My favourite film: The Goonies

Picture, if you will, a Midlands household circa 1990. Cable TV was still a distant dream and cinema trips were a rarity what with the newest addition to my family still on hourly feeds. Film choices were dictated via the somewhat arbitrary whim of my dad, perhaps popping into the local VHS shop to grab a copy of whatever would entertain three kids for an hour or two. Several Looney Tunes box sets later and we arrived at Spielberg's 1985 cult classic, The Goonies.

My childish enthusiasm for pirates had just begun to manifest itself. Dinosaurs were gradually falling out of favour, to be replaced by people called Blackbeard or Peg-Leg Pete. It didn't take long before names such as One-Eyed Willy (alleged Captain Pugwash-esque double entendre and all) entered my vocabulary.

To my youthful imagination, the movie basically depicted what my life was like. I rode around on bikes with my friends! I liked making elaborate games and toys out of bits of string and cardboard! I had an attic! All I had to do was dig out an old treasure map in our loft and I'd be just like Mikey (Sean Astin) and Mouth (Corey Feldman). Unfortunately my dad was less keen on the idea of me falling through our roof insulation, and I didn't have many Asian friends with a penchant for gadgets.

By this point, ET was passé among my friends and me. We'd decided it was "too unrealistic". Instead we spent hours crafting our own imitation treasure maps, painstakingly rubbing them with old teabags and staining them with spices plucked at random from the cupboard, because most pirates' hands were covered with paprika and Tetley's after a hard day's seafaring. A permanent fixture on these culinary cartographies was a ship labelled the Inferno: One-Eyed Willy's own pirate ship. We'd follow these maps around the local woodland (inexplicably) and dig at random, occasionally coming across old Coke cans or even a crisp packet. While I'm fairly sure One-Eyed Willy's treasure didn't consist of some half-rotted copies of Penthouse, we certainly felt like we were having adventures – or at least being mildly daring.

As an adult, I became aware that The Goonies is criticised for being crass, commercialised and lacking in moral value. It's true, it featured more casual swearing than a typical Disney movie of the period, but as a result it portrayed kids as real kids. My favourite Goonies trivia is the story that relates the first time the child actors saw the full-scale pirate ship, which they were banned from seeing prior to shooting. Their all-too-real shouts of "holy shit!" were considered too obscene to include, but for me they sum up my feelings, aged seven or eight, when first watching the film. Similarly, the scene where Mikey gingerly pulls back the skeletal One-Eyed Willy's eyepatch still sends a shiver down my spine, perhaps because of the surprisingly haunting soundtrack (at least, the bit that doesn't involve Cyndi Lauper).

The movie had its share of controversy. My friends and I debated whether the third Fratelli brother, Sloth (John Matuszak), was a hero or villain. What other kids' movie featured a massively deformed Joseph Merrick figure locked in a basement and chained to a wall? And then gave him a catchphrase? Similarly, we saw illicit kissing, swearing, bike theft and frozen corpses. This was a movie that had edge as well as a soft-hearted centre.

I occasionally rewatch the film, not for kitsch nostalgia value, but to introduce younger family members to the gleeful bullying of the "truffle shuffle". Now I find myself laughing at the slightly darker humour as Mouth taunts Rosalita the maid in Spanish and Andy's scumbag boyfriend attempts to angle his rear-view mirror up her skirt.

It's not high cinema, but it's not a patronising sermon portraying kids that never existed, either. Find me another kids' film featuring economic struggle, opera, disabled brothers and a piano made of bones and I'll do the truffle shuffle myself.