Ten Little Indians (1989)

Transporting Agatha Christie's classic mystery, an early example of the modern slasher, to an African safari rather than an island off the Devon coast was probably just meant to reduce staging costs to the purchase of a single tent, and it gives the classic story of gathered guests being picked off one by one by a mysterious safari host a distinctly Gilligan's Island-feel as our gathered guests, or doomed victims, including Frank Stallone as Phillip Lombard, take showers behind cane shower screens, traverse ravines in a rickety vine cable car,  and deliver lines of dialogue in the wooden manner of The Skipper.

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter preempts the first- and third-person perspective sandbox video games with his original Halloween, a 1978 movie in which the camera hangs back behind the residents of Haddonfield and follows them as they wander in and out of homes and up and down streets, like we are watching Carpenter's playthrough of Silent Hill, starting in the opening scene with Michael as a child in Halloween costume navigating a circuitous path into a home to start his long career of killing; then, fifteen years later, we follow Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie as she wanders around the township with student books in hand, friends in tow, unaware that murderous Michael, now 21, has escaped an asylum and is himself wandering around with a camera hanging just behind his shoulder - the net effect, not just dread for the minute all this peaceful ambling turns murderous and chaotic, is a sense by movie's end you have almost revealed the whole map of the township.

★★★☆☆

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Prince of Darkness (1987)

The John Carpenter aesthetic, kicking in immediately with the black and white opening credits set against the director's own pulsing electronic music composition - not to mention Donald Pleasence turning up as a troubled priest - rises this horror above similar others which generally don't get away with such laughable plotting: a team of physicists (a feast of Carpenter regulars (and Susan, the radiologist...in blue? With glasses?)) are gathered together in a church to investigate a glass chamber full of swirling green that seems to be alive, sentient, communicative, ancient, able to possess the bodies of others, and somehow author to strange Coptic, Latin, and English texts that contain differential equations...and if that weren't enough to overload a 102-minute horror romp, each of the gathered scientists receives tachyon messages in their dreams from the future!

★★★★☆

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Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

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Halloween II (1981)

You can nearly map the township of Haddonfield given the way the camera in Halloween II, like a before-its-time third-person sandbox computer game, follows behind people - the asylum escapee, masked lunatic Michael Myers, for example, or Donald Pleasence's psychiatrist (in not-so-hot pursuit of his patient) or random Haddonfield trick-or-treaters (including a very unfortunate someone who makes the mistake of way too quickly uptaking the latest halloween costume trend) - and as the camera follows these people around, around them the everyday of the town is revealed, its mundaneness in stark contrast with the serial killer's steady, bloody, inexplicable pursuit of Laurie which continues here immediately where the original movie left off: Laurie is taken to hospital after her climactic confrontation with Michael in number one (Jamie Lee Curtis pleads with doctors and nurses, "Don't put me to sleep," and then gets an injection that sends her to sleep for the whole movie); then there comes the beginning of an explanation for Michael Myers' pursuit of Laurie and the reason for his, um, resilience.

★★★☆☆

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You Only Live Twice (1967)

A shuttlejacking creates tension between world superpowers and unfortunately Sean Connery's James Bond has been shot dead, bundled up like an Egyptian mummy and buried at sea, but his death is all just a cunning ruse to allow the spy to secretly follow up leads in Japan where for the first time Blofeld shows his face and, thanks to an especially sleazy screenplay by Roald Dahl, 007 experiences all of the oriental delights the Land of the Rising Sun has to offer, including betrothal to a woman, Kissy Suzuki, who spends most of her time in a wet bikini.

★★☆☆☆

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Wake In Fright (1971)

An English schoolteacher stuck in the Australian outback "city" of "the 'Yabba" has his mettle tested by characters who excessively drink, gamble, and kangaroo hunt, but interestingly, it seems to be a hint of homosexuality that finally breaks his resolve in this classic from 1971 depicting life in the Australian bush as a gothic nightmare.

★★★★☆

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