April 28th, 2008
7. Gremlins (1984)
Released in June but set at Christmas, this poison candy cane from Joe Dante sets a group of destructive monsters who begin as cute little furry creatures loose in a picturesque small American town. The ensuing chaos plays like one long raspberry to quiet, normal life. Though executive-produced by Spielberg, the film is essentially E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in negative, gleefully smearing blood across E.T.'s twinkly suburbia as elements of everyday life—a microwave, a movie theater, a department store—become objects of horror thanks to one adorable little creature.
8. Robocop (1987)
Projecting Reagan-era obsessions with law and order, mindless acquisitiveness, and hostility to the underprivileged into the future, Paul Verhoeven's violent science-fiction action film casts Peter Weller as a Detroit cop killed in action, then revived as a gun-toting cyborg. Initially hailed as a hero, he rebels against his programming when he discovers that the police department has become just another extension of a cruel corporation. Verhoeven's breakneck direction and Edward Neumeier's sly script combined to make a movie that slipped philosophical concerns and stinging barbs into the form of a brainless action film. A decade later, the pair re-teamed for the equally pointed, eerily prescient, and widely misunderstood Starship Troopers.
9. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
For some reason, great leaps forward in filmmaking technology often come with backward lurches in storytelling: Witness movies like The Phantom Menace, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, and Immortel, which all melded live characters and computer animation in exciting new ways, while forgetting to make the characters themselves remotely interesting. Who Framed Roger Rabbit set a solid standard that these films failed to live up to; the film was all about the groundbreaking onscreen interaction of live actors and hand-painted, cel-animated characters, but it actually had a story to boot, a dense, witty take on Chinatown that was playful and gimmicky, but assumed audiences had the brains to keep up. Possibly the best part? As if actually recognizing that any repeats of the same shtick would suffer diminishing returns, the filmmakers left Roger Rabbit as one of the rare groundbreaking summertime smashes that was never sequelized.
10. Risky Business (1983)
As befitting a star of his retina-searing wattage, Tom Cruise camped out in the summer season for two decades, most notably in hits like Top Gun and Days Of Thunder—which aided evil-genius producer Jerry Bruckheimer in his quest for world domination—and then later with his own Mission: Impossible franchise. But it never would have happened without his breakthrough performance in Risky Business, an accidental blockbuster that endures precisely because it doesn't submit to the basest possibilities of a coming-of-age movie featuring Porsches, parties, and prostitutes. Before he became a confident, grinning stud of a butterfly, Cruise was still in the pupa stage in Risky Business, playing an uncertain teen who tries to rebel with his parents out of town, but takes a while to feel comfortable doing it. Plenty of summer sex comedies followed, but none so intelligent, atmospheric, and attuned to the awkward, terrifying process of becoming a man.
11. Ghostbusters (1984)
If bloated early-'60s Hollywood movies taught us anything, it was that big-budget comedy is painfully unfunny. But then actor-screenwriters Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis got Ivan Reitman to direct a special-effects-laden romp about a team of paranormal investigators, and almost improbably, Reitman and his crew found a way to make city-threatening monsters genuinely amusing. The movie's secret weapon? The ever-mercurial Bill Murray, whom Aykroyd and Ramis convinced to join the team in spite of his strong reluctance. Murray's wild-card approach loosened up what might've been an oppressively action-heavy picture, giving cynical '80s audiences someone to root for once the sliming started.
12. Finding Nemo (2003)
Up until Finding Nemo, Pixar's computer-animated kids' films always came out in November, and the one after Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, went right back to the November release schedule. Otherwise, there'd be a lot more Pixar on this list. But fittingly, the company's first summer blockbuster was its broadest, biggest film to date, a sprawling family comedy thick with heady, zipping setpieces and big, bold images. By keeping the human-interest focus tight (even though the protagonists were all animals), Finding Nemo got away with summer-movie visual melismatics without losing track of what made its smaller films so much fun.
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