The greatest movie ever made..!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

A movie I consider an underrated classic of the 1980's Cocoon, just gets better with age.Plot In A Paragraph: A group of aliens led by Walter (Brian Dennehy) and Kitty (Tahnee Welch) return to earth to retrieve cocoons containing the people they'd left behind from an earlier trip. These cocoons had been resting at the bottom of the ocean. They hire a boat from a local captain Jack (Steve Guttenberg) who helps them retrieve the cocoons. Once retrieved, they stored these recovered cocoons in the swimming pool of a house they'd rented in a small Florida town. Problems arise when three elderly people, Art (Don Ameche) Ben (Wilford Brimley) and Joe (Hume Cronyn) from a nearby retirement community have been secretly using the pool, and who discover a new lease of life after using the pool with the cocoons in it.All the lead cast are brilliant and Brian Dennehy is as excellent as always. Every time I see him on screen I warm to Steve Guttenberg, and I can't help but wonder what happened to his career, and looking on here, he didn't make a movie from 1990 (A sequel to "3 Men & A Baby") till 1995. Which is forever in Hollywood.The film marked the first collaboration between director Ron Howard and composer James Horner. Horner would go on to compose the music for many films directed by Howard.

Ron Howard's ambitious but mostly bland 'Cocoon' has some interesting moments, but is mostly a lazy film, that lacks sharp writing. However, Don Ameche's Oscar-Winning Performance is fabulous. 'Cocoon' Synopsis: When a group of trespassing seniors swim in a pool containing alien cocoons, they find themselves energized with youthful vigour.'Cocoon' has attractive special effects & some interesting moments as well. But, the excessive running-time of nearly 2 hours seems a bit too stretched & even the writing isn't engrossing enough. Ron Howard is a master at his craft & he directs 'Cocoon' with his usual memorable style. Performance-Wise: Besides Ameche, who owns the film, its the amazing Maureen Stapleton who lends wonderful support in the narrative. Brian Dennehy also is good. On the whole, 'Cocoon' is an okay watch.

The Citizen Kane of Ron Howard's directorial career has to be and still is Cocoon. It's a film that combines fantasy and science fiction better than any ever done before or since and it's the most life affirming item you'll ever see on the big screen or small. It also gives some of our older players some really fine roles and brought an Oscar late in his career to one of the class acts of Hollywood.The citizens of one of thousands of nursing homes are just whiling away the end hours of their lives and in Florida there's more of these homes than most places. Three of those citizens are Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn and Don Ameche. One of their activities is to go into an indoor swimming pool in a vacant house next door.But those activities are interrupted when four strangers, Brian Dennehy, Linda Harrison, Clint Howard, and Tyrone Power IV rent the place. It's that swimming pool that interests them. The quartet also rents Steve Guttenberg's boat and they bring up some large size boulder type rocks which they place in the pool.Our senior citizens keep going into the pool even with the rocks there and pretty soon they're noticing some marvelous changes, in Hume Cronyn, the most marvelous of all as his cancer goes into a complete remission, mystifying his doctors. That leads our group now joined by wives Jessica Tandy and Maureen Stapleton for Cronyn and Brimley and companion Gwen Verdon for Ameche that these are some special people.Special they are, humans they're not as the quartet shows them they're aliens in human body suits. And after some heartache and tragedy for both earth people and aliens, the aliens offer these old folks a chance never given to any humans before. For that you see Cocoon for.This is the kind of film that you can watch over and over and still feel good about yourselves and feel good that there are others out there in the vast universe who've played the game of life and have mastered the rules. There are so many other science fiction films that show monsters and other worldly creatures coming to earth with the most malicious of intentions. Cocoon is such a refreshing change.Cocoon got two Oscars in 1985 for special effects and a Best Supporting Actor Award for Don Ameche. In a sense it was wrong to single out Ameche because all the senior citizen players cut some fine characters that you'll remember and enjoy. But Ameche was always a class act in Hollywood, a person you'll not hear an unkind word about written or spoken by his contemporaries in a career that lasted from the Thirties to the Nineties. It was an award for a lifetime more than anything else.One of those characters also was Jack Gilford. There's a famous classic Twilight Zone episode which also takes place in a senior citizen home where the residents there are given the same chance as these people are. With a lot less attention I might add. Gilford fulfills the same function as Russell Collins did in The Twilight Zone, the one who stays behind because he can't bring himself to take the step necessary.Who knows how long or if humankind will approach what these aliens have, but in many ways Cocoon offers a peak into an existence more fabulous than ever portrayed on film before.

Pretty decent light sci-fi, kind of like E.T. except with old people instead of children. Brian Dennehy plays an alien come to Earth looking for cocoons left in the ocean a long time ago by their race. The cocoons they find are placed in an indoor pool next door to an old folk's home, and a few rascally old men (Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn and Don Ameche) sneak in and use the pool. The water has become rejuvenating, and the three men, along with their wives on subsequent visits, become reinvigorated. Steve Guttenberg plays a ship captain whom the aliens hire to take them out to sea, and Raquel Welch's gorgeous daughter, Tahnee Welch, plays one of the aliens for whom Guttenberg falls. Don Ameche somehow won an Oscar for his role, most likely for a silly break dancing sequence which he obviously did not perform. In my mind, Jack Gilford, as the guys' buddy who refuses to go into the pool, is the best actor in the film, though I don't think anyone deserved an Oscar nomination for it.