Road Games (1981)

Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), a truck driver transporting pig carcasses across the Nullabor Plain, repeatedly encounters on that long straight stretch of road through the Australian desert a green van, the driver of which he suspects is a serial killer, and Patrick supposes out loud to a hitchhiker he's picked up (Jamie Lee Curtis) that the killer thinks "women are pigs", a hint that there's an intellectual game happening in this horror thriller, but when all is said and done, the road games are just that: puns, wordplay and shallow tongue-in-cheek to while away time along the way.

★★★★☆

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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

The irreverence of some of the universes in an infinite multiverse makes sense, but that doesn't mean literal sausage fingers, raccoon chefs, goggly-eyed rocks, and swirling black-hole bagels are any less irritating in this sci-fi adventure about a woman who learns a simple life lesson in the most repetitive, long-winded way imaginable - not from the first iteration of her multiverse, where the message was already crystal clear, but only after ad nauseam repetition of several of the silliest iterations - yes, literal sausage fingers again and again and again - over 139 minutes that feel longer than a zillion lifetimes strung together.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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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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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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Blue Steel (1990)

I like Kathryn Bigelow's gripping Blue Steel about a rookie cop who just 24 hours into the job blasts away a supermarket robber, has her badge taken away and ends up the object of a gun-fetishist's psychopathy, and I like it so much I've watched it three times now, but full of awful policework and characters' really dumb decisions, it is best considered a slice of throwaway psychosexual horror (with horror stalwart Jamie Lee Curtis really just terrorised by another nightmarish Michael or Fog) than a more meaningful thriller/drama - there's nothing intelligent said, for instance, about gun violence or female cops or male violence.

★★★☆☆

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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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Knives Out (2019)

Not as effective a homage to the Agatha Christie murder mystery as it is a homage to the parlour game thriller stage plays of the likes of Ira Levin and Anthony Shaffer, director Rian Johnson nods to Sleuth with his mystery novellist's mansion setting crammed full of unusual murder mystery objects (including a prominent Jolly Jack Tar figure) and Deathtrap is brought to mind watching this movie's twisting, changing thriller-, not mystery-, plot and, really, this mostly fun, mostly well-plotted movie is in fact at it worst in its messy third act and attempts at a detective dénouement - Agatha Christie was never so longwinded. 

★★★☆☆

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Christmas With The Kranks (2004)

Not as madcapped, as funny or as focused as National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Tim Allen can't match Chevy Chase's ability to accentuate the absurd, but this is a harmless Christmas-themed comedy in which the Kranks decide to skip Christmas, much to the consternation of their neighbours.

★★☆☆☆

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