
The Car (1977, Elliot Silverstein) 5/10
I've not done much exploration in the sub-genre of killer vehicle horror but The Car and Christine seem to be the most major ones in which a car plays the role of murderous automobile. The former, however, has a lot more in common -- in terms of its style and action content -- with Spielberg's Duel, an atmospherically superior horror in which a man is pursued cross-county by a seemingly monstrous truck. In fact, this is essentially Duel overseen by a fictional police force with all the nous and finesse of your average slasher movie cops, in which character relationships are weakly developed, death scenes are fairly sanitized and the fact that The Car has no driver is reiterated again and again and again and again. It's not really a bad movie but it doesn't give you much reason to care about its plot or its characters.

A Simple Plan (1998, Sam Raimi) 8/10
Not a horror movie but a black comedy about the horrors a trio of friends inflict on each other following their discovery of $4.4million inside of a crashed plan, helmed by a mainstream horror director in Sam Raimi, and featuring spot-on performances from Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Brent Briscoe as the self-destructing unit (Bridget Fonda is also perfectly hateable as Paxton's money-crazed wife). For me it's Raimi's best film, in which he manages to maintain a fairly consistent balance between dramatic tension and morbid humour, despite the film being a bit protracted and the characters being overly stupid at times. In many ways it's like seeing Very Bad Things executed to the level of Fargo, although the film has more than enough personality of its own.