The Goonies Is Available As A Movie Download

By Vanessa Hendricks

Goonies Forever! If you grew up in the eighties, then no doubt you have fond memories of watching this movie over and over until the VHS tape finally wore out and snapped. If you haven't seen it yet for whatever reason, think of it like... Captain Blood meets Indiana Jones meets Stand By Me meets Goodfellas. It really does have a little something from everything in terms of movie genres, and it's definitely a classic as far as movie downloads go.

The movie focuses on Mikey Walsh and his band of "Goonies", kids from the docks area of Astoria, Oregon. The kids are sort of the outcasts, the rejects, the ne'er do wells of the town, who have a long on-going rivalry with the rich kids. This rivalry comes to a head when the local rich guys plan to foreclose on the neighborhood and turn it into a golf course.

The Goonies take it upon themselves to save the Boon Docks. They start by getting into the attic, where Mike's dad, a museum curator, has a bunch of old pirate stuff stashed. They find a treasure map leading them to an old restaurant on the coast. The restaurant is run by the Fratellis, a low rent crime family led by Ma Fratelli, a serious ball buster who takes a sort of Bates Motel approach to mothering her children, played by Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano. They have to figure out how to get under the restaurant to get the treasure without alerting the Fratellis and...

With the pirates, the foreclosure subplot, the gangsters, the treasure, the coming of age thread, it... Sounds kind of complicated, right? Well, it really isn't. Remember, the only reason all these other factors are there is to keep the movie moving. It's all about adventure, and the gangsters and rich kids and all that, that's just something for the Goonies to always be running away from as they go from booby trap to booby trap and develop deeper bonds of friendship.

Really, the movie's all about fun. It's a really silly, fun, exciting movie, partly because it doesn't go all the way into fantasy territory. Unlike Monster Squad, everything that happens in The Goonies technically COULD happen in real life... It's not very likely, but within the context of the film, it feels about as real as anything in Stand by Me. This really helps it inspire you with a sense of adventure in your every day life.

The film was thought to be incredibly fast paced, a little too break-neck, when it was released, but times have changed. Today, you won't get out of a kid's movie without seeing seven manic chase scenes, and at least one character getting dragged along an assembly line conveyor belt. The Goonies is relatively laid back in comparison to the madcap CGI films out today.

Regardless, the film is a classic of the eighties era of adventure movies. Back when Indiana Jones was big, you had a bunch of people who wanted to join in and put their own spin on it. The Goonies was actually devised by Spielberg himself, so it was sort of his own take on his own ideas: Put kids in place of Indiana Jones.

It really is a classic in its own right, sort of the family film answer to Indiana Jones. If you remember it from your own childhood, now may be the time to turn your own children on to the adventures of Mikey Walsh and the rest of the Goon Squad.

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