12 Wrongly Forgotten Movies From the Summer of 1985

A slew of classic films turn 40 this summer, including Back to the Future, Cocoon, The Goonies, and Fletch. Theaters were busy in 1985, in other words — which means a number of perfectly solid movies got bumped to the margins while those massive hits raked it in. Instead of (or maybe just in addition to) rewatching those beloved titles this summer, maybe it’s time to clear some space in the queue for movies that didn’t get enough love the second time around. Some of these films are cult favorites, while others have been all but forgotten. They all have one thing in common, though: Forty years later, you don’t need to be ashamed to love any of them.

Cat’s Eye

Horror anthologies can be a lot of fun when they’re done right, but like any collection of loosely related parts, it’s often difficult to maintain consistency from chapter to chapter. Cat’s Eye — a Stephen King-written trilogy tied together by the adventures of a cat with a psychic connection to a young girl in danger of being murdered by a troll — doesn’t entirely avoid those ups and downs, but it contains solid adaptations of two stories from King’s 1978 Night Shift collection. It’s rounded out by the aforementioned cat vs. troll tale, which King wrote especially for the movie as a showcase for Drew Barrymore, who’d starred in the underwhelming King adaptation Firestarter the previous year. It didn’t do much for Barrymore’s career, which soon entered hibernation pending her early ’90s reinvention and revival, but in retrospect, it’s just cheesy enough to be a good time. Besides, how much can you complain about a movie whose climactic battle is between a tabby and a tiny monster?

Ladyhawke

While it’s true that the ’80s didn’t lack for epic fantasy at the box office, only one movie united Michelle Pfeiffer and Rutger Hauer as medieval lovers kept apart by a curse that turned her into a hawk by day and him into a wolf by night. Toss in Matthew Broderick as a wisecracking pickpocket, hire Superman and The Omen director Richard Donner to helm the whole thing, and you’ve got yourself the charmingly uneven oddity known as Ladyhawke. Pfeiffer and Broderick were both coming off major hits (Scarface and WarGames, respectively), but neither were known for their work in this type of film, which may be part of why Warner Bros. struggled to market the movie successfully. Watch it this summer and pine for the days when studios were still willing to take risks on big projects this charmingly ungainly.

Stick

By the mid-’80s, Burt Reynolds had strung together a pretty impressive track record when it came to playing wisecracking heroes with distinctive names (Gator, Smokey and the Bandit, Sharky’s Machine). He’d also displayed some solid directorial instincts and a knack for finding good source material, so when he decided to star in and direct an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Stick, there was no reason to believe the end results would be anything but pleasantly pulpy. Unfortunately, after Reynolds turned in his cut, Universal boss Sid Sheinberg demanded wholesale changes, and by the time Stick arrived in theaters, it was a substantially different picture — to the point that Leonard publicly disavowed it, further hurting its commercial odds at a time when Reynolds’ career had already started to cool off. The end results are certainly imperfect, but it’s hard to argue with the source material — and equally difficult to find fault with the cast, which is rounded out by Candice Bergen, Charles Durning, and George Segal. Although the decade gave us better steamy action thrillers, it also gave us a bunch that were far worse. All these years later, it might be time to see Stick for what it is: an agreeably lumpy picture about tough guys, the dames who love them, and the violent double-crossing deals they get mixed up in along the way.

Read More: 25 ’80s Movie Sequels That Shouldn’t Have Been Made

Gotcha!

Let’s give credit where credit is due: Even though he was never really seen or treated as a viable leading man, Anthony Edwards put together an admirably eclectic string of films in the ’80s, one that included his desperately dweeby turn in Revenge of the Nerds as well as his appearance as the doomed Goose in the original Top Gun. In between, he starred in Gotcha!, a Cold War action comedy about a college kid whose vacation in Paris is upended when he meets a femme fatale (Linda Fiorentino) who gets him mixed up in all sorts of life-threatening intrigue. You’ve got exotic European locations, a couple of absurd MacGuffins, and a final act that ties everything together with our main character’s fondness for the titular paintball-style game, so why wasn’t Gotcha! a bigger hit? It probably had something to do with the fact that neither Edwards nor Fiorentino were big enough names to carry a movie, as well as the long, long list of similarly themed films that had come and gone in recent years. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie, though — book yourself a double feature of this and Top Secret!, and relive the ways in which Hollywood helped us laugh off our USSR paranoia in the months before Rocky whooped Drago’s ass and put all that conflict to rest forever.

Creature

Look, they can’t all be Alien, no matter how hard they might try. (Just look at most Alien sequels and prequels for proof.) This was especially true in the mid-’80s, when practical effects were the rule of the day, and if you didn’t have a big enough budget to really wow audiences, you had to scramble like crazy to cover up all the corners that needed to be cut along the way. Creature is a perfect example — the effects were handled by a young company that was just coming off the lamentable Jaws 3D, and although it’s worth noting that the experience they built up while working on this movie helped them land the Aliens gig a year later, there was only so much they could do with this movie’s roughly $1 million budget. Still, what it might lack in visual dazzle, Creature makes up with chilly atmosphere — not to mention the involvement of Klaus Kinski, who adds a layer of spacey gravitas that most of its peers lacked. This type of picture would shortly end up going direct to video; Creature will make you miss the days when Alien-inspired thrillers still regularly ended up at your local multiplex.

Ordeal by Innocence

The recent success of Glass Onion spawned a franchise while rekindling interest in good old-fashioned, Agatha Christie-style whodunits — and even brought a couple of actual Christie mysteries to the big screen, courtesy of Kenneth Branagh’s trilogy of Poirot films. There’s still something to be said, though, for the Christie adaptations of years past, including Ordeal by Innocence, starring Donald Sutherland as a paleontologist who gets mixed up in a friend’s murder conviction when he realizes he can vouch for his buddy’s alibi. The cast, which also features Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, and Ian McShane, is superb; toss in a score that includes some work from Dave Brubeck, and you’ve got yourself 90 minutes of perfectly passable entertainment. (Bonus points for being released by Cannon Films, the masters of B-movie schlock whose ’80s excess inspired their own documentary.)

D.A.R.Y.L.

When most people are asked to name an ’80s movie featuring a cute protagonist who turns out to be a military-grade robot that needs to be hidden from his warmongering creators, they’ll pick Short Circuit. But the year before Johnny Five graced screens, we also got D.A.R.Y.L., starring Barret Oliver as the titular “Data-Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform,” who’s adopted by an unsuspecting couple after the scientist who created him decides to set him free. Left with no memory of his time in the lab, Daryl believes he’s just an ordinary kid with amnesia, at least until his superhuman abilities begin to surface. There isn’t a single surprise anywhere in this movie, but if you miss the days when Hollywood believed computers could magically do anything, and every third film ended in a dramatic standoff between ordinary people and government bureaucrats, there’s still lots to enjoy here.

The Stuff

Like a lot of the best sci-fi and/or horror films, The Stuff works on two levels. If you’re the type of viewer who tunes in for satirical subtext, you can look forward to one of the decade’s more gleefully subversive satires of American consumerism — but if you just want to watch people (literally) losing their minds over an addictively sweet goop that becomes a snack food sensation, then this movie absolutely does not disappoint. Its dismal box-office reception probably had a lot to do with marketing that minimized the movie’s comedic elements, which is a shame; woven into the Body Snatchers-style plot is a lot of pointed humor about our cultural priorities, not to mention a handful of cuckoo cameos from Abe Vigoda, “Where’s the beef?” commercial star Clara Peller, and others.

Silverado

By the mid-’80s, the Western had been all but given up for dead, partly due to the lingering sting from the studio-destroying flop Heaven’s Gate in 1980. Cowboys still made their way to the multiplex on occasion, however, and 1985’s Silverado is a solid example of a genre title that probably would have performed a lot better if it had been released during a different time — or maybe just not during the summer when Back to the Future spent weeks pulverizing the competition, all while Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider saddled up and stole what was left of its thunder. The story’s pretty standard, but that’s par for the course for Westerns; tune in for Lawrence Kasdan’s steady direction and a killer cast that includes Danny Glover, Brian Dennehy, Rosanna Arquette, Jeff Goldblum, Scott Glenn, John Cleese, and Kevins Kline and Costner. Yeehaw!

Explorers

What were we just saying about Back to the Future dominating the box office in the summer of ’85? That went double for any other sci-fi films, including Explorers, a sweet Joe Dante-directed coming-of-age movie about a teenage boy (Ethan Hawke, making his big-screen debut) whose dreams of a circuit board prompt him to draw up a diagram and share it with his nerd friend (River Phoenix, also starring in his first film). Joining up with a more streetwise kid from school, they discover that the board’s design powers an indestructible force field that they can use to travel great distances at high speed — so, naturally, they plunder a local junkyard and build a spaceship. Like pretty much every Dante movie, it’s silly, occasionally startling, and ultimately tender; think of it as a sort of sci-fi spin on Stand by Me, and you’re on the right track.

Volunteers

Tom Hanks and John Candy were two stars on the rise when they co-starred in Splash. That 1984 comedy’s massive success paved the way for a slew of high-profile projects for both of them — including Volunteers, which reunited them the following year. Hanks plays Lawrence Bourne III, an Ivy League grad whose massive gambling debts prompt him to trade places with his roommate and board a flight to Thailand, where he’s supposed to work with the Peace Corps to build a bridge. On the plane, he meets Tom Tuttle (Candy) and Beth Wexler (Rita Wilson), jump-starting a plot that involves Communist brainwashing, the violent threat of a local drug lord, and (of course) Bourne’s slow turn from feckless doofus to stand-up guy. Like most movies that tried to depict other cultures in this era, it contains its share of gags that haven’t aged particularly well, but if you’re in the mood for a wacky ’80s comedy with a great cast — or you just want to see Hanks and Wilson falling in love onscreen before they were married in real life — raise your hand for Volunteers.