The quality of the “parody film” genre can run the gamut from the truly hilarious – such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s take on medieval tales, or Airplane!‘s spoof of 70s disaster films – to the downright dreadfully unfunny (we’re looking at you, Epic Movie, Date Movie, Disaster Movie, etc. from the late ’00s). The title of master of the style has to go to legendary comedic talent Mel Brooks. Between his takes on classic monster horror in Young Frankenstein and westerns in Blazing Saddles, he planted the flag for pulling off parody perfectly.

Even though some time had passed since the end of the original Star Wars trilogy, in the late ’80s the franchise was still selling, with merchandise, television, and so much more. In Spaceballs Brooks not only tapped into what’s absurdly amusing about the space opera fantasy, but managed to create almost equally memorable characters to inhabit his version. From the bratty princess Daphne and the warm and fuzzy Barf to genius casting choices like Joan Rivers as “Dot Matrix” and Rick Moranis as the scene-stealing “Dark Helmet,” not only are the expectations for Star Wars characters subverted, in some cases Brooks’ parodies actually surpass the originals in execution. Star Wars isn’t the only movie Spaceballs lampoons; there’s a great Alien cameo and a fun Planet of the Apes reveal, too. Yet the movie finds plenty of opportunities for inventive jokes all its own. There’s fourth-wall breaking meta-humor before it was widespread in cinema, and there’s visual comedy galore. It’s a spectacularly ludicrous film. There are so many jokes happening in Spaceballs that you might miss them from laughing too hard. – Nathan Chase

7. Raising Arizona

Did any 1987 cinephiles see this one coming? After their bleak but brilliant debut film Blood Simple, who but the Coens themselves could have imagined that their next film would be the total gear-shift that was Raising Arizona? While still centered around criminals, as nearly every Coen film is, Raising Arizona was far removed from Blood Simple’s post-New Hollywood sensibilities and seemed more like the illegitimate love-child of Stanley Kramer and Chuck Jones. Nicolas Cage (in what I maintain is his greatest role) plays H.I. McDunnough, a small-time repeat offender who falls in love with Ed (Holly Hunter), the officer who takes his mug shot on each of his return visits to prison. They marry, “Hi” vows to go straight, Ed desperately wants a baby but can’t conceive; and so they hatch a plan to kidnap one of the famous Arizona quintuplets, since those folks clearly “have more than they can handle.”

Haunted by a pair of former criminal associates and recent prison-breakers (John Goodman and William Forsythe) and hunted by a hellish bounty hunter (Randall “Tex” Cobb), things keep going from bad to worse as Hi and Ed’s plans fall apart in what would henceforth be known as a distinctly Coen fashion, all the while complemented by Carter Burwell’s bizarre yodel-infused score. I fell in love with this film as a teenager; it was my introduction to the Coens and remains my absolute favorite film of theirs. Other comedies have tried to capture the look and feel of this living cartoon (including several by Arizona cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld), but nothing else before or since quite matches Raising Arizona’s lunatic perfection. – Tom Kapr

Global Ranking #384
Ranked 217,342 times by 20,145 users
Wins 51% of its matchups
39 users have it at #1
786 have it in their Top 20

6. Evil Dead II

5. Wings of Desire

Some movies are all about an exciting narrative with twists and turns, and the joy is in figuring out what’s going to happen next. Wings of Desire is the complete opposite of that. It’s a slow, thoughtful exploration of humanity. There’s a story in here, and it’s a moving one, but if you’re watching it to get the details of what’s happening to our protagonist, you’re going to miss out on what makes this movie great. It’s full of scenes where the angel Damiel (played beautifully by Bruno Ganz) contemplates, sometimes out loud, what it means to be human, and if you’re ready to join him in that contemplation, the result is well worth it. The film is never in a rush, brilliantly evoking the angels’ timelessness and giving the audience plenty of time to experience every moment right along with the characters on screen. – Hannah Keefer

Global Ranking #259
Ranked 28,390 times by 1,634 users
Wins 56% of its matchups
11 users have it at #1
120 have it in their Top 20

4. Predator

3. The Untouchables

The Untouchables is one of the two films that was also in the top 10 grossing films for the year (Lethal Weapon being the other). Brian De Palma‘s seminal mobster film covers the attempts of a group of cops and agents to take Al Capone down in Chicago, a place where Capone himself was thought untouchable due to rampant corruption and his immense popularity with the public. Why is it that this movie has stuck with audiences for three decades? Perhaps in part because it’s a gangster movie that appealed to women. Not only did it use heartthrob Kevin Costner as its central character, but the script put a focus on the relationships between the members of the “Untouchables” in their drive to take down Capone. Capone’s own personal issues are on display, too, in a good if not particularly nuanced performance by Robert De Niro.

Sean Connery received an Oscar for his role as an elderly Irish cop who is fed up with Chicago being held in Capone’s thrall. His interactions with Costner help to develop a fleshed-out character that drew audiences into a film that they might not normally care for. De Palma’s direction may also be responsible. His slick, stylish take on the material helps make for a gorgeous-looking picture, especially in his homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s “Odessa Stairs” sequence. It draws audiences in and keeps them glued to the screen. The Untouchables remains one of the most popular films from its year and has lingered long in the cultural zeitgeist. – Connor Adamson

Global Ranking #213
Ranked 395,553 times by 41,593 users
Wins 56% of its matchups
142 users have it at #1
4205 have it in their Top 20

2. Full Metal Jacket

Attempts to explain what went wrong for the United States in Vietnam in the late 1960s will continue forever, and none will ever fully explain how a superpower that had successfully waged a world war on multiple continents failed to exert its will over a sliver of Southeast Asian jungle. Kubrick’s take, based closely on U.S.M.C. veteran Gustav Hasford’s semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers, creates an immersive, atmospheric, ground-level view that does not pontificate, but plants in the viewer’s mind the perverse and provocative idea that the U.S. mission in Vietnam was a victim of its own success.

The oft-quoted first half of Full Metal Jacket, following the first third of Hasford’s novel, places us in a dehumanizing boot camp, where a wordsmith of a drill sergeant (“You can give your heart to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the Corps”) makes insensitive killers out of raw recruits. He tells them that with training they can become like Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of Kennedy, or like Charles Whitman, America’s deadliest mass-shooter up to that time. A Marine nicknamed Joker, who passes for a protagonist, remembers the ambition that drove him to sign up for this brutalization: “I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the crown jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture, and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block with a confirmed kill.” The training process, the making of “killers,” works exactly as intended when one new-made Marine scores a kill before he ever leaves American soil. In Hasford’s book the victim’s dying words are “I’m proud of you,” but Kubrick’s script is too restrained, too respectful of its audience, to articulate the point so crudely.

In the second half of the film, which combines the second and third parts of Hasford’s novel, the unleashed killing machines take the fight to Vietnam. There, too, it is their success, not their failure, that horrifies us. In a sequence in which cinematographer Douglas Milsome’s camera stalks and climbs and crouches like a Marine’s shadow through half-demolished buildings and a hail of squibs set to just the right soundtrack, a series of brave sorties under deadly sniper fire results in a climactic kill. The identity of the sniper, though, seems to unsettle even the ruthless soldiers, and illustrates – like the inhumanity in the film’s first half – why winning this war on the military front meant losing it on the moral front, and why the American public decided that success wasn’t worth the cost. – David Conrad

Global Ranking #68
Ranked 579,819 times by 63,588 users
Wins 62% of its matchups
566 users have it at #1
10,256 users have it in their Top 20

1. The Princess Bride

When Rob Reiner directed The Princess Bride, he was smack dab in the middle of a strong early period that spanned seven films from This is Spinal Tap to A Few Good Men. The Princess Bride is a comedy fantasy adapted from a novel by William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay). Goldman says the genesis of the story came from asking his daughters what kind of bedtime story they wanted to hear, and one said “a princess” and the other said “a bride.”

Written in 1973, it took 14 years before the film eventually got made by Reiner (some of the notable directors who considered making it include Robert Redford, John Boorman, and Francois Truffaut). Reiner has a family legacy of comedy (his father is Carl Reiner), and he puts it to good use in The Princess Bride, a contender for his funniest and most quotable film; for me, it’s just slightly funnier than This is Spinal Tap. The plot elements are a stew of fairy tale and fantasy tropes which are simmered to perfection by an excellent cast including Cary Elwes, Wallace Shawn, and Andre the Giant, who balance believability with clever wit and outright hilarity. The film is enhanced by its framing story (I find this is rarely the case with framing stories) featuring a young Fred Savage as a whiny grandson and Peter Falk (who appears in 1987’s Wings of Desire as well) as his kindly grandfather. It’s a film that entertains all ages and can be watched over and over, getting better each time. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. (And if you haven’t read the book, read it!) – Ben Shoemaker

Global Ranking #43
Ranked 672,146 times by 69,970 users
Wins 64% of its matchups
1106 users have it at #1
13,953 have it in their Top 20

Blogger’s Choices

While the above films are the results of the aggregated decisions of every single Flickchart user’s chart rankings, many additional films are also worth recognizing here. Below are some of the blogger’s favorite films that aren’t in the site’s collective top 10.

Babette’s Feast

Babette’s Feast, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1987 and the second Karen Blixen story in three years to win an Academy Award (the first was 1985’s Out of Africa), is a subdued study in contrasts. Quiet, steadily-paced, with pivotal plot turns illustrated with just a lingering look or a flicker of a smile, the mechanics of Babette’s Feast are almost as Spartan as its setting: an isolated Pietistic Lutheran community on the coast of Denmark. The faces of the faithful look as authentically antiquated as you could hope to find in the 1980s, like living Baroque portraits. Their austere way of life is offset by a secular Dane, a Catholic Frenchman, and most crucially by Babette, a mysterious refugee from Paris who arrives by sea on a stormy night and stays for fourteen years. In all that time she asks only one thing: permission to give a gift. The gift she chooses has inspired rich restaurant menus and equally rich theological discussions in the years since the film’s release, and the way her adoptive community receive it makes Babette’s Feast the tensest and funniest theology-based movie out there, as well as Pope Francis’s favorite flick! – David Conrad

Global Ranking #1535
Ranked 6,120 times by 458 users
Wins 50% of its matchups
0 users have it at #1 (proof that the Pope is not on Flickchart)
17 users have it in their Top 20

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is a seminal film in the horror genre. The gruesome, grinning creation Freddy Kreuger remains one of the most well known figures in cinema due to his unique creative look and the twist of attacking you in your dreams, not to mention the fantastic though often over-the-top performance by Robert Englund. While used more to symbolic effect in the first film, this third entry in the series takes the concept of dream reality and runs in a slightly different direction with it. Dream Warriors becomes almost X-Men-like as Heather Langenkamp returns from the first film and helps lead a new group of children being terrorized by Kreuger in developing dream powers to combat the dream demon.

This concept is decent enough on paper, but easily could have been a disaster if handled poorly. Luckily, director Chuck Russell took Craven’s script and executed it well. The film features some of the more creative kills in the series, including the iconic “It’s primetime b*tch!” as well as a puppet-strings murder. The creative and surreal nature of the deaths has always been the distinguishing feature of this slasher series, and Russell understand this well. Not only is the direction solid, but the cast is too. Langenkamp works well as the older, wiser mentor, and Patricia Arquette, Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Rubin, and Ira Heiden fill out the roles of the children fighting back, distinguishing their characters and making the impact of their deaths felt. That is an accomplishment in of itself for a slasher film. If there is any sequel in this series worth watching, it is this one. – Connor Adamson

Global Ranking #1,819
Ranked 45,353 times by 4,783 users
Wins 39% of its matchups
4 users have it at #1
78 have it in their Top 20

Throw Momma From The Train

It makes sense that since I’m not a huge fan of ‘80s movies in general, the one I’d pick as a Blogger’s Choice is one that calls back strongly to classic-era filmmaking, especially Hitchcock. The plot is a riff on Strangers on a Train, as wanna-be writer Danny DeVito stalks his writing teacher Billy Crystal to try to get him to perform a criss-cross murder – DeVito will kill Crystal’s annoying ex-wife and Crystal will get rid of DeVito’s overbearing mother. What really endeared this movie to me is that even though the tone is outrageously humorous, DeVito (as director) really manages to tap into Hitchcock not only on the superficial level of plot, but even down to HOW he shoots things. Lots of camera angle choices were explicitly Hitchcockian, evoking Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, Vertigo, The Trouble with Harry, and more – obviously Hitchcock’s visual style is very obvious and easy to copy, but DeVito integrates those shots into his story so seamlessly that they never feel cheap or out of place. You could enjoy Throw Momma without this background, but for Hitchcock fans it’s especially delightful. – Jandy Hardesty

Global Ranking #3136
Ranked 32,072 times by 3,782 users
Wins 34% of its matchups
0 users have it at #1
8 have it in their Top 20

Robocop

The Last Emperor

The Best Picture winner of 1987 is a pretty gloss on the end of China’s last dynasty. It’s a pitying romanticization of a would-be emperor – Pu Yi – who was first too young, then too aloof, then too irrelevant to play a significant role in the political upheavals that reshaped China in the 20^th century. Throughout his life external forces tried to mold him for their own purposes: secluded relatives trying to fight time; a Western tutor (Peter O’Toole) trying to make a modern mandarin; the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria looking for a puppet. In vivid colors and oppressive grays, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and director Bernardo Bertolucci follow the thread of a tragic, flawed, yet enduring life, the life of someone who was born to rule a civilization that no longer existed, or that existed only within the confines of the Forbidden City – and soon enough not even there. The Last Emperor lacks narrative and psychological depth, its assertive prettiness disguising its lack of a consistent interpretation of Pu Yi (is he an emotionally-stunted manchild we should pity, or a nostalgic symbol of a lost and loftier China?), but this was the first Western movie granted permission to shoot in the emperors’ historic seat of government, so it’s worth a watch for cinephiles and Sinophiles alike. – David Conrad

Global Ranking #1085
Ranked 38,854 times by 4143 users
Wins 40% of its matchups
4 users have it at #1
72 have it in their Top 20

Benji The Hunted

Yeah, I’m a 35-year-old man picking a Benji movie. But listen – Benji the Hunted is probably the best movie starring a dog ever made. The star of the film isn’t the original “Benji,” as that dog (real name Higgins) had died at the old age of 17 in 1975. But Higgins’ daughter Benjean had taken up the Benji mantle in 1977, and her performance in Benji the Hunted is so real, man, so emotionally raw. Benji goes overboard during a storm off the Oregon coast and manages to make it to land, where he becomes a surrogate mother to a quartet of orphaned cougar cubs. He spends the next few days trying to get a mother mountain lion to adopt the cubs, all while dodging a hungry black rogue wolf and a hunter who wants the reward for Benji’s safe return. Benji even has to avoid his own human (Benjean’s real-life owner Frank Inn), lest he leave the cubs to die. The scene where Benji sees Frank’s face through the helicopter window, and has a moment of pure elation and begins to dash into the open, but suddenly stops, looking back at the cubs, is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in movies. Even more heartbreaking later is when Benji learns how ruthless the wild can be for a defenseless cub. I watched my Benji the Hunted VHS so many times as a child that I wore out the tape. I was worried re-watching it after these decades that I would discover it wasn’t as great as I remembered – but it is! And now as an adult, I realize that the narrative structure makes it even better, opening on news footage interview with a tearful Frank, and banking on the premise that this isn’t Benji starring in another Benji movie–this is really Benji! He’s lost! He’s hunted! It’s surprisingly meta for an ’80s Disney movie about a dog, but it’s still sincere, and transcends the family-film-about-a-smart-dog genre. Props to career Benji writer/director Joe Camp for conceiving and creating such an affecting film. – Tom Kapr

Global Ranking #9587
Ranked 3,229 times by 377 users
Wins 33% of its matchups
0 users have it at #1
3 have it in their Top 20

What are your favorite films of 1987? Let us know in the comments, and rank 1987 films here.