Christine (1983)

Pretty much, Carrie (CAR-rie) comes back as a 1958 Plymouth Fury in this Stephen King adaptation that has director John Carpenter doing his horror-movie best with the Horror Novel King's big, ugly and empty story about a vehicle whose gender is ascribed by men and whose unexplained sentience, jealousy and murderous nature serves only to eclipse the psychopathy of the movie's real monsters, those men themselves: ugly, knife-wielding, sniggering, self-loathing, cigar-chomping, bullying and friendless, gambling and drinking, erection-obsessed and female-objectifying boys aged 15 to 80.

★★★☆☆

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Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley became the archetypal kickass heroine after her introduction in this original Alien movie, essentially a pick-them-off-one-at-a-time horror like many American slasher flicks full of teens camping in remote locations with masked evil hunting them down, but Alien transcends its genre with its muted, echoey spaceship campground, its otherworldly Jason always kept at a distance, never seen fully extended, always in shadow and so not just masked but unfathomable, and the movie is rich in other details - robot crew members, extraterrestrial remains, slumber pods - that have been developed into a detailed mythology across four sequels to date (and happily counting!).

★★★★★

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