Top Ten 1980s Teen Comedies

10 -- Sixteen Candles

(1984 wr. & dir. by John Hughes, starring Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall). Hughes’s directorial debut. Ribald and somewhat amusing. Breakout roles for Ringwald and Hall, whose later work with Hughes was more meaningful. (See #4).

9 -- Fast Times at Ridgemont High

(1982, dir. by Amy Heckerling, starring Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Lee) Nicholas Cage had a minor role in this film. This is a coming-of-age story, with some much-needed comic relief provided by Sean Penn in his portrayal of surfer dude Spicoli. The subplot about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character obtaining an abortion is quite sad.

8 -- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

(1986, dir. by Joh Hughes, starring Matthew Broderick). A jaded and cynical look at high school life. It seemed to me that Bueller’s point-of-view was that of an adult looking back on his teenage years, rather than that of an actual teenager living through them.

7 -- Say Anything…

(1989 wr. & dir. by Cameron Crowe, starring John Cusack) This movie is the source of the trope about standing outside a girl’s window holding a boom-box over your head, blasting “your song” to the whole neighborhood.

6 -- Better Off Dead

(1985 wr. & dir. by Savage Steve Holland, starring John Cusack). Probably the biggest sleeper on this list. Many people haven’t seen it, but they should. It’s a dark comedy about teenage angst, rejection, skiing, and stop-motion hamburgers breaking into song.

5 -- Risky Business

(1983, wr. & dir. by Paul Brickman, starring Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay). Brickman’s directorial debut, and while it wasn’t Cruise’s first film, it is considered his breakout role. It’s a teenage sex comedy with many elements not appropriate for teens. I attended college at the University of Illinois in the 1980s, so, naturally, in celebration of being singled out as the main character’s collegiate Plan B, the university sponsored an annual campus screening of this film. I’m not sure if it still does.

4 -- The Breakfast Club

(1985 wr. & dir. by John Hughes, starring Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, and Alli Sheedy.) I remember watching this movie in my college dorm’s common room with a bunch of other students. One young man, an exchange student from Africa, found this film confusing and disturbing. “Why is this movie so negative against parents?” he asked. None of us Americans were able to give him a satisfactory answer, and after some consideration I grew in sympathy for his dismay. Not all teenagers are at odds with their parents. Still, I appreciated the film’s critique of the way high school cliques erect barriers to friendship.

3 -- Back to the Future

(1985, dir. by Robert Zemeckis, starring Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd). Hilarious and heart-warming. Stellar performances by Fox and Lloyd. Careful, though: my Gen X friends and I were shocked when we showed this movie to our children. We had all forgotten how much swearing it contained!

2 -- Footloose

(1984, dir. by Herbert Ross, starring Kevin Bacon, Christopher Penn, Lori Singer, John Lithgow, and Diane Wiest) A lovely fish-out-of-water teen romance. The beautifully drawn, three-dimensional characters are given outstanding portrayals by the entire cast. The result is a movie that retains the whimsical fun of a musical and yet has the depth of a finely crafted drama. For example, although the small-town preacher is the antagonist in this story, his motives are understood and he is treated with more sympathy than any of the parents in The Breakfast Club. The music, hair, wardrobe, and other incidentals mark this movie as Eighties All The Way, but the story is timeless and this movie has aged very well.

1 -- The Karate Kid

(1984 dir. by John D. Avildsen, starring Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Elisabeth Shue, and William Zabka) Same director (Avildsen) and music composer (Bill Conti) as the 1976 hit boxing film Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s break-out role. The screenwriter of The Karate Kid, Robert Mark Kanen, crafted an amazing story, based in part on his own life: after being beaten up by bullies as a teenager, he began studying the martial arts in order to defend himself. This is one of my favorite movies of any genre. The characters have been brought back to life and into the present day in the new television series, Cobra Kai. Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence are all grown up now…and still at each other’s throats. I’ve really enjoyed this series, and not just for the frequent call-backs to awesome 80s music!

Dishonorable Mention:

Valley Girl

(1983 dir. by Martha Coolidge, starring Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman) 19-yr old Nicholas Cage (b. Jan 7, 1964) is indeed a handsome young fella. The main character’s free-spirited hippy parents are mildly amusing. And of course, the 1982 song by Modern English “I Melt With You” is an iconic 80s hit. This movie was fairly popular when it was first released and I understand it has since become a cult classic.

But it’s a bad movie. Here’s why:

The “making-out” scenes are way too intense and explicit for a film intended for teens, let alone younger or more sensitive viewers. The female characters bare their breasts at the slightest provocation and for some reason we are also treated to at least one shirtless scene of almost every male character. There is a pointless and nasty subplot about a mother sexually provoking one of her daughter’s male classmates; it ends with a twist that fails to justify its presence in the film.

But where this movie really fails is in its development of the story’s premise. An edgy, relentlessly hip punk from Hollywood crashes into the varsity-jacketed, argyle-sweatered, boat shoe-clad, popped-collar Izod-wearing, high school culture of the San Fernando Valley and falls in love with one of its risk-averse, shopping mall-roaming, conformist denizens. They could have done So. Much. More with this fantastic premise. Instead, it’s one unfunny set piece after another, full of teenagers misbehaving and uttering incomprehensible dialogue.

Its theme is admirable: like whomever you want to like, and fie on your high school tribe’s disapproval. But The Breakfast Club is a superior treatment of this theme. Another trope more deftly expressed by another film on this list, namely the street-smart outsider making waves in bland suburbia: The Karate Kid.

Skip this movie. Listen to “I’ll Melt With You” on the Internet. It’s a miracle this movie didn’t kill Nicholas Cage’s career.

Trivia: Nicholas Cage’s real name is Nicholas Kim Coppola and his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola. Yes, that Francis Ford Coppola. When Cage was a young actor, he changed his name in order to get out from under the shadow of his famous uncle’s name and literally make a name for himself. At which he has done quite well, don’t you think? He stars in a movie on my short list of favorite films. (See blog post: Clare’s Top 5 Movies)