If you don’t know, Raiders of the Lost Ark follows Professor Indiana Jones on an adventure to save the Lost Ark of the Covenant. It has the 10 Commandments in it, and according to the Bible has the power of God. Any army that carries the Ark cannot be defeated. Hitler getting his hands on the Ark may mean the end of the world as we know it. So Indiana has to embark on a daring excavation to find it. Yes, I said excavation. This is an archaeologist movie. A movie about a heroic archaeologist. Have you ever met an archaeologist? I met a couple in college. I don’t think they are very daring or adventurous, but that’s what this movie is about.

It also brings me to my point. When the movie came out there was a documented phenomenon called the Indiana Jones Effect. Yes, they named it after the movie because when the movie came out, universities around the world saw a massive explosion in sign-ups for archaeology courses and degrees. A movie about a 1930s archaeologist who seems to break all the rules of archaeology, goes after the Ark of the Covenant, and fights Nazis inspired GenX to become archaeologists. I think this is like The Last Starfighter inspiring people to sign up to learn to fly airplanes, right? I mean, Indiana Jones at his heart is a tomb raider, and many archaeologists say that he basically defies every rule of archaeology. I didn’t even know archaeology had rules.

I can remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, and I don’t even think I realized he was an archaeologist. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I also played that Atari video game that was supposed to be Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I just kept falling to my death because I couldn’t find a parachute. There were no instructions with the game dammit. I digress again. Anyway, the movie has its own actual phenomenon named after it.

There aren’t hard numbers to back this up, or I would give them to you, but it is a real documented thing that even the actor John Rhys-Davies (who played Sallah) has been approached by hundreds of people saying they went into archaeology because of the movie. What? Why would you admit that? These were apparently archaeology professors.

Anyway, we can all agree this is a little much, right? GenX signing up in droves for a profession because of a movie that really has little or nothing to do with anything in reality around archaeology? The effect is real, look it up.

4. Top Gun — Directed by Tony Scott, 1986

Yes, Top Gun, the movie with Tom Cruise flying jets for the Navy, was taken way, way too seriously by GenX moviegoers. If you don’t know, Top Gun follows hotshot Navy pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise, who is sent to the elite Fighter Weapons School known as Top Gun to train with the best aviators in the U.S. Navy. Maverick is reckless and arrogant. Is he really as good as he says he is, or is his ego writing checks his body can’t cash? Ultimately he must overcome his own struggles and hardships to become the best of the best.

Yes, this movie about Top Gun flight school, which is real by the way, inspired droves of people in GenX to sign up for the Navy. It has been rumored that there was a 500% increase in enrollment, but that is a myth. In reality, enrollment jumped 8%. That is still a huge jump. Over 10,000 more people signed up for the Navy after this movie came out.

Again, what? The movie is cartoonish. I’m not sure there is anything even real or serious about the movie at all. It’s guys flying airplanes and doing things they would never really do in the military. Flying an F-14 Tomcat upside down and giving a Russian flying a MiG the bird is not good use of tax dollars, dammit! Maverick would have been kicked out of the Navy long ago for insubordination. Many people call the movie propaganda. Adjusted for today’s money, the movie basically made a billion dollars. It also really cleaned house in the rental markets. So everyone in GenX has seen this movie, and they probably saw it when it came out.

This one was a rental for me. It’s a fun movie, but I’m not signing up for the Navy for it. The power of movies is amazing though. Movies inspire us, even if they are cartoonishly silly like Top Gun. The characters are caricatures of people for most of the movie. The story is over-the-top simplistic and ridiculous, and the triumphant ending is all tied up in a bow, no one hurt, Russia is defeated.

Still it inspired droves of young men to sign up for the Navy. Anyway, I feel the need, the need to go on to the next movie on this list.

5. WarGames — Directed by John Badham, 1983

Often cited as one of the most loved GenX movies of all time, WarGames follows the misadventures in computers and national security of David Lightman (Matthew Broderick). David uses his computer to hack into a military computer to get it to play games with him. He starts the game Global Thermal Nuclear War with the computer for fun. What David doesn’t realize is that the computer, named Joshua, is actually a military defense computer in control of NORAD. The computer thinks the game is real and begins to launch its nuclear weapons. It’s a fun movie, end of the world caused by a teenager hacking.

And what did it inspire? Hackers! Yes, there was an explosion in hacking. Up until this time, “hacker” only meant having a deep knowledge of computers. It became a negative term after this movie. Some of the most famous hackers in the world, like Jeff Moss, known as “The Dark Tangent,” cited it as one of his inspirations for getting into hacking and cybersecurity. The conference Moss founded is called DEF CON, which is what happens in the movie WarGames. The conference started in 1993 and is actually named after what happens in the movie. So the movie inspired many, many hackers.

An even crazier sidenote is that a few weeks after Ronald Reagan saw the movie, he asked his Joint Chiefs of Staff if something like what happened in WarGames could really happen, and the generals told him yes. He would later order NSDD-145, a presidential directive that changed government cybersecurity. Wild, eh?

So yeah, it seems like WarGames is a ridiculous movie, and it was. It was fun but pretty far-fetched that someone could start World War III by playing a video game online. On the other hand, it inspired droves of hackers to really go out and try to do these things. They did hack governments, banks, and many other secure facilities. I don’t know. I love WarGames. I know much of GenX does, but it may have created hacker culture. Does that mean we have to blame WarGames for phishing emails and the Nigerian Prince who promises to send me money? I don’t know!

6. Saturday Night Fever — Directed by John Badham, 1977

This movie might be the most devastating of all movies of that era. Honestly, I do not know how we survived. Saturday Night Fever was a look at the evil subculture of 70s New York disco. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero. Manero lives on the mean streets but he can dance in a white leisure suit. Yes, dancing. Dancing on the mean streets. Oh and the terror of the style of dress in this movie coming back for even a minute. It’s a world of bell bottoms and ridiculously tight pants, and oh the humanity. I don’t even know what to say about the horrors this movie inspired.

Of course it was a smash hit and put Travolta on the map. He was nominated for his performance. But the damage that this movie wreaked on the country is immeasurable. First, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” topped the charts for 24 consecutive weeks. Disco, a small underground subculture, exploded in popularity. Everyday moms and dads were now going to discos. For the love of god, make it stop. Then dance TV was basically invented in response to this film. People were now dancing disco on TV. There is not enough emergency eye scrub in all the world.

Unbelievably, people started dressing like people in the movie. They were wearing polyester suits and platform shoes to work. Men were leaving their shirts open and wearing jewelry around their necks like in the movie, and this style lasted over 10 years. Yes, children like me had to tell their mothers and fathers that they could not dress like that in public. Oh the pain and anguish of it all. In fashion, the disco-inspired decade is also known as the “Lost Decade of fashion.” It chills me to think of it.

The oldest Gen Xers at the time the movie came out were only about 10 years old. So we were forced to take this movie seriously. I’m not going to say too seriously because there was a disco tragedy sweeping the nation and it had to be stopped. This, like so many other hardships, was inflicted upon GenX by Boomers. Go ahead. If you are brave enough, and you inflicted disco devastation on your juniors or children, be brave and admit it in the comments.

7. Wall Street — Directed by Oliver Stone, 1987

The GenX Wolf of Wall Street. Wall Street was a story about a young stockbroker named Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) who begins working for tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Gekko is a ruthless money maker and corporate raider. Fox has some inside information about an airline, and he feeds it to Gekko, who works to dismantle the company because he can make more money from its parts. Wall Street was really one of the first movies to look at the greed of Wall Street in an honest way.

People in the 80s understood the corruption, but they didn’t understand the full extent of what was happening behind closed doors with some of the richest people in the world. Wall Street was meant to be a cautionary tale about how to avoid being tied up in corruption and greed. It inspired the opposite.

Instead of young GenX men looking at the rich Gordon Gekko (for whom Michael Douglas won an Academy Award) and seeing the obvious pitfalls for the soul, they idolized him. In the movie, Gekko gives a speech where he says “Greed is good.” He is serious in the movie, but it’s meant to be ironic. Ivan Boesky had given a similar speech at a UC Berkeley commencement, so the culture was already real and very much there. The movie just highlighted it and inspired thousands of young men to become stockbrokers. There was an explosion of greed, basically. Even some historians point to this moment in the movie as a moment in history that solidified the acceptance that Wall Street was predicated on greed and corruption. Not just greed. Not just insider trading and cheating and lying, and the very idea that being rich made it all okay.

More than any other, this movie inspired GenX to accept that this is the way it is, or to pursue the advantage no matter what. It truly gave credibility to ideals that were diabolical to generations before.

8. Rocky — Directed by John G. Avildsen, 1976

Yeah, you know where this is going. Rocky was a 1976 movie about boxer Rocky Balboa, who is a no-name, kind of washed-up fighter from Philadelphia. The World Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed decided to fight him in Philadelphia to mark the Bicentennial. It’s meant to be a showman’s match because Apollo has basically beaten everyone else. Well, Rocky goes the distance and gives Apollo the best fight of his life but does not win.

Yes, yes, yes, GenX took this movie and all the movies after it way too seriously. There aren’t real hard numbers to back this up because little boxing gyms all over American don’t keep really great records of this stuff, but every time a Rocky movie would come out, thousands of young men would show up the next day wanting to become boxers. Yes, this did happen. Lots of gym owners have come forward and said yeah, we get kids in here for sign-ups every time a new Rocky movie comes out.

I can tell you firsthand that one of the first fights I was ever almost in was inspired by Rocky. I went to my school to play on the playground with some friends. Really, I went to my friend Jim’s house, and he only lived a block from there, and we went to swing on the swings and fall on asphalt like all GenXers back then.

A kid, we will call Gabe, came up to the outside of the fence and started taunting us. I was pretty little back then, hadn’t gotten my growth spurt yet, and he started targeting me. When I finally said “What?” he told me he wanted to kick my ass. I didn’t want my ass kicked and said no thank you. He kept arguing with me through the fence. Luckily there weren’t any close breaks in the fence, but he did the “Yo, Adrian” voice of Rocky, and I immediately knew that this whole bully fight thing was inspired by one of the Rockys. It was probably Rocky III. All bad Rocky things sprung from Rocky III, if you ask me, but hey, what did I know. After him shadow boxing on the other side of the fence, I just slowly backed away and then ran as fast as I could like 8 blocks home. He watched the movie, but alas did not put in the training of the Rocky run like I had. Some people got the fast hands and some people took the lessons of long distance endurance. Not a bad thing. Don’t judge me.

9. Dead Poets Society — Directed by Peter Weir, 1989

Dead Poets Society was the story of English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams), who begins teaching at the elite, conservative Welton Academy and inspires his students to embrace poetry, free thinking, and the philosophy of carpe diem, or “seize the day.” The phrase was little known before the movie, but man did it rocket into the stratosphere after the film’s release. Yes, carpe diem was on every teacher’s poster and in lessons and on the front signs of schools. My school put it on their front sign. Seize the day. Really? It’s high school. I’m just surviving, dude.

Anyway, this movie inspired countless Gen Xers to become teachers in the hopes of finding fresh minds to inspire, but they found ever more challenging classrooms instead. Carpe diem kind of became the rallying cry for a generation without any real rebellion. We were rebelling against life and Boomers and all the things that came before us, but seizing the day was stuck on everything. I remember my 9th grade English teacher telling us about this and telling us to watch the movie. Ugh. He was ruining a perfectly great movie by making it about my high school English class, and I wasn’t about to stand on a desk for this guy.

The movie had a positive influence overall, but for a film about a 1959 private school to sweep the nation and change everyone’s minds about how they should be living their lives seems like a stretch, right? I mean, yes, I will say it again, movies are powerful, but everyone ignored the poetry in this movie, which seems to be part of the point, and just took it as the go-ahead to abandon structure and completely be yourself. This is great if you don’t have to conform to school or do anything productive. Just seize the day. If I seized the day today I wouldn’t be at work, I’d be at the beach. Anyway, many people cite this movie as inspiring them to become teachers, writers, and artists. That’s a good thing, but we did take this movie way too seriously. RIP Robin Williams, you were the best.

10. The Exorcist — Directed by William Friedkin, 1973

Oh man, yes, it is true that they had nurses and EMS at the theaters when this movie was shown. Yes, people did faint and freak out and run out of the theaters. I mean, it is often cited as the scariest movie of all time, so yeah, I don’t think that’s taking it too seriously. It just freaked people out.

If you haven’t seen it, The Exorcist is about 12-year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who becomes possessed by a demon and has to be exorcised by a priest. The movie was bonkers scary and it’s just too much for some people to watch. The real problem with this movie is that its influence grew over time.

Even though it came out in 1973, its reach could be felt for years. Yes, the movie will make you crap your pants, but it also codified the child possession subgenre, and worse than that, it was what you would call a “cultural accelerant” of the Satanic Panic movement. Oh lord, help us. If you don’t know, the Satanic Panic movement started in 1976 and ran until 1994. That hellfire, however, started smoldering in the early 1970s. The movement was an evangelical moral hysteria that swept the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada. It was a terrible mix of Christian fundamentalism, fear, and media sensationalism. If you played Dungeons and Dragons, the devil was going to get you. If you listened to heavy metal music, you were going to be possessed. The pain of this movement. Its peak was really around 1983 to 1994.

The Exorcist was often cited by the Satanic Panic movement as a reason for children to be exorcised, and there were many child deaths while performing this ritual. Families were destroyed, careers ruined, people’s lives shattered. Fear basically drove some people to madness. That’s the best way to put it. They were afraid of the devil. They were afraid Satan was going to take over their lives and their families, and their fear became so great they destroyed themselves.

I know I joke in these articles. I’m not blaming The Exorcist directly for this movement, but the power of this movie did fuel many people’s fears. GenX often laughs off the Satanic Panic movement, but when you really dig into it, you see that it was horrific. Yes, children died. Yes, it destroyed lives, and yes, many people cited this movie as a justification and cautionary tale. A movie, even one as serious as The Exorcist was taken way too seriously.

Roll Credits

Anyway, on that light and fun note, I’ll end this article. Yes, we took some movies too seriously, blah blah. You can’t blame us, it was crazy times. The 70s and 80s were unbelievably turbulent when you actually think back. Don’t get me wrong, I loved growing up in the 1980s. Great music, lots of freedom, drinking from a garden hose. Yep, all great. But we also had the crack epidemic, high rates of abductions, serial killers were apparently all over the place, and tomorrow the world might end in nuclear destruction. But hey, what did we have to complain about?

Movies are powerful, even silly 80s movies where a guy does an illegal crane kick to the face to win a tournament where I’m not even sure you’re allowed to hit in the face. And man, I practiced my kick every day, though I was never brave enough to stand on one leg in front of someone who was about to punch me in the face. I would have joined a boxing gym after watching Rocky III at my sister’s house if there had been one in our little town. I was afraid of the water and terrified of leisure suits. My dad wore one to my sister’s wedding. I have pictures. Oh, the shame. Anyway, yes, movies are powerful for generations. Does it chill you a little bit to think that the sometimes unhinged minds of the Boomers basically made the movies that defined GenX? It keeps me up at night a little, if I’m honest. Anyway, thinking of the hysteria and havoc some of these movies caused gives me great comfort for some reason. It’s like validated nostalgia. We weren’t just bananas for The Karate Kid, Top Gun, Rocky, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We actually wanted to be these things, be these characters, and live these lives.

What do you think? Did you see any movies in your childhood that you took way, way too seriously? Let me know in the comments. I can’t tell you how much I love reading what you guys come up with.

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Jaws the Review: Hooper Must Die!

He’s reviewing Jaws? Is he out of his damn mind? We all know Jaws and it’s an amazing movie, why review an amazing movie? What is he thinking? Well, I’m thinking I asked my 24-year-old son about Jaws and he said, “I never saw it!” Wait, what? Never saw it? I have failed you as a father. Then the fear set in that maybe people in Gen Z are skipping this movie. That would be a tragedy. To that end, I’m writing a review of one of the greatest movies in history, but saying that it’s not perfect. You can’t see me flinching behind my keyboard, thinking not in the face, not in the face, but I am.

So Jaws is not only the first summer blockbuster, it is also one of the most beloved movies of all time. Fanboys of this movie are so charged and adamant about this being the greatest movie of all time, I fear their wrath on me saying there is something wrong with it. Alas, I love this movie too.

Without further ado, here is my take on Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg. Jaws opened on June 20, 1975. It made 7 million dollars in its first weekend and only took 78 days to surpass The Godfather as the highest grossing film of all time. It was a massive hit that changed everything. Up until that point it was considered suicide to open a large movie in the summertime. They just didn’t do well. Jaws started the trend of summer movies being the place to be for moviegoers.

Jaws was nominated for 4 Academy Awards and won 3: Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Original Score, but it did not win Best Picture. That went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jaws, though, has shown its staying power. Year after year, new audiences find it. In its 50-year run it’s made around 500 million dollars. That’s a lot for a movie that first released in the 1970s. It’s crazy to think that any generation would miss this amazing movie.

Jaws is the story of a great white shark that starts attacking swimmers near the small beach town of Amity Island. Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) wants to close the beaches, but the town’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) refuses, worried about losing tourist money during the busy summer season. After more attacks, Brody teams up with a young marine biologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and a grizzled, obsessive shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw), and the three of them head out to sea on Quint’s boat to hunt the shark down.

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At its heart, Jaws is a man vs. nature movie. It is a slow, methodical monster coming for you. It’s in the water. You can’t see it but you know it’s there. Like all man vs. nature films, the movie’s backbone is arrogance. How dare you venture into an area so vast and so dangerous. Like Moby Dick, which is referenced in the movie, the characters venture out against a force of nature, all for different reasons, but only the one who is the most humble should be able to survive. The problems of Jaws are showing, the fin is sticking out of the water. No man can survive who does not humble himself to the ocean. All things being equal, Hooper must die.

Entertainment Value: 20/20

Jaws is endlessly entertaining. From its opening scene to its climactic deadly fight with the shark, the movie presents constant danger and mystery that keeps you ever on the edge of your seat. The movie feels like the shark is swimming under you as you’re watching. You know the shark is out there, now it’s just a question of when and who will be in the water when it shows up. The first scene of this movie starts with two teens running toward the water and skinny dipping together. The girl, Susan Backlinie, had ropes tied to her and was dragged around screaming and almost drowning to start the movie. The death scene is so disturbing and terrifying it sets the tone for the rest of the film.

The rest of the movie you know the shark is coming, and it has a kind of ever-presence represented by its iconic dun-dun music growing faster and louder as the shark approaches and the danger grows. You just can’t look away from this movie. It sucks you in and keeps you fearfully treading water and watching for a shark fin the entire movie.

The three heroes of this film are all flawed and fighting nature. They all have ghosts in their past, but only one of these characters is changing. The character change in the movie should be what saves them.

Rewatchability: 20/20

Being the first summer blockbuster, really a 4th of July movie, it is probably one of the best movies set in the summer of all time. I watch it every 4th of July. If you think of a summer movie, Jaws, for the last three generations, is the one that leaps to mind. It feels like summer. It feels like danger, and it’s a great summer watch. It’s always on my list of great summer movies.

Jaws also is so well acted and so well directed that every time you watch it you will see something new, something you did not see the last time you watched the movie. I honestly think the more you watch this movie the more you really appreciate the genius of Steven Spielberg.

Acting: 20/20

Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody does an amazing everyday man’s job with this role. He’s vulnerable for a ‘70s man, but he still puts forward a competence that you can see would serve the town well. He’s a good father and a husband, and you get all this just from Scheider’s subtle yet telling performance. He’s not a larger-than-life character, just someone working in a small town trying to maintain their way of life. Scheider is a small-town sheriff on an island who is afraid of the water. He knows the ocean is dangerous, and he respects it.

Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, a marine biologist who has studied sharks and knows the water well, is ever the voice of warning in this movie. Dreyfuss plays his part with intelligence and confidence. He’s never out of character or outdone by the two veteran actors. He is a “rich boy” who is also filled with arrogance about knowing the creature and understanding the ocean. He has very little fear when faced with the ocean, and that arrogance should get him killed.

Robert Shaw as Quint puts up a masterful performance, a half-drunken fisherman who presents himself as more knowledgeable and stronger than the ocean itself. Shaw should have won an Academy Award for this role. He is amazing in this movie. He makes you feel like he is an old fisherman and Navy man, always on the sea, always at conflict with it. His underlying anger at the ocean and the story of his daring survival after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis is ever present on screen. His arrogance gets him killed.

There are no flaws in any of the performances in Jaws. I believe it is a perfectly performed movie. Nothing is out of place.

Story/Plot: 16/20

The real problems of Jaws show up in the consistency of the story. Sometimes filmmakers have to be willing to follow the demands of the story regardless of how the audience is going to feel about it. It may be Jaws’ only flaw. If you follow the story and the inevitable outcomes the movie lays down for itself, you will see that there is no way Hooper survives this movie. If you go back to the fact that this is a man vs. nature movie, the only person who can survive in the water is one who is humble and changing. That’s the rules the movie is laying down the whole time. Quint’s arrogance will get him killed, we know this. Just like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. When Quint charges out to take on the shark, we know he will not change. He will not see the error of his ways. He will never forgive nature for what it did to him when he and the crew of the USS Indianapolis fell into the ocean and over half of his shipmates were taken by sharks. He cannot forgive this. If he does not change, the shark will take him, and it does.

Brody is terrified of the water. He is very humble in the face of the ocean. His fear throughout the movie is a warning to everyone. Do not go into the water. Close the beaches. It’s too dangerous. We cannot fight this. Brody slowly, and through real immersion therapy, overcomes his fear. We see this at the end when he is swimming back with Hooper. He is no longer afraid of the water. His character has changed.

That brings us to Hooper. What saves him? Why does he survive? In fact, Hooper did die in the original script. While filming, a real shark attacked and damaged the diving cage. It created some dramatic footage Spielberg wanted to keep in the movie and ultimately led to Hooper surviving. If you are following the theme of this movie, man vs. nature, and you’re calculating out the demands of the story, the shark is coming for all of us, then Hooper cannot survive. His character did not earn his survival, and worse than that, it disrupts the entire theme and message of the movie. Humble yourself to the ocean. Humans are venturing too far out. They don’t understand the real dangers that are out there.

Many argue that Hooper in the movie, unlike the book (where he dies, by the way) is much more likable and that gives him less reason to die. Horse hockey! Dreyfuss as Hooper is indeed likable and charismatic. He’s a great character, but you can’t just change course in the middle of the film and decide he’s going to live. It would have been an easy fix. Humble Hooper. Give him a character flaw and have him overcome it before the end of the movie. There is plenty of opportunity for this. Spielberg, though, betrays the movie and lets Hooper live to please the audience and because there was a convenient shark attack on the cage.

Jaws is a great story, and a great movie, but it betrays its own rules of survival. Man vs nature is about not only overcoming the dangers of nature on the outside of us, but we have to overcome the nature of ourselves. Understanding the nature of ourselves and defeating our own monsters lets us overcome the monsters outside ourselves. It’s how most man vs nature stories are set up. It’s not always the case, but if the character doesn’t change, doesn’t overcome something, doesn’t earn survival, then why let him survive?

Directing: 20/20

Jaws is a perfectly directed movie. Every time you watch it you will recognize something different that Spielberg pulled off. From the blocking, which is done so well it’s almost a character of its own, to the famous dolly zoom when Brody sees the shark attack the little boy. I believe this movie is probably one of the top 5 directed movies of all time. Spielberg even plays with his audience. When the Orca goes out to hunt Jaws, the shot is through the teeth of a shark. When Brody gets the bullets to load the gun that will ultimately kill the shark, you see a shooting star overhead.

There is amazing directorial commentary added to this film. More amazing than this is Spielberg’s ability to create movie mysticism with these little moments in the directing. It’s what makes Jaws such a magic movie. It feels like what big movie cinema should be. In many ways the movie makes you feel like it’s summer. You feel like you’re laughing and joking at the beach, and that makes you very afraid when the shark shows up. You are in this movie, part of it, and even if you’ve never been to the beach, you feel the sun and the island culture. The amazing camera shots from under the water, the swimmers’ legs, you feel like Jaws is circling under you.

There are few movies so masterful in their construction and commentary to the audience through the directing. It’s a masterclass in filmmaking.

Overall: 96/100

Oh, it hurts me to say this movie isn’t perfect. I very much want it to be. Everything works so well. It is so masterfully crafted. Spielberg got amazing performances from every actor. He let Robert Shaw just go on the USS Indianapolis speech, and there are no awkward moments on camera. The movie is endlessly entertaining and rewatchable, but alas, Spielberg couldn’t do what every young writer is told to do with their darlings: kill them. Either Hooper has to die in this film, or the character needs a rewrite. Those are the only two options. I’ll even go further, I don’t really want to see a version of this film where Hooper dies.

Look, movies are powerful, and maybe they aren’t meant to be perfect. There is something we want from a movie that is more human than the dictation of the script. I understand that, but Jaws still cheats. If you want a perfect follow-through, Hooper must die. Maybe some movies are great because of their flaws. Maybe loving movies is about more than the perfection of the script, the acting, or the characters.

If you haven’t seen this movie go watch it. Jaws is a classic and a great movie; there is no arguing that. The triumph at the end feels better because Hooper is there with Brody to swim back to shore. I am so conflicted here. Should artists give the audience what they want, or stick to their artistic convictions? Do decisions of opportunity sometimes make a movie better? I don’t know. I’m happy Hooper lives in the end, but it’s not a perfect movie.

What do you think? Does Spielberg cheat the audience by keeping Hooper alive? Is it forgivable? Would it have been a better movie if Hooper died? Let me know in the comments.

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I love this movie. It’s terrible in many ways, but I love it. I saw Krull when I was a kid. I remember it was one of my best friends’ favorite movies forever, but when you put it up against other adventure epic movies like Clash of the Titans or Excalibur or Conan, the movie really dulls in comparison. The nostalgia of this movie is thick. On rewatch I was transported back to a carefree time when the most stress was missing a Saturday morning cartoon or if that girl with a locker next to mine really liked me or not, but if I’m honest, the movie has some major issues that are very difficult to overlook, even with a head full of reminiscing.

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If you have never seen Krull I encourage you to watch it. The movie has fingerprints on other adventure movies that came after it. It helped establish the fellowship quest template that many 80s and even 90s movies used, from Masters of the Universe (1987) to the Chronicles of Riddick (2004).

Krull is a medieval fantasy world with castles and kings, but an alien spaceship lands on the planet at the beginning of the movie and goes to war with its people. So Excalibur meets Star Wars, more or less. The alien monsters attack the castle at the wedding of Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony). She is kidnapped and Colwyn assembles a ragtag fellowship of companions, including a wise old seer named Ynyr (Freddie Jones), a bumbling magician called Ergo (David Battley), a melancholy one-eyed Cyclops named Rell (Bernard Bresslaw), and a band of outlaws that includes a young Kegan (Liam Neeson) and Rhun (Robbie Coltrane). To defeat the Beast, Colwyn must first retrieve an ancient five-bladed weapon called the Glaive from a lava-filled mountain, then track down the Beast’s ever-teleporting Black Fortress before sunrise, battling Slayers, giant spiders, and shape-shifters along the way.

It is an ambitious movie to say the least, but there are a lot of questions. You really don’t see any other people in this movie other than that ragtag band. Did the aliens kill everyone else? They basically eradicated the armies of Colwyn and Lyssa, but there is no one else on this planet that can help our hero? It’s one of the major problems of the movie. It wasn’t meant to be a sweeping epic with minimal characters and giant set pieces.

Entertainment Value 15/20

Some of this movie is very entertaining. There is sequence after sequence where they are battling monsters or getting past giant spiders that are very engaging, but sadly the pace of this is way off due to big lulls between those sequences. Most of the scenes in between are filled with explanation and exposition that just seem to drag on and on. I just kept yelling at my TV, get to it already!

The movie does look spectacular. It has been remastered, and the space scenes in the beginning are sweeping and would rival any early 80s movie including Star Wars. Unfortunately the big battle sequences, some that still fall a little flat, are the only thing really working in this movie. I think this is where the nostalgia comes in. We remember the battles, the spider, the Beast at the end, but the long boring explanations we have forgotten, for the better, I promise.

Rewatchability 10/20

This movie feels like someone is trying to tell you and not show you. There are some major script problems, but everything is explained over and over. Due to constant lulls and the over the top acting I will talk about in a minute, Krull is a hard rewatch. If you are very nostalgic for it, you might rewatch it every 10 years, but I can’t see it making the rotation of people’s movies every year. Even as a background movie I think it would be difficult to run often. It’s just clunky and difficult to like. The charm of this movie is all it has going for it. It was a big shoot with dozens of sound stages and on location shooting that was plagued with problems, so that might have been the overall problem. It has a lot of anti-charisma as a movie. It’s fun to look at, but you really don’t want to listen to it.

Acting 11/20

It’s very ambitious, but the execution is just not there. The acting is basically a bunch of stage actors doing Macbeth for the back row, but our main protagonist, the prince, is just a regular guy, of course! The movie was shot in England by director Peter Yates. Much of the supporting cast was from the stage and it shows. They all give those performances where they are bellowing out to the back row of the theater instead of speaking into the boom mic.

In some adventure movies this is a benefit, but in Krull it just feels like a mismatch. Ken Marshall, our main protagonist, doesn’t know if he should be stage acting or acting like he is in a movie of the 1980s. His performance seems odd and many times just bad. It’s like Han Solo is trying to have a conversation with Hamlet. There are some great actors in this movie including Liam Neeson as Kegan. Neeson is from the stage of course, and it shows in this movie. I don’t want to blame the actors for this. It’s just that the performances do not match each other. It feels like they are clanking together.

I also just want to take a minute to freak out about the Cyclops. We all wanted more Cyclopes in 80s movies, and this movie gave us a great one.

Story/Plot 12/20

Do you want to see Conan fight Darth Vader? No one wants to see that. I don’t think anyone really wanted this movie. Stop mixing my Clash of the Titans and Star Wars, it’s giving me a headache! Sometimes films can be too ambitious with their stories, and I think this one is. They are mixing medieval soldiers with aliens that have laser weapons. Also the pacing of this movie is terrible. You start with a slow boring wedding that immediately turns into a massacre of soldiers killed by all the Alien Slayers, but apparently they wiped out the entire military of these two native races, but a ragtag bunch of misfits can get the job done? It’s just too over the top.

Worse than that, again the story just can’t find its footing. The sets look great, but that’s about it. The battles many times even fall flat. Let’s run from a giant spider with the secret of where the disappearing castle is, and then sit and talk about it for 10 minutes. Ugh, move on! The film wants to be a novel and flesh out every single character and backstory, but it doesn’t have the chops for it. It falls short again and again. A little less ambition and a little more editing would have gone a long way.

Directing 12/20

First, the sets in this movie are outstanding. The visuals are great, and honestly that’s about it. I was shocked watching the opening sequence in how good it looked, but I feel like the shots, the blocking, and the editing of scenes and dialogue are just a mess. I know this movie was plagued with production problems, but some scenes feel like the director just said, “Ok, everyone just stand around and talk to each other. You be Horatio and you be Macbeth and you be Othello, now just have a conversation about ancient legends and space monsters, and action.” They took a big swing and missed with this movie, unfortunately.

I also have to say something about James Horner’s score in this movie. Horner is notorious for writing scores for movies and then reusing them. He did the score for Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, and while you are watching the giant spider scene in this movie, boom, there is the theme music to Star Trek. It discombobulated me. I was so confused for a few minutes figuring out what movie I was watching and why I wanted Kirk to yell “Khaaaaaaan!” so badly right then. So Krull’s score is pieced and parted together. Parts of the score are later used in Aliens and in The Rocketeer, so you might have a bit of an out of body experience watching this movie. So if you want to hear some of your favorite themes repurposed in a different setting, with characters projecting to the back of the theater, Krull is the place to find it.

Overall 60/100

I think I probably went easy on this movie. The rating is a D-, and honestly it could have been lower, but I gave it some points for the sets and the ambition of the story. This is one of my Movies that Made Me Love Movies, so you know, a movie doesn’t have to be great to love it. I do love this movie. There is a lot of camp here and real cheesiness, so rating it in a review is much different than loving it. I loved who I watched this movie with and how we talk about it. Its charm has dulled a little since the 80s, but it is still fun. I was thinking of screening it on one of my backyard movie nights. It would be great for witty observations about space and medieval knights.

So the nostalgia with this movie is thick. It will take you back, and if you haven’t seen it, for those Gen Zers who “don’t like old movies,” watch it. The movie is certainly a cult classic, and you should know a little movie history. You might not overly enjoy it, but not everything in life is meant to be enjoyed. You’ll like the visuals and the sets and some of the character design. You might even like the over the top nature of the whole movie. If you don’t, do what Gen X did and find the good in it. The movie is a Gen X favorite. We learned to like things that were hard to like. For instance, Big League Chew. It didn’t taste great and it ran out of flavor quickly, but you could eat it by the handful and it was cheap. Krull is the Big League Chew of movies. It’s ambitious and you get a lot of it, but not the greatest endurance of taste.

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Everyone talks about how we jumped timelines for craziness. I don’t even think we would have noticed in the 80s. I am trying to keep these short. They are meant to make us all remember, and I don’t mind reminiscing. It’s fun to remember the trauma, and yes, some of these were traumatizing for kids in different ways. Let me say what my biggest problem is with most of these PSAs: they were very adult problems that kids had very little control over, but they were all directed at kids. We couldn’t get our parents to stop drinking and driving or our aunts and uncles to put out their campfires, or even protect ourselves at grocery stores from “strangers.”

If you look at it, I think the government had given up convincing adults about this stuff, so they wanted us to nag them into change. Am I remembering this right? Most of these commercials I saw on Saturday mornings with my cartoons. Dammit, just let me watch Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends or even the Smurfs. I mean, I was not a big fan of the Smurfs, but anything was better than being terrorized by one of these PSA commercials.

1. The “This is your brain on drugs” frying egg PSA

My brain is an egg and it’s frying in a pan on drugs. This is what I needed while I was watching my Saturday morning cartoons? I mean I think Robin was going to beat evil Superman in that suit with that kryptonite, but now I have to worry about frying my brain on eggs. Wait, that’s wrong. You know what I mean.

The commercial was part of a larger anti-narcotics campaign and ran in 1987. It ran often at all times of day and night for 3-4 months. The commercial is pure scare tactics, no conversation, didn’t even name a single drug. “Does this happen when I take Tylenol?” The campaign didn’t stop the spread of drugs of course. It did shift some perspectives in teens about drugs like cocaine, but later research would show that most or all PSA campaigns on drugs did not reduce the amount of drug use.

The commercial did of course seep into the zeitgeist and everyone was talking about it. It was endlessly parodied and it was widely talked about. Oh, I remember my mom telling me to stay away from drugs and saying, you don’t want to fry your brain. Ugh, mom, the Superfriends are on, let me watch this!

2. Stranger Danger PSAs in general

Ok, this one is pretty complicated, but basically when Reagan won the presidency he had two goals. One was to rebuild the American family and get tough on crime. So there was a wide campaign that Gen X knows and is terrified of called Stranger Danger! Stranger Danger was a wide push for teaching children to avoid talking to strangers and know the signs of being abducted. On one hand it was successful in elevating the understanding of the issues of child safety to all of America, and on the other hand only about 10% of child abduction and sexual abuse cases were committed by people who were strangers. The vast majority of abductions and abuse were perpetrated by people who knew the children. You can’t say that Stranger Danger wasn’t needed, but almost all the resources were directed at this topic.

As a Gen X kid growing up, they gave us a key around your neck and said walk home from school but don’t talk to anyone. I remember the first time I rode my bike down to the local general store. I got my candy. I think it was a Pushup I wanted. I don’t remember exactly, but when I walked up to the counter, I suddenly remembered that I was going to be talking to a stranger. Did the people who worked at the store count as strangers? Was I about to be abducted? I remember my heart beating in my chest as I bought my Pushup and rode my bike home as fast as I could, thinking I had narrowly avoided being taken by that weird lady!

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The commercials for Stranger Danger were truly terrifying. They were so 100% scare tactic, which again seemed to be the entire goal of the 80s. There are many of these ads, but in this one, which I think was every Gen X kid’s nightmare, “Hey kid, I have a van, you want some candy?” There is no way to describe to the coming generations how often you were terrorized by thoughts of being taken. Also, does someone want to tell the adults to look out for us for once? We’re just on our own? Ok got it.

3. Pollution Commercials

I remember seeing this commercial in reruns. There is no way to explain to people the problem with littering back then. I can remember on occasion barreling down the highway, stopping for McDonald’s and then heading back out. When we had finished eating, my mom made us put everything in the bag. Once we were all finished I remember her rolling down the window and chucking it out! “Mom! What are you doing! Give a hoot, don’t pollute!” Yes, she was hit and miss for a while on throwing stuff out the window.

There was trash all over. I want to stress they would tell you not to pollute because it gets you where you live, and I remember trash rolling down the street in my neighborhood. I also remember driving behind a car and playing the game where you tried to guess what they just threw out the window. I lived in Northern Ohio and I have to say it seemed for a very long time littering was rampant. It caused major distress in kids. I know we had all kinds of clean-up days at school. The playground was a mess. I swear there was trash everywhere, and much of it played on our sympathies, like the crying Native American commercial. I had no context when I saw this commercial. Knowing the history now, he had a lot more than pollution to cry about, but this was a straight up emotional manipulation to get people to stop polluting. Meanwhile companies were dumping toxic waste everywhere. They tried everything. I remember so many angles to get you to stop throwing things out the window. Woodsy Owl? Man why did they let adults who were on drugs in the 70s make characters for kids?

From what I remember it seemed to have no effect on adults. I mean Boomers were completely oblivious to PSAs but kids, we were stressed! Stop throwing stuff out the window, mom, you’re making people cry and you are killing our environment! No one cared.

Now there is much debate about if these campaigns were successful or not. I’m not sure about all that. I was young. I didn’t want people to litter, but my parents didn’t seem to care. I remember the day it changed. The day it seemed like everything suddenly got cleaned up. In 1987 Ohio passed a law that said $500 for littering and 60 days in jail! To put that in perspective, my dad bought a small compact Toyota in 1987 for like $400. You could buy a brand new Yugo for under $4,000. We were in the car, barreling down the highway. We had just eaten at McDonald’s. Waylon Jennings was blasting on the radio in the LTD. We were headed up to see my sister who lived by the lake. We finished eating, and my mom took the bag, rolled down the window, did her usual wind up to throw it out, and my dad grabbed her arm, “You are NOT throwing that out the window. They are charging $500 for littering. They are serious, and I’m not getting a fine for you tossing that out the window. We can throw it away when we get there.” After that, I never saw my mom or dad throw a single thing out the window. This was my experience, but I don’t know, maybe the owl influenced other people’s parents. The money is what changed mine.

4. Seat Belts (We’re all gonna die!)

No, we did not wear seat belts. I don’t know when this changed. I can’t put my finger on it. I can remember laying up in the back window of that big LTD while my mom was driving on the highway. I can remember curling up in the floorboards of the front seat. I remember jumping from the front to the back seat of the car or laying down across the giant bench seat in the back. From the time I was 4 until I was 16 and got my driver’s license, seat belts seemed to be optional.

On the flip side though, everywhere you went and all over TV you always saw kids dying in commercials. There were crash test dummies and kids disappearing. There were about 50,000 people a year dying in car crashes, and in 1980 only 11% of people wore their seat belts. Again, watching all those commercials when I was about 10 years old, I got in the car and buckled up, and my dad looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re gonna wear your seat belt.” He thought about it for a minute. I know he was thinking of telling me it was a waste of time or something, but he didn’t. Later he would start wearing his when I was in the car. My mom though, no way. She hated the seat belt and cussed it often. None of my uncles would wear seat belts.

It’s amazing. The commercials seemed to work a little bit on kids. We were so aware that we were driving in a big death box, and from time to time I was truly terrified of going on car trips. I mean, those commercials were everywhere. I remember putting my seat belt on when I got in the front seat with my uncle one time. He looked me up and down, I think I was maybe 11, and he said, “You know if we are in a car accident, that’s not going to do you any good.” He started the car with a scoff and drove us to wherever we were going. I was then just flat out terrified to ride in any car. Kids were dropping like flies and I was riding in a death machine.

In the mid-80s they passed a law that started fining people for not wearing their seat belts, “click it or ticket.” I think that worked better, but I know a few older Gen Xers who still refuse to wear their seat belts.

5. Smokey the Bear “Only you, not your parents, can prevent forest fires.”

Now look, Smokey was relatively harmless. I mean he did scare you to death that you were going to accidentally burn down a forest here or there. I didn’t go to the forest often. Was that patch of woods in the campground a forest? I don’t know, but if my mom threw out a cigarette while driving I was terrified Bambi was going to die.

This particular ad campaign though had the above commercial that I believe pretty much traumatized all of Gen X. It’s the Smokey the Bear commercial where a beautiful woman is speaking to the camera about a wonderful secluded place to go, yeah! She’s hot, let’s go, and then she rips off her face and it’s Smokey the Bear. Ugh, just wrong Smokey, just wrong. I really didn’t know how we were going to accidentally burn down a forest when we were camping, but with all the careless, reckless, bullheaded adults in my life, I was sure it was going to happen. This woman turning into Smokey the Bear haunted my nightmares.

6. McDonald’s Menu Song (Yes I know not a PSA)

This is not a PSA I know, but it did traumatize me. Oh my god, the McDonald’s Menu Song contest was probably one of the most stressful contests I have ever tried to win! Basically in 1989 McDonald’s ran a contest based on a commercial. In the commercials the people sing this very complicated and long song that listed everything on the McDonald’s menu. It’s one of those songs that is just made up to sound like it has the right word in the right place, but really, it’s just kind of gibberish. Anyway, the way the contest worked was they gave you a little flimsy record when you bought certain meals or spent so much. You brought this record home and then played it on your record player. If the people on the record made it all the way to the end of the Menu Song you won like a million dollars.

Now I was not a big McDonald’s fan. Burger King was my jam. Burger King gave away the cool toys and the Return of the Jedi glasses. Nothing beat a flame-broiled cheeseburger back then, but I switched to eating McDonald’s, who had better fries, but I digress. I went to McDonald’s as often as I could. I spent my allowance. I did odd jobs. I was going to win the money from this simple contest. You just had to get one of these records with the people getting all the way to the end of the song, how hard could that be? So yes, I got record after record and brought them home and listened to this very stressful song with the rambling, and every single time the group of singers would fumble all over each other, and it would go, aww sorry, try again, and ugh I’d have to eat another soggy cheeseburger from McDonald’s. I hate clowns! I just want to win the money. I never did. Gen X was duped and tricked again and again with so many of these contests! There is something about this song that is pure stress, and listening to it over and over gave me nightmares.

7. Nuclear War/Civil Defense PSAs from the 1950s to the 1980s (Ok I was wrong, now we’re all going to die!!!)

Ok so there was much, much talk about nuclear war. I know that there weren’t a lot of ads about it, but the Day After screwed us all up. The worst part though is that you heard about it all the time on television. I don’t remember a lot of PSA ads on Saturday mornings like many of the others, but from time to time you’d hear talk about the Doomsday Clock or just talking heads worrying about it. It was truly terrifying. It’s hard to explain to people who did not live through it how much this was on your mind. I mean, hiding under our desks at school was not fun. I remember this clearly. I think we quit doing it maybe when I was in the 3rd grade, and I’ll say clearly, stopping doing this was worse than just continuing it. At least when we did those drills, I thought we had a chance. When we stopped, I knew there was no hope. I also remember that my elementary school, the big brick building that it was, had a nuclear bomb shelter sign hanging on the outside of it. That was not reassuring for some reason. Whenever I looked at it, it just made the possibilities more real.

The original video of the “Duck and Cover” movement is up there. It’s from the 1950s. When we were hiding under our desks in the 1980s, it was just a leftover from that movement. I don’t know where I saw that movie when I was little, but I know I saw it. Maybe they showed it to us in school, I just don’t remember. But when you think that they never upgraded their response or “what to do in case of” nuclear war advice for over 30 years and then just gave up, it kind of tells you how pointless it was.

I know I would lay in bed at night sometimes, as a little kid, maybe between 5 and 10 years old, and I would not be able to sleep imagining a bomb coming and us all dying. I’m not sure what good all that fear did for me.

8. McGruff (Hey ask your parents if they want to take a bite out of crime)

Oh, McGruff the Crime Dog, “Take a Bite out of Crime.” The commercials for this damn dog are truly disturbing. Sometimes he’s breaking into your house to remind you that you didn’t lock your doors and other times he’s showing kids being abducted. Hey McGruff, you want to help that little kid or just talk about it? I understand this campaign was made to keep kids aware, but when they were talking about putting your lights on a timer when you went on vacation, there was no amount of words I could say to my mom that would get her to buy a light timer or to ask the neighbors to come over and check on my Star Wars toys. “But they will take my stuff when we are gone, can we just put a light on a timer like McGruff said!” “It’ll be fine,” she would say. So frustrating. The truth is about half of what this cartoon dog said was just plain making me afraid someone was going to take me or break into my house, and anytime my mom left the window open at night to let some air in, I thought I was going to die. I mean, it’s crime, can we make these damn Boomers responsible for something? Does everything have to be pointed at the kids? Yeah, they are letting us ride in the backs of pickups and staying out until the street lights come on. Maybe you could tell them to be responsible for something instead of just scaring the crap out of me on the daily.

The truth is the government wanted us to nag our parents because they knew they were too jaded from WWII and Vietnam and Richard Nixon to care about anything, I guess.

9. I Learned It from You, Dad

I think this was the perfect 80s drug ad. Yes! Finally something wasn’t my fault! My parents didn’t drink or do drugs, that I ever knew of, but I knew a lot of kids who were getting in trouble for drinking when their dads were throwing back a six pack on the nightly. So finally a drug ad that was pointed at parents. There was some vindication in this, but on the other hand it just made you feel like everyone was doing drugs. This really made me snoop around my house and wonder if dad or mom was maybe throwing their egg brains in a frying pan every once in a while. Did mom have a drug problem I didn’t know about? It never turned out to be the case, but I was paranoid! Dammit, this ad worked in reverse on me. Sadly, like I said, I knew friends whose dads did do drugs and were alcoholics and it wreaked havoc on their lives. I don’t know if these commercials ever helped anyone, but they sure made me afraid of everything.

10. Drinking and Driving (Go ahead, tell that Vietnam vet he’s too drunk to drive)

Besides drugs, crime, abductions, unwittingly burning down forests and going headlong to your bloody death out the window of your dad’s pickup, you also had to worry about drunk drivers! My parents didn’t drink but my uncles did, and man they sure seemed to like driving around while tipping back a beer. My mom was careful with this one. If we met my uncle and his family at the park and wanted to ride home with them, mom would be like, “No, not this time, maybe next time.” Looking back I’m pretty sure my uncle was sloshed! All my uncles have passed, so I’m not outing anyone whose feelings I can hurt, but I think they would have admitted to it. They thought everyone should be able to drink and drive. The commercials, aw man, there were a lot of them, and the damn commercial said, “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive.” I cannot tell you how big of a deal this was. There were over 20,000 deaths per year and it is estimated that 60% of all traffic accidents were alcohol related! That’s crazy. From a kid’s perspective, adults were driving drunk, running over trash on the highway with a forest fire in the background on the way to abduct a kid and break into someone’s house. The 80s were sure madness.

Now again, these commercials put a lot of pressure on kids to do something about this. They were all pointed at us. We were supposed to fix these adult problems, dammit. To that end, I remember my uncle being over at my house. He was drinking all day. My grandfather, who I never met, was a raging, abusive alcoholic, so my dad didn’t let people openly drink in the house, but my uncle would sneak it. He kept it out in the car and brought it in in a mug. Once he was leaving and I gathered up enough courage to say to this guy, this southern drinker who had worked construction all his life, “Hey, are you sure you’re good to drive, I think you might have had too much to drink.” His eyes flashed with anger. I think he may have smacked me if my dad wasn’t standing a few feet away. “Boy, you never tell me if I can drive or not, I’ve been driving long before you were born,” and he kept angrily cussing me and bitching at me all the way to his car. I could hear him in the car still saying how dare I say something. The TV said friends don’t let friends drink and drive. This was my uncle. I loved him, but TV didn’t know crap about telling people what they could or couldn’t do. My dad told me, “Yeah, you really shouldn’t talk about his drinking. If he wants to do it, it’s up to him.” So confusing. My uncle had several DUIs until I think they took his license away, and I don’t know how many car accidents.

Finish it!

Ok, I tried to make this quick, painless, and fun. See, remember how it was in the 80s? You were traveling down the highway with your mom smoking and throwing things out the window, with a forest fire in the background and some kid being abducted right under your nose because you forgot to lock your doors, and later you would try to go home with your cousins but your uncle would be too drunk for your mom to want you to ride with him. See, fun times. Does anyone remember the 80s this way, or is it just me?

Please tell me I’m not crazy about all this in the comments.

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