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!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTEMCE REVIEWS