25 Years Ago This Month (November 1985)

Following the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a Wes Craven horror classic that still holds up really well today, November 1985 saw the release of the first of man sequels: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge. For reasons surpassing understanding and logic, Freddy possesses a teen and makes him do the killings instead of invading their dreams. It was directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin, neither of whom ever had a higher profile Hollywood job. It still managed to gross nearly $30 million.

Jim Carrey played a high school teen who finds sexual satisfaction from Vampiress Lauren Hutten in Once Bitten. Not Carrey's first movie, but it was his first starring role.

To be filed under the Films That Time Forgot heading there was Santa Claus, a fantasy adventure film that attempts to seriously explain the origins of the mythical hero starring David Huddleston in the title role and Dudley Moore as an elf.

The two big films of the month were Rocky IV in which Rocky faces down the Russian Ivan Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren, and White Nights in which Mikhail Baryshnikov plays a Soviet ballet dancer and defector whose plane crash lands in Siberia. After being recognized he is placed under house arrest and meets and befriends an American dancer and defector to the Soviet Union played by Gregory Hines.

Outside of film history:
-The comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" debuted on the 18th.
-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time in Geneva on the 19th.

Deaths:
-Stepin Fetchit, who popularized black stereotypes on film and television, died on the 19th at age 83.
-Anne Baxter at age 62 from a brain aneurysm on Madison Ave. in NYC. She was most famous for her role as the young eponymous theater ingenue who takes Bette Davis's place in All About Eve. She also won a supporting actress Oscar for The Razor's Edge.