Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The second film adaptation of Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (after the first in 1956) is this terrifically creepy and frequently startling 1978 version with Donald Sutherland,  Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Brooke Adams playing Public Health inspectors and friends who investigate when, seemingly overnight, San Francisco (its mud bath bathhouses, its bookshops, its restaurants, workplaces and streets) become overrun with people who, according to their loved ones, aren't really them at all!

★★★★☆

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Flight of the Navigator (1978)

A boy's eight year disappearance turns out to have been spent flying around space in a silver almond talking to a goofy Paul Reubens-voiced spaghetti strainer, in this kids sci-fi from Disney, the third act of which plays out just a smidge too much like a geography lesson.

★★☆☆☆

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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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