As I did last year I am making up a list of movies not traditionally thought of for viewing on Halloween. This post will deal with films made mostly in the last thirty years. Other posts this month will deal with classic movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, TV show episodes, and children TV show episodes. I am only going to deal with twenty titles all together, five per post. My alternative film choices in alphabetical order are:
Batman (1989)–Tim Burton’s summer blockbuster hit from the end of the eighties, is a dark comedy/ noirish nightmare with Michael Keaton’s enigmatic Dark Knight facing off against Jack Nicholson’s over the top deranged and disfigured Joker who is poisoning the entier population of Gotham through their cosmetics in a city that looks like Dante’s Inferno erupted from Hell and just kept going.
High Plains Drifter (1973)–Clint Eastwood brings his popular man With No Name personae into the seventies with this spooky, unsettling western. Eastwood rides into a town that allows him carte blanche in return for facing down three gunfighters who are getting out of prison soon. As Eastwood turns the citizens lives into a living hell, there is a dawning notion that he may actually be the ghost of the sheriff the towns people let get killed by the gunmen years ago and has come back to punish them for it.
Hot Fuzz (2007)–After Simon Pegg and friends laid waste to the zombie horror movie with Shaun of the Dead (2004), they decided to do the same for the buddy cop film. Pegg plays the top cop in London who gets sent to a literally crime free village because he is making the rest of the force look bad. Once there he starts to notice an alarming number of “accidental” deaths. Investigating the seemingly idyllic village’s lack of crime leads to a conspiracy that is unbelievably horrific and ridiculously petty at the same time, ending with Pegg and his buddy Nick Frost having to shoot it out with everyone from the police chief to the parish priest.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)–Spielberg and Lucas take everyone’s favorite maverick archaeologist into the 1950’s as Indy braves McCarthyist FBI agents while trying to rescue his former lover Marion in the jungles of South America from Russian agents after a supernatural power associated with an ancient crystal skull, eventually discovering a flying saucer full of aliens, and a son he never knew he had.
Shoot to Kill (1988)–Sidney Poitier’s heralded return to film after an almost ten year hiatus. He plays an FBI agent on the trail of an unknown killer hiding among a group of mountain hikers. When his identity is revealed, the criminal kills the rest of the group, takes the guide hostage and it becomes a race against time toward the Canadian border.
