Movies come and go in seasons. While you most certainly watch particular movies around one holiday or another, summer movies are a bit of an enigma. These days, summer movies are mostly shared universe marketing exercises, and they rarely embody the spirit of the summer.
With that in mind, I've assembled five of the best summer movies for when it's so dang hot, you can barely peel yourself out of your chair. These are the essential summer movies. They embody the soul of the season. They make you recall the long, hot nights, and the searing intensity of the sunny days.
Essential Summer Movie no. 1) "Rear Window"
"Rear Window" makes you paranoid and stir crazy in a summer without air conditioning.
Spanning a single hot summer week, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" stages Jimmy Stewart as Jeff, a photographer with a broken leg. He's laid up with nothing but boredom and a powerful camera lens to observe his neighbors coming and going from the apartment building’s courtyard.
Hitchcock traps the audience, sitting, like Jeff, with nothing but voyeurism, be curiosity, and suspicion.
This makes "Rear Window" one of the best summer movies. You've no choice but to set yourself neck-deep in a murder mystery unfolding. The movie demands vigilance. We all have to look harder at the weird neighbors coming and going, with escalating suspicion. Escalation is vital in the best summer movies.
Viewing "Rear Window" in the summer only intensifies the hot days' endlessness. Just as The "Thing" is best viewed during a blizzard, "Rear Window" is best viewed during a heatwave.
Essential Summer Movie no. 2) "The Warriors"
"The Warriors" is one of the best summer movies about bad people having a bad summer night in a hyper-real 1970s New York City. Everything glows in smeared graffiti. It's a weird heat-dream dipped in the apocalypse. Street gangs are uniformed weirdos warring for reputation, giving themselves names like the Gramercy Riffs, the Rogues, the Baseball Furies, the Hi-Hats, and the Electric Eliminators. Their currency is notoriety and territory. It reads like a Midwestern mother's nightmare.
The best summer movies exude a creeping, sleepless mood, like you're hanging out with kids you know you shouldn't.
Things go sideways when our protagonists, the Warriors, arrive at their gang summit and the man organizing the meet, Cyrus, is shot dead. Hundreds of gathered gang members scatter as the cops appear. Luther, the leader of the Rogues, and Cyrus' true slayer, accuses the Warriors of the murder.
A 100-block chase down Manhattan follows as the Warriors try to escape the Bronx back to Coney Island.
Every inch of the city, the Warriors encounter a new, strange gang with a gimmick, and they have to fight, or run, or parlay their way through. This version of New York is the disgusting, filthy New York of "Taxi Driver," amped up far past reality's boundaries. It's an imagination flailing at what might be out there in the city night's hot, stinking streets.
The Warriors must fight every inch back to Brooklyn before dawn. This is one of the best summer movies. Go watch it, it's a classic.
Essential Summer Movie no. 3) "Die Hard With A Vengeance"
"Die Hard With A Vengeance" tears ass all over the city on an endless scavenger hunt, perhaps the quintessential summer activity.
It’s one of the best summer movies because it caters to the violent, juvenile childishness we equate with summertime. A pre-9/11 blasterpiece, the third "Die Hard" movie again includes terrorists, now on a blistering New York City summer day. The terrorists have singled out the hungover dead beat cop, John McClane, still Bruce Willis, as their main focus, tasking him with what amount to time-based action-movie stunt-pieces.
McClane has to tear ass through Central Park in a stolen cab, shoot German bad guys, find the missing gold, solve some riddles, and save some kids. It's a love-letter to moronic rule-breaking and the summer impulses the audience only fantasizes about in their moments of delirious leisure, should we even have those moments these days.
We shouldn’t pretend this is an enlightened, modern, or fair read of how we ought to behave. It’s a momentary, seasonal fantasy, that’s distasteful, at best. Never mind the problematic racial debate McClane and Samuel L. Jackson's Zues, which is 22 outdated at this point.
But like Homer Simpson, McClane is a warning of how you should not act. In that, it’s entertaining.
Essential Summer Movie no. 4) "Assault on Precinct 13" (1973)
The original 1973 "Assault on Precinct 13" is a dry-run for the zombie genre. It also reminds us that the zombie genre is fucking racist.
The setup: a cop transfers to a new precinct. A prisoner-transport bus arrives to make use of their holding cells for the night. The building comes under fire from a local gang. The cops and criminals trapped inside must fight them off.
It’s a sweaty, angry siege through a boiling night, integral to making the best summer movies.
This is perhaps the best zombie movie ever made because it has no zombies in it. When George Romero introduced "Night of the Living Dead" to a wide audience in 1968, zombie movies weren't gore and gun exercises yet. He injected some fantastic ironic humor and metaphors for the living dead in "Dawn of the Dead" in 1978, but that was five years after "Assault."
"Assault on Precinct 13" immediately escalates beyond metaphor directly into maximum violence. A little girl is executed gangland-style while buying ice cream in the first fifteen minutes.
Bang! You've arrived.
Its cruel plausibility is arresting. There are no supernatural forces or science fiction to play away the idea a hundred armed men could come in the night and open fire on a police station. It just happens. It's just revenge in motion.
The movie is a true, living American nightmare. There is no comedy. It's dead-serious and mean.
The antagonistic Street Thunder gang is out for revenge after their members are ambushed by cops. You witness their motivation in the mysterious "cholo" blood ritual. After that, they're a gigantic, living mass of night, driven by the inexplicable.
The question is: why would they turn to violence so easily? The answer: for reasons you can't understand. You don't get to get them.
Where does the monster live? Nowhere.
The threat from the gang is enveloping and terrifying. If they were zombies, they’d be zombies. Since they’re not zombies, but they’re equally-dehumanized, it’s cops with guns killing endless waves of otherness they don’t understand. It is believable, mean, terrified, constant violence.
"Assault" is even realer today than it was 44 years ago. I wasn’t certain I should include this movie in the list, considering the content, and the current political landscape in America.
It's terrifying to see things at their darkest. This is one of the best summer movies ever made.
Essential Summer Movie no. 5) "Heat"
"Heat"'s characters do not know any other way to live. They’re disciplined to be cautious and thorough, whether cop or criminal. The tension is breathless.
Robert De Niro plays the thief. He is an all-metal ghost-monk of a man. His detachment from the world is built into his character, convincing the viewer that whatever he does, he must do, and he does it on principle.
Al Pacino plays the cop. He’s a destructive fanatic for his job. However, like De Niro, he is not heartless. He's trained and educated. He understands crime’s brutal mistreatment of the world.
Through the film’s middle acts, the audience is taught life cannot go any other way for these characters, self-destruction be damned.
Intensity ratchets up. These are keen individuals so close to bursting, so calm when the whole world wants to shriek. Heat is always building. There’s an entire HBO drama season's worth of story plotted out in the nearly 3-hour movie. No scene is wasted, always escalating, not through action, but through character tension.
"Heat" ups the plot with each heist, or failed heist, or discovery, or aftermath, or betrayal. The entire third hour characters betraying each other, betraying themselves, or, perhaps NOT betraying anything, against all odds.
Enough cannot be said about the brutality and cacophonous violence in the bank heist shootout. That's what most people will remember, but it's the in between that makes Heat into the long saga we equate with the summer months. Summer is as much about waiting for action as it is about the action itself. Summer is a season that builds, intensifies, and must be vented.
Go watch "Heat." It's beautiful.
