Ten years in the dark. Yes, film fans, it’s been a decade since The Dauph first pitched headlong through the doorway of a screening room as CREEM’s ambassador to the cinematic wasteland. Since that fateful day, there have been many screening rooms and yours truly has wandered from one to another like a water rat scurrying from cesspool to drainpipe. So many bright, sunny days spent in darkened enclosures. So many awful movies. So much inadequately buttered popcorn. And always, at the close of each year, the dreaded wrap up, in which the scum of the past 12 months must be stirred up yet again, just when you hoped you had put those wretched films out of your mind forever. Join me then, reader, as I dip a tarnished spoon into a fresh batch of sewage, separating its foul, filmy covering for the feature everyone in Birmingham likes to call The 10 Worst Movies Of The Year.

Future historians may look back on 1985 as the year when Halley’s Comet put in its long-awaited appearance. Or the year when Ed Meese bought his very first pair of Beatle boots. But film scholars will, no doubt, recall 1985 as the unfortunate year when audiences were subjected to not one, but two, Sylvester Stallone movies. Not since 1983, when David Bowie starred in no fewer than three pictures, has there been a comparable glut of cinematic inadequacy.