After the last few years, one might be inclined to think that it is downhill from here given how many heavy hitters there were but really, when it comes to formative movies for me during childhood, it just keeps going up. This year created a bit of a conundrum in terms of what to choose and I feel like just having a top five is increasingly unreasonable. When putting this list together I called an audible and dropped two movies out in favor of two others but it is one of those things where it depends on when you ask me and the order might change. Still, I feel like these five are as close to definitive as I can get.

This year is weird because it really doesn’t have any horror on it. From a timeline perspective, this was still a year or two before I was able to overcome my fear of horror movies and get really into them but even looking back, there weren’t any that broke the top five this year. This is a year of sci-fi and comedy, with just a touch of action. We are back on the horror train next week but this is one of the few horror-free years of the whole list.

As always, this year has a bunch of runners up which include in no particular order: Big Trouble in Little China, Iron Eagle, Troll, House, Highlander, Gung Ho, Rad, the Money Pit, Critters, Short Circuit, Space Camp, Karate Kid Part II, Labyrinth, Vamp, One Crazy Summer, The Fly, Night of the Creeps, Stand by Me, Crocodile Dundee, the Wraith, Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, Little Shop of horrors, and Brighton Beach Memoirs.  

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 1986 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 40-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1. Aliens-James Cameron

Probably one of the best sequels ever made, right up there with Godfather II and Terminator 2, Aliens takes the horror from the original movie and ups the ante to full on sci-fi action with more Xenomorphs and a squad of space marines with auto-cannons. It probably shouldn’t work but it does and a lot of that has to do with James Cameron.

Taking place 57 years after the original Alien, Aliens finds Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) conscripted (through thinly veiled threat)by Weyland-Yutani to accompany a squad of space marines and a corporate douche canoe, Burke (Paul Reiser), to LV426, where her ship had originally encountered the Xenomorph, after settlement Harley’s Hope goes radio silent. This time instead of one alien there are a metric shit ton and things go pear shaped very quickly which is exacerbated by Burke’s mission to get a couple of people impregnated by face huggers to take back to Earth. Aliens manages to take the threat of the first movie and turn it all the way up. While it doesn’t replicate the horror of the first, this escalation feels like a perfect next step in the franchise.

The story goes that when Cameron pitched this movie he walked into the boardroom where Alien was written on a dry erase board and just put an ‘S’ on the end and then made that S a dollar sign. This feels especially fitting for a franchise largely based around the evils of corporate greed and excess. It also wasn’t wrong as Aliens scored 20th Century Fox an almost exact monetary repeat of the first movie. It could be argued that it did marginally worse given that Aliens cost roughly six million more and made about one million dollars less but 185million worldwide off of an 18 million dollar budget is a hit regardless.

These first two movies are remarkable for how good they both are while feeling like different sorts of movies. They feel of a piece but they are fundamentally different films, the first offering claustrophobic scares from growing tension and the second equally tense action scenes that emphasize character and spectacle. Alien was not wanting for good characters but Aliens kind of blows it away. With sharp, quotable dialogue and interpersonal conflicts that are always relatable and, in some cases, build from the first film’s conflicts, Aliens honors the original while carving out its own place in cinematic history.

The performances are great across the board with Sigourney Weaver again commanding the screen and proving why it is important to listen to the smart woman when she tells you what is up. Bill Paxton is legendary as Hudson offering up one of cinema’s best cowards with infinitely quotable lines. Michael Biehn is the perfect Hicks, which we almost didn’t get as James Remar was originally cast. Remar is a great actor but I am glad things shook out the way they did. Lance Hendrickson offers a different take on a synthetic than we got in the original film and managed to give Bishop heart while also delivering the needed robotic detachment. Paul Reiser is the platonic ideal of a slimy corporate shill who can come as a friend and betray you on a dime. Carrie Henn’s Newt is at once fiercely capable and achingly vulnerable. It is a shame that this was her only role. Al Matthews’s Apone is one of my favorite characters of the 80s and Matthew’s made him so much fun. You could do this with every actor in the movie because they are all great and this is what makes this movie so good. If you didn’t give a fuck about the characters or what happens to them, then none of this works at all.

I have already spoiled how I saw this movie in the Alien entry. My mom thought it would be fine since there was a little girl in it. That is another thing I have to thank Carrie Henn for. I thought this movie was one of the coolest things I had ever seen in my life. This is a fairly common refrain when it comes to James Cameron movies. When I watched Alien the next day it scared the living fuck out of me but I still thought Aliens was rad.

Aliens is a movie I can watch over and over again, and do with a fair amount of regularity. I rewatch Alien as well my heart lies with Aliens. No one has been able to make a better Alien sequel despite many, many attempts. Not even Ridley Scott has been able to replicate the success, although I like Prometheus a lot more than most and Alien Covenant isn’t terrible. I don’t outright hate any Alien movies, although Alien 3 comes pretty close. I think that Alien Romulus comes in third for me in the Alien movie rankings, with Alien Resurrection coming in at fourth. This may be blasphemy to most Alien fans but it is like a proto-Firefly with xenomorphs and I can’t argue much with that. I really wish that we would have gotten the proposed Neil Blomkamp Aliens follow up that ignores Alien 3 and brings back Hicks and Newt and I am still kind of mad about it. I am not sure where the Alien series will go from here beyond season 2 of Alien: Earth but wherever it goes I am here for it for better or for worse. That series loyalty is largely due to what Cameron did with Aliens and I don’t ever see that changing.

2.Top Gun-Tony Scott

When Top Gun released, there were protests calling it a piece of jingoistic propaganda serving as a military bolstering recruitment tool. I find that to be preposterous but on the other hand it did make me want to join the Navy to fly jets. Migraines kept me grounded and out of the military but I still think that Top Gun is cool as hell.

Tony Scott, brother of Alien’s Ridley Scott, took this on after his iconic vampire film the Hunger to deliver an equally iconic action movie dripping with cool style that was entirely different than his last one. Top Gun is chock full of iconic lines and scenes with a cool that feels effortless. It also manages to give us the most homoerotic volleyball scene ever put to film without making anyone feel particularly weird about it.

I saw Top Gun on VHS as soon as it was released and it set my house on fire. Both of my parents loved it so much that they then rented Iron Eagle and loved that too. My mom was particularly into this movie and it was the first time I ever really saw her break into any kind of patriotic fervor. Whether this came from a real sense of patriotism or a love for Val Kilmer’s abs is a secret she took with her to the great beyond. For my part, I wanted to fly jets and it was somewhat heartbreaking to learn that I would never be able to. On the other hand, I also never had to shoot anyone down or explode at high speed over the Pacific Ocean so it all kind of worked out. I can watch Top Gun anytime, anywhere and I frequently do. I guess it is just that I often feel the need…the need for speed.

3.Ferris Bueller’s Day Off-John Hughes

Ferris Bueller is a movie that my dad brought home from the video store on Friday night and I had no idea what the hell it was. It sounded weird and I wasn’t especially interested. My dad’s video picks could either be iconic or he could bring home some B-movie bullshit that looked like it was made for a dollar fifty and a wish. I was a kid, though, so I watched it anyway and I absolutely loved it. Ferris was the sort of person I wished I could be all the while knowing that the person I was was Cameron.

It was kind of amazing to me how relatable the movie was while also existing within as grounded a magical realism as I could imagine. I loved the Meta-textual elements of Ferris’s direct addresses of the audience, with bullet points appearing on screen as he goes through the steps to calling out of school. I wanted to go to Chicago so bad when I saw the movie and when I actually did go to Chicago, I did the same thing they did when I went to Willis Tower (Formerly the Sears Tower) and I was just one of the many doing the same thing for the same reason. Most of my wonder at Chicago’s filming locations was from the Dark Knight but there was a lot of Ferris in there too (and some Married with Children for good measure).

Ferris Bueller was a movie that taught me a lot about comedy and informed my sensibilities quite a bit. This was another movie that I watched over and over and have quoted on the regular ever since. I think there is very little wrong with it and it exists in time as a fairly perfect comedy. That Jeffery Jones was convicted of child porn charges is both horrifying and tragic as it casts a dark and subversive shadow on everything he was a part of. That is really the only negative post-script one can apply to Ferris Buller’s Day Off.

4.Three Amigos-John Landis

A tried and true story trope stretching back to the Seven Samurai and beyond, Three Amigos is a broad comedy involving silent film actors accidentally brought in to deal with a bandit and his gang who have been terrorizing a small Mexican town before they teach the town to defend themselves. I didn’t know anything about film history when I first saw this movie and thought it was one of the most hilarious and original ideas ever. Having seen it done over and over again in everything from the Magnificent Seven to a Bug’s Life has done nothing at all to diminish how good Three Amigos is.

The Three Amigos was a pretty big deal to me as a kid. It was filmed at Old Tucson Studios, which at the time was a working movie studio in the town I grew up in. I used to go to Old Tucson all the time so seeing sets and outdoor locations that I recognized made Three Amigos feel more like it was mine than most other movies at the time.

I saw this originally in the theater with my parents but the most memorable time watching it was a sleep over in which we rented it the night before going to a now-closed water park called Justin’s Water World, which was filled with badass hydro-tubes and water slides. Looking back now, the place was a nightmare with hot rocks and concrete to walk on between slides and tubes made of corrugated metal that would essentially feel like you were sliding down superheated stove coils. But we had a ton of fun, particularly as we went down each slide and started the theme song, holding the one falsetto note the entire way down the slide. I am positive that we annoyed everyone else at the park that heard it but definitely not any more than we annoyed my parents when we did it repeatedly in the car on the way there and the way back. I am not certain how my parents didn’t burn the video tape and throw the VHS player into the alley but I am glad they didn’t.

I have a deep and abiding love for Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase that continues to this day. I love them in many other movies as well but it is really hard to argue with the three of them in this movie. I have watched this movie so many times over the years it would be impossible to count but when I put this on to prepare for this article, I found myself laughing as hard as if it was the first time I saw it and you really can’t ask for anything better from a comedy.

5.The Transformers the Movie-Nelson Shin

Sandwiched between the second and third seasons of the cartoon, The Transformers the Movie brought the transforming robots from Cybertron to the big screen. The cartoon operated largely as a half hour long commercial for the popular toy line and everyone involved severely underestimated just how much that cartoon meant to the legion of children who watched it. So, when it came time to make a movie of the Transformers they decided to use it as an opportunity to clear out the old toy line to make room for the new toy line. So, they had beloved characters slaughtered wholesale and taught an entire generation of children a harsh lesson about grief and despair for which few of them were even remotely prepared.

I wasn’t able to see The Transformers the Movie (clunky title and all) in the theater but my parents bought me the soundtrack on vinyl. I loved it and it was probably most responsible for getting me into metal later in life. It also did not have any kind of spoiler warning and one of the tracks was called ‘the Death of Optimus Prime.’ Just seeing those words was devastating and I was left with the knowledge that my favorite cartoon character of all time was going to that big junkyard in the sky. The wait to see the movie was excruciating but I thought at least I would be emotionally prepared when I finally managed to. I was wrong.

When I finally managed to rent the movie and watch it was annihilated. It wasn’t just Prime. Just about everyone that I loved went down and did so in horrifying ways. Watching smoke pour out of Iron Hide’s mouth while being gunned down by Megatron was the stuff of nightmares. I didn’t want a new line of toys. I wanted the characters that I loved. This was one of the the first and most painful lessons in loss and the indifference of pure, unadulterated capitalism I would receive. It was brutal and I was reduced to tears, which was apparently a familiar reaction from the kids who saw it in the theater. It is a generational wound that Hasbro is still trying to make up for even up to the movie’s 40th anniversary.

Still, deep seated trauma aside, The Transformers the Movie fucking rules. I still roll tears when Optimus dies but the movie is rad. A lot of people my age still blame Hot Rod for Prime going down but bro was trying to help. Is Rodimus Prime as cool as Optimus? No, but Judd Nelson is cool. There are a lot of people who think that Ultra Magnus should have taken over but he was a little bitch who went to literal pieces when the going got too hard. This movie is a real testament to how much you can love something despite it being painful at the same time. The Michael Bay Transformers movies aren’t fit to smell Stan Bush’s shit let alone The Transformers The Movie’s. This movie hurts so good.