Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Ten Little Indians (1965)

Agatha Christie's grisly plot is so good, movie adaptations just can not mess it up, and even this prosaic 1965 version, filmed in large and austere, airy sets that undo the plot's claustrophobia, manages to be thrilling - keeping things fresh is the setting of a snowed-in mansion (not an island off the Devon coast), some deaths from great mountain heights, and a hilarious but oddly effective "Whodunnit break" (a one-minute pause with a voice-over that prompts audience members to turn to their neighbour and hazard a guess at whodunnit!)

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Ninth Guest (1934)

Among the more shocking moments of this 1934 horror mystery are scenes showing hysterical characters throwing themselves against the electrified door of the booby-trapped New Orleans apartment they are trapped inside having been lured there with dinner-party invitations but finding themselves not wined and dined but picked off one by one by their mysterious host, a plot that suggests Agatha Christie may have had inspiration for her famous "And Then There Were None."

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Ten Little Indians (1989)

Transporting Agatha Christie's classic mystery, an early example of the modern slasher, to an African safari rather than an island off the Devon coast was probably just meant to reduce staging costs to the purchase of a single tent, and it gives the classic story of gathered guests being picked off one by one by a mysterious safari host a distinctly Gilligan's Island-feel as our gathered guests, or doomed victims, including Frank Stallone as Phillip Lombard, take showers behind cane shower screens, traverse ravines in a rickety vine cable car,  and deliver lines of dialogue in the wooden manner of The Skipper.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Those roman numerals in the titles count up the episodes, in case you thought it was a daftness factor inexorably ratcheting up, a reasonable mistake given things are dafter than ever in this eighth installment - as daft as the acting is bad (try to decide which death scene is the most lethargic) - with a resurrected-from-his-Camp Lake Crystal-grave Jason Voorhees - sodden, moldy, mute and ridiculous, not scary -  plodding around a NY-bound ship (it sometimes resembles the Love Boat but at other times looks like a weather-beaten paddle steamer), killing one-by-one a group of high schoolers who are on as unlikely a cruise as you are ever likely to see - 'unlikely' because it is a school group with a supervising teacher but the students on board nonetheless participate in full-gear boxing matches; they take saunas; they honeytrap their Principal and film it with the canera equipment they've brought with them on the trip; they pack in their luggage electric guitars so they can jam in the boiler room; and other really really daft things-to-do while they wait, like the bored audience, for Jason to, well, not so much 'strike' as 'lumber heavily, tiredly in'.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Again, we are introduced to a group of school kids, one of whom has premonitions that help them all escape violent death, only for these survivors to then be stalked one-by-one by Death because "Death doesn't like to be cheated", in this reasonably entertaining fifth instalment of the inventive horror series that sticks to the formula but returns the quality of the acting and the special effects back to standard after some woeful earlier sequels.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Friday the 13th (2009)

The first twenty-three minutes, a lead-up to the titlecard and effectively a mini-movie that shows just how short and efficient these Friday the 13th episodes could actually be, may be too much for some viewers - it is a nasty, distressing sequence - but for the gluttons for (torture porn) punishment who resist the urge to switch off, the next 70 minutes prove to be the same old 80s business enlivened by naughties' production values, with better actors and a Jason Voorhees who is more gigantic than ever but also more nimble - we never see, but scene-to-scene this lumbering hockey-mask-wearing mute exhibits a wuxia lightness-on-his-feet that sees him cutting effortlessly and silently across vast expanses of woods, moving from underground tunnels to Camp Crystal Lake jetties to rooftops and toolsheds in split seconds-flat to dispatch more bong-smoking, copulating teenage prey.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS 

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

This sequel to 1980s Friday the 13th is just the first movie spat out again not a year later sans any creative effort, with a group of different-but-the-same teens heading out into the woods to train as camp counsellors unaware that it is camp counsellors the now adult Jason Voorhees blames for, um, well, not his drowning death - he's alive - and not the beheading of his mother - he dispenses with Alice in the opening Scream-inspiring scene - but because, well - who knows - he's just stomping flat-footed around the woods with nothing better or new or creative to do, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

April Fool's Day (1986)

Like And Then There Were None, the Agatha Christie book that inspired it, this wafer-thin cult classic 80s teen slasher opens on a group of people boarding a ferry to spend a weekend on an island, and even before these college kids arrive at their destination, someone starts picking them off one by bloody one and the surprise at the end is that there is a reason for this other than the fact each of the characters is extremely annoying - particularly the penis-obsessed, gnashing, gyrating, sniggering hyena frat boys.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) (1945)

Like most other film versions of Agatha Christie's 1939 murder mystery, Rene Clair's 1945 adaptation fudges the book's climax, adhering instead to the more sanitised ending of Christie's 1943 stage play, but otherwise this movie is faithful and the story of characters summoned by a mysterious stranger to a remote island where they are picked off one by one is suitably chilling, creepy, puzzling, and there is also plenty of humour like a wonderful scene of cabin fever paranoia and fear that literally has each character being watched as they in turn watch another.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

You're Next (2011)

There's a couple of lines at the start that sound like clues suggesting this might be something more than a mere home invasion slasher — perhaps an And Then There Were None-style mystery where family members gathered in a sprawling mansion are picked off one-by-bloody-one by a Mx X  — but the leaden dialogue never lets up, the acting remains wooden, we never feel even remotely interested in the victims, and as the body count increases without there being anything clever whatsoever in the bloodletting, you'll stop wondering which one of the dead might actually still be alive and abandon hopes for a sensible twist — that the heroine is in on it or that it is Muffy or Buffy's April Fool's Day prank — in the knowledge this 2011 movie is in fact just a low-budget and unimaginative home invasion slasher, nothing more.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

A Million (10억) (2009)

Eight strangers believe they have been chosen to compete in a televised Survivor-style game in the Australian outback but once the game begins, they realise it is a sick game of life and death, in this intriguing but really very stupid And Then There Were None reiteration featuring lots of screaming, a bad guy who is able to magic himself to wherever the contestants happen to be - it doesn't matter how far they've stumbled through the desert that day, he's there - and webcams which broadcast the grim events from even, say, a billabong or a random sand dune, a dead tree or at The Pinnacles.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Reef (2010)

There are two or three tense moments in this low-budget Australian 'natural horror' movie about a group of friends terrorised by a shark after their boat capsizes off the Queensland coast but otherwise it all quickly becomes a repetitive cycle of underwater goggle shots and the frantic treading of water.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Life (2017)

About as rewarding as watching a "system failure" warning light blink at you for 90 minutes, this misfire hoped to meld the breathless rollercoaster action of Gravity, the profundity of 2001, and the horror of Alien, but fails on all accounts with key action scenes so chaotic they're nonsensical, all emotion demanded rather than earned by a script and score that doesn't just hand-hold but latches on and constricts the life out of you like a parasitic lifeform, and a really daft and totally unaffecting nonsense ending delivered with embarassing fervour!

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

And Then There Were None (2015)

This is a ripper star-studded BBC adaptation of the oft-adapted Agatha Christie serial killer mystery, one made for tv that thankfully sticks to the plot of the book (so many others deviate), and one that looks great, sounds terrific, and even if you are someone who has watched six or seven other iterations and know very well the whos and whats and whys, the three episodes of this series will grip you to the no-longer-surprising but surprisingly unspoilt surprise end!

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Alien Resurrection (1997)

This time, in an Alien instalment too clever by half, Ripley is resurrected in director Jean-Paul Jeunet's "Delicatessen", a futuristic green-yellow world of zany characters and irreverent detail, but in fact, Ripley isn't Ripley at all but a Ripley-alien clone and empath who once again takes charge of a group of mercenaries when aliens - distinctly Jurassic Park raptor-like ones - break free from their Umbrella Corporation science experiment chambers and start - you guessed it - picking off everyone on board the Earth-bound spaceship Auriga (including elfin robot, Winona Ryder) one-by-especially-bloody-one.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Incite Mill - 7 Day Death Game (2010)

Agatha Christie's claustrophobic thriller And Then There Were None sees ten strangers summoned to a remote island where they are killed one-by-one by a mysterious someone; this more recent Japanese movie references Christie but its ten strangers are lured by job advertisement to a hi-tech underground fortress, where they die one-by-one in a bizarre seven-day death contest - a contrived, not very interesting, nor vey likely update that also features too many exaggerated and irritating characters among the ten victims.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None) (1974)

An Agatha Christie adaptation, Ten Little Indians (or less controversially, And Then There Were None) has ten individuals including Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough, and a singing, piano-playing Charles Aznavour gather in a remote Iranian desert mansion (not the book's island off the Devon coast) summoned by a mysterious host and, from their first tension-filled dinner, these guests are picked off one-by-one by a killer whose identity and motives are the surprise revelation at film's end.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

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!).

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW