Search for 1985

Had Back to the Future come to life as originally envisioned by the purse string-holders at Universal Pictures (which owned the rights to Bob Gale's screenplay), it might have been a very different project, with Eric Stoltz in the lead role. Stoltz...

About the kindest thing that can be said about Better Off Dead is that it’s a product of its time. Seen today, the movie is painfully dated and littered with unfunny material and broad “acting” that was somehow thought to be amusing. Yet,...

If nothing else, The Black Cauldron has become the most infamous of all of Disney's animated motion pictures. When it was first released in the summer of 1985, it was to have re- invigorated Disney' moribund animated division, which had produce...

When it comes to movies, there are two things that the early-to-mid-1980s are best known for: slasher films and teen comedies. While the former category was hard-pressed to give birth to a vaguely watchable entry, quality was widely variable in...

When Clue was released around Christmas 1985, it was intended to spearhead a wave of based-on-board game movies. The film’s box office failure, coupled with poor critical notices and lukewarm viewer response, stopped the “craze” before i...

History has labeled Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan as “a Madonna film” but a more accurate descriptor might be “a Rosanna Arquette film.” Indeed, at the time Seidelman was casting the film, Madonna was a footnote in the musi...

Fletch is an excellent case study about how something that may have worked in the 1980s no longer works today. Chevy Chase’s slapstick antics, a screenplay tailored to his improv routine, and cheap production values make it hard to understan...

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a fascinating character study - an exploration into how a bond of kinship can develop between two very different men, each of whose present circumstances is erected on a foundation of secrets. The film, based on the nov...

The Mad Max trilogy is pure adrenaline - a quality that was not lost when the franchise received an injection of American money for its third installment. The essential formula is straightforward, and involves a lot of fights and chases. The film...