Halloween III (1982)

A kid is happily playing with toys in one of those rooms with the one-way mirror (or are those called two-way mirrors?), wearing some kind of plush or fabric pumpkin-head mask that covers his entire head. Then a mad scientist pushes a button—no, he makes something come up on the television in the room with the kid (maybe by pushing a button, sure)—and a light on the mask blinks, the kid frantically clutches his head and pitches over, and the mask constricts and collapses to smaller than kid-head size, at which point cockroaches or beetles come pouring out of it. (Right: holy shit!) The evil scientists intend to broadcast that signal to televisions everywhere, having already distributed these masks all over the place; we see other happy children wearing these masks in television rooms around the country, ready to have their heads devoured by bugs or turned into bugs or whatever it is that happens. The end.

Television is bad for kids.

[I think my memory of this movie may actually be quite clear and accurate; the real problem is that I saw only a few minutes of it. This was on TV, in the days before you could push a button (or at least check the Internet) to find out what show you were watching, so it was years and years and years before I knew what disturbing weirdness it had been that had scarred me in a small way at that late-'80s Halloween-night slumber party. And no wonder I couldn't figure out what movie it had been: who makes a third movie in a series that has nothing at all to do with the first two?! It would be like if Iron Man 3 came out and instead of Iron Man it was about a group of mischievous street urchins who rob a candy store.]

License to Drive (1988)

Corey Haim borrows someone's car? And then he picks up some hot girl, but she gets drunk, or maybe she does drugs or has some kind of drug interaction, and she passes out? Maybe he puts her in the trunk? And then has a series of misadventures? I watched this on VHS when I was a kid and home sick* to the point of delirium, so I'm not sure I remembered it ten minutes after it was over. I think half of what I'm "remembering" now actually comes from Adventures in Babysitting, and the other half from "Parents Just Don't Understand" by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. (But maybe this movie is basically Adventures in Babysitting meets "Parents Just Don't Understand"...?)

"I want the veal scalopini! I want a good fetuccini alfredo!"

* ≠ homesick

Scream 3 (2000)

There's some suggestion in this one that shit may have just gone supernatural, the same way we jump from Jason's disgruntled mother to an undead Jason himself in the Friday the 13th movies: I remember Sidney (wait...that's her name, isn't it?) in like a fake haunted house where suddenly it appears that maybe the actual ghost of her mom is coming for her, under a sheet? But then it turns out no: no ghost. I think Sidney shoots somebody in the head on a stage at the end, but that might be in Scream 2.*

Pretty sure this is from the opening scene of Scream 2, but it
came up when I searched for Scream 3 images, so fuck off.

* BLOG-INAPPROPRIATE NOTE: I just recently rented Scream 4, and [SPOILER ALERT] isn't the whole movie basically just a not very good set-up for the actually relatively worthwhile final 20 minutes? What a character or two refer to as the "alternate ending" is way more interesting than everything leading up to it. I might be wrong about all this: I was half-asleep when I watched it (and also high on uranium).

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)

Steve Martin and John Candy get stuck going cross-country together (presumably via plane, train, and automobile). At one point they share a bed in a hotel and John Candy says he has his hands between two pillows and Steve Martin says, "THOSE AREN'T PILLOWS!" (Or, wait, probably it's Steve Martin who has his hands in John Candy's ass, right?) Also they stand holding suitcases, hitchhiking. I think both of the things I remember about this movie were in the trailer.

Totally forgot they're transporting a 12-year-old Swedish vampire.

L.A. Story (1991)

I've seen this movie twice, and the second time I'm pretty sure I liked it. AND YET...all I can remember is (1) people shooting at each other in a traffic jam, (2) Steve Martin talking to a sign that quotes Hamlet, (3) the "half-caf decaf triple-latte" order, however it went, (4) marital discord with the woman from the ABC sitcom Taxi, and (5) Sarah Jessica Parker as Rollergirl.

In the early '90s, only signs spoke this kind of pidgin English.