The Goonies

Today is a bit of a special one, because this is the very first From the Vault review here on Frame 70, a new midweek feature where we dust off the classics, the favourites, and the films that made us fall for movies in the first place. And when it came to picking the film to kick it all off, honestly, there was never a debate. What kind of From the Vault collection would this be without The Goonies? You can’t do it. It’s simply not allowed. So today we’re taking a look at The Goonies, the 1985 adventure classic directed by Richard Donner and starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Jeff Cohen and Ke Huy Quan.

A little bit of context first, because the pedigree behind this movie is quietly ridiculous. The Goonies is directed by Richard Donner, the man who gave us the original Superman with Christopher Reeve, and who would go on to make the Lethal Weapon films. The story comes from Steven Spielberg, the screenplay is by Chris Columbus, who had just written Gremlins the year before, and the whole thing was produced under Spielberg’s Amblin banner. So you’ve got three of the biggest names of that entire era pooling their talents into one kids’ adventure movie about hunting pirate treasure. No pressure.

The setup is beautifully simple. We’re in the Goon Docks neighbourhood of Astoria, Oregon, where a group of young misfits are about to lose their homes because wealthy developers want to bulldoze the whole area to expand a country club. And then, up in the attic, the kids stumble across an old doubloon and a treasure map belonging to a legendary seventeenth century pirate called One-Eyed Willy. So off they go, down beneath the Oregon coast, through caves and booby traps, chasing the fortune that could save their families’ homes, all while being chased themselves by the Fratellis, a family of criminals who are after the exact same loot.

That’s it. That’s the movie. And that’s exactly why it works.

No Homework Required

Because here’s the thing about The Goonies: there’s no homework required. There’s no huge underlying plot to untangle, no lore, no research, no sitting down beforehand to watch three other films so it all makes sense. It opens with a genuinely impressive jailbreak sequence, rolls straight into a bunch of kids mucking around and having fun, and never once lets go of your hand. It is a pure, uncut kids’ adventure movie, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

And I’d put money on this: if you watched The Goonies as a kid, you went treasure hunting afterwards. I know I did. Digging around the house, exploring places you absolutely should not have been, convinced that somewhere out there was your own elusive One-Eyed Willy fortune waiting to be found. That’s the magic of this movie. It doesn’t just entertain kids. It sends them outside to have their own adventure. Not many films can put that on their resume.

Every Kid Gets Their Moment

Now let’s talk about this cast, because every single one of these kids gets their moment, and that’s rarer than you’d think in an ensemble film.

You’ve got Sean Astin as Mikey, the young dreamer leading the whole expedition, years before he’d carry Frodo up the side of a volcano. Josh Brolin as Brand, the protective older brother, and I’ll get back to Josh Brolin in a minute, because I have a confession to make. Corey Feldman as Mouth, the fast-talking sarcastic one. Jeff Cohen as Chunk, who I could honestly do an entire episode about. And Ke Huy Quan as Data, the gadget kid, basically a pint-sized James Bond with a spring-loaded set of teeth on his belt.

And can we take a second for Ke Huy Quan? Because I absolutely love that here in 2026 we are seeing so much more of this man. This is the same kid who played Short Round alongside Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second Indy film, just one year before The Goonies. Then Hollywood basically stopped calling, and he spent years working behind the camera as a stunt choreographer instead. And then came the comeback. Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won him an Oscar. The TV show Loki. Now he’s popping up everywhere, leading action movies, doing voice work, the lot. Watching Data all these years later, knowing where that kid ended up, adds this lovely extra layer of warmth to the whole movie. He was always the heart of the gadget humour, and now he’s back in front of the camera where he belongs.

Oh, and one more bit of trivia that I love to bits. Jeff Cohen, Chunk himself, grew up to become an entertainment lawyer. And whose lawyer is he today? Ke Huy Quan’s. Chunk is Data’s real-life lawyer. Quan calls him his Goonies brother. If that doesn’t warm your cold heart, nothing will.

So what actually works about this movie, forty-odd years on?

First, the humour still lands, and a lot of it is aimed slightly over the kids’ heads. Even for a kids’ movie there’s a surprising amount of adult underlay in here. The standout is Mouth acting as translator for Rosalita, the lady helping the Walsh family pack up the house. Corey Feldman just casually mistranslating everything into the most inappropriate nonsense imaginable, completely deadpan, while she nods along horrified. As a kid you laugh because it’s silly. As an adult you laugh because you finally understand what he’s actually saying. It’s a joke that grows up with you, and the movie’s full of those.

Second, and this is one of my favourite dumb things about eighties cinema, the villains cannot shoot. The Fratellis are firing guns at children for large stretches of this film and they could not hit the ocean from a boat. Marksmanship in 1985 was absolutely shocking. They shoot like bloody stormtroopers, and we all know stormtroopers can’t hit anything. But that’s part of the charm, right? The danger is real enough to give the adventure stakes, and cartoonish enough that nobody in the cinema is actually scared. It’s a kids’ movie that knows exactly what it is.

And third: Chunk. Sweet, clumsy, chaotic Chunk. Here’s the thing people forget: the Goonies only get as far as they do because of Chunk and his clumsiness. He’s not the comic relief bolted onto the adventure. He’s load-bearing comic relief. His disasters keep moving the plot forward. And he gets two of the funniest sequences in the whole film. The first is his full confession scene, where the Fratellis demand he tell them everything, and Chunk takes them extremely literally and confesses his entire life story, every prank, every sin, every crime against a cinema full of moviegoers, sobbing the whole way through. The second is everything he does with Sloth. Chunk and Sloth are, for my money, one of the funniest duos of the entire 1980s. A terrified kid and a gentle giant chained up in a basement, becoming best mates over a Baby Ruth. It should not work. It absolutely works.

Right. Josh Brolin. The confession. I have, at one point in my youth, dressed up as Brand for Halloween. Headband, the works. And I have also owned a Chunk shirt. So when I tell you this movie is one of my all-time childhood favourites, understand that I have receipts. Physical, wearable receipts. This film was stitched into my childhood in a very literal way, and I regret absolutely nothing.

Easter Eggs and Real-World Treasure

Now let’s play Easter egg hunter for a minute, because this movie is hiding some beauties.

At around the one hour and twelve minute mark, there’s a scene where Chunk finally gets through to the sheriff on the phone, trying to report everything that’s happening. And the sheriff, who clearly knows Chunk’s reputation, brushes him off by bringing up his previous prank calls, including, and I quote the spirit of it, that time he called about the little creatures that multiply when you throw water on them. That is a direct wink at Gremlins, which came out the year before and was written by the very same Chris Columbus who wrote The Goonies. He slid a reference to his own movie straight into the script, and it sails right past you unless you’re paying attention. I love it.

Then there’s Sloth. Late in the film, in one of the great heroic moments, Sloth rips open his shirt to reveal a Superman t-shirt underneath, and if you listen closely, a little sting of the Superman theme plays. That’s director Richard Donner tipping his hat to his own movie, the original 1978 Superman. Two Easter eggs, one from the writer, one from the director, both hiding in plain sight in a kids’ film.

Now, in my dictaphone notes I wondered aloud whether Spielberg snuck any Easter eggs of his own in there, and I said we might need to do some googling. Well, the googling has been done, and here’s what I found. There’s no hidden Spielberg cameo or reference in the traditional sense, but there’s something better. Remember Chunk’s confession about the prank at the cinema, the one involving the fake vomit off the balcony? That story was based on a real prank a young Steven Spielberg pulled as a kid growing up in Phoenix. So Spielberg’s Easter egg isn’t a wink at one of his movies. It’s a piece of his actual childhood, smuggled into Chunk’s rap sheet. That might be my favourite bit of trivia in this entire review.

And on a side note, if you love The Goonies the way I do, I’ve got a companion piece for you, and the timing on this could not be better. There’s a show called Expedition Unknown, hosted by Josh Gates, a man I’ve been watching for over ten years now. If you’ve ever seen Josh Gates, you’ll know he is a massive movie lover, and The Goonies is his all-time favourite film. Well, for the fortieth anniversary of the movie, he dedicated an entire episode to it. It’s called The Real Goonies Treasure. He heads to the Oregon coast, the actual setting of the film, and hunts for the real-life pirate treasure that inspired the whole legend: a Spanish galleon that wrecked off the Pacific coast back in 1694. They actually find pieces of the ship. It’s a proper real-world Goonies adventure, made by a grown-up Goonie, and it is a great watch. You’ll find it on the Discovery Channel, streaming on HBO Max. Consider that your homework, the fun kind.

So, final thoughts. The Goonies is all about saving the house. It’s about a bunch of kids who refuse to accept that the adults have already given up, because Goonies never say die. And it ends exactly the way an adventure like this should end, with that pirate ship slowly sailing out of the cave and into the sunset, while the kids watch from the beach. It’s one of those closing images that gets burned into you as a kid and never leaves. No sequel bait, no loose threads, just a perfect full stop on a perfect adventure.

Is it a flawless film? Of course not. It’s loud, it’s chaotic, the plot logic wobbles if you lean on it, and every child in it is screaming roughly eighty percent of the time. But none of that matters, because The Goonies isn’t trying to be prestige cinema. It’s trying to bottle what it feels like to be a kid on the best day of your childhood. And it does.

But as always, that’s just how The Goonies lands for me, a movie I grew up with, dressed up as, and clearly cannot be objective about. Entertainment is subjective. Maybe the eighties chaos isn’t your thing, and that’s completely okay. But if there’s even a small part of you that ever wanted to find a treasure map in the attic, this one’s for you. Goonies never say die.