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 September 19, 1986, and we’re off to see Blue Velvet.
Blue Velvet
This was the closest mainstream audiences had come yet to David Lynch’s style, and boy was it talked about.
Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home from college when his father has a medical episode. While walking through a field, he finds a human ear, and from there he is sucked into a seedy underworld of his hometown. As he investigates the ear on his own, he meets Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini), who is being controlled by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) who kidnapped her husband and son.
For a 1986 movie, Blue Velvet was “out there,” but compared to some other David Lynch projects, this was pretty tame.
This probably ended up being most people’s introductions to Lynch as it hit during the video rental explosion. As I watched it, though, I kept thinking, “Yeah, you all really didn’t get all of Lynch with this.” It felt very much like a film noir detective movie more so than a one of Lynch’s otherworldly tales.
Well worth the watch, but just remember this is ‘tame’ by Lynch standards.
Where to watch: Available to stream.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on Sept. 26, 2026, with Crocodile Dundee, Down by Law, and The Name of the Rose.
