This was the first year I was taken to a movie, much to the annoyance of people around us, I am sure. My parents said that the first movie I was ever taken to was Star Wars. Obviously, I do not remember that experience but it is as fitting as any movie could be. Maybe Jaws would have been more fitting but I wasn’t alive yet so I will take Star Wars. This year’s movies fall a bit more into the sweet spot of the sorts of things that I love but they were all things I saw later in life and my opinions of them and their placement in my own personal preference is colored by that.

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 1977 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 49-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.Star Wars

First things first, I am not going to list this as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I know that is the title now and I am not the sort of pretentious dick that rejects that out of hand all the time. I usually call this a New Hope when I talk about it. But in 1977 it was just Star Wars and was not given the episode IV designation until the 1981 re-release. So since this is about 1977, I am just going with Star Wars. I am also not talking about the special editions here either. I am just talking about Star Wars ass Star Wars.

This impact that Star Wars had when it was released was massive and it is well documented so I will not belabor it here but it is still pretty amazing that this thing came out when it did. The effects from newly formed Industrial Lights and Magic were insane for the time and the fact that it more or less held up for decades before George Lucas tweaked them is as good of an argument for the power of practical effects as anyone could make. It was a technological marvel that captured imaginations in a way that the world had not really seen before.

Critical reception, beyond Pauline Kael and assorted others, was largely rapturous and fan response exploded which kept the film in theaters for over a year. It’s box office was so massive that, adjusted for inflation, it is the second highest grossing American movie and fourth overall. It spawned a merchandising empire, pun intended,  that that assured Lucas more money than he would ever need and redefined how studios looked at those sorts of deals. Star Wars spawned a fandom so dedicated that 49 years later people are still arguing about it ad nauseum any chance they get. Even the current president tried (and failed) to co-opt Star Wars for his own propaganda with a horrifying misread of what the series is about and what colors of lightsabers the good guys and bad guys have. This is all very impressive for a movie that theaters didn’t want to show and 20^th Century Fox had to package with The Other Side of Midnight in order to get it on screens.

The movie itself is a pastiche of Flash Gordon serials, Kurosawa samurai films, and the car tuning culture that Lucas explored in American Graffiti (1973). Some have used this as a point of critique of the series and of George Lucas, but even borrowing and homaging elements from other things, Star Wars finds its own life and identity and is certainly greater than the sum of its parts.

Star Wars is as known of a quantity as you can get so there is not much point to rehashing the trials and tribulations of its production and reception. There were many and in a world where it is a miracle anything gets made at all, it is especially amazing that this exists and is what it is.

Despite having seen this as a one-year old in the theater, I didn’t remember any of that and my first introduction to Star Wars was at a friend’s birthday party, watching it on a rented VHS. My friend was obsessed with Star Wars in a way that feels fairly normal now but at the time was exceptional. I sat there confused by a few things. Why did it say Episode IV? Where were the other episodes? One of my friends at the party confidently told us all that they were all in black and white, according to his uncle, who had them and would one day bring them to show him. Such was the life of a eight year olds before the internet existed. The other thing I was confused by was, where were the AT-AT’s? Why were they in the desert and not in the snow? My friend explained that this was a New Hope and not Empire Strikes back, which was what I had sees more times than I had years on earth in the theater with my dad. I was gob smacked and I was immediately annoyed that no one ever told me about this first one. After the party found myself at my grandparents house playing Star Wars by myself jumping across their plastic carpet tiles like I was leaping gaps on the Death Star.

I can’t really explain what it was about the first Star Wars that especially captured my imagination after having already seen Empire Strikes back but it did. Maybe it was Luke’s beginnings on the moisture farm feeling lonely, isolated, and dreaming of something better? Afterall, I was an only child either being babysat by my grandparents or being taken to my dad’s work sites and expected to keep my head out of the stars. Maybe it was the cool effects and tech that I fervently believed was real until my mom had to break it to me that laser guns didn’t exist and there were no lightsabers or the force when I asked why military conflicts weren’t more easily sorted by technology. Maybe it was just the fact that there was more time spent with Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy, and the droids together. I am not sure but I loved it. I continue to love it. It doesn’t matter how cynical the fandom gets, I love Star Wars. I have my preferences, of course, but any Star Wars is better to me than no Star Wars. I feel genuinely bad for people who are unable to hold on to the magic of this series. All that being said, Han shot first and I don’t give a maclunkey what the special editions have to say about it.

2.Kentucky Friend Movie-John Landis

The breakout film of not only director John Landis but also writers (and eventual directors) David and Jerry Zucker, Kentucky Fried Movie is a sketch comedy movie spoofing television that kicked off the era of parody movies that continues to this day.  I saw this years after developing a massive obsession with Airplane!(1980) and Naked Gun(1988), and loved it. I am not sure if I really understood all the jokes at the time, as a kid, or if it was all of the nudity, but really dug this. There was also an element of discovery to it at the time as it wasn’t much talked about, in the same way that Police Squad was not something most people had seen even though they loved Naked Gun.

I was a teenager when I saw this for the first time so I really ate up the scatological humor and the aforementioned nudity, even while not really understanding some of the gags specific to the 70s but it still worked for me which I think spoke to its success as a comedy in general.

Watching it again recently I was struck by the fact that, with one notable exception, it has aged pretty well and even then, the deployment of the offending word has a point as opposed to just being a racial slur. When considered next to Murder By Death (1976), it is pretty remarkable that there wasn’t more that was offensive in this. The Enter the Dragon (1973) parody that makes up the longest bit of the film, a Fistful of Yen, had plenty of chances for racism but it did not take any of them. That the parts were played by Asians instead of white people in offensive make up and prosthetics was even better. That the actors were martial artists doing martial arts was even more impressive. I don’t know that I like Kentucky Fried Movie as much as the Naked Gun or Airplane! but those are high bars to get over for me. It is a lot of fun to see where all that started and there are some very funny things here. Your mileage may vary on the amount of female nudity here. It is hard to defend as anything other than gratuitous. As a teenager, I was all about it. Now, it feels a little gross. The Joy of Sex sketch with the appearance of Big Jim Slade remains my favorite part of this movie. The sequel, Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), is less successful but it still has its moments, and also Steve Guttenberg and it is hard to argue with the Guttes.

3.Close Encounters of the Third Kind-Stephen Spielberg

Stephen Speilberg’s precursor to ET is a much more contemplative and adult look at contact with aliens which is exactly why I didn’t appreciate it much when I saw it as a kid. When I first saw Close Encounters as a kid, the most noteworthy thing about it was the mashed potato gag in Weird Al’s UHF in 1989.

Watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind as an adult was a much different experience and I found myself thinking ‘wow this is really fantastic’ and then immediately chastising myself as a dipshit for dismissing it earlier. It is a good example of how age, maturity, and experience colors films and how differently you can feel about something depending on when you see them.

As it currently stands, I prefer Close Encounters to ET and I think it is just that I connect more with Roy and his fascination with the unknown than I do the plight of Elliott and ET. I think it is wild that Roy bails with the aliens at the end but I suppose it would be hard not to choose that level of discovery, especially if you don’t have to directly engage with the consequences of abandoning your family, but I do then start to think about the added anxiety of not knowing what the food and toilet situation was on the ship. You know, if love for family wasn’t enough to hold me back.

It is fairly wild that Star Wars and Close Encounters came out in the same year. Sci-fi fans were eating very well. Spielberg and Lucas were too given that they had a gentlemen’s bet going on in which each man thought the other’s movie would make more money. They agreed to give the other 2.5 % of the profit of the other’s project. Spielberg made out better on that deal given the aforementioned massive commercial success of Star Wars, but with 306 million in earnings in its own right, Close Encounters was no slouch. It came in third behind Smokey and the Bandit in second which is kind of weird, but also speaks to the power of Burt Reynolds’s mustache.

4.The Hills Have Eyes-Wes Craven

If there is a director most responsible for my pure, unadulterated terror at horror movies when I was a kid, it is Wes Craven and it is not close. A Nightmare on Elm Street fucked me up in a way that it is hard to describe (although I will do that when it appears later on this list) but part of me wonders if I had seen the Hills Have Eyes first if I would have been too busy trying to manage my anxiety and agoraphobia to notice Freddy Kruger. I might never have taken a vacation again.

Thankfully, I did not see this story of a vacationing family stalked, tortured, and slaughtered by desert dwelling mutants until I was an adult and had already shed the legacy of terror that had plagued my since I was a kid. As it is, the Hills Have Eyes remains cemented in my head as the most disturbing example of gritty 70’s ‘off the beaten path’ horror. Most people reach for Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) but I feel like the desolation and helplessness on display here is much more palpable and real. Obviously it is a matter of taste, but I think that there is something about Wes Craven’s sensibility that matches mine in very real way. He is without question my favorite horror director by volume and the Hills Have Eyes is a great example of why.

I haven’t watched any of the sequels or remakes of this and they may be alright, they may not be but I feel like you really don’t need more than what Wes Craven gives you hear. You have dread, helplessness, nuclear panic, body horror, and depravity in a tight 90 minutes that feel like an eternity in the best and most terrifying way possible. I genuinely think this is a horror masterpiece.

5.House-Nobuhiko Obayashi

Holy shit. I saw this movie a few years ago at Scream-o-rama, the Loft Theater’s annual 12-hour horror festival and I was blown away. It might be that it occupied the 4 am ‘weird shit’ spot and I was bleary eyed and incoherent but once House kicked off, I was wide awake.

Not to be confused with the 1985 William Katt vehicle (although that is also great), House is a Japanese horror movie that is equal parts hilarious, disturbing, and wackadoo. The story of a Japanese girl going to visit her Aunt’s house with a bunch of her friends from school only to find that the house is haunted. The movie plays out like a whacked out Scooby Doo episode mixed with a horror version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It is impossible to describe this acid trip of a movie but it is really fucking good. It is available on Criterion in 4K and if you like horror or weird shit, or both, you owe it to yourself to check this out. If you can watch it in a movie theater full of sleep deprived horror fans hopped up on god knows what, all the better. House rocks.