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 March 29, 1985, and we’re off to see Almost You, The Care Bears Movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, King David, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, and The Slugger’s Wife.
Almost You
Once again, the 1980s embraced the idea of “We might as well have an affair and not tell our significant others until they get hurt.”
Alex (Griffin Dunne) is unhappy with his life and bored. His wife, Erica (Brooke Adams), has an accident and needs the help of an in-home nurse, Lisa (Karen Young). As I’m sure you can guess, Alex ends up sleeping with Lisa, while Lisa’s boyfriend catches on and starts tormenting them both with his “I know but I’m not going to tell you I know” ways.
Yet another “adult drama” filled with unlikable characters. Erica is guiltless here, but everyone else in this story is so incredibely unlikable that you just don’t care what happens to any of them. Possibly the best thing that could have happened to Erica is if the taxi that hit her had killed her and then she could have avoided all of these awful people.
The Care Bears Movie
Well, I’ll say this for The Care Bears Movie, at least it didn’t feel like a bunch of episodes squished together to make a ‘movie.’
A middle-aged couple that run an orphanage share a story with the children about the time the Care Bears helped save the world from an evil spirit that tries to erase all the caring from the world. The Bears team up with two children that hate everyone due to the death of their parents, and meet the Care Bear Cousins along the way, and it takes everyone to bring caring back to the world.
The film was produced by Nelvana out of Canada, and they honestly hit it out of the park with the animation in this film. There is a sequence of the Care Bears and the human children wrapping a May Pole that is truly stunning to watch from a technical perspective.
The film wouldn’t set the world on fire from a story perspective, but compared to ‘recent’ animated films such as Here Come The Littles, this one was a homerun.
It’s a decent animated film, and an interesting artifact of one of the biggest pop culture properties of the 1980s.
Desperately Seeking Susan
This is one of the movies that people think of almost immediately when they think of the 1980s. It’s mainly for starring Madonna and the iconic decade-specific fashion, but it’s definitely a film everyone associated with this decade.
Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) is an unsatisfied housewife from New Jersey who just wants to have some romance in her life. She peruses the personals everyday and has bccome obsessed with Susan (Madonna), a woman who communicates with her boyfriend via the personals ads. She follows them to one of their meetings and follows Susan throughout her day, eventually buying a jacket that she had just traded in at a thrift store. Through a series of events, Roberta gets mistaken for Susan, ends up with amnesia, and gets thrust into Susan’s life which now involves dodging jewel thieves.
It’s an incredibly silly and convoluted plot, but it still works mainly because Arquette and Madonna work. Madonna is very clearly playing ‘herself’ here, or what at least her public persona was perceived to be, and Arquette is doing a fantastic job of mimicing it without crossing into the fangerous territory of becoming a caricature of her.
It’s not high brow, and it won’t change your life, but it’s a fun little film that feels like it should be reuqired viewing if you’re going to explore 1980s cinema.
King David
Biblical epics hadn’t been around for a while, and considering the quality of this one, they should have stayed away.
The film follows the story of David (Richard Gere) from the time he is chosen to be king through his death. It touches on all the high points, such as his (very short) fight with Goliath, his multiple wives, his many children, and the war he fought for the throne. All of the story is here.
And not one bit of it is interesting. Bruce Beresford’s directing is incredibly flat and uninteresting. The script by Andrew Birkin and James Costigan relies on you being intimately knowledgeable on every aspect of David’s story. And Richard Gere’s acting, which has showed a lot of promise up to this point in his career, just doesn’t work here.
The film isn’t good, and it’s a shame because it is an interesting story.
Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment
For once, I think someone succeeded in making a comedy sequel that was better than the first.
It’s been sometime since the events of Police Academy, and six of the cadets from that film are sent to help in the crime-ridden 16th Precinct of an unnamed city. The captain has been given 30 days to clean it up or lose his job. Of course, there’s someone in the preinct wants jos job and is going to make sure nothing can be done to get the crime rate down. In the end they do in an off-the-books fashion, but they get the job done and end up with some pretty happy endings for the characters.
While I say the film is better then first one, by no means am I saying it is a good film. It still has some very ‘of the time’ jokes that don’t work in the modern era. In particular a ‘cavity search’ gag is really a bit unsettling in this day-and-age, but overall the film worked a bit better and seemed to actually have a slightly better grasp on how comedy works than the first film did.
The Slugger’s Wife
No.
That really could be the whole review for The Slugger’s Wife. Just… no.
Darryl Palmer (Michael O’Keefe) plays for the Atlanta Braves, but he’s been in a bit of a rut. He meets singer Debby Huston (Rebecca De Mornay), immediately falls for her, and sees his results on the field change immediately. Darryl gets obsessed with knowing where she is at all times and hearing from her before games to the point she feels suffocated. She eventually leaves him for a period, and he finally realizes she wasn’t truly a good luck charm. As the film comes to a close they agree to try to work on their marriage and see if it can be salvaged.
This film was written by Neil Simon and directed by Hal Ashby who had directed some great films such as Being There. What either of these people were thinking with this one is a complete mystery.
Darryl turns into a full-on psychotic stalker of Debby to the point of busting up a diner when he sees her with another man. Simon’s dialog, which was usually snappy and flawless, just falls completely flat here.
There is not one redeeming quality to this movie, and you really have to wonder if it was just done so some people could get a paycheck later in their careers.
Absolutely awful.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on April 5, 2025, with Alamo Bay.
