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 July 5, 1985, and we’re off to see Back to the Future and The Emerald Forest.
Back to the Future
Do I even really need to write this one up?
Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) builds a time machine. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), Doc’s teenage buddy, accidentally uses it to travel 30 years into the past and nearly erases himself from history. Hijinks ensue.
You have to wonder if, at any point during filming, they realized they were making a movie that would end up becoming an iconic milestone for an entire decade. When people think of movies of the 1980s, there is very little chance this one won’t come up in discussion. And the nice thing is, it’s still just as entertaining today as it was then.
The acting is sharp. The comedy on point. There is really not a thing you can say against this movie, and that’s an amazing thing considering some of the other garbage we’ve seen during this project.
Day of the Dead
George A. Romero walked when it came to zombies, so others could run.
Serving as the third installment in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead series, this film takes us to an underground missile bunker in the Florida Everglades, which has become home to a group of military personnel assigned to watch over scientists studying the zombies that have ravaged the world. As is often the case in these types of stories, the two sides hold very different opinions about the current state of affairs.
In a pop culture environment where you can’t swing a bat without hitting a zombie story, this film was a breath of fresh air. Romero was doing things with zombies that had never been addressed before, and it’s easy to see how he influenced so much of what has come since. This film’s fingerprints are on so many novels, comics, TV shows, and movies at this point. This is a must-watch for horror fans.
The Emerald Forest
Imagine a land-locked version of The Blue Lagoon with more guns and death.
Bill Markham (Powers Boothe) moves with his family to Brazil to work on a major dam project. Early in his tenure, Tommy (William Rodriguez and then Charley Boorman) is abducted by an indigenous tribe known as the Invisible People. After 10 years of searching for his missing son, Bill encounters the cannibalistic Fierce People, and is saved from them by a now much older Tommy/Tomme. Tomme has become the Invisible People’s chief’s son, and has no interest in returning to civilization, but after a turn of events, he needs Bill’s help to save his tribe.
Lets get this out of the way: The film makes you super uncomfortable. For a large portion of the film, Tomme’s love interest, Kachiri (Dira Paes), is running around in nothing but a g-string. After raising an eyebrow at how young she looked, I looked it up. She turned 16 on the last day of filming.
Blame it on Rio did the same thing to viewers, and you really have to wonder how they all got away with it.
Beyond the creep factor here, the film is well shot, the acting is fine, but there is just nothing new here. You’ve seen parts of this story a million other places from The Bounty to The Blue Lagoon. The mid-80s seemed to really get into the stories of people giving up their contemporary world for an indigenous life. While The Bounty was based on a true story, one has to wonder if this trend was being driven by the increasingly stressful decade.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on July 12, 2025, with Explorers, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Silverado.
