Yes. Even though it was set in 1980-1981, it covers lots of the same details as the late 1970’s. For example, that was about the time “razors in Halloween candy” rumors started, famously shown on the TV show.
Some minor aspects of WarGames (1983), none of which involved almost starting World War 3.
Phantasm.
I graduated high school in '82, which makes me such an in-between child. Both Fast Times and Dazed and Confused show a lot of what my high school days were like. Throw in some Heathers and you’ve got it down pat.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Freaks and Geeks
Stranger Things.
Stranger Things was fucking uncanny. I seriously spent hours with my friends in the basement playing Dungeons and Dragons and riding bikes everywhere.
Stranger Things and Three O’Clock High were very close to my 80s adolescence. If Dazed and Confused were re-costumed in acid-wash jeans, hyper-color tees, and feathered mullets it would have been perfect.
Early teens: The M Night Shyamalan movie The Village.
Late teens: The Outsiders and Clockwork Orange come closest to what I remember.
While Freaks and Geeks definitely hits the high points (and I briefly dated a girl who looked and flaked out like Lindsay Weir, resulting in my Linda Cardellini infatuation to this day), it was Better Off Dead which succinctly captured the feeling of high school, complete with parental neglect/disconnectedness, alienation at school, being upstaged by popular asshole jocks, a succession of shitty jobs in kitchens, a non-working Camero bought out of desire to be cooler than I really was, friends trying to make drugs out of household substances, and spontaneous attacks by paperboys looking for payment. We even had a foreign exchange student from France. I spent most of the decade wanting to die in some spectacular fashion. All I was missing was the skiing and the Howard Cosell-mimic street racer. I was hoping for Real Genius or Risky Business, but I got wacky John Cusack before he became all serious. “Now that’s a real shame when folks be throwin’ away a perfectly good white boy like that.”
Stranger
Really? I remember after we got HBO in the late 1970’s/early 80’s and this movie was on and my Dad had watched it and he expressly forbade me from watching it, which I of course ignored.
Other than being bored with suburbia (“The suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth”) I don’t recall anything like in the movie.
“Dude! That’s my skull! I’m so wasted!”
Krull
There was…quite a lot…of D&D.
Risky Business. Sheesh. Thank God there wasn’t a sequel.
No movies, as they are all American and did not reflect my reality at all. All I have are TV shows.
Grange Hill, a British show about a high school that ran for 20 years. Very closely resembled my own teen years.
And The Henderson Kids, an Australian TV series about a brother and sister from the city who move to a small rural township. A little bit heightened, but quite realistic, especially about small town life.
I knew someone in real life exactly like every single character in that movie. The dialogue was real; my friends and I talked that way. Situations between teens were often awkward, just like in real life. No, my friends and I didn’t lock our parents in a school and then set out to destroy the school… that’s the fiction. But the characters, setting, etc. all rang true for 1978/79 IMO.
Yup. (As soon as I saw the thread title, I knew this would be a popular answer.)
Seeing that movie was a very strange experience. It was 1996 and I was at Freeport’s Grasberg Mine, one of the largest copper and gold mines in the world, in a remote, high-altitude station near Puncak Jaya in Papua. I was there on a site visit with the Environmental Bamboo Foundation to see about a Freeport CSR project to plant bamboo as a means to reclaim land environmentally damaged by tailings.
The residential facilities for people working at the mine are miles away from everything, over steep, harsh mountain roads. So Freeport’s guest cottages were pretty nice, since you couldn’t go anywhere for entertainment when off-duty. They had what was by 1996 standards a state-of-the-art entertainment system with tons of movies. One night we watched Deliverance and Dazed and Confused.
My head damn near exploded from the wildly contrasting images filling my brain. There I was virtually reliving my high school years through a movie, but I was perched on a mountainside in Papua thinking about gold mining and bamboo.
Another vote for Dazed and Confused.
I watched it with a friend that went to the same HS, and we agreed with no argument on who in real life matched the movie characters. It was uncanny how true to life it was. (Wisconson, graduated 1980). Except - -
Two differences - not everybody in HS smoked pot like in D&C. The movie had to have been written by some one in the stoners, and they failed to realize not everyone was like them. And the paddlin’ stuff - I have no idea what that was.
Not a movie, but a TV show - The Inbetweeners pretty accurately reflected what high school was like in the “hanging around with your mates and getting into some funny larks” kind of way.
There has never been a movie about something as dull as growing up in the late seventies/early eighties in the suburbs of a minor capital city in Australia.
We never went out looking for a kid who got hit by a train but, being from rural Illinois in the Seventies, Stand By Me is pretty close.
ETA: oh, teen. Hm. We were in the middle of suburbia by then; can’t really think of anything.
That sounds surreal!
pmwgreen - yeah, Risky Business works, obviously without the fantasy wish fulfillment, damnit. When I was 16, I would’ve loved someone having to tell me to get off the babysitter 
