Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1985 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 four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1985 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 1984 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 April 26, 1985, and we’re off to see 1918, Hellhole, Just One of the Guys, and Stick.
1918
Sometimes you want to make an epic, and instead you end up with a ‘meh.’
1918 follows the lives of various members of a family as they deal with the ramifications of World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, and all of the trials and tribulations of living up to your family’s expectations.
It felt as though the movie wanted to be some sweeping period piece, but partially due to the fact that nearly every scene happens in one house, it comes off feeling more like a play, and a poorly written one at that. The dialog is choppish at the best of times, and even more choppy at the worst.
Despite its numerous flaws, living in a post Covid-19 pandemic world, and having never personally heard of the Spanish Flu pandemic before 2020, it’s interesting to know it was enough to warrant a film.
Perhaps worthy of a watch from a historical perspective, but otherwise a very easy miss.
Hellhole
“What if we made a women in prison movie, but set it in an asylum?”
After Susan (Judy Landers) sees her mother murdered by a man looking for some damning papers she stole, Susan suffers from amnesia and ends up in an all women asylum so the bad guys can keep an eye on her. Much to everyone’s chagrin, the asylum is also conducting experiments on patients to develop an injectable chemical to lobotomize them.
… and there’s a mud bath… in an asylum.
This truly feels like it was once meant to be a prison film and someone just got the random idea to switch the setting. But even despite the setting, it’s just a trash film that serves no other purpose than to show you breasts, and lots of them.
Very much a skip unless you just hate yourself.
Just One of the Guys
This is one of the first films I can remember seeing the impact of video stores on its cultural status. The film lost money at the box office, but I can remember nearly everyone I knew seeing it at some point.
Terri Griffith (Joyce Hyser) wants to be a journalist, but she’s finding that no one takes her seriously. After losing a competition for a summer job at a newspaper, she decides the solution is to enter again, but as “Terry” at another school. Not only does she prove her point, but falls for a new guy while changing the lives of some of the other people at the school along the way.
While not important to the end product: I would love to know how Terry got set up for the gender swap that fast, especially enrolling in a new school.
The film is a teen comedy, but it’s also oddly progressive. When you have your lead character thinking about whether women’s liberation for nothing, while her brother is hanging up Playboy centerfolds, it’s an interesting commentary.
Surprisingly, there is only one breast shot in the entire film, which, for the 80s, was darn near being the equivalent to zero.
It’s a fun little movie. It won’t change your life, but from the topics to the music & fashion, it’s so 80s it almost hurts. And it even has William Zabka in a non-Karate Kid role!
Stick
Burt Reynolds directs Burt Reynolds. This goes as well as you might expect.
Ernest “Stick” Stickley (Burt Reynolds) is freshly out of prison for armed robbery, and quickly falls into delivering drugs with an old friend. What he doesn’t know is it’s a setup and he falls into a world of people trying to kill him and his need for revenge.
This film is just a huge bunch of nothing. Other than a fairly memorable big stunt of a hit man falling off a building, there is nothing in this film that will ever pop into your head ever again. The acting is horrific from the vast majority of the cast, and Reynolds was clearly out of his depths directing.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on May 3, 2025, with Code of Silence, Gotcha, Gymkata, and Private Resort.
