By: Matt Jackson

Huntsville —     If you’re reading this, it’s quite possible that you weren’t even born yet in the summer of 1986, or if you were, you were too young to know what movies were just yet. If you happen to be a little older, perhaps you hadn’t yet cinematically matured, preferring instead the fine films of the Walt Disney Company. In any event, it was awhile ago, so don’t feel bad if it seems you’re out of the loop.
    The ‘80s was the first blockbuster era. On the heels of late ‘70s classics like Star Wars and Jaws, a host of huge films started hitting the theaters each summer to capitalize on the newfound moneymaking potential of movies with lots of special effects, big stars and tons of Hollywood pizzazz (yes, there was a time before this was prevalent; movies cost money, after all). As the 1980s dawned, it was quite uncommon for a film to clear $100 million at the box office. By the end of the decade, it was almost a failure if a film didn’t hit that mark.
    Somewhere along the way, blockbusters became all about the polish and the bombast, but a few films in that mix turned out to be classics. A quarter century ago, somewhere on the journey between the birth of the blockbuster and the oversaturation of it, 1986 produced an unlikely cluster of truly great films that also made tons of money. We’re not talking just films that were passable, or films that people still watch. We’re talking about absolute classics. In fact, the whole year produced a host of great cinematic achievements, but focusing just on the summer, you get these five.

‘Top Gun’
Debate the cinematic profundity of it all you want, there’s no denying that Top Gun is a bona fide movie classic, and if you first saw it between the ages of 6 and 10 you were probably convinced that it was pretty much the coolest film of all time. It’s the flick that launched Tom Cruise to megastardom and made director Tony Scott (who went on to make films like Unstoppable and Domino) a hot Hollywood commodity, and with good reason. The flick teems with blockbuster style energy. The fighter jets themselves become characters, and even if parts of the plot are clichéd (the whole angry hero thing Maverick’s got going on was like a disease in the ‘80s), the flick just moves. It’s a frenzied, thrilling picture with lots of polish that still doesn’t lose its heart. Most of that heart is thanks to the presence of Anthony Edwards as the adorably goofy Goose, but Cruise, Val Kilmer and the rest of the cast always look like they’re having fun, and that’s a real key when it comes to making action movies work. Even that beach volleyball scene, which may well be one of the most uncomfortable things committed to film, can’t overshadow how much fun this movie is.

‘Stand By Me’
    With his third film, director Rob Reiner cemented himself as a classics factory. He’d already made This is Spinal Tap and would go on to make seminal films like Misery, A Few Good Men and When Harry Met Sally, but Stand By Me still stands for many as his most compelling. Adapted from a Stephen King novella (no, he doesn’t just write horror), it’s the story of a group of boys (Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, River Phoenix and Jerry O’Connell) who set out one day to see a dead body in the woods. The journey becomes an unlikely kind of adventure, and in many ways makes the boys into men. The film is notable not only for its use of many young actors who would later become stars (Keifer Sutherland is also in it), but also for its astounding heart and deep sense of cinematic nostalgia.

‘The Fly’
    The original The Fly is a corny ‘50s mad scientist movie about a man who invents a machine that malfunctions and gives him the head of a fly. Take that concept and put it in the hands of horrormeister David Cronenberg (whose other credits include Rabid, Scanners and The Brood), and you’ve got something truly chilling. Jeff Goldblum stars as Seth Brundle, who invents a teleportation system that goes horribly wrong when a fly gets in the chamber with him and their DNA fuses. But instead of simply sprouting a comic fly head, Brundle slowly changes, developing first a few of the more advantageous attributes of a fly (the reflexes and the proportional strength), and then the more unpleasant ones (vomiting acid onto his food and then slurping it all up). It’s a chilling but also quite amusing film that, like many of Cronenberg’s classics, is all about the horror within.

‘Aliens’
    Yes, he made the first two Terminator pictures, Titanic and the monstrously profitable Avatar, but James Cameron’s best film is Aliens. When it came time to make a sequel to Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Alien, it would have been easy to just find a way to make the exact same film, but with more monsters. For all its sci-fi posturing, Alien is really just a haunted house flick in outer space, and the best way to follow up a movie about a haunted house is by making a movie with an even more haunted house, right? Cameron didn’t think so, and instead made his follow-up a film not about phantoms, but about war. Sigourney Weaver reprises her role as the intrepid Ellen Ripley, but this time she’s traveling with a group of marines to an interstellar outpost in response to a distress call that may or may not relate to the creatures she once encountered on a starship. As it turns out, the place is crawling with those creatures, and the battle becomes a clash between the technologically superior marines and the primitive but savage aliens. Cameron famously described it as a Vietnam War movie in outer space. It’s a fitting description for a classic of both the sci-fi and action genres.

‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’
    John Hughes was the king of the teen film when he made Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986. He had already churned out the screenplay for Pretty In Pink and written and directed Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science, and was quickly becoming a legend in his own time. With Bueller, Hughes capped off his era of teen pictures with a love letter to the genre and to his hometown of Chicago. Matthew Broderick launched his career as cocky, wise-cracking Ferris, a seemingly brilliant kid whose only ambition is to do anything but stay in school. The film moves like a road movie, but never leaves the Windy City. Hughes somehow manages to take the viewer on a sightseeing tour of Chicago while never losing sight of Ferris’ grand ambition to have the best day ever both to delight himself and his friends and to spite his overbearing, malicious principal. It’s not the most moving of his films (that’s The Breakfast Club) or the most famous (that’s Home Alone) or even the funniest (that might be Uncle Buck), but Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a tremendously entertaining film that’s both a tribute to the constructive apathy of youth and a master class on how to make a good teen comedy.