You’d live in the 1950s, wouldn’t you? You have seen Grease and Stand By Me and Back to the Future, so you know it was a carefree decade full of dancing and childhood adventure and songs about cars that can somehow bring schoolgirls to orgasm. Even now, 40 years after it was first released, Grease still feels like an escape.

For the most part, cinema has been kind to the 50s. The Shawshank Redemption found uplift in suicide and incarceration, M*A*S*H retroactively transformed the Korean War into a goonish cavalcade of knockabout high jinks, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull managed to take the decade’s constant palpable fear of comprehensive nuclear obliteration and leverage it into a vehicle for slapstick fridge jokes. So long as you ignore stuff such as Vera Drake and Badlands and The Last Picture Show, you would totally live in the 1950s.

But, using a similar formula, would you want to live in any other recent decade? Let’s find out.

1960s

Nope. No. Absolutely not. Sure, it was the decade of free love and the Beatles, but watch almost every post-60s film and you will know what a relentlessly abhorrent decade the 60s was. Gay? A Single Man taught us that you would experience enough loss to give you a fatal heart attack. Mentally unwell? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest depicted the outright savagery you would encounter. And if you were young enough to be drafted, God help you. Two words: Apocalypse Now. And three more words: Full Metal Jacket, not to mention Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July or Good Morning Vietnam. However, if you still need convincing – and, truly, I am sorry to have to point this out to you – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was also set in the 1960s. The horror. The horror.

1970s

Once again, hard pass. Judging by the films made about them, the 70s were almost comically bleak. Look at Zodiac and Summer of Sam and you’ll see that the entire decade was absolutely riddled with real-life serial killers. Watch Rob Zombie’s one-two of The House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects and you’ll see it was just as full of fictional serial killers. If you lived in the 70s, you were doomed from the outset. The haircuts were bad, the politics were bad and the clothes were bad. Even something as treacly as My Girl was essentially a dire warning that anyone with the temerity to fall in love in the 1970s would end up dead by bees. Avoid.

1980s

Hey, now we’re talking. Cinematically the 1980s was the decade of The Wedding Singer, Adventureland and Hot Tub Time Machine; a decade where nothing bad happened and everyone could get rich and goof off like it was the 1950s all over again. Even Fargo and American Psycho (both set in 1987) could shrug off numerous grisly murders with Phil Collins references, because what the hell? It was the 80s! But the haircuts, boy oh boy. What were those guys in Precious and No Country for Old Men thinking? Thank God nobody could tag Anton Chigurh on Facebook back then.

1990s

Of course, being more recent than the other decades, there are fewer 90s revivals to choose from. However, Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs, – which is genuinely intolerable to sit through – can’t help but paint the decade poorly. Other 90s movies include I, Tonya and The Informant!, along with some of Straight Outta Compton, some of Notorious, some of One Day and some of the Adam Sandler film Click, none of which do enough to conjure a full picture of what the decade was really like. However, you could argue that cinema doesn’t need to remind you what the 90s were like, because I’m still alive and happy to tell you at length how rubbish they were. Honestly, just ask.