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 May 24, 1985, and we’re off to see Brewster’s Millions, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Steaming, and A View to a Kill.
Brewster’s Millions
It’s hard to believe that by 1985 this was already the fifth film adaptation of the original 1902 novel.
Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) is set to inherit $300 million dollars from a great uncle he was never aware of if he can spend $30 million in 30 days and having nothing to show for it. The other catch is that he can’t tell anyone why he is doing all of this. With the help of his best friend, Spike Nolan (John Candy), the men set out on a life they could have only ever dreamed of.
When a movie stars Richard Pryor and John Candy, you expect to laugh a lot more than the lone time I did. (If you’re curious, it was Candy’s insults to the batter during the Yankees game.) This had to be the most humorless ‘comedy’ I’ve watched in some time. Absolutely nothing worked here from Pryor’s chemistry with any of his cast mater, to just the pure pacing of the film. A complete misfire of a movie made that much sadder by the amount of talent involved.
Rambo: First Blood Part II
It’s amazing to say, but I have been wrong calling this a ‘bad’ movie for the last 40 years. It’s a ‘horrible’ movie.
John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is serving time in prison following the events of First Blood. Colonel Samuel R. “Sam” Trautman (Richard Crenna) comes to him with an offer: Leave prison and go back into Vietnam to help locate some P.O.W.s. It’s an offer that’s hard for him to pass up, but of course he finds out once he’s there that no one is really that interested in getting them back and he had been double-crossed. Time for some muscle-bound justice.
Where do you even start with this movie? It takes a character that was truly engaging in the first film and turns him into nothing more than a standard action character. There is a completely useless sub-plot about the Russians showing up which was completely unnecessary. And don’t get me started on the super-forced ‘romantic’ element of the film.
I can’t even begin to fathom how anyone thought this was a proper follow-up to the first film.
Steaming
Apparently I had forgotten just how many plays were turned into films in the 1980s.
Steaming follows a group of women in England who frequent a Turkish bath house. It is made clear early on that this place serves as more of a home to many of these women than their own houses. The patrons serve as each other’s family, therapists, and much more, replacing their otherwise empty, vapid, and sometimes abusive, existences.
There was a really interesting movie hiding somewhere inside of here, but it just never managed to come together. It suffered from not only too many characters, but also a severe lack of a sense of time. One scene simply melted into another, and it was up to you to try to determine if any significant amount of time had passed.
I really held a lot of hope for this film, but in the end the filmmakers let down a stellar cast of actors with some very amateur film techniques.
A View to a Kill
The more I watch of the Roger Moore films, the more baffled I become by him in this role. This, thankfully, was his last time in the role.
I’m not even going to try to explain the plot of this film. At one point it has to do with drugged racehorses, and the next minute there’s a plot to explode multiple fault lines in California to wipe out Silicon Valley so that Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) – a psychopath born from a Nazi experiment – can take over the world’s supply of microchips.
I have to positive things to say about this film: The theme song is still awesome and thank goodness I never have to see Roger Moore as James Bond ever again.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on May 31, 2025, with Brazil and Fletch.
