Terror Train (1980)

Three years after a (really revolting) med student prank, a group of students gather for a New Year's Eve party aboard a steam train, and as the train shoots through the night, it turns out one of those on board is picking the others off one by bloody one....and the passenger we sympathise with, not so involved in that prank and striving to stay alive while all her besties end up sliced and diced is -- no, not a starey young David Copperfield who appears as a magician without a Working With Children check, hired to be the onboard entertainment - but Jamie Lee Curtis, adding her 80s-horror clout to this effective slasher with several truly chilling moments.

★★★☆☆

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Cruising (1980)

Because he resembles the murder victims, a policeman (Al Pacino) is sent undercover into the S&M gay sex clubs of NYC to flush out a serial killer, but forget the danger posed by a brutal knife-wielding maniac — what effect will all the gyrating mustachioed bears in leather — with whips, chaps, handcuffs and gimp masks — not to mention coffee dates with a new gay neighbour, have on the young policeman and upon the relationship he has with his girlfriend (Karen Allen), left-in-the-dark about her lover's undercover nocturnal adventures...you'll never know because although there is one fleeting scene that suggests the policeman willingly gets trussed up in masochistic fashion and a line of dialogue that suggests the couple's love life has changed, the movie prefers to skirt ambiguously, frustratingly around this pivotal and at-the-time sensational subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

A Hollywood production sweeps into St Mary Mead and brings with it highly-strung celebrity A-lister Marina Gregg (Elizabeth Taylor), her arm-candy husband (Rock Hudson), their entourage of secretaries and house people and production staff and, among them, a murderer, and it is up to Angela Lansbury's terrible Miss Marple, an American-accented beanpole covered in cobwebs, to solve the poisoning cases central to Agatha Christie's classic mystery.

★★★☆☆

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Oh, God! Book II (1980)

As in the 1977 original, George Burns' God's strategy for spreading the word of his existence is to appear before doubters and wow them with some 80s-cinema SFX...but not until after he has first driven one unfortunate soul to an asylum with a diagnosis of delusional psychosis, and in this sequel the poor individual isn't John Denver but Tracy Richards, an 11 year old who really should be practising spelling and coming to terms with her parents' divorce, not god-bothered, but she is such a delight, her friend Shingo is so relaxed and natural, their interactions are so well acted, and the movie is so gently amusing and unsanctimonious that the ridiculousness of God's methods doesn't matter: this is a pleasure.

★★★☆☆

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John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

Celebrating the town's centenary, the folk of seaside Antonio Bay are weirded out by a fog that occasions a pandemic of shattered glass and maritime deaths, but all it takes is for local Father Malone to read a couple of pages of an old diary and suddenly everyone is confidently spouting paranormal fog lore and exhibiting magical knowledge of things they can't possibly have seen or heard, and this silliness doesn't matter because The Fog is atmospheric horror so fun I'd like to see it continued as an ongoing series of sequels, origin stories and offshoots - forgetting all about the woeful 2005 remake, of course.

★★★★☆

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The Elephant Man (1980)

David Lynch's second film is about Joseph 'The Elephant Man' Merrick and although the 1980 movie has a black-and-white schlock horror look, Merrick, not a ghoul, really did exist, really did suffer a congenital disorder that left him deformed from an early age, and really was exploited and abused by a freakshow exhibitor before a kind doctor introduced him to (Victorian-era) London high society.

★★★★☆

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Altered States (1980)

As in The Fly, a scientist pushes his experiments too far but instead of a slow metamorphosis into a human-sized insect, this scientist enjoys extended psychedelic trips through a mind-expanding light fantastic - well, essentially a series of 80s rock music videos showing the star, William Hurt, looking awed against a swirling backdrop of esoteric symbols, ticking metronomes and time-lapse nature clips - and to progress the story, he eventually morphs into a caveman and then into an early version of Doctor Manhattan - pretty random scientific outcomes dictated by the makeup and the tech of the time (and anything to get the stoners to go, "Whoa, man").

★★★☆☆

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Friday the 13th (1980)

For a movie that spawned eleven sequels (and counting) plus numerous spin-offs like Freddie vs Jason, this 1980 slasher is fairly derivative with Camp Lake Crystal (the setting where a bunch of young adults kumbayah around a fire, have sex, and generally have great times before being mercilessly picked off one-by-very-grisly-one) now a slasher movie cliché and the climax, which eveeeeeentually comes, heavily influenced by twenty years of film since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

★★★☆☆

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Dressed To Kill (1980)

Modern audiences won't be surprised by the twist in this 1980 Brian De Palma thriller about a high-class prostitute on the trail of a killer, but it is interesting to watch for the director's nods to Hitchcock, specifically Psycho, including an extended sequence in which poor short-term lead actress, Angie Dickinson, meets a kind of Psycho shower scene demise, her death being the last of a long string of insults to befall her including her repeatedly losing her gloves, misplacing her diamond ring, falling into a sexual liaison in the back of a taxi, becoming exposed to venereal disease, and being stuck in an elevator going down, not up, with a starey, obnoxious girl - you can imagine Dickinson thinking, "Just kill me already."

★★★★☆

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Flash Gordon (1980)

Oh how I adored this as a kid when I went to the local twinplex to see it, to my mind then a simple comicbook space adventure about an American football star tasked with saving Earth from an evil intergalactic Emperor Ming...and, well, I still love it having watched it again as an adult but now recognise a strong subtext in what is a kitsch sci-fi full of drag outfits, butch winged S&M costumes, leather underpants, and bizarre rituals involving hands plunging into muddy holes.

★★★★☆

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Airplane! / Flying High (1980)

There are two types of people in the world: those that watch this cornball comedy classic with crossed-arms, po-faced, and others who snort and guffaw and howl with laughter at the disaster movie spoof full of daggy dad jokes, puns, sight gags, and Peter Graves' deadpan inappropriateness.

★★★★☆

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