Three Movies with 'Stranger Things'-like Movie Buff Cred

As you may have heard, Stranger Things is Netflix's latest mega-hit series and it is pulsing with 80's nostalgia.  Stranger Things is what would happen if 80's Steven Spielberg invented a teleportation machine and tested it on himself but 80's Stephen King got mixed up in it at the last second and their atoms got scrambled together.  The cast features 80's movie stars Winona Ryder (Heathers, Beatlejuice) and Matthew Modine (Vision Quest, Full Metal Jacket), as well as some kids living the E.T. life and a few teenagers surviving a horror movie.

Mostly.

Stranger Things comes from a long line of homage art.  A good film buff can pinpoint all the ways Star Wars owes a debt to the likes of Flash Gordon and The Searchers.  Stranger Things certainly isn't the first show or movie to build itself around an established genre from an earlier time.  Here are a few films to check out if you like the way Stranger Things likes cool things.

Super 8

The second Super 8 shows up on Netflix again expect to see it in the category "Because you liked Stranger Things."  The 2011 film has all the same influences as Stranger Things but one of them had a hand in creating it.  Steven Spielberg served as producer alongside writer and director J.J. Abrams.  Super 8 is full of nostalgia although it takes place a few years earlier than Stranger Things, in the late 70's rather than the early 80's.  The Goonies/E.T. kids of this movie include excellent performances by Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney along with the prerequisite cool adult Kyle Chandler.  Together they hunt down a mysterious creature, the reveal of which is really quite impressive.  Super 8 takes the film love to a meta degree because the kids' favorite hobby isn't Dungeons and Dragons but amateur movie making, hence the title, a kind of film commonly used for home movies of the time.

Pacific Rim

If there's one thing director Guillermo del Toro is good at it's making monsters.  In 2013 he made his monsters huge.  Pacific Rim tells the story of a battle between giant monsters (Kaiju) who want to invade Earth from an alternate dimension and the humans in giant robots (Jaegers) tasked with defending the world.  Obviously it's an homage to the giant monster movies of old like Godzilla and Gamera, yet still feels like one of the freshest and most original sci-fi blockbusters of the decade.  For the most part, the robots and monsters are the real stars of Pacific Rim but it also features some thoroughly captivating performances from Charlie Day as a frantic, tattooed mad scientist, Ron Perlman as a black marketeer and Idris Elba as an Idris Elba character.  An Idris Elba character named Stacker Pentecost.

Captain America: The First Avenger

I've made no secret about my love for Captain America: Winter Soldier but I'm also a staunch defender of its criminally underappreciated predecessor The First Avenger.  Winter Soldier is strongly influenced by 70's political thrillers but as a World War II period piece First Avenger draws from a very different pool of inspiration.  It has elements of 40's sci-fi but mostly First Avenger is the best Indiana Jones movie since 1989's The Last Crusade; the Indiana Jones series itself being an homage to the action serials of the 1940's.  Director Joe Johnston excels at period pieces and is perfect for an Indy inspired film.  The First Avenger  also introduced the world to Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter, who more than earned an excellent spin-off TV series with a similar tone but more espionage.





Side note: Three guys looking for their friend who mysteriously disappeared?  I liked it better when it was called The Hangover.