I was born in 1986.
I grew up in the 1990s and am a child of Jurassic Park and Home Alone; their John Williams scores will forever fill me with pure happiness and nostalgic pleasure.
After years of causing shock when admitting I’d never seen it, last weekend I watched Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys for the very first time and really bloody enjoyed it. As a gobby film geek, I get a lot of stick when I haven’t seen a film everyone else has seen, and so it goes…
Colleague/Friend/Random house party attendee – “You know in Top Gun where…”
Me – “I’ve not seen Top Gun”
Colleague/Friend/Random house party attendee – “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN TOP GUN, CALL YOURSELF A FILM FAN!”
Me – “It looks shite though? Isn’t it actually a bit shite?”
I find it hard to believe that every member of my generation in the Western World watched The Goonies as a child except me. Surely not? It could be that my parents just had different tastes and showed me Some Like it Hot or The Life of Brian instead of Star Wars (they’ve never seen it) or it could just be that I missed a few things; I still haven’t seen Bergman’s The Seventh Seal either, but no-one tells me off for that, bizarrely…
Though maybe, just maybe, some of these films just aren’t very good? Could it be that? Perhaps.
I saw Willow fairly recently after hearing it talked about with such fondness for many years, and thought it was baggy tosh, but surely I would’ve loved the fantastical shit out of it if only I’d seen it in my younger and more formative years… I must stress, this is not about film snobbery, I remember watching Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone over and over again, as well as its sequel The Jewel of the Nile – I loved those films and they’re definitely not classics. I only discovered the superior action adventure franchise Indiana Jones much later on. I didn’t see ET, Ghostbusters, The Breakfast Club, The Princess Bride or Back to the Future until my later teens or twenties, but I’ve gone out of my way to watch them because either I knew they’d be good or I knew they’d be great and of course I love them all dearly, except ET, that was a little disappointing. The Lost Boys was trashy but charming, totally 80s and completely mad. Pre-Buffy, teen gore fantasy fun and super silly. I’d watch it again anytime.
So it’s time to fill in a little more of the giant 80s cult cinema hole in my heart. I’ve identified the following films I STILL haven’t seen either by choice, because they look like pants (Highlander), or just through sheer circumstance, to watch and respond to in the following weeks:
The ‘Burbs
Evil Dead II
Flash Gordon
Flight of the Navigator
Gremlins
Highlander
Predator
Short Circuit
Top Gun
So, “I’ll be back” (I’ve seen that one).
Han x