In this lauded satire, veteran news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) discovers that he's being put out to pasture, and he's none too happy about it. After threatening to shoot himself on live television, instead he launches into an angry televised rant, which turns out to be a huge ratings boost for the UBS network. This stunt allows ambitious producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) to develop even more outrageous programming, a concept that she takes to unsettling extremes.
Chevy Chase and Darryl Hannah star in, and John (Halloween) Carpenter directs a lighthearted adventure: a Wall Street analyst becomes invisible after a lab accident, leading to complications both comic and romantic. Chevy Chase plays a investment banker who gets exposed to fusion energy and becomes invisable. Daryl Hannah plays a TV/film maker who discovers what happened to him, and falls in love with him (the romance is actually honest, and not cliched). There are some good ILM effects work and the ending is not a tragic one - it's a comedy with a bit of heart.
Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal).
