The Mean Season (1985)

Based on a book by John Katzenbach called In The Heat of The Summer, the dull The Mean Season should have capitalised on Florida's oppressive Summer, but everyone in it — Kurt Russell's journalist, a camera-toting colleague, his boss, and a detective played by a very young Andy Garcia — remains fresh despite running around after a serial killer - and Mariel Hemingway's love interest at one point even leaves Kurt a message written in a fogged up car window - and in the same way, the serial killer himself, a taunter of the public via the phone on Malcolm's news desk and a presence that really should sweep through with menace and ravage the community, never actually takes a compelling shape.

★★☆☆☆

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Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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Deepwater Horizon (2016)

It comes across as a rather simplistic account of what caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, especially with John Malkovich playing a corporate Dastardly Whiplash whose amoral calculations - on - the - day - cause the blowout and Gulf of Mexico oilspill, but as a glimpse at life on an offshore oil platform, Deepwater Horizon is gripping and as a tribute to those that died, it succeeds wonderfully.

★★★☆☆

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Breakdown (1997)

About a man whose car breaks down in the New Mexico desert and whose wife disappears after she hitches a ride to get help, Breakdown for a moment looks like being one of those nobody-believes-him mystery dramas but quickly develops into something much more akin to a road thriller - it's more Duel and The Vanishing than The Lady Vanishes - and even though the movie cheats and fudges some details and has the look of the low-budget nineties, it really is rivetting heart-in-your-mouth stuff, terrifying - horrifying, even - because Kurt Russell's everyman remains for a long time completely bewildered by his nightmare situation and yet it requires him to claw desperately, moment-to-moment for survival.

★★★★☆

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Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino is at his best making movies unfettered by conventions or expectations and that is the case with this grindhouse exploitation horror, really only one-and-half acts of any other more conventionally told flick, about a highway madman who kills women with his death-proofed car...until he comes up against some spunky women who fight back.

★★★★☆

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Stargate (1994)

The most remarkable thing about this sci-fi about a Robert Langton code-breaking Egyptologist who with a military team crosses the universe via an Einstein-Rosen bridge only to experience trouble returning home is that it spawned multiple television series and computer games despite being so dreadfully, dreadfully boring.

★☆☆☆☆

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Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

1986 was a big year for Chinese mysticism in LA with this fantasy adventure released in quick succession with The Golden Child - both feature rather disconcerting sfx sequences but where The Golden Child crosses its fantasy elements with a Beverly Hills Cop-style police procedural, Big Trouble In Little China, directed by John Carpenter, is full of John Carpenter horror-lite and features Mortal Kombat-style streetfighters, sewer monsters weird and wonderful and thrilling to a kid in the 80s, and the fabulous Kim Cattrall long before Sex And The City was a thing - watching it back today, though, it really isn't very good at all.

★★☆☆☆

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The Hateful Eight (2015)

The signature Quentin Tarantino violence, when it comes, detracts from this otherwise metered, suspenseful story of eight or so men and a whole lot of lies holed up in a snowed-in room; I'd have preferred more plot and twists to the From Dusk Til Dawn gorefest that brings everything to a decidedly unfun finish.

★★☆☆☆

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Tango and Cash (1989)

Rascist (at one stage, Kurt Russell's Cash impatiently screams at a Chinese man to speak English) and sexist (sisters need chaperoning, and an on-duty policeman asks two women on the street for a threeway), but somehow this vacuous 80s buddy cop story is tolerable - nostalgia for children of the 80s like me and a means of marvelling at how much more politically correct the world now is.

★★☆☆☆

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Overboard (1987)

Rich and nasty Goldie Hawn isn't very nice to her carpenter, Kurt Russell, so when she hits her head and suffers amnesia, he takes revenge by adopting her into his less fortunate life, making her keep house and raise his children in this light and frothy romantic comedy from the 80s.

★★★☆☆

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