Rob Reiner directs River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton and Corey Feldman in this period teen classic.

1959. Four lads walk through the woods over a summer weekend to get to see the dead body of another kid everyone is looking for. Like Star Wars and Ghostbusters, this movie always seemed to just exist in my house as a child. A mainstay, a lodestar. As familiar as the dining table and the mesh fire guard. Probably helped that my parents loved Motown and my sister fancied the boys. Maybe just River… Who knows? He acts his socks off in this one. Tough and tender, jaded and calm. It is a very morbid film even without the spectre of its rising star’s congruous young passing. Death and grief and finality looms over every interaction. An end-of-childhood movie we used to enjoy for the swearing, the train tracks, the pie eating contest and the leaches. Now it feels so much deeper and humane. A weepie for Gen X boys and Smash Hits girls. It has that Norman Rockwell meets The Great American Novel vibe that Stephen King gives when he takes a step away over to the soft edges of horror. Reiner helped define what a Stephen King drama should taste like. No one has jumped the rails on the visual simplicity and honest lived in nostalgic detail he established here. Possibly Darabont improved on this model in The Shawshank Redemption but that behemoth has the advantage of scale and maturity. After Stand By Me it is fair to say all Stephen King adaptations were informed by Reiner’s totemic vision, undeniably in debt to its texture and atmosphere in a way that De Palma, Kubrick and Cronenberg never laid out.

10

Perfect Double Bill: Explorers (1985)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/ and my own Substack https://substack.com/@edinburghlaughterbulletin