I never got around to seeing this until now - I should've been the perfect age for it when it came out, and Stephen King was rapidly becoming my favourite author, but I was years away from being able to see R-rated movies with impunity (and even my fallback strategy, watching them at the houses of friends with more permissive parents, fell through because none of my friends wanted to see this when we could've been renting something with a lot more blood).

So by the time it became easy to see this, I didn't care to anymore...most of the stars went on to stumble through unlikeable teenager/YA roles, and though I couldn't articulate it as such yet, I was already getting pretty sick of boomer nostalgia.

A quarter-century later, I find it suffers a bit for having been quoted to death, and its most famous setpieces popping up in awards shows and retrospectives so often that while all this time I know I hadn't seen it, it always felt like I had.

Nice to see an early movie capitalize on Kiefer Sutherland's terrifying screen presence, even at that age. Between the degree to which these kids are unsupervised - only one kid's parents show up, and even then only in flashbacks - and the fact that it's a Rob Reiner movie that isn't a shit tsunami, this is going to look like science fiction before long. Hell, just the fact that it's an R-rated movie obviously aimed at tweeners (and, of course, nostalgic boomers) makes it feel like it's pulled in from another universe.