Alright, this year is the really big one for me. 1985 is unique both in terms of the total number of movies that are important to me but also in terms of the horrible, rules breaking chicanery on my part. Luckily, this is my shit and I make the rules so I don’t care.

If you are asking yourself what I am talking about then you must never have asked me what my favorite movie is before. This is because I don’t have a favorite movie, I have two. I have never really been able to separate them from that top spot (aside from the handful of years that I was lying to myself and everyone else when I identified Fellowship of the Ring as my favorite). People usually look at me weird, not just because I am a wishy washy dipshit who can’t make a simple decision, but also because of what they are. When not met with another fan of them who will then lose their shit about how cool that is (This is a hypothetical scenario), it is usually some variation of “…Oh.” Or sometimes it is ‘Wait, I thought it was Jaws based mostly on your apparently genetic incapability to ever shut up about it?’ or ‘But what about Terminator 2 or the Crow? You saw them so many times in the theater and you are apparently genetically incapable of ever shutting up about them?’ Or Guardians of the Galaxy or Ghostbusters or any number of other movies. And I think that is fair. I saw the two of these when I was a kid and they were trapped in amber and have stayed there. As I will get into shortly, these two movies mean profound things to me that will always persist even if they earn me no Serious Film Buff cred. I don’t genuinely care that people look at me weird.

So, today’s list is really a six movie list in that the top two will be 1A and 1B. The decision about which to talk about first wasn’t very easy either as it then leads to ‘well you mentioned that one first so it is your real favorite and you should shift everything down one.’ This is not the case. I say them in different orders all the fucking time. I love them both equally.  I find it enormously strange that both movies are directed by men with the same last name. It is weird that I have far less merch related to these movies than I do other movies I love but that is really more a product of there being far less merch to have so it shouldn’t be read into too deeply.

Despite the fact that this is a longer list than usual by one, I do still have runners up because this year is a goddamn beast for me and is probably the most important to my development as a person and a film fan full stop. There are other stacked years later that I encountered at different stages of my development but this one is the most ‘core memory’ of all of them. If you don’t understand me after this year, you likely never will (but by all means keep reading and trying). So, the runners up are as follows (in no particular order): Clue, Rocky IV, Moving Violations, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, The Breakfast Club, the Sure Thing, the Last Dragon, the Care Bears Movie (fuck you), Ladyhawke, Gotcha!, D.A.R.Y.L., the Stuff, Silverado, the Black Cauldron, Weird Science, the Return of the Living Dead, Teen Wolf, Silver Bullet, and Young Sherlock Holmes. That is a lot. There are a few more that I dig but didn’t include. This was a massive year for me at the movies.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1985 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 41-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1A.Fright Night-Tom Holland

Fright Night directed by Tom Holland (Not that one) is a fairly simple take on Rear Window but with vampires. Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is a typical teen who likes horror movies, is navigating the burgeoning sexual politics that arise with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse), is failing trig, is super into the horror movie anthology series Fright Night hosted by aging Hollywood never-was Peter Vincent ( Roddy McDowall), and  believes a vampire lives next door to him. Pretty standard high school stuff all things considered.

Fright Night is a love letter to classic horror films and is remarkable for its near-perfect blend of humor, horror, heart, and satire. Peter Vincent is as a character is a pastiche of Vincent Price, who Tom Holland had originally envisioned in the part, and Peter Cushing although he was not meant to be as successful as either of those actors. The movie embraces and acknowledges horror films, both good and bad, from the past and carves out its own place in horror history by grounding it in the suburbs and offering compelling and relatable characters. There is depth here that is acknowledged if not fully plumbed. The movie doesn’t get bogged down in backstory or pathos, but it offers glimpses of it to let the viewer know it is there and this is built on a solid foundation of real substance.

William Ragsdale’s performance as Billy feels very real to me and he does an amazing job of giving us a normal kid spinning out in growing terror while everyone doubts him or gaslights him. When he is ultimately proven right it is a pyrrhic victory at best as now he has to deal with a fucking vampire and he is just this kid. He loses his best friend and Amy is taken by the vampire and he knows he can’t beat the vampire on his own but he tries anyway because that is who he is. He can’t stand by while someone he loves is in danger, especially not danger that he put her in. So he goes. To me that is the epitome of bravery and heroic behavior. Doing the right thing with no expectation of success because it is the right thing and to do nothing is wrong.

Chris Sarandon as vampire Jerry Dandridge is fucking phenomenal here. This is the post-modern vampire, hiding out in the suburbs trying to stay hidden, feeding on sex workers and trying to stay low-key. He never overplays the part and never goes for camp or overblown caricature. He is calm when he needs to be, charming when he needs to be, and scary when he needs to be. He is at once seductive and dangerous, a monster lurking in plain sight with a smile as potent a weapon as his fangs. That he is at least somewhat regretful about it all deepens his character that much more and saves Jerry from being just another mindless eating machine.

Roddy McDowall’s Peter Vincent is a blustery coward who hides his shortcomings beneath a pompous and arrogant façade. He is a man well past his prime with his best years behind him reckoning with the notion that those years weren’t all that great to begin with. He is on the precipice of being evicted, has been fired off of Fright Night, and now he has to become the man he has pretended to be his entire career when it turns out that vampires are real. And he fails. He fails hard at first and runs away in terror. This is so refreshing out of this genre, the vampire genre, littered with cool gothic badasses ready to battle the undead to the end. He runs because he is terrified and the failure solidifies every fear he has about himself. He is a fraud. And then he steps up. He realizes he can’t leave Charley and Amy to be killed and he pushes past his fear and becomes the hero he had only pretended to be in movies. Fuck that is good stuff.

The performances here are all great. Stephen Geoffrys as Evil Ed delivers a complex kid struggling with his place in the world and trying to fit in amidst a sea of bullies. He is trying his best to get by and when he succumbs to Jerry’s seduction, you understand not because the movie has told you who he is but because Geoffrys has shown you. Amanda Bearse’s Amy is a strong young woman who is in love with Charley and cares for him but not at the expense of who she is and does not accept his distraction and neglect. Even when she thinks he might be going crazy, she tries to help him. She has her own agency until it is stolen by Jerry. She fights it as best she can and is not a shrinking violet. Amy is not a typical movie love interest that the main character is in love with for no reason. You definitely get it in Fright Night.  Jonathan Stark’s Billy Cole, Jerry’s familiar, is creepy and hilarious. The actor brought the humorous side out of Cole on his own and it makes this feel decidedly of the moment and not a film caught in a different time. He feels real because he isn’t just some lifeless henchman.

I went into detail about the characters and the performances not to belabor a point but rather to highlight that while this movie looks on the surface to be another quirking 80s vampire movie, it has more going on under the hood than that. The story is pretty simple but the characters and how they move within that story are what set it apart from other movies in the genre. You can read it simple or read it deep and both are correct. If you just want a fun vampire movie with great special effects and fun performances, then you’ve got it here. If you want something more, to pull more out from a theme and character perspective it is there for you too. That is the thing that has made this movie beloved. It probably isn’t ever going to be the first horror movie mentions when talking to you about them but it is often in there. It was the most financially successful  summer horror movie in 1985 and the second highest grossing horror movie of the year behind Nightmare on Elm Street 2.

I saw Fright Night on TV with my mom. After the years of abject terror over horror movies, I became interested in vampire and werewolf stories. I don’t really remember why or what got me into them but I started paying attention to them and when Fright Night was going to come on TV I wanted to see it really bad. My mom consented to let me watch it but insisted that she watch it with me in order to gauge appropriateness in real time. I am pretty sure that was a smokescreen for wanting to watch it herself but she never really admitted to loving horror movies so she wouldn’t cop to it. Man I loved Fright Night.

This was the fist time I realized that you could have comedy mixed with horror and that horror was something that could be poked fun at in addition to screamed at. I started looking at horror in a different way and now instead of being a victim to the scares I was a critical observer able to dissect what was happening and find hidden humor and meaning in it. This was pretty heady stuff for a 5^th grader.

I eventually wanted to rent the movie from Best Video so I could record it and watching over and over. It was rated R and my mom had let me watch it initially because it was a TV edit. I lawyered my way into renting it and the stipulation she had for me recording it was that I edit out the short moment of nudity in the movie. I agreed and did my best but because I was a kid and VCRs were tough to edit with because they would auto-rewind slightly every time you stopped and started, I ended up editing right to the nude scene and it was much more noticeable that they otherwise would have been. Luckily this, coupled with an eventual Robocop debacle, helped my mom realize how stupid it was for me to edit out bad content since it required me seeing said content several times to do it. Fright Night is one of those movies I could probably recite word for word for you at any given time. I watch it a lot, even now. I have read the novelization that Tom Holland wrote a few years ago and I have his novel sequel on deck. I love the sequel that we got and I am waiting with bated breath for the 4k release of Fright Night 2 later this year. I love the remake because they took the idea and characters and did new things with them while retaining the same heart and tone. I love Fright Night full stop and unabashedly. It is my favorite movie of all time.

1B.Better Off Dead-Savage Steve Holland

Better Off Dead, directed by Savage Steve Holland (no relation), is an 80’s teen comedy that follows a lot of the tropes and conventions of the time while managing to be unique, quirky, and just fucking weird in its own right. It tells the story of Lane Meyer (John Cusack), a hapless high school student who is dumped by his girlfriend Beth (Amanda Wyss) for Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier), captain of the ski team and douche bag extraordinaire. Lane does not take this well and contemplates, and attempts, suicide. Each attempt is a failure as he sinks deeper into depression before finding light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Monique (Diane Franklin), a French foreign exchange student living next door with weirdo Ricky Smith (Dan Sneider) and his mom (Laura Waterby).

As I write the plot synopsis, I realize how horrifying this sounds by today’s standards. In a world in which you have to say ‘unalive yourself’ on Youtube to avoid being demonetized, it is a hard sell to pitch a light hearted comedy about teen suicide. But I guess it is all in the execution.

Writer/director Holland based the movie on his own experiences in high school with being obsessed with his high school girlfriend and becoming suicidal when she broke up with him for the captain of the ski team. There was a particular incident in which he was preparing to hang himself when he realized the gravity of what he was doing and that he hadn’t seen or done anything yet and to throw your life away over an ended relationship is a bad move. He was standing on a plastic garbage can with a hose tied around a pipe and as he decided not to kill himself, the garbage can collapsed, which left him temporarily hanging until the pipe broke and he fell into the garbage can which was now filling with water. His mom then came in and yelled at him not understanding what had happened. He found the whole thing darkly funny afterward and started writing a journal of ways he could kill himself and how they could go wrong. That is more or less the basis for the movie.

Suicide isn’t funny. When people get to that place where the feel like they are a burden on those around them and the world would be a better place without them, it is tragic. If they complete it is even more so. So often people get to this point without any help or awareness and that is a further tragedy. This is a real thing that destroys lives, not just the one taken but the ones affected by the loss. That is part of the irony of it all, a person feels everyone else would be better off without them ,but they are wrong and their absence is a tragic loss. The most dangerous time for suicidal people is when they are feeling better. They don’t feel like they can complete when they are depressed and when they start feeling better, they feel like they are able to do it. Check on your friends and family. Even if they appear happy, they may be hiding a pain you don’t know about and your perceived indifference to this may inadvertently amplify that. So, please, ask and check in. Even if it annoys them. Suicide is real and it isn’t funny. Better Off Dead is not making fun of suicide.

What is going on in Better Off Dead is Lane getting to these precipices and deciding not to jump but falling over anyway. He continues to bash his head against the wall until he realizes that there is more for him than this. Every time he contemplates the attempt, he stops himself because he realizes that it is a mistake. The humor then comes from the silly results of putting himself in the position. It is the irony of him realizing it is a mistake and then it going wrong anyway. This is Holland processing his feelings through comedy and there is an important message here. Holland said in an interview that after the movie came out, his high school girlfriend called and apologized to him for how the break up affected him.

Aside from all of the heavy suicide talk, Better Off Dead is hilarious with weird and quirky characters. Lanes brother Badger (Scooter Stevens) is a non-verbal savant who ultimately builds a working rocket ship to launch to space as the credits roll. Lane’s mother (Kim Darby) is a complete nutbar who gives him tv dinners for Christmas and makes dinner that crawls away on its own. His dad (David Ogden Stiers) is worried about his son’s sinking obsession and depression and sets him up with his law partner’s daughter while highlighting ‘paranoia’ in a book on how to manage teenagers. Lane’s best friend Charles DeMar (Curtis Armstrong) is a drug addict unable to find real drugs, eventually resorting to snorting snow off the mountain. The paperboy (Johnny Gaspirini) hounds Lane throughout the entire run of the film demanding his two dollars. Rick Smith is a weird asshole and it turns out may not have been acting so much given the entire ass documentary series, Quiet on the Set,  on HBO about Sneider’s abusive run at Nickelodeon.

Better Of Dead works because of where the humor is and the enormously heightened world in which it takes place. The world is cartoonish and preposterous which goes a long way to diffuse the seriousness of the subject matter. It is somewhat crazymaking to write about this movie as a light hearted teen comedy when suicide is so centrally positioned but it works because of where the humor is and where the jokes are aimed. That Lane has a real character arc in which he finds himself in the midst of all of this further cements its legacy and success.

That success is measured by the cult ruler as it wasn’t a massive hit when it came out and John Cusack hated it, walking out of a screening and refusing to speak to Savage Steve Holland for the remainer of the One Crazy Summer shoot, which is the follow up to this and was shooting when Better Off Dead came out. He refused to talk about it or sign anything from it for years after and it wasn’t until roughly 2013 until he started coming around on it. That has always been sort of heartbreaking to me. I love John Cusack and it has always sucked a bit that he hated the thing of his that I love the most. I am glad he is back on board.

I saw Better Off Dead on cable. I remember having seen trailers for One Crazy Summer and thinking it looked fun but not seeing it before I came across Better Off Dead and when I finally caught up with One Crazy Summer it became a special treat as it was something of a spiritual sequel. Interestingly, I saw Better Off Dead in the summer. I was flipping channels trying to find something to watch on cable and I flipped past this as a clip of ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’ played. My mom, a lover of that song, told me to go back so she could hear it. I did and when Lane pulls his radio out of his car for only playing breakup songs, my mom asked why I changed it, I told her I didn’t and told her what happened. She came in from the kitchen and sat down and watched it with me.

I caught snatches of Better Off Dead for weeks after and I wanted to watch the whole thing. I asked to rent it and my mom said no because we had more or less seen it all. Then we went to best video and they were watching it and it was on a scene that we had not seen yet. So mom realized there was more and we rented it. We watched it together. She liked it as much as I did.

I was in elementary school so I didn’t really identify with Lane in the way that I would identify with other Cusack characters in the future but there was a piece of Lane that was definitely in me. He was kind of weird and didn’t have a lot of friends. Things seemed to break the wrong way for him a lot and that is how I often felt. He was a cartoonist and so was I, he was trying really hard to be a normal cool guy and he just wasn’t most of the time and I felt that pretty hard. He was a good person, ultimately, who was able to overcome the things and people who sought to keep him down and I hoped that was me too. Also, he had weird day dreams about Claymation hamburgers singing Van Halen and while I didn’t have that particular daydream, it was in conversation with the stupid day dreams I did have.

I didn’t really have a K-12 that I had to overcome in any kind of real physical sense. I live in the desert and don’t ski and there was no analog to that mountain peak in my life. But the notion that Lane didn’t actually need to beat Stalin, he just needed to believe in himself was still something that meant a lot to me and informed how I navigated high school when the time came. I didn’t have any girlfriends leave me for much more attractive and more physically fit dudes until much later in life and by that time I didn’t really feel the need to challenge them to a ski race over it.

Better Off Dead is a lot of fun but it is a movie about survival and about surviving for yourself. It is about finding yourself buried deep inside insecurity and moving forward. Monique, while eventually becoming Lane’s real love interest, doesn’t start that way. They build a friendship of helping each other survive. She needs refuge from the terror of Ricky Smith and he needs refuge from his self-loathing. ‘I think all you need is a small taste of success, and you will find it suits you.’ Monique’s encouragement is pivotal to Lane turning things around but she doesn’t arrive as a manic pixie dream girl. Monique is real and well drawn and helps Lane see his own value. That helps him move past Beth and his feelings of inadequacy. He challenges Stalin to defend Monique, not himself, but when he succeeds he realizes that Stalin was not important anyway. He finds who he is and at that point is able to move forward with Monique. After a ski pole fight with Ricky first.

I don’t want to talk in circles here but the silly quirkiness of Better Off Dead is one of the things that allows it to mean so much. If you were doing this material without it, it would immediately become bogged down and overwrought. As it is, the movie is able to deal with a lot of real things, real emotion and processing while still feeling fun and light. That feels like some kind of real magic trick. I love Better Off Dead full stop and unabashedly. It is my favorite movie of all time.

2.Back to the Future-Robert Zemeckis

Inspired by writer Bob Gale looking through his father’s yearbook and wondering if he and his father would have been friends, Back to the Future tells that story with Marty(Michael J Fox) going back in time to the 50’s and having to figure out how to get back to his own time and how to fix the broken timeline he creates when his mom falls for him instead of his dad. This is as close to a perfect movie as you can get, as far as I am concerned.

Generating two more sequels, a theme park ride at Universal Studios, and a Broadway musical, Back to the Future occupies a rarified position in movie history as a film that has not been remade. Indeed, Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis have long said that as long as they are alive they will not allow the movie to be remade. I have a hard time imagining that anyone really would given the general feeling about it.

I don’t remember when I saw Back to the Future for the first time. This is pretty weird because I have a clear recollection of most of the big movies in my life like this. I know it was on VHS as I didn’t see it in the theater (I don’t think) but I know that I loved it immediately. I was already a Micheal J Fox fan from family ties and I was in immediately. I love time travel movies and while Back to the Future 2 is my favorite of the series, the original delivers an absolutely unassailable experience.

This was another movie that my parents and I watched together and loved. They both got into the nostalgia for the 50s and I wanted to ride a skateboard and couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get a DeLorean.  This is another movie that I revisit often and can watch at any time. It is a masterpiece.

3.The Goonies-Richard Donner

Another virtually perfect movie, The Goonies is a childhood adventure movie that just hits on all cylinders from beginning to end. With compelling characters, action, danger, and humor it really has it all. Packed with great performances by actors who would go on to even greater success in their careers moving forward (for the most part) and writing that is clever and heartfelt without ever straying into schmaltz this movie was exactly what I needed when I was a kid.

The Goonies is really the platonic ideal for this sort of movie and filmmakers have been trying to rekindle this magic ever since. It wasn’t the first, certainly but whenever anyone says they are trying to find the tone of an Amblin Entertainment film, this is what they are talking about (it is worth mentioning that Amblin was also responsible for Back to the Future…great fucking year). From Super 8 to Stranger Things, the imitators are chasing the Goonies dragon and while some do a great job of the feel and ton, the Goonies stands alone.

I saw the Goonies on VHS, one of the Friday nights that my dad stopped by the video store on the way from work. His selections were always a bit of a gamble. He was just as likely to bring some ridiculous horseshit as he was a banger but this night he chose wisely. I fell in love with this movie in the opening scene as all the Goonies are introduced against the backdrop of the Fratelli’s police chase. Data was always my favorite character and I tried replicating his inventions, but I am hot garbage at that sort of thing and managed only to stab myself with a stick while trying to rig it to shoot out of a Sausage McMuffin container I had strapped to my chest.

Various creatives have been threatening to make a sequel to the Goonies for years and years but at this point I really hope they just leave it alone. It is possible that the magic could be recaptured but the degree of difficulty is so high that I would rather they not. A sequel to the NES game Goonies 2 would be pretty rad though. I would take that without question.

4.Fletch-Michael Ritchie

Fletch occupies two different spaces in my heart. As a kid, I loved this movie and watched over and over again. Chevy Chase shines very brightly in this movie and I think it is his best performance outside of MAYBE Christmas Vacation. Chase’s Fletch is funny, sarcastic, and dips into hilarious characters but maintains a sense of competency all the way through, which I really appreciate. He is not ‘ON’ the entire movie and while he cracks wise all the way through he is a very good investigator and manages to get the job done. If that was all that was going on for me with Fletch, it would still be on this list because I love it. But it doesn’t stop there.

Kevin Smith is one of my absolute favorite writer/directors and my love for him borders on obsession. I love his writing, particularly his dialogue and early in my fandom I heard him talk about his influences and he named the Gregory McDonald Fletch books as a major inspiration for how he writes dialogue. So I decided that in order to learn how to write snappy dialogue I would read all the Fletch books and take inspiration from them and develop my own style of dialogue based on the same source material. Whether or not that works is up for debate but it led me on a journey with the novels that transcended the exercise. I love the Fletch novels and McDonald has become one of my favorite authors. And they are really different. Not so much in the plot of the first movie, that is basically the plot of the first movie, but in terms of tone and how Fletch goes about investigating. He dabbles in costumes and false identity but for the most part, he plays it a lot straighter than Chase does in the movie. What I found, however, when I went back to the movie after reading the books, even with the tonal differences, they are more of a piece than I thought. A lot of that has to do with the more serious moments in the movie. Fletch makes jokes but isn’t a joke and I think that is what really works. Also, a lot of Chase’s dialogue is improvised, and the man is a comedy genius regardless of whether he is a nice guy or not. If you have not read the Fletch books, I highly recommend them. And if you are interested in a Fletch movie that is closer to the books, check out Confess, Fletch starring Jon Hamm. I would say more but there is a good chance you will be reading more about it later in the year.

5.Real Genius-Martha Coolidge

The story of a 15-year-old genius entering a science college early to work on experimental laser technology alongside a quirky genius who doesn’t take any of it seriously, Real Genius came out in a field that included Weird Science, a fact that led the production of Real Genius to rush so that it would be in theaters months before its competitor. I really like Weird Science but for my money, Real Genius is the superior film and it’s not close.

Written by Pat Proft, Neal Isreal, and PJ Torokvei, Real Genius started life in the vein of Revenge of the Nerds or Porkys but when director Martha Coolidge came on, it was changed to better reflect real people and turned the humor away from making fun of these people as nerds and more toward circumstances and antics. This was a very good change and it averted another Revenge of the Nerds level disaster (you know the scene I am talking about) and instead delivered a movie that was respectful of its characters and much funnier for its trouble.

Val Kilmer is insanely good here and he brings such confidence to Chris Knight that his charm carries the movie from beginning to end. Knight isn’t the main character but his influence is pervasive without ever hamstringing real main character Mitch (Gabriel Jarret) on his journey and accomplishment. William Atherton turns in another fantastic villain performance as Professor Jerry Hathaway who is a selfish dickbag but is a lot of fun that way. He isn’t just running back his Walter Peck character from Ghostbusters.

I saw this one on VHS as a kid as well and I have watched it over and over since. I was very drawn to the Chris Knight character and the fact I can’t keep myself from cracking jokes constantly is very influenced by him. So when you get annoyed by this, you can blame Real Genius for it. It is worth mentioning as well that I have a Real Genius t-shirt that I wear often and I have never failed to get at least one compliment about it. It isn’t just me, the people love Real Genius.