Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 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.
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 1986 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 1986 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 April 4, 1986, and we’re off to see April Fool’s Day and P.O.W. – The Escape.
April Fool’s Day
For once, I can honestly say I didn’t see that coming.
Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman) invites a group of friends to spend the weekend at her family’s mansion ona n isolated island. From the moment they head over to the island, things start going horribly wrong, and more and more of the guests begin being murdered. But is everything is as it seems?
This movie is far from perfect, but it does an effective job of turning a couple of the decade’s slasher tropes on their head when you get toward the end of the film. It is not a slasher film… but it is?
As I said, it caught me by surprise toward the end, but I would never call it a “must watch.”
P.O.W. – The Escape
Boy, Cannon Films really fell in love with Vietnam-based stories.
Colonel Cooper (David Carradine) is heading up a mission to rescue some hidden P.O.W.s in the final days of the Vietnam War. Nothing goes quite to plan, leading to Cooper being more personally involved than planned.
This movie is just straight up garbage. The suspension of disbelief is pretty much shot down almost immediately when Cooper shows up to hook up with his team and it is clear he has never once spoken to his team about the mission. Four Hueys are going in, and the commanding officer has never once spoken with the soldiers under his command?
Okay… sure.
I couldn’t stay engaged from that point forward. And the rest of the film was just silly moment after silly moment of nonsense.
This film is a great example of when Cannon was truly trying to just cash in on anything that seemed popular. After the Missing in Action films and Rambo: First Blood Part II had made P.O.W.s a hot commodity, and it rarely worked.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on April 11, 2026, with A Room With a View, Band of the Hand, Critters, and Off Beat.
