Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1981 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly three dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1981 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1981 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around it’s May 29, 1981, and we’re off to see Dead & Buried!
Quick side note: Since we launched this series this year, we’ve discovered that Vintage Video Podcast is doing the exact same project with two differences: First, it’s audio (naturally), and second, they are doing every major film. We’ve listened to numerous episodes and it’s fun checking off their thoughts against my own. Check them out over at Vintage Video Podcast.
Dead & Buried
1981 really was about horror in the opening months of the year. That continued this weekend with Dead & Buried, which, as much as I want to dive into this one, I don’t want to ruin it for anyone.
Dead & Buried was one of the few films in this project I went into not knowing a thing about it. I had heard the title over the years, seen the poster, and so on, but I didn’t know the mystery of it. And it delivers in a big way as everything is revealed towards the end. It’s a smarter film than I expected, and was even smarter than it began.
I will say it opens with a photographer arriving in the small town of Potters Bluff. He comes across this attractive young woman who is willing to pose for him, and next thing he knows the tables are turned on him as he is tied up by the townspeople and burned alive while they take photos of him.
Does that sound odd enough? Good, because it was and it just gets weird from there.
I’m not going to proclaim Dead & Buried is some sort of classic, but it is smart and engaging throughout and worth your time.
The 1981 movie reviews will return on June 5 with Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams and Final Exam!
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