Movies that left a lasting impression on you

If only because some woman was stepping out on George Clooney to get with Shaggy.

 

I liked it for three reasons:
1) I’ve walked around that part of Ventura where the final outdoor scenes were filmed.
2) The pageant was hilarious.
3) Grandpa Alan Arkin gave some of the best worldly advice you can give a teenage boy.

 

The Grapes Of Wrath
To Kill A Mockingbird
On The Beach (1959)
Children Of Men

 

I wish I could come up with some profound movie to wow the crowd. But the truth is I came of age in the era of video rental stores and peak HBO/Showtime/Cinemax relevance, so the answers are probably a lot of schlocky horror movies and forgotten comedies from the 80s and early 90s. I often feel like Brian Benben's character in the old HBO series "Dream On," where something happens in my life and a random video clip punctuates it.

Friday the 13th Part V made a big impression. Scared the shit out of me. I was 9 when I saw it. I'd seen all the other Friday the 13ths to that point and wasn't scared by them or other slasher movies at all. But that one got into my brain and stayed there for some reason. I was afraid to go to the bathroom alone because I kept seeing Jason out of the corner of my eye. Maybe it was the sheer volume of kills in it and its snuff film quality. Whatever it was, it's only been recently -- 30 years later -- that I finally was able to start watching the F13 movies again without any apprehension.

 

So the Friday the 13th that scared the shit out of you was the one with fake Jason?

 

My wife LOVES The Way, Way Back! And I find much of it very enjoyable. Sam Rockwell is fantastic.

 

Blazing Saddles
Dr. Strangelove

 

Yeah, go figure.
It always mystified me as I got older. There were some genuinely creepy moments in that one (like a close up of fake Jason's bloody hand turning a door knob while he's stalking one of the teenagers, the opening scene, or Tommy's hallucinations of the real Jason standing over his bed), but in analyzing why it hit me so hard I think it was the body count. There was an edict from the producers that they needed a kill every seven minutes, so there are something like 21 kills in the movie. Some of them are quite inventive and memorable as far as slasher flicks go.
Compare that to a lot of movies of that era that might have six or seven, maximum, and I think it just overloaded my 9-year-old brain to the point that it stuck with me for a long, long time. It was like getting food poisoning from a bad buffet. Even if there's stuff there you like, you remember what it did to you.
Oddly, what helped me snap out of it was playing the Friday the 13th video game. Playing repeatedly as Jason and seeing him repeatedly overdosed me the same way the movies had as a kid and took the lingering fear away.

 

The original ANOES is still my all-time favorite horror movie, and it only had four.

 

Friday the 13th part 3D. I was ten and I had reoccurring nightmares into my twenties, same dream over and over.

 

The production values on the first four or five F13 movies really were about one step up from snuff film quality. Grainy and dark, which was perfect for injecting a slight dose of realism to that kind of movie.

 

Good point on going beyond just a list of movies.