The Fog -- 1980 -- R

The original version of The Fog was written and directed by John Carpenter, the guy who gave us Halloween. It follows a small town preparing for their centennial celebration only to find out that their founding fathers may not have been entirely scrupulous in their dealings to acquire the monies needed to build the town.

So we get a fog which rolls in and brings with it the zombie-ish people who want revenge on the town for their founding fathers. What follows is a handful of deaths and a small climax to wrap things up. It has a fair amount of chilling moments, and a very creepy atmosphere which helps, but beyond Carpenter's inherent film making strengths, there's really nothing to write home about.

We are introduced to a host of different characters, but Carpenter is more focused on his thrills and plot than developing these characters to anyone memorable, and if a character dies, we don't really miss them.

The basic plot is decent, and it has a solid backstory. If Carpenter had spent some time on his characters, we'd have a really memorable movie. As it is, it's another filmed filed under the slashers that could have been better.

Airplane! -- 1980 -- PG

Dubbed one of the 10 funniest movies ever, it lives up to its name admirably. This film was hilarious.

Basically, you have a spoof of disaster movies that had been going around to that time, and Zucker made his name spoofing movies (even today, he is behind Scary Movies 3 & 4). Well, this one had him and his team is rare form as almost all of the gags worked.

The film follows a guy who crashed his squadron during the war (they didn't say which one), and has the hots for a flight attendant who is leaving on the next plane out. He overcomes his fear of flying and gets on board to get back together with her. Once in the air, the flight crew gets food poisoning, leading to the line, "thank you for flying with us today, and by the way, does anyone know how to fly a plane?"

It's a real trip and very funny. Definitely recommend.

Friday the 13th -- 1980 -- R

As a movie lover, watching this film was simply a requirement. It spawned the second longest running movie series of all time with ten sequels (so far; the first being James Bond with twenty sequels), gave us a horror icon with Jason Voorhees (though he ironically does not appear in the first film), and still makes us scratch our heads in trying to figure out how it did so well.

The premise is simple and ancient. Get a bunch of kids to an isolated location and kill them off one by one. The killer remained a complete mystery until revealed, and ended up with a perfectly plausible reason for killing everyone and an equally creepy trait in doing it.

To back up a little bit, we have a Camp Crystal Lake that was closed out in 1958 because two counselors were killed. The year before that, a boy drowned in the lake itself. The camp had been wrought with problems and delays for years anytime it tried to open, and now we're trying again. While we're given a series of red herrings to follow in regards to the whodunit, none of them make a lot of sense and it looks like the film is in continuity error hell until the big reveal which sets it all straight.

So once everyone is in place, people start dropping like flies. The director knows suspense, though, which is rarer and rarer in a film like this. We know the killer is out there, but we watch as the characters cluelessly carry on with their completely logical routines. They don't know there's a problem; only we do, which adds to the suspense of each death. This is consistently done well throughout, and the characters don't make any choices that are illogical, which is another plus. After all, they are counselors who need to know the camp inside and out. If they see something, it stands to reason that they'd check it out. They are also a bunch of late teens who like having fun, so the presumption that someone is playing with one of them is also not illogical. After all, they don't know anything is wrong.

We can fault the film in the character area, but for what it is, it does fairly well. Most of the characters are just cardboard cut outs, and there's not much to relate to in them. This makes their deaths kind of anticlimactic, since only the suspense gives the deaths any meaning or feeling. We do get some snippets of the characters' lives, but just not enough. However, since we're also dealing with a large number of characters whose fate it is to die, it's hard to go very deep in a ninety minute film.

The final issue here when it comes to the fear factor is that the film has no real staying power. Halloween takes place in a neighborhood. I live in a neighborhood. A Nightmare on Elm Street happens in dreams. I have dreams. Friday the 13th happens at a camp. I never go to a camp. If I ever do, I will probably be creeped out, but as I sit here, the party is over. I'm not invading the camp, so the killer isn't out to get me.

Oh yes, and the score does seem to pay a tad bit of homage to Bernard Herrmann's main titles to Psycho. That's the main titles, not the famous "violin screech" accompanying Marion Crane's demise in the shower.

I rank this film as being very good for its genre, and delivering a solid amount of suspense. It doesn't really deliver in the scare department because I never really felt any fear during the movie, but I was locked in on the suspense, because it did that very well. If you like movies, you gotta view it. As for the sequels...well, they're on my list, so I'll let you know.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut -- 1980/2006 -- PG

Superman II was originally written with Superman: The Movie as a single script that was broken into two movies to be directed by Richard Donner. Most of the film was done at the same time as the original Superman film and Donner actually completed 75% of the film before the studio fired him for "creative differences." Richard Lester was brought in to replace him and in order for Lester to get a director credit on the film, he had to shoot 51% of it, meaning that Donner's footage had to be scrapped and Lester had to reshoot it. This created, of course, a veritable mutiny on the part of the cast and crew and a rather dark episode in the Superman movie history. Now we have on DVD That Richard Donner cut of the film created using the original footage shot by Donner, some test footage, audition material, and some of Lester's footage to fill in the missing pieces which gives us a different view of the same film that came out in 1980.

The story involves Lois Lane figuring out that Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same person, and as a result, he decides to become human, forsaking his powers to be a normal person with her. Well, this came at a bad time because one of the missiles Superman diverted in the first film, flew out into space and shattered the Phantom Zone housing the Kryptonian criminals, who subsequently fly to Earth to take over. Superman is forced to get back his powers and battle the threesome with powers identical to his. The restoration of Donner's material gives the story a more cohesive feel as we have Marlon Brando back playing Kal-el (the studio and Brando had butted heads over this film as well causing him to be removed in the final version since he wanted no part of it or something), Superman's father, and it more completely explains both the transition of Superman to humanity and back.

We still have the painful realization of Superman and his knowledge that he will forever be assigned to protect humanity from itself and major disasters, and as a result, can never assign himself to one person. It must be something disturbing to know your lot in life is to always be alone, and this version makes a poignent point of that.

This one was a little rough in spots, but given that it is basically a movie reconstructed with 30 year old and occasionally incomplete footage, it works very, very well. It was nice to see the film that actually has continuity with the first right down to linking the reason the baddies escaped with the rescue in the first movie as opposed to a completely different save-Lois-Lane incident.

My only real complaint (which might be a result of the incomplete footage) has to do with the budding Superman/Lois relationship in the first half as the bad guys get the lion's share of screen time while Clark and Lois gets a few minutes here and there for single scenes to explain what they're doing before we dive back into the new plot. It came off as very choppy and if we didn't have an entire film of development preceeding this one, it wouldn't work at all.

I will say the ending solution to this film was a little dissatisfying, but then again, it produced the same basic ending in the Lois-Clark as the Lester version, but in this version, the ending to that relationship was more emotional and a bit more painful, so hence, a lot better done. The final solution for the overall plot echoed the first movie, which also served to provide continuity, but at the same time, it left it kind of open ended in regards to the villains, which is not necessarily a good thing, and I can't help but wonder what changes might have been made had Donner stayed on and they tested this version officially.

So, it was nice to see a Superman II that worked with the original instead of being a sequel that disregarded it. It was still a rather good film, and had this version been allowed to get out there, I'm sure it would have been far better than what we ended up with. Definitely worth checking out.