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 12, 1985, and we’re off to see Explorers, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Silverado.
Explorers
If you are looking for an 80s film that feels as though it could easily exist in the Stranger Things universe, you just found it.
Benjamin “Ben” Crandall (Ethan Hawke) awakens from a dream with a schematic of a circuit board in his head. He shares it with his friend Wolfgang Müller (River Phoenix) who is able to build it and it forms an airtight bubble that experiences no interior inertia. Darren Woods (Jason Presson) joins the little group after saving Ben from a bully. The three of them later share a dream, seeing the missing component that will allow them to breathe in the bubble and find themselves on an intergalactic voyage.
It had easily been 30 years since I watched this film, if not longer, and it was super easy to see this film – amongst many others – must have been what influenced the Duffer Brothers when coming up with their hit Netflix series.
The first two thirds of the film are incredibly charming – minus the very odd peeping tom sub-plot – but the last third with the aliens is so over the top as to be grating.
You end up with a slightly mixed bag, but it’s still entertaining.
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
What in the world happened?
Set some time after the events of The Road Warrior, “Mad Max” Rockatansky finds himself relieved of all his worldly possessions after a jalopy pilot (played by Bruce Spence, who played a different pilot in the last film), knocks him off his vehicle. He makes his way to Bartertown where Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) offers him a deal if he will help him get rid of Blaster (Paul Larsson), so Master (Angelo Rossitto) will no longer have the muscle to hold the town ransom.
When Max fails to kill Blaster, he is exiled, and ends up running into a group of feral children that drag him into their own silly adventure.
Mad Max is an odd little film, but enjoyable. The Road Warrior is a classic. Beyond Thunderdome is just hot garbage.
The portion with the kids feels like an entirely different movie from the first third. If anything, this feels more akin to a very compressed TV project than a movie.
Other than a few memorable lines, this film doesn’t remotely hold up, and you can very much skip it.
Silverado
It appears that once Hollywood decided it was safe to make Westerns again, it went all in.
Emmett (Scott Glenn) finds himself ambushed by three men, and decides he must head out to find out who tried to kill him. While on his way he stumbles across Paden (Kevin Kline) wearing nothing but underwear in the desert, and takes pity on him to get him to town. Once there, they hook up with Emmett’s brother, Jake (Kevin Costner) and meet Mal (Danny Glover), forming what will become their group of heroes for the rest of the film.
From there we run into one Western movie trope after another, but they are all done so well that you’re fine with them. The movie is humorous, filled with some excellent action scenes, and is generally just an easy watch, and I’m not normally a Western fan.
It’s just interesting Pale Rider was the first Western since the financial disaster of Heaven’s Gate, and then mere weeks later we had Silverado. Of the two released already in 1985, I would go with Silverado.
1985 Movie Reviews will return on July 19, 2025, with The Coca-Cola Kid, The Legend of Billie Jean, and The Man With One Red Shoe.