18. First Blood
Optimum Home ReleasingBefore First Blood came along, playing in the woods with our friends required an active imagination - all that changed when Sylvester Stallone released his classic action movie which introduced the world to John Rambo, the troubled Vietnam War Special Forces veteran who finds himself harangued and hunted down by the local police. While the sly politics may have been completely lost on us at the time, the thrills of watching Rambo as he sets up one ingenious trap after another as the hunted becomes the hunter stuck in our minds well after watching First Blood, and remained there while we ran around the woods like idiots wielding invisible machine guns. It's a good thing that the ending to the book was altered and John Rambo's life was spared, but that said, the sequels never quite reached the same deliriously exciting highs of the original.