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 May 16, 1986, and we’re off to see Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
Cobra
A decent script is the cure, and Stallone is the disease… is that how that went?
Lieutenant Marion “Cobra” Cobretti (Sylvester Stallone) is the cop you call when you’re out of solutions, and we’re introduced to him taking out a mass shooter in a grocery store. From there he gets wrapped up in the hunt for a serial killer that no one realizes is the head of a cult. When Ingrid Knudsen (Brigitte Nielsen) gets a good look at the cult leader, she becomes their new target, and only Cobra can keep her safe.
This film is so bad. It is Stallone at peak Stallone nonsense, and with Nielsen starring, his then wife, the acting approaches painful.
Stallone wrote this movie, and considering he has proven he can write excellent films, it’s hard to say what wrong here other than hubris.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
Crawlspace
There was a kernel of an interesting movie here, and then, as is often the case, too many layers were piled on.
Dr. Karl Gunter (Klaus Kinski) runs an apartment building with strictly female residents. The reason? He enjoys killing them. Gunter spends his nights crawling through the ventilation system of the building, spying on his resident and plotting how each one will die. And when done, he returns to his attic space where he keeps one woman alive in a cage, even though he cut out her tongue. As more residents die, newcomer Lori Bancroft (Taila Balsam) begins to figure out that not all is as it seems.
I will never understand why a layer of Nazi nonsense was added on top of this film. The mad doctor plot was plenty, but no, we had to tack on a bunch of unnecessary stuff about his father having been a Nazi. They could have just gone with a doctor with a God complex and called it a day.
Decent premise muddled by a weird ending.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
Poltergeist II: The Other Side
This movie is so wildly worse than the first one that it is kind of amazing.
The Freeling family is still reeling from the events of the first film when odd things begin happening around them once again while staying with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother, Jess (Geraldine Fitzgerald). While the first evil came from the graveyard the house was built on top of, this new evil comes from below even those graves and a minister who killed all of his followers. Now, with the help of Tandina (Zelda Rubeinstein) and Taylor (Will Sampson), the family has to confront this new evil to save Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) once again.
The entire premise of this film is so half-baked as to be laughable. While the first film could also serve as a meta-commentary on the rise of capitalism to new highs in the early 80s, this one tosses all of that out by saying “Naw, that wasn’t the actual problem of the first film.”
The addition that Carol Anne has some form of abilities is also an additional layer that really adds nothing to the story. There was nothing wrong with the premise of the first one, just say the spirits attached to the family and moved with them. Problem solved. But no, they had to add an insanly weak new premise.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 23, 2026, with A Great Wall and Big Trouble.
