Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1985 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 1985 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 1985 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 Nov. 22, 1985, and we’re off to see Bad Medicine, King Solomon’s Mines, and One Magic Christmas.

Bad Medicine

Steve Guttenberg really was having a moment in the 1980s. Sadly, this film was part of that moment.

Jeffrey Marx (Guttenberg), comes from a medical family, but he has been able to get into a medical school due to low scores. His father finally sets up to go to a school in Central America. Once there he makes a few new friends, and eventually discovers not only does he actually like medicine, but he’s good at it.

This film had a few ingredients to be fun, but it lost it’s way with too many sub-plots. We didn’t need the owner of the school (Alan Arkin) lusting after Liz (Julie Hagerty). It added absolutely nothing to the overall story, and only served to slow the pace of the film down in several spots.

There may have been a decent film hiding in here, just no one knew how to get to the meat of it, apparently.

King Solomon’s Mines

Kids love Indiana Jones, so lets make our own!

Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone) wants to find her father, and hires Allan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) to help her. Her father had been looking for the fabled King Solomon’s Mines, so naturally they end up on the path to looking for them as well, running into every obstacle imaginable along the way.

Lets make no mistake, this is not a good movie. It is an out-and-out ripoff of everything that made Indiana Jones cool and successful. But despite it not being good, Chamberlain is so blasted charming as Quatermain that it’s hard not to root for the film a bit.

What kept tearing me out of the film was the stunts. Realistically, you know Indiana Jones should be dead about 20 times a movie, but the stunts were so good that you could believe he survived it. And it’s just not the same here. The scene where Quatermain gets dragged behind the train hitting all of the boards of the track was just too far to even be believable for a moment, and that really pulled me out of the film.

I give them points for trying, but they just never quite make it over the line.

One Magic Christmas

Hey kids! Christmas is coming! Who’s ready to get depressed?

Christmas angel Gideon (Harry Dean Stanton) gets assigned to help Ginnie Grainger (Mary Steenburgen) find the Christmas spirit… and so what if she watches her husband get killed along the way and she believes at one point both her kids are dead the same day?

Merry Christmas, everyone!

The film is unflinchingly sad for the majority of its runtime, making it difficult to fathom how it was made. In the end, Ginnie does get her Christmas spirit as Santa rewinds time so that her husband never dies. Of course, he doesn’t remove her memory of watching him get shot and him dying in front of her, but, you know, it was the 80s, who cared about trauma?

Just a bleak film that is baffling how it got made.

1985 Movie Reviews will return on Nov. 29, 2025, with Rocky IV and Santa Claus: The Movie.

The lethal and tenacious Aatami Korpi returns in this sequel to 2022’s Sisu. Like its predecessor, Sisu: Road to Revenge offers up nonstop, gory hyper-violence as the old soldier shoots and stabs his way through the Soviet Union’s Red Army to avenge his family’s murder. Paired with all the bloodshed is a handful of f-words and some drinking, as well.

I am an audience of one at a late afternoon “preview” matinee of “Sisu 2,” aka “Sisu: Road to Revenge,” the sequel to the savage sleeper hit by Finnish carnage Jalmari Helander.

Do the locals know something I don’t? Or are the good folks in “The Last Capital of the Confederacy” showing their red ball cap displeasure at a movie about mowing down Russians by staying home?

I’m guessing it’s the fact that Screen Gems’ marketing didn’t spend enough to move the needle even a centimeter that dampened enthusiasm, as nobody knows about it.

That’s no big deal, because this sequel is inferior in pretty much every way to the original “Sisu,” which came out of nowhere back in 2023 and which takes its title from a Finnish word that more of less means unfettered rage. It’s not on a par with Helander’s “Rare Exports” Santa-horror splatter film either. He’s due for a misstep. Here it is.

“Road to Revenge” brings back our non-speaking, unstoppable and unkillable Finnish commando Korpi (Jorma Tommila), this time out to haul the pieces to his house across the Russian border after the end of World War II.

When your anti-hero is “unstoppable” and “unkillable,” that lowers the stakes. A lot.

Throw in feeble pacing and thus no urgency to its story of driving, shooting, stabbing and missle-launching his way through legions of belligerant Russians, fresh from their triumph in “The Great Patriotic War,” and you’ve got a thriller whose only creative bits are random moments of Russian-mutilating and murdering.

Remember, the vodka/borscht-folk and their dictator sided with the Nazis at the beginning of WWII, only to F-around and find out you can never trust a Nazi. And the Russians further earned their history’s bad-guys status by invading Finland at the start of the war, and paying dearly for their miscalculation, at least for a time.

The Soviet Russians annexed Finnish territory at war’s end, and that’s where Korpi lived. So he’s got his passport and his battered, oversized military truck and he’s aiming to move the logs of his old homestead, where his family was slaughtered, to a new location across the new border.

Ivan doesn’t want him to get away with it.

The stages of his quest are broken into superfluous “chapters” like “Old Enemies,” “Motor Mayhem:” and “Incoming.” The dialogue, almost all of it by a Russian tormentor (Stephen Lang) who commanded the troops who failed to finish off the Finn in the first film, is every bit as pointless.

“Unleash Hell,” like they haven’t already. “Keep your eyes open,” the most worthless command cliche of them all. And “Look at me,” served up as if he isn’t looking at you.

Duels against armored commandos on motorcycles (!?), airborne fighter bombers and the like ensue. Our hero takes another licking and keeps on ticking. The Russians? Let the body count commence, Comrades!

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Rating: R, graphic violence, pretty much start to finish, profanity

Cast: Jorma Tommila, Richard Brake and Stephen Lang.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jalmari Helander. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:29