Recommendation
Slightly edgy movies for 12 yr old boys sleepover party - need recommendations
Need some late-night movie recommendations that will make the boys feel edgy and grown up without getting me in trouble with their parents. Give me your best edgy, scary, counterculture, funny, or action movies that won’t scar a 12 yr old kid for life or get me banned from the dad’s club, but will still make the boys feel like they got away with something cool.
TREMORS.
A bunch of odd character, but none of them mean or an ass.
Just a little group of people doing their best to help each other.
It will teach the boys the sense of camaderie.
Perfect for sleepover.
They wouldn't dare to step on the floor to make noise.
I showed this movie to a gymfull of Korean middle-schoolers for a Halloween event at a boarding school, and it might be the greatest movie experience of my life. Those kids responded to every beat of the film like the director was mine-controlling them: “WTF is happening?” at the beginning, edge of their seats during the second act, and two huge cheers at the end: one when the last graboid is taken out and one at the kiss. (The latter I wouldn’t expect from Western audiences though.)
Love the story, thanks for sharing. I can imagine their reaction.
God I wish we have a reaction videos, lol.
I remember watching it on a a friend's house, he's got huge TV, around dozen or so kids watching it together.
I remember how we're too "scared" to go home and role playing to hop on pavement (grass and street is big no no) to avoid grabods, lol.
Happy memories.
Hell yeah. I also saw it when I was twelve and it single handedly changed the course of my life I loved it so much. (Got into making dumb movies with my camcorder, learned to edit, went to film school, career in motion graphics and editing.)
The end scene where Neo almost gets killed in the subway… I ask my son “So, do you think he’s going to die?” He said “mom, come on. They aren’t going to kill the protagonist”. He was 10… I was like well, in a few more years we will show you Game of Thrones….
That fucked me up because my bedroom was in the basement at the time and we had centipedes one morning I woke up with a few on my stomach and then saw that in the movie and damn near threw up. Still creeped out by those things till this day. Damn near 25 years later.
1000x this. It was my first R rated movie and we watched it at a sleepover in 5th grade right after it came out on video (must have been summer 2000?), so right around the same age. Nobody had any idea what to expect and our minds were truly blown.
It's a rite of passage for any twelve year old boy. Their parents should not be mad.
I saw it as a toddler and had all the accompanying toys and videogames so you know it's expected for kids to watch. It's just that good of a movie, one of the finest films ever made.
You don't even need to show them the first one if they haven't seen it. T2 does an incredible job explaining the lore before taking you on the best ride in the franchise.
Also, incredibly appropriate given the current times.
Teaches them If it walks like skynet and quacks like skynet, we should probably defy skynet.
T2 came out just before my 11th 10th birthday. I was going to go to the local waterpark with some friends, but had an earache, so my mom called it off. To make it up to me she took me to the theatre and said we could see any movie I wanted. I walked past all the huge posters in the lobby and said I wanted to see T2.
I’ll never forget it, she gained so many cool mom points that day. And when school started a few weeks later, I told all my buddies I had seen it and it earned me cool points too. When it came out on video my mom rented it so all my pals could come over and watch it. I have so many great memories tied to that movie.
I saw this a few days ago when visiting the museum of popular culture. I am 35 years old and still was ridiculously excited. I could not bring any pals with me, so I took this picture and your comment made me want to share.
Yes of course I did a very poor impression, it had never felt more necessary. Somehow my husband did not leave me there.
I just watched it again at the cinema last weekend for the 35th anniversary. It was amazing seeing it on the big screen. I can only imagine what it was like seeing it fresh in the 90s. As I recall they worked really hard to hide the motives of the two terminators for the second movie so it’s unclear up until the scenes in the mall who the good guy was.
I remember it very clearly - in the UK magazines promoted arnie as the good guy. This seemed crazy to me and I had an argument with my parents that the magazines must have got it wrong. I was 12 and the movie was a 15 so I had to sneak into the cinema to watch it. Luckily I knew the box office guy - he was called Jip and one of those cool adults - who sold me and my two mates tickets. I’ve never had a movie experience since - the wtf feeling that stuck with me was when the t-1000 drives the semi off the overpass into the storm drain.
Remember those Capri Sun commercials around the same time? Where the kids would drink juice and turn into a bunch of little T-1000s? Or "The Secret World Of Alex Mack" on Nickelodeon, where a young girl is also secretly a T-1000? 😂
I feel like there was four or five years where that visual effect was frickin everywhere
The TLC Waterfalls music video used the same effects and that thing was on heavy rotation on MTV for like six months. And that was about 5 years after T2.
Ok personally I massively regret watching T2 before T1.
Seeing John Connor be chased through the mall by a cop and Arnie, and only late on discovering that Arnie was the good guy (having been the villain in T1) and the cop is trying to kill him is a massive twist in an otherwise quite linear (but very enjoyable!) plot.
"Featuring, things your inner nin year-old will love! Giant robots! Giant monsters! Giant robots punching giant monsters! Bo staff fighting! Using shipping crates as brass knuckles! Using a freighter like a baseball bat! Colors! Ooh, a doggy! Woah! And that one part, where the monsters all, 'waaarrrgh!', and he's all, 'yaaargh!'"
Yes, I have watched both it and the movie way too many times. Fucking perfect movie to recommend to 12 year olds.
I'd also tentatively suggest Scary Movie, since I had a lot of fun with it as an early teen, but it may be either too raunchy and/or the references will go over their heads.
I don't think they'd understand most of Scary Movie. Even an age appropriate group these days probably wouldn't, it's largely based on references that don't really hold up. Fair amount of stoner humour too if I remember right which I wouldn't expect twelve year olds to get.
Another commenter said Shaun Of The Dead and I think that is a great fuckin' pick. It's crass, hilarious and smart as hell. 12 year old dudes love zombies and at times dumb humor.
The World's End is a great film, but I don't think it would hit with 12 year olds in the same way as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. At it's core, it's very much a film about a depressed guy going through a mid-life crisis while trying to chase this rose-tinted memory of his youth.
That movie hits a lot harder when you are in your 30s/40s
I'd go even further -- if the world didn't end (by alien invasion), Gary King's world would have ended (by suicide) at the end of the movie. He wanted to drink himself to death because he already knew his glory years were behind him, and set out to do it with the only friends he still could think of.
The alien invasion made him realize his love of fighting, and so it gave him a new lease on life.
Absolutely agree. Caused a depressive episode in me for a few days when I first saw it a few years ago, as I have just turned 30 and spent four months in a hospital!
Duuuude good call! Genuinely good movie, and made within the last 20 years. (IMO millennials here are thinking too much about movies they liked when they were 12.)
To be fair, the films listed above are bangers, and a movie that has been around longer is more likely to have been seen by more people, including gen-z.
Kung Fu Hustle was one of the wildest blind-watches I’ve ever had.
I literally knew nothing about it. I was trying to adjust back from working graveyard shifts so I couldn’t sleep. I put that movie on and got blown away
I gave my 82 year old early dementia sits in his chair all day Chinese dad a gummy and put on kung fu hustle and he was so entertained. Had a huge smile on his face and every so often he’d turn to me and say “what the hell is this…?!”
I’d never watched the whole thing all the way thru either, but I was more entertained by him than the movie, which was still great.
When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that:
I watched this in the cinema when I was 6. Scared the daylights out of me, but I absolutely loved the toys. My 16 month old son now plays with one of the toy cars that came out after the movie. One day the circle will be complete and I'll scare him by watching it with him.
Yeah I don't buy it, like I can see older kids having some prejudices, but most of these movies still hold up visually very well and aside from the stylistic quirks (in cinematography/photography) of the era and lack of heavy CGI aren't significant different from what we have now. It's not the same as the 1960s to 1990s gap where the pacing and way of structuring movies completely changed, let alone the fact that some were still in black and white!
Really I feel like for adventure/fantasy/action blockbusters the main thing that matters is that there's an era before Star Wars and an era after Star Wars. Star Wars set the template in 1979 and almost everything afterwards is digestible to those who are used to its ilk, be it 90s action movies or 2010s MCU.
Unconventional, but my 13th birthday we watched Rat Race. Huge hit. In retrospect it's a pretty great movie for what it is. The Jon Lovitz driving Hitler's car sequence is one of the funniest scenes ever imo.
Evolution, featuring Sean William Scott, Orlando Jones, and David Duchovny fighting an alien invasion. Spot on perfect for this particular brief I say.
An incomplete list I would have thought was cool as a kid:
The Fifth Element (still a favorite)
Reign of Fire
Independence Day
Mars Attacks!
Mad Max: Fury Road (Maybe Road Warrior)
The Transporter
Predator (or even Predators)
The Matrix (not the sequels)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Mystery Men (it's a good time and funny)
Kubo & The Two Strings
Men In Black
Edge Of Tomorrow
Pacific Rim
Olympus Has Fallen
*Edit for formatting and to thank everyone for the feedback. Kinda forgot about the nudity in Fifth Element and the rape scene in Road Warrior. I guess that would be up to parent's discretion. Also bummed that someone else mentioned Tremors (plus Tremors 2), because those movies are great!
When I taught that age group, I would sometimes show them The Princess Bride — adventure, sword fighting, humor, good vs. evil, etc. They generally seemed to like it.
The best thing about that movie, showing it to kids, especially boys, is the subject and the title. They think they're going to hate it and they always turn out loving it.
The Gate, Demolition Man, The Abyss, The Burbs, The Goonies, Red Dawn (original), Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Akira, Willow, The Last Starfighter, Silver Bullet, Night of the Comet, Independence Day, The Lost Boys, Freejack, Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure, Labyrinth, The Rocketeer. I don't think any of those are too bad.
Depends on what is ok for violence in their houses. These might be way too much for some parents. All of these movies are fast paced:
Bullet Train (if any of then like anime this has serious live action anime vibes. Ensemble cast of Killers, the jokes and dialogue are very Japanese. It's in English though)
The Suicide Squad [2021. It's very important that it's the 2021 James Gunn version]
Mortal Kombat 2 (the newest one. It feels like a video game cutscene imo.. People freaking love this movie and I suspect they will. Easy to follow)
Predator: Badlands
Prey
Novacaine (pretty graphic but still treats death and violence lightly. Bonus points for non toxic masculinity signaling. Skip this if you don't want that cus it's literally about how to be a nice guy without being wierd and woman-hating about it)
The Running Man (newest version. Id just like to radicalize as many 12 year olds against fascism as possible so skip this one if that's not your vibe)
^ These 7 all have adult graphic violence but it's kinda flippant, not so much the scarring vibe. No overt sex scenes or romance. You'd absolutely want to watch 15 mins of them atleast first. hard to tell what's ok and not, yk.
Other less graphic ones if they havnt seen them:
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Gaurdians of the Galaxy
Thor Ragnorok
Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers (surprisingly adult and fun. Jokes might go over their heads or be corny for them tbh it's kind of made for millennials)
Oceans 11 (this is a wild card obviously. Not really an action movie. but they might think it's cool. Might be too boring idk)
The Fall Guy (technically a rom com but this movie freaking slaps. Ryan gosling pushing those good sweetyboy masculinity vibes. The antagonist is a shallow tool. Love this movie. It moves fast)
Edge of Tomorrow (absolutely slaps. Almost worthy of putting it in the extra adult category but not really. Just some semi realistic Warfare style deaths but it's against aliens)
Alright that's where I'll stop. Honestly at this point I'll be sad if this doesn't cover you for the next few movie nights
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Edited to add Dungeons and Dragons. I said I would stop but I can't leave that one behind. I also took out an unnecessary negative comment I made about one of them and I won't say which one >.>;
I'd say Bullet Train would be a hard no for 12. I saw it when it came out and my child was just shy of 12 and yeah, nah - way too violent.
I think the problem here is that OP hasn't given us very much context. Where does he live (this will drive tolerance to swearing, violence and nudity)? What other movies do these children like? Do they even like movies?
(I'm GenX and saw Rocky Horror Picture Show at a sleepover when I was 11 and also parent to a teenage cinephile so absolutely not prepared to offer suggestions!)
All the 80's movies that everyone else are recommending and upvoting would completely miss the mark - this is a great list though! Hope OP takes one of your suggestions.
Kinda depends. I remember loving some movies that my parents grew up with when I was little - but it's very much dependent on what it is that makes the movies great.
If the movies strongest selling point is that it had cutting edge visual spectacle when it was released then it's at risk of aging very fast, and probably be very unimpressive to new audiences a few decades later if that cutting edge spectacle has become industry standard.
Movies that are good because they tell a good story are slightly more likely to stand the test of time, but even those are vulnerable to values shifting.
Yeah I started to reply with Monty Python and the Holy Grail and realized that's like the people who recommended 3 Stooges and Abbot and Costello to me at 12. I did not give a solitary fuck about that stuff at 12.
It is a horror movie/parody with a lot of fun quotable moments. There is very brief far off nudity (topless woman on screen for a couple second) towards the beginning of the movie. There is also gore, but it’s all played for laughs.
If that’s a little too far for 12, keep it in the pocket for once they hit 15-16, they’ll go bananas for it by then.
The only time when I actually fell off the chair and was literally rolling on the floor laughing. My stomach hurt afterwards. The kids will know all the adult references.
Talladega Knights and dodgeball is a great suggestion, just edgey enough but not too much and the humour is perfect. I was quoting these movies nonstop at that age.
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u/YJSubs 7h ago edited 7h ago
TREMORS.
A bunch of odd character, but none of them mean or an ass.
Just a little group of people doing their best to help each other.
It will teach the boys the sense of camaderie.
Perfect for sleepover.
They wouldn't dare to step on the floor to make noise.