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 11, 1986, and we’re off to see 8 Million Ways to Die, Crimewave, and Violets are Blue.

8 Million Ways to Die

The 1980s made several runs at trying to capture the essence of film noir, and this is one of the attempts that fails miserably.

Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is an alcoholic Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy who gets thrown off the force after shooting a man attacking another cop with a bat (somehow Scudder was in the wrong for not letting the other deputy to be beat to death?). After getting himself into Alcoholics Anonymous, he is invited up to a party where he quickly gets entangled in a drug and prostitution ring that will see to the deaths of multiple people as Scudder tries to reclaim his life.

It’s not a good movie. It’s frankly a bit of a mess with some atrocious dialog thrown in as well. (There is one line that made my jaw drop that I sadly can’t run here, but it was just one of many bad lines.)

There is no doubt the film was trying to merge the feeling of a classic film noir with the rising Miami Vice style of the time, and it didn’t succeed at either of them.

A complete misfire that you can easily skip.

Crimewave

Sam Raimi directing from a script by the Coen Brothers should be amazing, but then the studio got involved.

Victor Ajax (Reed Birney) is on his way to be executed, but before that can happen he makes a last ditch effort to clear his name to the prison officials. It seems Victor was indeed framed for a murder he did not commit, and only a car full of nuns who took a vow of silence can clear his name.

Something felt horribly off in this movie, and I went and looked it up. Sure enough, the studio decided Raimi couldn’t edit the film and we ended up with a muddle mess of a story. That being said, there are some lovely shots in the film, and the Coen brother’s fingerprints are all over the story, albeit greatly mangled by the editing.

There are times you can feel a studio abusing its position, and this one felt it all the way through. Good for Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Coen Brothers completists only, and absolutely no one else.

Violets are Blue

Oh good, another 1980s movie were we are supposed to be rooting for people who are cheating.

Gussie (Sissy Spacek) comes back to her hometown after becoming a famous photojournalist. She runs into her old flame, Henry (Kevin Kline) who is now married with a teenage son. It’s impossible for them to avoid their old feelings and almost immediately begin an affair.

I am quickly tiring of this trend in the 80s films, and this one in particular is pretty egregious. Henry tells Gussie the only reason he is married to Ruth (Bonnie Bedelia) is because her got her pregnant. Ruth clearly loves him more than he does her, and I think somehow that is supposed to excuse everyone’s behavior.

I love Kline and Spacek, but I hated every minute of this movie.

1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 2, 2026, with Blue City, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, No Retreat, No Surrender, and Saving Grace.

Ready to sing along from your couch? The Amazon Music Stagecoach Saturday livestream has you covered. For a heartfelt ballad, you’ll be able to tune in as Teddy Swims and Lainey Wilson take the Stagecoach stage. Take a trip back in time to watch Bush perform, then end the night tuning into Mr. Worldwide taking over the desert as Pitbull closes out the Saturday performances.

The festival will be livestreamed on Amazon Music, Prime Video and Twitch. On Sirius XM’s the Highway (channel 56), you can listen to exclusive interviews and live performances. Their station Y’allternative will also be covering the festival on Saturday.

Note that if you wanted to catch Journey or Diplo with Theo Von and Caleb Pressley, they are not currently scheduled to be on the stream, but you can follow along with our team posting live updates in the field.

Here are updated set times for the Stagecoach livestream Saturday performances (times presented in PDT):

Channel 1

3:10 p.m. Kevin Smiley; 3:30 p.m. Braxton Keith; 4:05 p.m. Redferrin; 4:40 p.m. Corey Kent; 5:35 p.m. Teddy Swims; 6:20 p.m. Treaty Oak Revival; 7:20 p.m. Little Big Town; 8:20 p.m. Riley Green; 9:30 p.m. Lainey Wilson; 11 p.m. Pitbull

Channel 2

3:10 p.m. S.G. Goodman; 3:30 p.m. Lane Pittman; 4:05 p.m. Benjamin Tod; 4:40 p.m. Michael Marcagi; 5:20 p.m. Willow Avalon; 5:55 p.m. Billy Bob Thornton & the Boxmasters; 6:40 p.m. Chase Matthew; 7:20 p.m. Charles Wesley Godwin; 8:10 p.m. Bush; 9:10 p.m. Gavin Adcock; 10:20 p.m. Two Friends

Sirius XM The Highway

4 p.m. Corey Kent; 6:30 p.m. Little Big Town; 7:50 p.m. Riley Green; 9 p.m. Lainey Wilson

Sirius XM Y’allternative

9 a.m. the Red Clay Strays; 11 a.m. Larkin Poe; 12 p.m. Ole 60; 1 p.m. Sam Barber; 2 p.m. the Marcus King Band; 6 p.m. S.G. Goodman; 8 p.m. Treaty Oak Revival

When a once-successful director finds himself stranded in a wilderness of misguided projects and indifferent audience response, he may try to reignite inspiration by going back to the ingredients of an iconic hit. If he can replicate the perfect storm of elements that made the earlier film work, maybe the new movie will put him back on top.

This kind of thing happens often enough — examples range from William Friedkin shooting for a West Coast “French Connection” with “To Live and Die in L.A.” to John McTiernan making “Die Hard with a Vengeance.” But we’re in a far more degraded realm of return-to-glory-days syndrome when it’s Renny Harlin out to recapture the low-trash spark of “Deep Blue Sea,” his well-liked exploitation action thriller. Talk about a 1999 movie that wasn’t about the brave new movie future!

It was about killer sharks (with enhanced intelligence!) eating people, and about a scientific experiment — something to do with curing Alzheimer’s — that was there to fill up the space between chompings. But “Deep Blue Sea,” whose big star was Thomas Jane, went down as a summer sleeper (it bit its way to $73 million domestic), and the nostalgic fondness that a lot of people have for it surely fed into why we’re now getting “Deep Water” (opening May 1), Harlin’s most lavishly scaled production in quite some time.

In the 1970s, disaster films had titles that described exactly what they were. “The Towering Inferno” was about a towering inferno, “Earthquake” was about an earthquake, and then there were films like “Meteor” and “Avalanche” and “The Swarm” and “The Hindenburg” and “City on Fire.” In that spirit, “Deep Water,” which is very much a neo-’70s disaster film. should have been called “Airplane Crash into a Sea of Jaws.” As it stands, the word in the film’s generic title that echoes that earlier Harlin movie is more than a bit ironic, since “deep” is just the word to describe what Renny Harlin’s movies are not. They are shallow. They are dramatically flat. They do not have interesting characters even on a schlock B-movie level. As a director, he has a sixth sense for how to reduce actors to walking slabs of pulp.

Yet there’s no denying that Renny Harlin, in his utilitarian action-hack way, has some chops. “Deep Water” starts out by introducing the main players on an intercontinental flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Aaron Eckhart, with his likable downcast valor, is the First Officer, a stalwart fellow who’s a bit of a ne’er-do-well (that’s why he’s never become a captain); he’s suffering from an oblique family trauma we can kind of suss out. Ben Kingsley is the captain, a jaded overseer on the verge of retirement who is introduced singing “Fly Me to the Moon” in a karaoke bar, where he somehow imagines that his crooning is going to have a seductive effect on the flight attendants seated at a table. (The truth is that he looks rather frighting in his sand-brown goatee.)

We’re also introduced to the passengers, who are real Jane and Johnny one-notes, though we do take special notice of Dan (Angus Sampson), a long-haired slovenly bellicose chain smoker whose bulky red plastic suitcase the camera tracks onto the plane. For a while, we think it must have a bomb in it. It doesn’t, but it does contain something that randomly ignites, setting a fire in the cargo pod, which becomes an explosion, which ricochets into the cabin, at which point a hole gets blown in the side, one of the engines catches fire, and this thing is going down.

It doesn’t take excessive skill to make a plane crash scary, but Harlin executes this one with stylish flamboyance, as bodies get sucked out of the plane and flying wine bottles turn into shrapnel. Our heroes want to try landing at an airport in Guam, but that plan goes out the window, as they barely manage to ground the plane in the middle of the ocean.

There were 257 passengers aboard, all but about 30 of whom are now dead. The plane is in pieces, the main two chunks being the cockpit and the fuselage, both of which have been reduced to floating canisters with wires popping out of the sides. The plane’s pieces are now, in effect, life rafts (though there are some actual oversize yellow inflatable rafts aboard that will come into play). If the proper distress signal was set off (there’s some question about whether that happened), they should be rescued in a matter of hours. But until then…sharks!

They are mako sharks, which to my movie-trained eyes don’t look all that different from the great white shark in “Jaws,” as they flop their giant razor-toothed mouths aboard the rafts. “Jaws” was scary because it was about anticipation and sudden fear and the power of suggestion. “Deep Water,” on the other hand, has little in the way of suggestion, which is why it’s more gory than scary. Harlin stages the shark attacks in an overt here-ya-go way, with the one consistent suspense issue being whether the shark will consume a victim whole or bite off his or her limb or simply leave them with a nasty gash (which happens quite often).

Meanwhile, two bros (one American, one Chinese) start off as enemies but get over that, the scurrilous Dan continues to assert what a dick he is by smoking and snapping at everyone, and Eckhart’s character bonds with Cora (Molly Belle Wright), the now-orphaned young girl aboard, which triggers a reappraisal of his own domestic situation. Human drama! Not. (Or, at least, not very much.) Yet there’s a way in which it matters not, since even back in the ’70s the “human drama” of disaster films was just the frame on which to hang the sensationalist fantasy of death porn and survival. “Deep Water” isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.