Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1980 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 three dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1980 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 1980 so that it is their true 40th anniversaries. 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 Nov. 21, 1980, and we’re off to see The Apple!
The Apple
I… don’t even know where to begin.
Normally when I watch these movies, I don’t go back and do any research because I believe you should only judge a film by what is on the screen. However, when the end of the film heavily revolves around a character we have never seen called Mr. Topps (Joss Ackland), I really needed to know where this character came from.
It seems there was a never-completed prologue that not only let you know from the opening minute that this was a biblical story, it introduced Mr. Topps. It seems it never looked good and it was cut so you never learned until the film is a ways in that it is the story of Adam & Eve… oh wait… no, it’s the story of the Rapture. It never seems to be able to make up its mind which one it is about.
It finally lands on the rapture as Mr. Topps arrives at the end – in an apparition of a Rolls Royce – and takes away all the good souls leaving record executive Mr. Boogalow (who you have figured out is Satan) on Earth with all of the other souls.
This movie makes next to no sense. It may have worked better with that prologue because then you would have known from the outset that all of this was a biblical story, but instead, you spend a chunk of the film trying to figure it out.
And we could have spent way more time trying to figure out the cars of The Apple society…
1980 movie reviews will return on Dec. 5 with Flash Gordon!
