This is an interesting year because while it is not quite as chock a block with bangers as the last few years, it still has a ton of heavy hitters that make choosing and ranking difficult. In particular, the top two positions on this list are tough for me. I keep going back and forth about which one is my favorite. To put one of them at number two feels like blasphemy of the highest order and to not put one at number one feels like a betrayal of myself in a way that is difficult to articulate. So, I am left with the caveat that these top two spots depend on when you ask me. You may get a different answer but be aware, as always, that if they are in the top five, they are my favorites with very little separation in rank and preference.

Runners up this year include (in roughly release order): Action Jackson, Bloodsport, Return of the Killer Tomatoes, Willow, Maniac Cop, Kill Klowns from Outer Space, Big, Waxwork, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Young Guns, Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, They Live, Child’s Play, Scrooged, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1988 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 38-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! -ZAZ

After the cancellation of their TV show Police Squad!, a send up of cop shows like Dragnet, after only six episodes, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker (Collectively known as Zucker Abrahams Zucker or simply ZAZ) brought the concept to film with the Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

The plot of the movie is a loose Manchurian Candidate set up in which a wealthy business man Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) develops a remote control hypnosis technology that allows anyone to become an unwitting assassin and joins forces with Pahpshmir (Ray Birk) in a plot to assassinate the Queen of England. It is up to Lt Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) of Police Squad to uncover the plot and stop the assassin. While the plot really doesn’t matter a ton, it is in keeping with cop show plots at the time.

The Naked Gun, like Police Squad! before it, expertly skewers cop shows and does so the same way they did with Airplane! (they really love using exclamation points in their titles) with the actors playing it entirely straight with the parody happening around them. This rangers from sight gags, puns, double entendres, slapstick comedy, literal language, and silly situations. This movie hits the vast majority of its pitches and is very consistent all the way through with some current event style social commentary thrown in for good measure. Generally, the social commentary is fairly light here although as the series and genre progresses that becomes less the case to the genre’s overall detriment.

While the basic framework of the style of comedy and characters are consistent from Police Squad!, the Naked Gun doesn’t really recycle many jokes from the series here and delivers more of that kind of humor instead of regurgitating it. By the time we get to Naked Gun 33 1/3 we start getting entire chunks of the series thrown in, which perhaps signals that ZAZ was running out of new ideas for this franchise. Regardless, this first movie is very strong and is arguably better pound for pound than the series was.

Of the series cast, only Leslie Nielsen made the trip to the Naked Gun as Lt Drebin. Other characters from the series were present but played by different actors. George Kennedy takes over as  Captain Ed Hocken and OJ Simpson took over as Detective Nordberg. This became pretty weird in the years following this series but Simpson spends most of the movie in the hospital and the running gag throughout the series is to sideline him with injury so it reduces the amount of time with have to spend with an alleged double murderer. Priscilla Presley joins as the love interest Jane and does a great job.  Ricardo Montalban turns in my favorite of his performances this side of Kahn as Ludwig and brings a believable gravitas and style to the villain.

Comedies are difficult to talk about critically because either they are funny or not and describing jokes is never fun for anyone. Parody films existed long before the Naked Gun and it did not start the trend but they did seem to boom after Naked Gun. Spoof movies became a fairly dominant form of comedy for over 10 years before the quality went off a cliff and exploded at the bottom of a ravine of memberberries and sight gags in the misguided belief that just referencing something makes it funny.

I have talked about parody movies in general and ZAZ in particular in this project already but Naked Gun is, without question, my favorite. I loved Top Secret and Johnny Dangerously before this but the Naked Gun is just the king of this particular hill for me.

I went with my parents to see it in the theater and I loved it right away. I am sure I annoyed them with how much I talked about it. My mom liked these sorts of movies and turned me on to Airplane! and called them ‘stupid humor.’ I disagreed with her pretty vehemently and we debated about it quite a bit. I found it to be very clever humor and felt that people write it off because it is silly. Because silly and dumb are not the same thing and while some of the gags are silly for silly sake, being able to deconstruct a genre and spoof it in this way takes keen insight and understanding of how that genre works. It is the same argument I would get into with my cousin when he would tell me that Weird Al isn’t talented because writing parody songs is easy since you are just making jokes out of existing lyrics. That he then failed to do it on his own to prove his point proved mine instead. Sure, anyone can make jokes or change song lyrics but for those jokes to work and be funny? That is an order of magnitude more difficult.

Now, am I saying that the Naked Gun is the highest form of comedy? No, but I think that writing clever humor off as ‘stupid’ is a shortsighted mistake that doesn’t give the material enough credit and betrays a lack of real understanding on the part of the detractor. That there are dozens of examples of parody done badly is more evidence to my point, it is hard and you have be clever.

I think that satire and parody are very important in pointing absurdity out to people in a less confrontational way. I mentioned earlier that the social commentary of the genre was to its detriment but that is because in this case it started to lean more into xenophobic and jingoistic takes that served to widen the gap between people as opposed to closing it by pointing out the flaws in the system. It is a testament to how powerful this medium can be that it can be misused to hurt people as easily as it can be used to help.

For the Naked Gun’s part, it was largely a fun and funny movie that didn’t do much to harm anyone, although the cold opening and terrorist plot did have shades of the jingoistic nationalism that would come to infect later entries of the genre ( check out David Zucker’s An American Carol if you doubt me). Despite the eventual genre misuses and crashing into mediocrity, I still love the parody genre and the first Naked Gun movie is probably the best of all of them. That is why it ultimately sits a top the 1988 list. I really miss this kind of movie and I am happy that it is starting to make a bit of a comeback with the Naked Gun remake and Fackham Hall, even if we do need to put up with a new Scary Movie in the bargain.

2.Die Hard-John McTiernan

When ‘terrorists’ take over a Christmas Office party, it is up to a lone everyman cop, John McClane (Bruce Willis) to save his estranged wife (Bonnie Badelia). The premise is fairly simple but the movie is a tour deforce of action and suspense with a breakout villain turn from Alan Rickman as terrorist leader Hans Gruber that makes it not only one of the best action movies but one of the best CHRISTMAS movies of all time.

So much of Die Hard hangs on the lead performance by Bruce Willis and kicked off a trend away from super hero style action heroes in favor of more grounded everyman characters. The casting of Willis was a long road that took some wild turns before arriving at him.

Die Hard is based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe which is a sequel to his novel the Detective. That novel was made into a movie of the same name in 1968 starring Frank Sinatra. This complicated the casting process for John McClane as Sinatra had right of first refusal on the role. Luckily, he did not take it but  the role was offered to several other actors before Willis came on the scene including Sylvester Stallone, Richard Gere, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Burt Reynolds, Nick Nolte, Mel Gibson, Don Johnson, Richard Dean Anderson, Paul Newman, James Caan, and Al Pacino. Willis originally turned it town due to his schedule on Moonlighting but was available later when his co-star Cybil Shepard became pregnant and the show went on hiatus. Even still, the divide between TV and Movie actor was a thing at the time and producers were nervous about Bruce Willis carrying the film. This was clearly unfounded concern.

Doing this exercise, I find myself mystified that some movies came out much later than I always think of them coming out. It is weird, certain films get canonized and it feels like they have always been around. Die Hard is one such movie. It is wild to me that it didn’t come out until two years before I was in high school.

I have loved Die Hard since the first moment I watched it and Alan Rickman quickly became one of my favorite actors from then moving forward. I don’t really remember when I saw it for the first time which is weird but contributes to this feeling that it has always been around. It has led to a full on franchise as well as a litany of imitators, creating its own sub-genre. This one is not my favorite but it is definitely the best at its purest level. And it is 100% a Christmas movie. Fight me.

3.Beetlejuice-Tim Burton

The story of a couple who die and are forced to haunt their house for 100 years and try to scare the insufferable family that moves in after them, and who eventually turn to self-proclaimed bio-exorcist Beetlejuice to get rid of the family, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice blew my mind as a kid. I was fairly new to this aesthetic and I fell in love with it right away. I was interested in ghosts, I had just recently found out that the house in which I lived was haunter, and I loved the rules and the world building. I was somewhat dismayed that Michael Keaton didn’t have much screen time as Beetlejuice but the movie made up for that with a really cool story told from the ghost’s perspective.

I did not become a goth kid, nor did I emulate any of Tim Burton’s style but from a storytelling perspective, this movie was right up my alley before I really had a solid handle on what my alley was in the first place. I thought it was very funny but it was the story that really hooked me here and it has persisted in the years since. This is so much my jam I have a hard time putting it into words.

I saw this with my cousins Penny and Kelly one afternoon at the El Con theater. My parent’s dropped us off and picked us back up. My parents drove a truck with a camper on the back so Penny got to ride up front in the air conditioning as the oldest of us while Kelly and I were relegated to the entirely unsecured hotbox that was the back of the truck. I remember this distinctly not because of the heat and discomfort but more because my parents asked Penny what she thought of the movie and she said she liked it a lot except didn’t really understand the ‘bio-exorcist’ part. My parents had no idea what she was talking about since they didn’t see the movie but I did. I remember thinking at the time about the clarity with which the movie covered that and it wasn’t like I thought that I was better than my cousin for getting it more quickly, it was just the first pangs of me realizing that I engage with movies differently. In this case, I suppose it was mostly just paying attention but I really locked into it and I think that even then I approached things differently. I probably sound like a complete dipshit but at the time I just took note of it and still remember it.

The other thing I remember is the score. I really loved it and I can remember the feelings I had sitting in the theater listening to the movie as the camera zoomed around the town and over the trees. I had the soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop and on it was a song by Danny Elfman. I didn’t know from Oingo Boingo at the time so my only context for Elfman was the song Gratitude from that soundtrack. I loved that song and took note that Elfman was doing scores and I loved it too. I was very excited once I found out about Oingo Boingo because it gave me another thing to love about Danny Elfman. I have now seen him live three times and I really wish that one of these days I will get to hear Gratitude live. I have gotten to hear the Beetlejuice theme live all three times though and that is not nothing.

4.Coming to America-John Landis

Coming to America is a hilarious Eddie Murphy vehicle about an African prince who does not want to enter into an arranged marriage and travels to Queens, NY in search of love. It is as 80s of a premise as you are ever going to find but it is hilarious from beginning to end. This is one of Eddie Murphy’s great films with fantastic performances from Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, Eriq La Salle, John Amos, and Shari Headley. The beginning of the era of Eddie Murphy playing several characters  (with Arsenio Hall playing several himself), Coming to America sets up a lot of the template for Murphy’s movies into the 90s.

I saw this movie on VHS and it became a staple of my cousins and I rewatching and quoting endlessly. It is also a movie that holds up now and is largely as funny as it was at the time. The first time I saw it was with my parents and they both liked it as well, despite the content being more adult than it probably should have been. This is another entry in the saga of trying to figure out what the hell my parents thought was appropriate for me and what wasn’t. I lived through it and it still baffles me.

5. Mississippi Burning-Alan Parker

This one is a bit heavier that films have been up to this point but Mississippi Burning is a movie that had a profound effect on me when I was a kid. Based on a true story, with names changed for legal reasons, Mississippi Burning follows the investigation of the disappearance and subsequent murder of three civil rights activists in Jessup, Mississippi in 1964. Two FBI agents, Special Agent Ward (Willam Dafoe) and Special Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), with vastly different styles and backgrounds lead the investigation which ultimately leads to a clash with the Klu Klux Klan that results in further terrorizing of the black community until the responsible culprits are found and arrested.

Mississippi Burning is a very difficult watch but it is extremely engaging and well paced and performed. The cast is full of up and comers, that guys, and established actors firing on all cylinders. It is a little disturbing to see some of these guys playing horrendous racists like Steven Toboloski as the Grand Wizard masquerading as a businessman, or Michael Rooker as an especially violent klan member, or current Pa Kent from Superman Pruitt Taylor Vince as a klansman turned informant. The most head spinning is Gailard Sartain as Sherriff Stuckey spewing racist invectives when he should be the Chef at Camp Kikiki with Ernest talking about Eggs Erroneous (That is a lot of Ks in Kikiki now that I think about it).

It is not that I was unaware of racism before I saw Mississippi Burning but I don’t think I had really seen anything like that before. When I first saw this, it felt more like a horror movie than anything else. My mom wanted me to watch it with them when they rented it because she wanted to me to know. I didn’t see that kind of thing in Arizona, a state with its own race issues, but nothing like the deep south during the civil rights movement. I think this movie is the one that made me really start loving Gene Hackman and I found myself at least clinging to the notion that at least the FBI was out there to protect people and figure this stuff out. It was a child’s understanding of all of this so you’ll have to forgive the naivete at the time.

It is strange to watch this movie now. When viewed in the 80s it was more of an artifact of how bad it used to be and a testament to how far society has come. Now, it looks pretty current as we see a resurgence in white nationalism but now we are facing it with a complicit government and an FBI on the entirely wrong side. This shit should be ancient history but lately it feels more and more contemporary. I sincerely hope that we will get to a point when people make movies like Mississippi Burning about the things happening right now and a child in the future can take solace in it being a thing of the past and having characters to find safety with but hope seems pretty far away right now.