My 1985 Usenet Movie Reviews

Welcome! This site presents several movie reviews I posted to the “early” internet in 1985 … and the spirited responses that followed.

I posted the reviews to a bulletin board service called Usenet, one of the earliest “social networks.” You could post text messages to the system, and others on the internet could access the messages. You assigned each message to a “newsgroup,” or general subject area. I posted my reviews to the newsgroup net.movies, which was for discussions, questions and reviews related to movies.

In theory the posts were available indefinitely, but many of these early postings have been lost to history. A few of these reviews and responses are still available in Usenet caches like Google Groups.

I posted the reviews roughly once a week starting June 1985, and stopped three months later, in September. Up until the end, I posted only the reviews. I did not respond to any of the follow-up posts or direct email, and I did not participate in any other discussions. I was new to Usenet then, and had never posted before.

In 1997 I put the old reviews and responses out on the internet again, this time as web pages. I again got several responses, and those are also here.

See below for the list of reviews, in the order I posted them. The first one is very skippable. Responses are mostly in the order they were posted, with some re-sorting to group responses with the reviews.

Thanks … and enjoy!

— Kelvin Thompson, January 2023

Futurekill (Don't bother reading.) [No responses.]
Return of the Soldier [Read Responses]
1984 [Read Responses]
My New Partner [Read Responses]
Star Wars [Read Responses]
Perfect [Read Responses]
Brewster's Millions [Read Responses]
Warning About French Movies [Read Responses]
Fahrenheit 451 [Read Responses]
Return of the Jedi [Read Responses]
Pale Rider [Read Responses]
Casablanca [Read Responses]
Back to the Future [Read Responses]
Gallipoli [Read Responses]
The Color Purple [Read Responses]
Conclusion [Read Responses]

(Last updated 11 March 2023)