When it comes to 80s kiddie ensemble action-adventure movies, there are Goonies people and there are Monster Squad people. No, we don’t get into fights over it, as most of us have bad backs or bad knees. Many of us also have to go to work the next day and kids who need to be ready for school. In any case, after three minutes of debate, we all kind of figure out that we like both movies. We even like Joe Dante’s Explorers almost as much. Still, if I had to choose, I’m Team Goonies simply because it’s the funniest. If little else in this film has aged well, the constant squabbling among the group still gets laughs, with Jeff Cohen’s fat kid in plaid pants Chunk stealing every scene (laugh at him without reservation; Cohen lives well today as a big-time entertainment lawyer in Hollywood). It’s an Indiana Jones adventure except with kids. It comes complete with dusty death traps, an old map, hidden jewels, an escape from bad guys by waterslide and a frantic pace. Don’t look for it to make any sense. The whole story runs on a sixth-grader’s logic. It survives the decades as a nostalgic cult classic, regularly booked for the midnight movie circuit (now that midnight movies are largely an 80s perennials show, with the 90s slowly taking over). Its audience is people who were kids in the 80s and who wore out their VHS tapes by the time Reagan was out of office. We barely even notice the clumsy editing and the weirdly bad special effects (considering this is a Spielberg production from the director of Superman). You might call it a common bond. If The Goonies is before (or after) your time, you’re on your own.