House of Games (1985)

A successful author of a book about compulsive behaviours, an austere psychiatrist played by Louise Crouse, heads into a gambling house one night to confront the heavies holding a debt over one of her patients, but "nothing is as it seems" in writer-director David Mamet's terrific thriller - well, except that seasoned thriller fans won't be surprised by anything that happens - but the deliberate acting and pace grip as the psychiatrist quickly becomes a keen student in the art of the long con.

★★★★☆

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Cobra (1986)

Switch the roman numeral for another and 'Cobra'' is an anagram of Rambo', my mind discovered, desperate for something to think about during this especially vacant action thriller from the 80s about a cop so slick, so smooth, so self-assured, so nonchalant in his delivery of zero-tolerance violent justice, he's an unmitigated wanker, working on a case to product-place as much as possible while he takes down a murderous cult called New Order; fortunately for Cobra and the witness he is protecting (played by Brigitte Nielsen), the so-bad-it's-good action ends everyone up at a murderous-cult-member-dispatching factory replete with lava baths, furnaces and hooks.

★★☆☆☆

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Ordeal by Innocence (1985)

The David Brubeck Quartet jazz soundtrack is the best thing and the worst thing about this Agatha Christie adaptation, on the one hand keeping things atmospheric and cool as Donald Sutherland's paleontologist returns to the UK from Antartica after a two-year-long expedition to discover he was the missing alibi of a man since hanged for murder, but on the other hand robbing scenes of weight by going eclectically on and on and suggesting a complexity not shared by the plot.

★★★☆☆

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Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

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Commando (1985)

A good way in, Rae Dawn Chong's character, a woman with zero reason to be tagging along with an ex-commando as he tries to  recover a kidnapped daughter, exclaims, "I can't believe this macho bullshit," and you can imagine, as Arnie launches a violent mercenary through the air on to something sharp, that the end of her sentence, had she not been interrupted by the thud, might have been "...used to constitute blockbuster cinema in the 80s."

★★☆☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning (1985)

Most people will have given up on this slasher series long before Part V but if, say, a global pandemic has you housebound and your local movie network is working through the series by way of Sunday night double features, and if you haven't long ago been driven away by the irritating "tch-tch-tch-tch" soundtrack, then you might be able to sit through this, one more instalment, and discover your opinion that the series to date is an entertainment-free string of impalements of irritating characters who die in the middle of such charming activities as "taking a crap" in the woods or shitting in a "disgusting shitbox" or "washing up" at a swamp after picnic-rug sex....confirmed - yes, like a big, dumb flat-footed serial killer, cinema's least fun slasher series plods inexorably on.

★☆☆☆☆

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Rocky IV (1985)

Trading in his scantily clad beach runs alongside Apollo Creed in Rocky III for runs through Soviet snowfields with his new-look goatee, Balboa heads to Russia to fight a drug-enhanced Russian giant, Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) in this more-rudimentary-than-ever Rocky episode that is nine-tenths rock video training montage and only one-tenth boxing scenes cut with shots of what are quite possibly just cardboard cutouts of poor Adrian and her brother Paulie, both with nothing better to do than sadly watch on as the series inexorably worsens.

★☆☆☆☆

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Spies Like Us (1985)

They cheat during their CIA entrance exams - in laboured, unfunny fashion - but even so two boobs are sent out into the field in Afghanistan and Russia because, unbeknownst to them, it is hoped they will distract the enemy from the actual nuclear missile mission happening elsewhere, in this comedy with punchlines that come first, longwinded setups that come second, and that has Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase at the height of their comedy movie careers in 1985 (Aykroyd fresh from 1984's Ghostbusters; Chase squeezed this in between Fletch and National Lampoon's European Vacation in 1985 and The Three Amigos in 1986), both presumably too busy to scrutinise or veto subpar projects (Aykroyd, the co-writer, should've gone over the script again) or perhaps they wanted to do any and every old thing that came along before the world tired of Chase's unchanging schtick or twigged that Aykroyd is more irritating than funny.

★☆☆☆☆     

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Back to the Future (1985)

This classic tightly-written time travel adventure comedy that spawned two follow-ups has Marty McFly travelling back thirty years from 1985 to 1955 where he complicates the blossoming romance between his teenaged father and mother and threatens his future existence!

★★★★★

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The Goonies (1985)

A group of kids hopes to save their home from demolition with a last ditch adventure that proves to be a riotous treasure hunt involving pirate ships, bats, maps, codes, caves and the not so sinister Fratellis!

★★★★☆

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