Halloween II (1981)

 "I've been trick or treated to death tonight!"

This, despite its fairly high wattage cast and its script credit for John Carpenter, may be an above average horror film but it can't hold a pumpkin to the original. Yes, Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence (despite his accent slipping a bit) are very good. Yes, the killings are effectively done in a way which places this above your average slasher. But the first film was superb, and shot with aplomb by Carpenter himself. This is a bit of a let down in comparison. Such is, I suppose, the fate of most sequels.

There's some interesting stuff here, not least of which is the intriguing twist at the end. It's leaned into, but not made explicit, that Michael Myers may be a bit supernatural. After all, Loomis does shoot him six times, and he may have mentioned it once or twice.

There's also some nice use of Night of the Living Dead being shown on the telly in one of the killings, a nice echo of the parallel use of The Thing from Another World in the first film. The acting and dialogue are decent, and there's a reasonable amount of character stuff for this sort of film.

Still, there's not an awful lot here that's fresh, and a lot of that is down to the decision to make this the story of the few hours immediately after the first film. These events feel like an extended postscript, and they are exactly that. A fairly decent slasher but, disappointingly given its predecessor, no more than that.

Jaws (1975)

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat...”

My parents still remember seeing this at the pictures, two years before I was born, at the old Cannon cinema in Hinckley. It made quite an impression on them. And now I see why.

This isn’t Spielberg’s first film by any means, but it’s where he invents the blockbuster, right here, with a film where every lock of hair and every item of clothing is, unmistakably, at Peak Seventies. If any film defines a decade, this is it.

What's incredible is how very, very, straightforward the plot is- shark attacks terrify small town; police chief is prevented from taking action by stubborn mayor; three men ultimately spend the second half of the film hunting the shark and fighting for their lives. That's it. In lesser hands this would have made a kitsch B movie. That such a ho-hum premise and plot could lead to such greatness is a testament to Spielberg's mastery of the camera- some of the POV shots are dazzlingly creative- and a wisely scarce use of a not-that-good shark prop. It’s also the start of a very fruitful film career for the great John Williams. That musical hook is genius.

The other difference, of course, is the cast. Roy Schneider, Richard Dreyfuss and a very much against type Robert Shaw are all superb, especially towards the end of the film when it’s just the three of them doing a lot of nautical stuff that we landlubbers (I’m from about as far from the sea as you can get on this island) don’t understand. A lot of the little things are done right, and that’s good filmmaking.

My God, the young Spielberg is good.

Clue (1985)

"Husbands should be like Kleenex; soft, strong and disposable."

"You lure men to their deaths like a spider with flies."

"Flies are where men are most vulnerable..."

Clue: a film so good that even the episode of Family Guy based on the film is one of the finest ones. I remember seeing and liking this film since before I was truly old enough to understand the style of humour but, frankly, as soon as I realised that this was a film by Jonathan Lynn of Yes, Minister fame I knew I was in for a good time.

Is it the first class comedy performances from the likes of Tim Curry (he may be even better here than in Rocky Horror) and Christopher Lloyd? Is it the abundant wit of the film, one of the wittiest ever? No; I think it's the plot, a gloriously meta exploration of how silly the whole country house murder mystery is. The fact that there are three different, equally plausible endings is a perfect deconstruction of the genre; after all, who cares about the arbitrary identity of the killer when we're having this much fun? It's true to say that the structure of this film is as witty as the dialogue.

But as good as the film is Tim Curry, whose performance in the final minutes of the film is exhilarating and extraordinary. One of the great comedy films of all time.