We're shifting gears and Chuck Norris and Anthony Edwards kick things off

Wait! How the hell did we end up in May 1985?!

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.

Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

MAY 1985

Both the US and France conducted major yield nuclear tests because it was the ‘80s and it was all the rage.

Madonna topped the charts with “Crazy For You,” while Murray Head had a smash hit with “One Night in Bangkok.”

Michael Jordan was named the NBA Rookie of the Year, which may well be the understatement of the century.

And in a historic agreement, Britain arranged to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, kicking off a countdown clock that was nothing but shits and giggles for all involved.

If you’re feeling disoriented right now, hold on a moment, and I promise that feeling will pass.

I hit a wall. And I am totally happy to admit to it. Covering the months that we originally covered on ‘80s All Over lent a sort of Sisyphean quality to the exercise. It felt like I was never going to make any progress on the project, which isn’t true, but because I was going over ground that we had already gone over, even the change in media was not enough to shake that feeling.

So I’m going to mix up the format a bit for myself. And I hope you’ll be okay still taking the ride with me this way. This month, we’re going to pick up right where ‘80s All Over left off. We recorded and released an April 1985 episode and then things imploded. So today, we’ll start with the first weekend of May 1985. When we’re done with this month, I’ll do October 1981. Then we’ll come back for June 1985. Then November 1981, July 1985, December 1981, and so on and so on.

Just thinking about doing this made me feel so much lighter. These newsletters are a ton of work if I’m going to do them properly, and it’s hard when I feel like I’m just not getting anywhere. This way, I’ll be breaking new ground every other month. It’s going to be exciting to mix it up, and all of you who were there for the podcast are going to feel like you’re finally getting the follow-up that you want, at least in part.

As for the biographical intros, I’ll still be doing those. It’s funny how just four years can represent such a profound difference in who I was and what was going on. The last 1981 entry was fairly dull because I was 11 and in school and it was all kind of a blur. In May of 1985, though, I turned 15 years old, and I was, to put it mildly, a nightmare. By the end of the summer, I would leave Tennessee for a new home in Florida, and much of the reason for that move was because of me.

By this point, I was movie crazy at an almost unbearable volume, all the time, as much as I could see, and by whatever means necessary. I was living in a neighborhood called Mountain Shadows, just outside Chattanooga in what was technically Ooltewah. It was a sprawling, hilly neighborhood full of giant family homes, with a community club and pool at one end of the neighborhood. My best friend at the time, Bill, lived near the pool, and I lived way at the other end of the development, with a giant hill between us. Bill was a comic book nerd the way I was a movie nerd, and part of our friendship was built around the way we shared things back and forth. He became friends with some of the older kids who lived near him, and one of them worked at a movie theater. This kid, Chris, not only worked as an usher, but his father owned and operated a Burger King that was in the same parking lot as the movie theater. That meant that for about a year and a half, our Friday and Saturday nights all consisted of going to Burger King, eating whatever we wanted, then going to the theater and seeing anything we wanted without paying for any of it. That’s a deranged set-up for any kid that age, and we abused it mercilessly.

Eventually, I burned that bridge in spectacular fashion, humiliating myself in the process, and I suddenly couldn’t go anywhere near that theater. I had to change my entire moviegoing habits and I also had to adjust to suddenly not having the same friend group anymore. My actions also led to most of my friends at school suddenly going cold on me, and again, I can’t blame anyone. Even at 15, I had a restlessness built into me, one eye perpetually turned to Hollywood and the future, and it made me into a monster sometimes. Growing up in the American South in the ‘80s, I did not fit into the mainstream mold, and there was a part of me, especially as I started to dig into punk music and more daring and transgressive literature, that took great delight in offending and upsetting people. I look back at my 15-year-old self now and wonder how he managed not to get punched in the face once a day.

I was working at a golf course, frustrated that I wasn’t old enough to get a job at a movie theater. Caddyshack was, by this point, sacred text, and when I heard from a friend about the kind of money he was making as a caddy, I had to give it a try. I still think it may be the most demanding physical job I’ve ever had, and I was decent at it. Not great, largely because of my terrible eyesight, but the social part of the job? I was excellent at it. As a result of that job, I had enough pocket money to get to the theater and see whatever it was I wanted to see, and by the time this May rolled around, I was making most of those trips solo. That changed once I was out of school and headed to Memphis to stay with my grandmothers for a few weeks. They were happy to take me to see anything, which is how I ended up sitting next to my dad’s mom for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Brewster’s Millions, films she would have never seen otherwise. The whole family went to A View To A Kill because, by this point, Bond films were a tradition in my house. My dad seemed genuinely sad to see Roger Moore go, and while I’m not a fan of the film now, I certainly had very strong feelings about it that summer. By far, the biggest event of the month for me was at the very end of the month, and even though my dad was a fan of the Gregory McDonald novels, the Chevy Chase incarnation of Fletch just left him baffled.

I had no idea that my parents were already talking about relocation, but in hindsight, they were thinking about the fact that I had pretty much poisoned the well at my high school. They wanted to give me a fresh start, and I would reward them by having an even crazier sixteenth year. I was just getting warmed up in so many ways, which is exactly how I feel about this project. But in a good way this time! I swear!

As I said, shifting gears like this has given me a new burst of creative energy, and I’m going to need it. This issue of the newsletter, covering May 1985, is #22. By the time we’re done, we’ll be on #122. It will be the year 2033 when I finally put this project to bed. That sounds insane on one level, but it also sounds like it’s way too soon for me, because I know just how much more writing is involved here and how much more work it’s been than I expected.

So why continue? Why finish? First, because I said I would, and I’d like to finish one of these giant research projects of mine. Second, because no one else will, and I think there’s real value in having this archive as a permanent standing archive. If I ever finish, I’ll drop the paywall and just leave this up as something people can search and refer to any time they need, and I will feel secure that it will be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource about one of the most interesting decades of film of my lifetime. In the end, I wish this website already existed and I could just go read it, but since no one else is going to do this, it’s up to me. By the end of 2025, we’ll be at December 1985 (in November) and May 1982 (in December). That means that we’ll spend most of 2026 alternating between two of my favorite years of the decade. It also means I’ll get to break up the death march of 1983 with the wild and wooly 1987. Everything will come together as I intercut the great 1984 with the equally great 1988 and the very start of 1985 just in time to allow 1989 to be our final year of publishing, with nothing to interrupt it. It feels like an exciting way to structure things, and while it was never my original plan, it’s going to finally give us all a way to move forward with this thing.

With that in mind, there seems like no better way to kick off any month of the 1980s than with a Chuck Norris movie. And, in a delightful change of pace, it’s a great one…

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MAY 3

Code of Silence
Chuck Norris, Henry Silva, Bert Remsen, Mike Genovese, Nathan Davis, Ralph Foody, Allen Hamilton, Ron Henriquez, Joe Guzaldo, Molly Hagan, Ron Dean, Wilbert Bradley, Dennis Farina, Gene Barge, Mario Nieves, Miguel Nino, Ronnie Barron, Joseph F. Kosala, Lou Damiani, Nydia Rodriguez Terracina, Andre Marquis, John Mahoney, Dennis Cockrum, Zaid Farid, Howard Jackson, Alex Stevens, Don Pike, Les Podewell, Trisch Schaefer, Martha Oton, Jack Kandel, James Fierro, Tom Letuli, Jeff Hoke, Gary Pike, Frank Strocchia, Jack Decker, Sue Kelly, Michael E. Bradley, Sally Anne Waranch, Jerry Tullos, Catalina Caceres, Shirley Kelly, Angela Zimm
cinematography by Frank Tidy
music by David Frank
screenplay by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack and Mike Gray
story by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack
produced by Raymond Wagner
directed by Andrew Davis
Rated R
1 hr 40 mins

A Chicago street cop gets caught in a turf war between the American mob and a Colombian drug cartel and even members of his own department.

So much happens in the first fifteen minutes of this film, and it is so well shot and well staged, that you might forget you’re watching a Chuck Norris film.

Say what you will about his star wattage, but his filmography is fairly low rent, and part of the problem is that he did not exhibit much care or taste when choosing collaborators. This is one of those rare moments when Norris crossed paths with people who were determined to make a good film, regardless of his appearance in it, and Code of Silence remains one of the best things he was ever involved in.

Set in Chicago, the film is as much a showcase for Andrew Davis as it is for Norris, if not more. The script was originally set in San Francisco, but once Davis signed to direct it, he changed the setting so he could write about a city he knew intimately. In its earliest incarnation, this was developed as a sequel to Dirty Harry, but when Warner Bros. opted not to use it, the script kept bouncing around and was finally sold to Orion. They tried to fit various movie stars into it for years before finally landing on Norris, and honestly, he’s the one who benefitted the most from that arrangement. For Orion, that almost feels like they’re slumming it a bit. For Norris, this was a big step up into respectability. He’d been making money for Cannon, but his films never really broke through into the mainstream. He’d made a serious attempt with Lone Wolf McQuade in 1983, and he gained a bit of critical traction. Maybe that’s what convinced Orion to try him in a fairly radical change of gear for him as an action star.

image courtesy of Orion Pictures

Norris plays Eddie Cusack, and I like that he’s not some supercop at the start of the film. He’s in charge of a sting operation that they’ve been planning for months, and the first twenty minutes or so of the film is the day that Cusack and his team are about to move in on the coke dealers they’ve been watching. Before they can move in, though, a bunch of men dressed like house painters burst in and there’s a huge firefight. The “painters,” a bunch of mobsters working for the Luna family, kill a bunch of the Colombians, all working for the Comacho family, and a ton of cops get caught in the crossfire. In the midst of all of this, the dude who stars in the movie-within-a-movie in Home Alone (you know the one I mean, the “Filthy animals” guy) kills an innocent kid by mistake and plants a gun on his dead body. It’s a ton of story communicated amidst a whirlwind of intentional chaos, and Andrew Davis handles it all effortlessly. By the end of that sequence, you know you’re in the hands of a real filmmaker, and he does a great job of juggling all of the narrative threads while making Norris feel like an actual human being with an actual inner life. It’s like a magic trick. Norris has never been this comfortable onscreen, and the actors around him all elevate his game.

The great Dennis Farina co-stars as one of the cops who works closely with Cusack, and at this point, he was just a few years away from his time as an actual Chicago Police detective. He made his debut onstage at the Steppenwolf in ’82, and he was still a working cop at that point. His first encounter with Hollywood was working as a police consultant for Michael Mann, but he did the work to train himself as an actor before he really made the jump to movies. This one came just before he was cast in Crime Story, and that’s when he became a full-time actor and never looked back. There’s an authenticity that Farina brings to this movie that is reflected in the entire production. I love the way they use Chicago in the film, and the fight on top of the El Train is one of the film’s highlights. I love that the stunts in the film are all human-scale. It doesn’t feel like these people are meant to be heroes and villains in any elevated sense. Instead, it’s all the prickly, difficult human experience that Davis uses to ground the movie that makes it feel special. Anyone can make an action movie, but to get us to invest fully in Cusack and his struggle to navigate “right and wrong” in a moral landscape as complicated as this is difficult, and Davis pulls it off. Ralph Foody, Nathan Davis, and Mike Genovese all do terrific supporting work as well, with Henry Silva showing up to lend the film some serious gravitas, and it’s clear that Andrew Davis was just as strong an actor’s director as he was with the camera and the action.

Code of Silence isn’t the best action film of the ‘80s or even the best of 1985, but it may well be the pinnacle of what Chuck Norris did on film, and it’s no surprise it trapped Davis in a genre that was almost an accident. That’s what happens when you over-deliver this completely.