Storm boy (1976)

I understand Colin Thiele makes it clear in his book that Mister Percival, the pelican raised by Storm Boy, is trained and responds to voice commands, but the movie springs this idea on its audience right when Mister Percival is needed to save a boatful of fishermen, resulting in a laughable Skippy moment that slightly strains the otherwise faithful adaptation, an emotional, likeable, and touching Australian classic, with the ten-year-old Storm Boy living a lonely but - to me - dream existence, quietly at the beach with the Coorong - its beaches, birdlife, and Ngarrindjeri culture (as taught to Storm Boy by David Gulpilil's Fingerbone Bill) - resplendent around him.

★★★★☆

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The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane (1976)

With its young female protagonist (Jodie Foster, playing 13-year-old Rynn Jacobs) living in a gothic American mansion and trying to keep the outside world out, this 1977 horror-mystery tells a very Shirley Jackson story - it's dark and there are magical elements, even, when a magician turns up - Mario - who helps Rynn avoid the world - and it is all quite chilling like a Jackson story, but perhaps this plot is a little aimless and it is a shame the most chilling aspect of it all is Jodie Foster's 21-year-old sister's nude scene that surely wasn't okay in 1977 either.

★★★☆☆

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The Inugami Family (犬神家の一族) (1976)

Seishi Yokomizo's murder mystery is set in motion by the death of a rich patriarch whose unusual will plummets his extended Inugami family into conflict, and when the bodies start turning up in grisly giallo fashion, Kindaichi Kousuke,  Yokomizo's recurring detective, a vagabond with dandruff (!), must race to unmask a murderer in a plot that, as always with Yokomizo, involves a thousand similarly named characters, centuries of buried family history, and complicated - and here, really, frankly, impossible - characters' comings and goings from busy murder scenes.

★★★☆☆

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Burnt Offerings (1976)

It's The Shining before there was The Shining: a star-studded movie released in 1976, one year earlier than Stephen King's brick, about a writer (Oliver Reed), his wife (Karen Black) and their young son (Lee Montgomery) - oh, and Bette Davis as an aunt - who move into a holiday retreat (a summer rental too good and cheap to be true, not a hotel) and fall victim to strange goings-on - weirdness that probably stems from upstairs where the mysterious octogenarian Mrs Allardyce resides behind a closed door - but in this movie, the effect of this paranormality upon the family is just a whole lot of family bickering - whose dad hasn't played too rough with them in a pool? - and it doesn't just affect dad but first dad, then dad and mum, and then, weirdly, just mum who becomes house-obsessed - dad for some reason gets a reprieve - and then poor Bette Davis' aunt becomes ill...and all this not very scintillating stuff - fights then remorse then fights then remorse -  never ends up making a word of sense, so in that respect too Burnt Offerings is very much like The Shining.

★★★☆☆

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Rocky (1976)

Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone, this feelgood schmaltz delivered with a grubby working class credibility introduces Rocky Balboa, a boxer with a heart of gold who would feature in seven subsequent movies, who wanders Philadelphia being called a 'creepo' and being yelled at by his trainer, best friend and the heavies who employ him until he finds Adrian, a timid pet shop store owner whom Rocky brings out of her shell and in return is boosted with a self-respect that enables him to give boxing champion Apollo Creed - and Life - a long overdue uppercut.

★★★★☆

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Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece resonates powerfully even today, thirty years after its release, with its story of a war veteran taxi driver, a kind of grown-up Holden Caulfield, who over the course of on-the-job transactional exchanges with psychos, pimps, politicians and prostitutes grows increasingly alienated from and disdainful of NYC - it is hard to argue with De Niro's taxi driver, Travis Bickle's perception that this 1970s NYC is perverted, immoral, sick but it is the taxi driver who psychotically reacts to it.

★★★★★

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The Omen (1976)

Seventies hairstyles, dischordant organ music and skivvies under plaid leisure suits with flared pant legs are enough to scare the gee willikers out of anyone but add respected actors and some gruesome deaths (a glass pane beheading is the worst) and you have the effectively creepy horror, the original The Omen about a baby switch Gregory Peck and viewers of umpteen lesser sequels wish he'd never made.

★★★★☆

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Carrie (1976)

The original 1976 film version of Stephen King's Carrie is a not especially enjoyable American gothic horror story about an alienated student bullied into the sort of destructive behaviour that these days happens in American high schools with guns, not telekinesis.

★★☆☆☆

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Murder By Death (1976)

Mystery buffs will love the tangle of traditional mystery elements woven into this 1976 Neil Simon comedy thriller which sees the famous detectives of the world gather in a remote mansion to compete in a sinister challenge put to them by a sinister Truman Capote!

★★★★☆

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