My Five FavoriteMovies Growing Up

Weird Science is one of those movies that could only exist in the 80s.

Two nerds use a computer, a Barbie doll, some hacked government equipment, lightning, bras on their heads, and pure teenage desperation to create the perfect woman.

That is pretty much the plot. Two guys make a girl to have sex with and fail to have sex with her.

And when I was a kid, I accepted every single second of it without question.

This movie made computers seem like magic boxes that could do absolutely anything. Forget Oregon Trail or typing class. Apparently, if you knew what you were doing, a computer could create Kelly LeBrock, destroy a house, summon bikers, and somehow make you cool by Monday morning.

What a ride!

Gary and Wyatt were exactly the kind of awkward kids a lot of us understood. They were not popular. They were not tough. They were not exactly drowning in confidence. They were me.

Then Lisa shows up and basically becomes a chaos fairy godmother.

She does not just make them cooler. She forces them to stop being pathetic. That is what I love about it now. Lisa was just the catalyst for them taking control of their lives.

Also, Bill Paxton as Chet is one of the greatest obnoxious older brothers in movie history.

And then he gets turned into a giant pile of shit.

Weird Science is dumb, loud, inappropriate, ridiculous, and very much not something that would get made the same way today.

It ruled.

First of all, calling this movie The Final Chapter is hilarious. This franchise saw the word “final” and treated it like a polite suggestion.

But if I’m picking one Friday the 13th movie from when I was growing up, this is the one. Because honestly, I didn't see the others until much later. I saw this at a drive-in movie. My parents tried to make me sleep, but I saw boobs, and that was that.

This movie has everything I wanted from a scary movie as a kid. Doomed teenagers. Bad choices. The feeling that nobody is safe. Jason doesn't walk into this movie like a villain. He walks in like a hurricane you hope will miss your house. It won't.

Corey Feldman was great as Tommy Jarvis, but honestly, he was the last thing I cared about in the movie. I just needed carnage and nudity, and this movie had them in spades!

The Breakfast Club is the oddball on this list, because nobody gets stabbed, set on fire, created by a computer, or attacked in their dreams.

It is just five kids stuck in detention.

This movie was my introduction to conversation movies. I learned that you don't always need big action setups or heads rolling. Sometimes you just need a conversation. That seems to be an art this world lacks today.

This movie really taught me three important life lessons.

Everybody has a label.

The label is usually wrong.

Labels are stupid.

That is not exactly a hard idea to understand when you are a kid. Adults love putting kids in boxes. Schools love putting kids in boxes. Other kids love putting kids in boxes. Hell, sometimes you put yourself in a box because at least then you know where to stand.

The Breakfast Club made it feel like everybody was walking around with more going on than they showed. That hit me.

And that ending fucking works.

That fist in the air is not just some cool freeze-frame. It is a victory lap for every kid who ever felt like school was trying to sand them down into something easier to manage.

Freddy Krueger was different. Freddy got you when you fell asleep. That is such a simple idea, and it is still brilliant. That made Freddy feel impossible.

As a kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street felt like horror with imagination. It was not just a guy with a knife chasing people around. It was dream logic. It was weird images. It was impossible rooms and body bags and claw marks and that feeling that the world could change on you at any second. I understood none of it!

Freddy was terrifying, but he was also interesting.

That is the thing. Even before he became the full comedy roastmaster of the later sequels, Freddy had personality. He enjoyed what he was doing. He was theatrical. He did not just want to kill you. He wanted to make a show out of it. And the glove alone is one of the greatest horror weapons ever created.

I absolutely should not have been watching this as young as I was. But I did. And I loved it.

This is number one, and I will not be taking questions from the committee.

Real Genius was everything I wanted in a movie growing up. It was smart, sarcastic, weird, rebellious, and somehow made being the smartest person in the room look cooler than being the strongest person in the room.

Val Kilmer was the entire movie for me. He was brilliant, but he also treated life like one long setup for the perfect smart-ass response. He was not the jock. He was not the square-jawed hero. He was not trying to be cool in the usual movie way.

He was cool because he was smarter than everybody else and knew it.

That is a dangerous character to show a sarcastic kid.

Real Genius made intelligence look fun. Not like some after-school special where the lesson is “study hard and eat your vegetables.” This movie said being smart meant you could build lasers, mock authority, live in a secret room, and turn an evil government project into the greatest popcorn delivery system in human history.

The ending is still perfect. A house exploding with popcorn is the kind of movie ending that makes your brain go, “Well, I guess movies are allowed to do anything.”

And honestly, they should be.

Real Genius made being smart look like a superpower. Not the kind where you wear a cape. The kind where you look at a problem, see the scam behind it, and figure out how to turn the whole thing back on the people who thought they were using you.

That hit me harder than any punch, explosion, or slasher kill.

It was funny. It was weird. It was sarcastic. It had heart without getting all syrupy about it. And it had Val Kilmer giving one of the most effortlessly cool performances of the entire 80s.

So yeah, Real Genius is my number one.