Alright guys, shit just got real. I changed this original idea from favorite movie from each year to top five because it was too hard to pick just one without acknowledging so many of the others. This year could easily be a top 25. This year is another heavy hitter with banger after banger after banger. This top five was absolutely excruciating to cut down to five movies and as much as I look at the runners up and think ‘there is no way I can leave this off and not talk about this movie’ I look at the final five and there is nothing that could go. And it kills me, it really does. There may be a pass where I go back and fill out the top 10 of some years in the future but for now, understand that the runner up list below is in roughly release order but it has so many movies that would have been number one in any other year. That is the cruel reality of this project, it is dependent on the year and when they are crammed together like this, some have to go in the runner up pile.

The huge runner up list is :Mannequin, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: the Dream Warriors, Raising Arizona, Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, The Secret of my Success, American Ninja 2: the Confrontation, The Gate, The Untouchables, Predator, Dragnet, Spaceballs, Innerspace, Adventures in Babysitting, Summer School, the Lost Boys, The Monster Squad, Near Dark, The Running Man, and Planes Trains and Automobiles.

That is a lot. And it is pared down from what it could have been. 1987 is one of the best movie years for me. It happens from time to time. Just wait until we get to 1999. It is another one.

1987 also represents the beginning of a shift in my life with movies. I am still going to movies with my parents at this point and watching a bunch of stuff on VHS. I am 11 this year so obviously I am not out on my own or anything. But there are only a few of these left before I enter the next phase of my movie journey. As we start to near the end, I find myself extra nostalgic for these halcyon years. They were really, really good and represent the foundation of my pop culture interests in general and my movie fandom in particular.

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 1987 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 39-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.Robocop-Paul Verhoeven

Robocop directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner is an ultra-violent satire on capitalism set in a dystopian future Detroit and follows Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), a cop who is brutally killed on his first day at a new precinct by a gang of drug dealers and is subsequently resurrected as Robocop, a cyborg law enforcement officer owned wholesale by Omni Consumer Projects. With the help of former partner Lewis (Nancy Allen), Robo fights against the gang and OCP while trying to find a humanity stolen from him and sold as product. Fuck this movie rocks.

The production of Robocop was not an easy one and the story behind it is just as engaging as the movie itself. Peter Weller clashed with Paul Verhoeven such that he quit the movie and had to be convinced back. The Robocop suit weighed 80lbs and the Dallas heat during filming caused Weller to lose roughly 3lbs of water weight a day. It took years to get the script right and until Verhoeven signed on, it had been rejected by just about everyone. Verhoeven himself threw the script away after reading one  page because he thought it was a stupid sci-fi movie. When he came back in from swimming, he found his wife reading it and she told him it was a fairly deep and layered satire. There is a fantastic four part documentary about the making of the movie called Robo-Doc on Amazon that is as exhaustive as any I have ever seen. If you are interested in how this movie was made at all, definitely check it out.

With such production woes it is amazing, as ever, that this movie made it out at all let alone becoming a cultural touchpoint. The satire is sharp and permeates every pour of this film. It is frequently funny while maintaining a current of trauma and grief. The amount to which people suffer in this movie on the backs of corporate elites who have no concern at all for right and wrong or justice is staggering. That their Frankenstein’s monster turns on them and disrupts their schemes in the name of a reclamation of humanity is not undercut by Robo shooting a potential rapist in the dick is some kind of insane magic trick that is a genuine marvel to behold.

The violence in this movie is extreme and several seconds had to be cut out to avoid an X-rating. Those scenes are from the boardroom scene in which a malfunctioning Ed-209 guns down an executive in a fountain of gore that would make Wes Craven blush. This over the top violence helps to punctuate the stakes and show just how far society has fallen. The sadism of the gang who kills Murphy, led by Clarince Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) is both stomach turning and brutally effective. When it is revealed that they work for OCP executive Dick Jones (Ronnie Cox) the circle of corruption is complete. It also makes Robocop feel far more prophetic than any of us should be comfortable with.

The cast of this movie is stellar with Weller offering a wooden and robotic performance that still offers emotion and glimpses at his lost humanity. Doing that while encased in an 80lbs suit and attached visor is amazing. Weller worked with a movement coach to embody Robocop. He was also method and insisted that people call him Murphy or Robo on the set, which annoyed everyone and they either ignored him or called him by his real name more. Nancy Allen’s Lewis is a strong and badass cop who is able to be kind and ‘soft’ enough to help bring Murphy back to life and is in stark contrast to Allen’s role in Carrie in which she was a vicious bully who gets everyone burned to death. Ronnie Cox had placed mostly good guy roles up to this point but he absolutely nails the smarmy corpo dickhead, a turn that sees him play a different sort of corpo dickhead in Total Recall. Miguel Ferrer’s Bob Morton is a marginally more likeable corpo dickhead, and Robocop’s creator. The script originally called for him to be an unlikeable scumbag but Ferrer brought a more likeable energy to the role so he was changed into a more sympathetic character, which really works when Boddicker bodies him in his apartment midway through the movie.

Kurtwood Smith was another actor who had previously played nicer and more intellectual characters in the past and playing against type here really brought something out of him. Boddicker is somehow both likeable and detestable. He is a monster but has an unpredictable charisma that makes him that much more dangerous. Ray Wise, Paul McCrane, and Jesse D Goins round out the rest of Boddicker’s gang and all of them offer memorable performances as absolute shitbags and worthy villains to square off against Robo.

There have been two sequels, a tv series, tv movies based on that series, a cartoon, several video games, and a reboot of Robocop since this movie came out. Those vary in quality from good to god awful but none of them come close to matching the power of this first movie. The message, satire, action, and just general ‘cool’ of this movie is untouchable and second to none.

I wanted to see Robocop so bad in theater I could taste it. Every time a commercial for it would come on I was like Ralphie asking his parents for a Red Rider BB-gun. The hard R rating kept them saying now and sadly there weren’t really any kids in it so that loop hole didn’t work out. One day shortly after release, my mom and I were out and about on some errands and the car broke down. It wasn’t very far from home but it was the middle of summer so the walk home was brutal. Because of this, we stopped at a convenience store roughly half-way home to get something to drink and they had the official Marvel comics adaptation of Robocop. I pleaded with my mom to get it for me and argued that the Comics Code Authority wouldn’t let anything too bad be in it. Either the argument worked or my mom was severely dehydrated and heat exhaustion was setting in because she bought it for me.

I read it voraciously and I loved every bit of it. I read it over and over and I was even more ravenous for the movie. I used this as leverage to argue that the movie couldn’t be too bad if they could make it into a comic. My mom said I could rent it if I edited out the swear words and violence when taping it. I genuinely gave that nonsense a shot until my mom told me to just give up because it was a fool’s errand. I asked her if I had to stop watching it and she said ‘well you have already heard and seen a bunch you shouldn’t so there is no point to stopping now.’ I think this is because she was now engrossed in the story and wanted to finish. This is also why we didn’t walk out of a screening of Basic Instinct (also Verhoeven) years later. It is worth mentioning that I was amused that when Boddicker goes to kill Bob Morton while he is snorting coke with a couple of leather clad sex workers (holy shit I was 11), in the Marvel adaptation he says “If you two lovely ladies could excuse us, we have some business to discuss” and in the movie the line is “Bitches leave.” I guess it really could be too bad if they made a comic of it.

Robocop has had a fairly profound effect on how I write and how I look at how important satire is. Just about every screenplay I have co-written for the movies my writing partner and I make has a Robocop reference in it somewhere and it has directly informed how we use media inside the movie to comment on politics and the state of moral decay in current society. Not a lot has changed as far as corporate hijacking of the American political system nor the middle and lower class having to fight for whatever scraps are offered by the top 1%. The rampant and corrupt capitalism the film gives us is an all to real reflection of the direction we are heading to right now. It offers some small amount of hope but also blows up that hope when Lewis is lying shot to pieces near the end and Murphy offers the resigned reassurance “They’ll fix you. They fix everything.” Yeah, I’ll buy that for a dollar.

2.Beverly Hills Cop 2-Tony Scott

Tony Scott’s triumphant sequel to the Martin Brest original, Beverly Hills Cop 2 is arguably the superior film. With a more stylized look and slick action movie moves, Beverly Hills Cop 2 builds off of the strength and rapport of the first while doubling down on the stakes and ramps up the fun. This is what a sequel should be like.

This was another movie I saw on VHS and there was much controversy attached. While I had the soundtrack to the first one and loved it, I was not allowed to get the soundtrack for this movie because it included George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” That shit started before the movie came out. Then cut to a Friday night after it had come out on VHS and I went out to ride my bike before we went to the video store to rent movies for the weekend. I meant to circle the block and come back home. What actually happened was that I ran into a friend from school and ended up talking to him for awhile. The topics ranged all over the place but centered on him having seen Beverly Hills Cop 2 and he was raving about how good it was. The conversation was good and I failed to take note of the passage of time. When I realized it was almost dark and sped home, I found my mom in a frenzied panic on the verge of calling the police.

In my mom’s defense, a family friend had been abducted from a chess tournament and murdered by a burgeoning serial killer so her abject terror had some weight of justification behind it. But she went apeshit. It was one of those this that went from ‘I am so glad you’re safe’ to ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing, I thought you were dead’ kind of things pretty much instantly. I apologized profusely and after a lot of crying, hugging, and general calming down of everyone involved, I asked about going to the video store now. My mom came unglued again but not quite so much and eventually after deciding not to ground me for the rest of my natural life (a sentence I would still be serving so thank god), we went to the video store and rented a Bill Cosby standup special (I think it was called 30 but I am not going to look it up because fuck that rapist fuck).

A few weeks later, after having another conversation with one of my cousins who also offered an emphatic endorsement of Cop 2, I asked mom if we could rent it and she agreed based largely on Penny’s recommendation. Then we watched it and there is a scene in a strip club and my mom became upset and grounded me for two weeks. This was my turn to come unglued because this was not something that I snuck by her. I asked and acknowledged it was rated R. And also Penny had recommended it. I am not sure if that led to a Christmas Story style bought of retribution where my mom called my aunt and Penny got hers across town, but I think that is how it lives in my head cannon (that is two Christmas Story references this article. Will I go for three? Time will tell). You’ll all be relieved to know that I successfully lawyered my way out of being punished for watching a movie I was given permission to watch but it came with the cost of increased scrutiny of what I was watching. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have mentioned that there was ALSO a strip club scene in the original film which they had let me watch without issue. Reminding my mom of that kind of a lapse was never really a good idea but on the same token, I have to fight injustice where I find it. It is just how I am wired, like Robocop.

3.Lethal Weapon-Richard Donner

Lethal Weapon, written by Shane Black and directed by Richard Donner, isn’t the first buddy cop movie, not really, but it is probably the most important one. It set up the template for so many others that followed and was the urtext of this kind of movie. One aging and by the book detective being paired up with a loose cannon cop with a death wish and sent to stop Gary Busey and a cadre of bad guys is a pretty classic formula that we have seen replicated over and over ever since.  Mel Gibson is a problematic dude these days but he was perfect and iconic here. He is one of those actors where I can’t walk away from his previous work before we knew he was a racist, sexist douche canoe.

I saw Lethal Weapon 2 before I saw this movie and I continue to maintain it is the far superior film but this first movie is legendary and important for kicking this whole genre into high gear. I saw the second one in theaters with mom and dad and went back and rented this. I am sure the fact that it is rate-R and yet was no problem for me to watch with my parents had nothing to do with my mom having an almost disturbing crush on Mel Gibson but this is another movement in the bizarre and mysterious dance I did all through my childhood of trying to figure out what I would get in trouble for watching and what I wouldn’t. It is also strange to think that this was a time when Gary Busey could pull off legitimately scary villain as opposed to free-range weirdo but here were are. He was awesome in this movie. It is further weird to think that I am older that Murtaugh was when he was saying he was too old for this shit and I don’t feel too old for much of anything aside, maybe, from having hair.

4.Evil Dead 2-Sam Raimi

When I was a kid I went to a movie at the drive-in with my parents. I don’t remember what movie it was now. What I remember is that I glanced at one of the other screens and saw roughly one single second of Evil Dead 2 and whatever scene I saw scared me so badly that I was afraid to sleep in my own bed that night. I was 11 so the time of crawling into bed with my parents had come to the sort of end that entails your dad telling you very sternly that the time of crawling in bed with them had come to an end. So, instead I slept on the floor on the mom’s side of the bed and woke up before they did and snuck back to my room so they didn’t know I was still so scared of horror movies (they still knew anyway).

Cut now to 1993 and I am sitting in a theater with two friends from the video store I rented at and Don, the one who tutored me in math and who was a massive fan of schlocky horror, b-movies, and porn, explained to me that the film we were about to watch, Army of Darkness, was the third installment of the Evil Dead franchise. I was gobsmacked because I had seen trailers for this thing and it was a horror-comedy at best and a straight up farce comedy at worst (read:even better). Don explained that the first movie was legit horror but the second was very tongue in cheek and funny. I loved Army of Darkness and went home mystified by what I had seen based on that time years earlier where I slept on the floor.

I talked to my mom about it and she was aware of Evil Dead but hadn’t seen them. So I rented both of them and she watched both of them with me (and still would not cop to being a horror fan). When I got to Evil Dead 2 I found it to be hilarious and delightful and it remains one of my favorite movies to this day. I have no earthly idea what could have scared me so bad when I was 11 but I see it as a great reclamation of something that had terrified me and now delighted me. It solidified Bruce Campbell to me as someone damn close to godhood and has made me even more fiercely loyal to Sam Raimi than I was after Darkman. I see Evil Dead 2 in theaters as often as I can and I have never failed to have a fantastic time with crowds just as excited as I am.

Last summer I visited the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburg which was the filming location of Dawn of the Dead and the mall now has a horror museum that contains original pieces of the cabin in the woods set from Evil Dead 2 as well as the animatronic of Ash’s hand after he cuts it off and it runs around like a murderous Thing. I was there with my friend Troy and I am so grateful for that experience because he died this past Tuesday. I don’t want to get too far off topic but he was an amazing person who I have known for over 20 years I will miss him every day of however much time I have left on this Earth. I am glad that something I love like Evil Dead 2 is tied to how much I loved my friend. Also featured in this museum is a Jersey for the Monroeville Zombies from the Kevin Smith film Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which was filmed in Pittsburg. I met Troy on a Kevin Smith fan forum so it was kind of a nice full circle moment for us there in that museum. It was as fitting as us then going to the church at which Kevin Smith filmed Dogma, the movie that brought me to the forums in the first place. All that to say, I miss you Troy and I am glad I got to spend time with you last summer at places that meant something important to us.

5.The Princess Bride-Rob Reiner

As it has been well established, we rented movies every Friday night from Best Video when I was a kid. This one weekend my cousin Kelly spent the night and when my mom went to pick her up they swung by the video store and rented movies. I was at home doing god knows what. They showed up and announced that they had rented the Princess Bride. I was immediately turned off. Kelly said it had Cary Elwes in it and she had a big crush on him. Less than being unmoved, I was moved that much farther away from ever wanting to watch that movie and I told them so as loudly and obnoxiously as my 11-year-old body would allow.

Later that night, I was offered another opportunity to watch it and I said no way, it sounds like a girly (jesus fucking christ) movie with romance and kissing in it. I walked back to my room as if I had just won some major revolutionary victory and played video games in my room. Eventually I needed to go to the kitchen and get some pizza and I walked in to see there was sword fighting going on the tv in the living room. I walked in and said ‘what is this?’ I loved sword fighting more than just about anything back then. My mom said ‘it is the Princess Bride, you said you didn’t want to watch it.’ I told her that I did now and she promptly told me no and to go back to my room because I had been such a little shit about it early. And so, hoisted upon my own petard, I sulked my way back to my room completely unaware that I had inadvertently recreated the opening moments of the movie in the Fred Savage role.

The next day, Kelly and I watched the movie together and I loved it so much more than just the sword fighting. The Princess Bride quickly became one of my favorite movies, and it even had Jerry Dandrige (Fright Night) himself, Chris Sarandon as the villain! I read the book and fell even deeper in love and the movie became a short hand of things I loved.

Many years later I was hanging out with my friends Amie and Bethany on New Year’s Eve and we were trying to decide what to do. I mentioned that the Princess Bride was playing at the Loft at midnight and both ladies hit with ‘I’ve never seen that.’ I said ‘Okay, that is what we are doing then.’ I sat on the aisle because I was super particular at the Loft in those days due to past awkward trauma, so I was sitting next to Amie, with Bethany next to her. Watching Amie experience this fucking masterpiece for the first time made me so happy and I felt like I was seeing it for the first time through her. Her gasp when Roogan gets Inigo in the stomach with a knife spoke to her real engagement and investment in a story she had never seen and it was absolutely wonderful. This is the best argument I have for why I enjoy watching movies again with people who have never seen them before because I can live vicariously through them and experience the movie for the first time again. I continue to watch the Princess Bride as often as possible and quote from it with regularity. It is easily one of the best movies ever made and I am so glad that Kelly had a crush on Cary Elwes.