John Carpenter star.

Tombstone
The Thing
Escape from New York
Big Trouble in Little China
Miracle
Breakdown

I'm going to stop ranking there. I'm a huge Kurt Russel fan.

I went for Big Trouble…, but Used Cars came out for me in the right time of my life.

I went for The Hateful Eight because I really enjoyed that and he was brilliant in it. It could as easily have been Tombstone or The Thing, both fantastic.

(But I don't know what anyone sees in Big Trouble In Little China - what a mess of a movie that is! And Russell doesn't know if he is playing John Wayne or Harrison Ford or even Chevy Chase!)

No "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" or "Superdad?"

Poll fail.

Sky High was a charming little take on a family of super-hero types, if not exactly in the same league as The Incredibles.

Big Trouble made me laugh most.

Perhaps it didn't succeed in your eyes, but it was a very intentional spoof of the stereotypical American hero (John Wayne type). If you notice, nothing he tries in the movie works, none of his bravado is on point, and the other characters actually solve every problem that gets solved. The Carpenter/Russell commentary is good on this one (as it is on The Thing and Escape).

I noticed it alright, but I thought the whole movie was very uneven in tone which meant that I was never sure if it was intentional. It felt like a spoof one minute, deadly serious the next. It felt like they couldn't make their mind up what they wanted to go with. And this was my impression at the time, when it came out. I haven't watched it again since, at least not all the way through, at least partly because the critical consensus - those critics I read at the time and since - seemed to agree with me so I didn't feel I had missed anything first time.

It's cropped up a couple of times on here over the years and I have seen that people felt more warmly about it, but a re-viewing has never really appealed. Maybe if I went in with more of a 'they are definitely aiming for a spoof' feeling...

On this list, Big Trouble… is the only one I own on DVD. I also own Sky High, which I
also like, but I tend to buy just about anything that's superhero related. I guess I just like what I like.
I enjoyed Kurt's early Disney movies, too. I'll probably watch those again some day. Oh, and when
he was Jungle Boy on Gilligan's island—that was okay.

Young Kurt was also on a first-season episode of Lost In Space, in which he and Will Robinson face off in a series of physical challenges.

John Carpenter was having some very big issues with America at that time -- the Reagan years caused a lot of Hollywood types to conclude we were in the Apocalypse (he was our version of Thatcher in terms of how he drove them crazy). Carpenter all but says this on multiple commentaries. Big Trouble was very much Carpenter's expression of how much he hated some of America's conception of itself. Kurt Russell is essentially America herself in that movie, and it is no accident that all the action and advancement is performed by Asian characters. He wanted Russell to not only seem stupid, but unaware that everything he was doing was not helping. The only thing he would give him is moxie and bravery. This movie was sort of a counter point to icons like Rambo and Schwarzenegger in Commando.

I'm not saying it should have won the Oscar, but the "hard to figure" tone of it was because Carpenter wanted to accomplish something different with the Russell character, and surround him with non-western actors while doing it. And Russell was in on it.

Yeah, and it's funny.

This.

Big Trouble in Little China.

Big Trouble in Little China for me, thanks.

The Thing.

USED CARS

End of discussion.

I honestly thought The Thing would be a runaway. I tried watching Big Trouble when it first came out on home video and thought it was a chaotic mess at the time, but now you guys have me curious to give it another try.

Had to go Big Trouble, but Escape was close. The Thing is up there too.

They did this in the comics... should have had these two fight The Thing. (And not Ben Grimm... though a young Kurt Russell would have been a great casting choice for that role.)