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 June 14, 1985, and we’re off to see D.A.R.Y.L., Prizzi’s Honor, Secret Admirer, and The Stuff.
D.A.R.Y.L.
The mid-80s did love its stories of kids going on adventures, it seems.
D.A.R.Y.L. (“Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform”) escapes from a military base with the help of a scientist and lands in a suburban home and learns what it means to be human, and how the government is an unfeeling monolith.
D.A.R.Y.L. is just so bland. It feels very paint-by-numbers and is just a film that exists. And Barrett Oliver (The Neverending Story) was certainly having a moment in time at this point in the decade as he played the lead in this film.
It’s an incredibly bland film that just leaves you feeling nothing.
Prizzi’s Honor
It’s nice to see a movie do the unexpected some times.
Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson) is a hitman for the mafia, and he ends up falling for a woman the second he sees her at a wedding. It just so happens that Irene (Kathleen Turner) ends up being the wife of his next hit. And then it further turns out that she is also a mafia killer. Despite the potential conflict of these two, they fall in love and form an unusual relationship.
I had never gotten around to this movie and really didn’t know a ton about it. When the ending came along I actually went, “Oh… well then.” It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it made a ton of sense. A very rare combination.
My biggest complaint about the film was Nicholson’s accent, but other than that a really enjoyable film that made me laugh more than a few times. Well worth checking out.
Secret Admirer
This had to be one of the most complicated teen sex comedies to come out of this time period.
Michael Ryan (C. Thomas Howell) receives a note from a secret admirer, and he assumed it is from Deborah Ann Fimple (Kelly Preston). When he goes to write her back, his letters aren’t great, so his friend Toni (Lori Loughlin) agrees to help him. Along the way, all of these letter fall into the hands of adults who begin believing they are from their friends and they are all looking to have affairs.
The movie made me chuckle a few times despite just how insanely improbable every step of the story is. You see the ending coming from about 30 seconds into the film, but it was still a fun little diversion of a film that was a bit smarter than most of the other teen comedies coming out at the time.
The Stuff
At a brisk 87 minutes, it’s pretty clear that not all of this movie made it on to the screen.
A man discovers a bubbling white substance coming out of the ground at an oil field and immediately sticks it in his mouth (as you do) and so begins the journey of ‘The Stuff’ to grocery market shelves. What no one realizes is that it is highly addictive and will eventually take over your body as ‘The Stuff’ is sentient. When an ice cream company hires industrial spy David “Mo” Rutherford (Michael Moriarty), only then do the pieces start to fall into place.
It’s fairly obvious as you watch the movie that there are scenes cut out. There are some massive leaps in logic, and nearly nothing is explained along the way. The film ends up being a mix of satirical comedy and part horror film, and it just ends up feeling a bunch of elements being thrown in a blender and none of them quite work.
The film isn’t so much ‘bad’ as just misguided in what it tries to communicate.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on June 21, 2025, with Cocoon, A Flash of Green, Lifeforce, and Return to Oz.
