My Five Favorite Teen Movies of the 1980s (Part One: ‘80-’84)

It was a great decade to be a teenager

If there’s one genre Hollywood has been cashing in on since James Dean swaggered across the screen in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, it’s the teen movie. These movies have always been a safe bet for filmmakers because they are cheap to make (rarely if ever needing CGI or exotic locales) and have a built-in audience. From Frankie and Annette’s Beach Party films in the 1960s to Mean Girls to Licorice Pizza (showing in theaters at this moment), the list of great (and so-bad-they’re-good) teen films is endless. Never was this more true than in the glorious 1980s.

The films of that decade reflected Generation X better than any sociologist could ever hope to. Like in our real lives, parents in these movies were either clueless or missing entirely. Video games were a fairly new thing, and they mattered (I once stood in line at an arcade for an hour to get my turn to play Space Invaders). And the music was, in a word, awesome.

I chose the teen films of the 1980s not simply because they were great movies, but also because they coincide with my own teen years. I was 14 in 1980, and even though I was 23 by the time Say Anything hit screens in 1989 it’s not like I’d matured that much since hitting my 20s. I think this is important, because while I can watch a teen movie now and understand what’s happening, the only way to really feel it is to be living that moment. Once you reach a certain age, watching a teen movie from any era can only really trigger nostalgia.

Below are my five favorite teen films from the first half of the greatest decade ever. Why five and not ten, and why only the first half? It made sense to break this into two parts, both for read time and because covering 1980 to 1984 in part one aligns exactly with my high school years.

They are listed by the year they were released, which keeps me from having to choose which one is my second-favorite. My favorite will be clear (having only recently gotten cable TV in our neighborhood, I watched it every time they showed it on HBO).

1. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Watching this one again 40 years later (how is that even possible?) the thing that stands out to me is how much the mall was a part of our lives, especially given that they basically no longer exist. If we weren’t working there, we were hanging out in the food court or at the multiplex or record store, all completely unsupervised; it was a teen Mecca. And it’s not one of my favorites solely because of the Phoebe Cates pool scene, but that didn’t hurt and I’ve never heard “Moving in Stereo” the same way again.

Cameron Crowe’s excellent first screenplay elevated Fast Times beyond the normal teen film, and also gave us a glimpse of things to come from him, from Say Anything to Singles to Almost Famous. And if you thought I couldn’t slip a Springsteen reference into this piece, you were both wrong and a little silly. During the pep rally scene, one cheerleader appears briefly (and even has a snippet of dialogue). That cheerleader is Pamela Springsteen, baby sister of the Boss, celebrated photographer today, and still potentially my next wife.

2. War Games (1983). Three years before he was Ferris Bueller, Matthew Broderick was a computer nerd. Before she was “The Basket Case” in The Breakfast Club, Ally Sheedy was still totally out of his league. This story of one of the first teen computer hackers fascinated us on multiple levels. For one thing, during the same year Broderick was hacking his way into NORAD, I was spending a semester writing code on a Tandy TRS-80 hoping that after four months my name would run across the screen (life was tough before Windows). On a deeper level, with computers being a brand-new thing and understood by few of us, the idea that you could launch a global thermonuclear war from your bedroom while Quiet Riot played in the background was maybe the coolest thing ever.

3. Valley Girl (1983). This film holds the distinction of being Nicholas Cage’s first starring role (a small part as a stoner in Fast Times at Ridgemont High a year earlier was his first film role). It was all downhill from here for Nic, but at least he has this masterpiece of the ’80s teen movie genre on his resume. A not-so-subtle retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in Southern California, Cage and Deborah Foreman pull off something rare in teen films: they make a believable couple. The interaction between the four main female characters was solid and true-to-life as well, and having since raised two daughters I can say with some confidence that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The soundtrack to this one deserves special mention, in no small part because for decades you simply could not buy it anywhere. When done right, the music in a film can become a character in itself (I wrote about that here). In Valley Girl, the contrast between New Wave Pop (Modern English, Psychedelic Furs, Sparks) for the Valley scenes and much harder rock (Pat Travers, Payolas, and the vastly underrated Plimsouls) for the Hollywood scenes only helps accentuate the difficulties these two star-crossed lovers face.

4. Red Dawn (1984). For all the comic hijinks of the ’80s teen films, remember that we were Cold War kids and war with Russia was a question of when, not if (seems a bit prophetic now, doesn’t it?). This film answered the question every military strategist from NATO and the Warsaw Pact was asking at the time: in a battle for control of Colorado, who would win? When the choice is between the Red Army and the two leads from Dirty Dancing, Ponyboy from The Outsiders, Charlie Sheen pre-meltdown, and Howard the Duck’s girlfriend, the answer is obvious. Those godless Commies never stood a chance, plus the kids got to skip school to ambush Soviet patrols, the dream of everyone I knew in 1984.

5. The Flamingo Kid (1984). This nearly forgotten film stars Matt Dillon, who was quite possibly the coolest of all the ’80s teen film stars, as a recent high school grad working as a cabana boy at an exclusive beach club in the summer of 1963. The year is important, because it allows the use of some awesome songs from Dion, The Chiffons, and Martha and the Vandellas on the soundtrack. Richard Crenna is excellent as Dillon’s nemesis, a gin rummy card shark (apparently that’s a thing), Janet Jones plays Dillon’s love interest years before she married hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, and Marisa Tomei makes her big screen debut. It’s a movie that’s a lot of fun, something that too many in this genre simply were not.

Those are my five favorites from 1980 to 1984; I’ll cover the second half of the greatest decade ever soon. Let me know your favorites in the comments, and in case it wasn’t as obvious as I thought, Valley Girl was the film I watched non-stop on HBO. I’m going to watch it again tonight, and I make no apologies.

Update: Part Two is now out; you can read it below:

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