[10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about. Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch. How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?]
In this edition: some films of director John Carpenter!
- Dark Star - 1974, d. John Carpenter - tubi
- Someone's Watching Me - 1978, d. John Carpenter - rental
- The Fog - 1980, d. John Carpenter - rental
- Escape from New York - 1981, d. John Carpenter - DVD
- Christine - 1983, d. John Carpenter - netflix
- Starman - 1984, d. John Carpenter - CTV
- Big Trouble in Little China - 1986, d. John Carpenter - DVD
- Prince of Darkness - 1987, d. John Carpenter - rental
- They Live - 1988, d. John Carpenter - youtube
- In the Mouth of Madness - 1992, d. John Carpenter - DVD
Preamble:
The podcast Blank Check (hosted by actor Griffin Newman and The Atlantic film critic David Sims) is a podcast I enjoy where they talk about directors, deep diving into their filmographies film-by-film, looking at those who were given "blank check" status to make a film (or many films) where sometimes those checks cleared, and sometimes they bounced, baby. Their most current series, at the time of this writing, is a dive into the films of John Carpenter (if that weren't obvious by my setup) and I've been, for the most part, watching a new Carpenter film each week. I missed out on Assault on Precinct 13, and I passed on both Halloween and The Thing -- both Carpenter's unrivaled masterpieces of horror -- which I've seen many many times and didn't need to rewatch in order to sit in on the conversation.
Were you to have asked me three months ago, I would have proclaimed myself a fan of John Carpenter's. What I've realized in following along with the podcast, though, is I'm not as big a John Carpenter fan as I thought I was. In my list of 10 up for commentary here, four of them I had never seen before, and of the remaining 6 only Escape from New York and Starman had I seen more than once. Does that sound like a fan to you?
I came into Carpenter in my later teens in the 1990s. The first film I had seen of his in the theatre was Village of the Damned which came with the director's ownership (eg. John Carpenter's Village of the Damned). I must have know about Carpenter already by this point, but I'm completely at a loss to either remember what of Carpenter's films I had seen or why (I saw Starman numerous times as a kid, but don't think I picked up on who the director of that film - or any film for that matter - was at that point). Clearly the not-so-greatness of Village didn't dissuade me from seeking out more Carpenter and finding the films of his I love, enough to follow him through both Vampires and Ghosts of Mars. That tail-end trifecta, Village, Vampires and Ghosts are three of Carpenter's weakest works, and yet that was my prime exposure to him, and I can distinctly recall rooting for each of them to be a win. I have no idea why I was so invested and likewise I don't know.
Looking back, Carpenter's filmography is a wildly mixed bag. His prolific output from Assault through to They Live, that's 12 films in 12 years, and they vary between outright genre classics, top tier cult status, watchable stumbles, and maybe a slight misstep in the case of the lengthy TV docudrama Elvis (which I didn't see but by all accounts is pretty tedious viewing). But through it all is a craftsman, a man who is direly efficient at getting what he wants out of his films, except maybe the budget.
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Carpenter's inaugural feature film, Dark Star started life as a featurette made by Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon when they
were film students. It was so well received that a distribution company picked it up and had the pair blow it out to feature length. In a meta sense, it's a fascinating archeological artifact of science fiction, the
prototype for more humour-laden scifi like Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy and Red Dwarf, and even the foundation of O'Bannon's later work with Alien can be
seen here.
But at the same time as it blazes trails it's also very much an overlong, padded out student film that looks like MTS3K fodder and sounds awful with, at best, middling performances. O'Bannon for decades has assured that it's a comedy, as if begging you to believe him, but if people miss that fact it's because, well, it's not finely crafted as such. There's some conceptually funny stuff (in particular the malfunctioning bomb with an AI that just wants to do its job already) but there's also a lot of "comedy" bits from guys who don't seem to have a well-honed sense of comedic structure or timing. Certainly Carpenter as a director isn't terribly known for his sense of humour.
In all it feels like a prototype, a proof of concept. Others have come along and certainly improved upon it since (in some cases vastly), and it only sporadically entertains (it gets tedious frequently, much of which I believe is inserted footage and not the original student film stuff). I'm curious if the O'Bannon/Alan Dean Foster novel is, in any way, an improvement.
If this were to be redone, the only casting I could see working would be to get the entire Always Sunny In Philadelphia crew on board. Charlie Day as Pinback, Glenn Howerton as Talby, Rob McElhenny as Dolittle and Kaitlin Olson as Boiler, with Devito as the Bomb(s).
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Before Halloween exploded, Carpenter struggled to get films made. He wrote and sold scripts (The Eyes of Laura Mars for example) but he really wanted to direct them. When the opportunity to direct his script for the Giallo-esque thriller Someone's Watching Me to network television, Carpenter apparently didn't hesitate.
Lauren Hutton explodes in the role of Leigh, a network news producer newly relocated in LA from NY. Hutton plays Leigh with a razor-sharp wit and general sardonic demeanor. She's playful, confident, assured, and aware. At her new gig, the network stud does his damnedest to hit on her and she delivers a masterclass in shutting him down. Living alone, she fills the space frequently by talking to herself, a habit both endearing and useful, as it lets the audience get inside her head, and occasionally receive expository information.
What Leigh doesn't know is she's become the object of obsession from an onlooker in the apartment complex across the street from her, and she slowly becomes more and more aware as strange mail and phone calls start occurring.
As freaked out as she is, Leigh isn't the type to just sit back and take it from anyone, so she, her new boyfriend, the dull, curly haired moppet Paul (David Birney), and her new best friend from work, Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) begin investigating themselves, in spite of very real danger.
As an aside, Sophie is a lesbian, an out and out lesbian, which is kind of shocking for a 1970's era network TV movie, and more shocking for it's decided lack of homophobia. During a great exchange between Sophie and Leigh while eating dinner and discussing their dating situations, Sophie points out that Leigh doesn't seem intimidated by her, to which Leigh replies matter-of-factly, "I'm with men all the time, and they don't threaten me, so why should you?"
The lack of police protection for women being harassed in the 70's is very upsetting (I'm aware it's not exceptionally better today) and the intensity of being stalked, the psychological toll, is palpable. It's really rough watching Leigh go from lively and vigorous to demure and breathless, her agency and liberty robbed.
Of course it's all set up to the climactic showdown, with misdirections aplenty (the sudden arrival of Seinfeld's "Uncle Leo" Len Lesser is unintentionally hilarious if you throw in a "Jerry, HELLO!" into the mix). While the mystery is very involving, and Carpenter's direction definitely borrows from the chruch of Dario Argento, the final confrontation between Leigh and her stalker is brief and lackluster, and about the only thing (besides the clear commercial break edit points) that really stick out as "made for TV". It's otherwise a tremendously engrossing thriller.
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While Carpenter certainly brings a lot of mood to the piece, The Fog it's a groggy mess of a film. Carpenter navigates the small coastal town of Antonio Bay adeptly, giving us a sprawling cast, but beyond Jamie Lee Curtis' Elizabeth -- a confident, liberated hitchhiker -- there's not much in the way of character building in this ensemble. There's no central figure to guide us through the events, and without really building out the personalities of the townsfolk, there's very little to glom onto.
The reveal that the fog is a smokescreen for murderous, vengeful ghost lepers pilgrims sounds more absurd than it is actually presented, yet the spirits are far too visually and physically present in the film (knocking on doors, bursting through glass). The obvious costuming and their tangibility within the world destroys their mystique as malevolent spirits. The effect of the fog rolling in on the bay, lit with an eery deep forest green looks good though. Beyond their murderous intent, the film never clearly defines how or why they cause the metaphysical chaos they do (consisting mostly of knocking out electricity). Given how they kill so tangibly, the electricity thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Adrienne Barbeau introduces us to the film, in voice over, as she hosts her radio show. Barbeau's radio voice is so smooth with a little sultry, making it easy to understand why people would listen to her. Barbeau is great, certainly the most compelling performer in the film (she should have been the main protagonist and focus of the film), up until the fog rolls in and she loses her cool, then she delivers a literal hot mess of a performance. I don't even know what she was doing there up on top of that lighthouse.
Carpenter's score is a little plain here and he frequently returns to familiar notes from his Halloween theme which only calls out the stark differences between the two films, one a genuine masterpiece, the other decidedly not.
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After establishing a fruitful working relationship on the Elvis TV movie, Kurt Russell returns to Carpenter's fold, destroying his squeaky clean Disney-bred image as Snake Plissken, a tough-as-nails, one-eyed ex-marine-turned-thief who, we quickly learn, is notorious in both the law enforcement and criminal communities, not that his reputation matters much in getting him out of trouble.
When the President's plane is hijacked on his way to a peace summit, the President (Donald Pleasance) escapes with a briefcase full of materials that would go a long way to de-escalating tensions around the globe. However, his escape pod lands in Manhattan, which has been cut off from the world and acts as a national prison. Snake Plisskin is deemed the only man capable of getting the president out alive, and, if he were to go rogue, well, they implant a bomb in him set to go off in 24 hours, so no dawdling.
The formulae for Escape is sort of a mix of "the gauntlet" and "travelogue" with a "ticking clock" element, all about the strange people to meet, the unusual situations that occur, and the trouble to avoid or escape along the way to achieving a final goal in a set time limit. Snake himself isn't very trustworthy, but in Russell's hands he's got charm, swagger and a likeable vulnerability. In modern action movies, the protagonists have become impossible heroes, capable of living through most any event (surviving nuclear blasts in refrigerators, say). Plisskin is very much still human, still capable of being injured, still succeptible to being tricked and deceived. He's just a little more competent, a little more street wise, and a little more lucky than most.
Carpenter's films often have a very cynical streak to them, his vision of humanity seems to be one of disdain, distrust and full of selfishness. This is on full display with Escape, not only in its villains, it's city of criminals, but in the law enforcement and even Plisskin himself. Plisskin is an anarchist with an out-for-himself/watch the world burn view. Yet the difference with Plisskin is there's sort of an integrity to his cynicism, willing to pass up a payday if it means he can punch a dickhead in the face.
By modern standards, this is barely an action movie, there's really not a lot of action happening. It's genre trappings and skewed view of 1988 (not even ten years in the future at time of release) give it a very unique sensibility that make it a tonal contemporary to Mad Max and precursor to Robocop. It's so early-80's it hurts, Carpenter's score is still epic, and it's just an all-time landmark genre film. The most disappointing thing about it has nothing to do about how its aged and everything to do with the fact that there's not a half dozen more Plisskin films in the world. Unfortunately, Escape didn't really do much business at the box office, but it would quickly become a home video hit as VHS rentals took off (a repeating pattern for Carpenter). It would be 15 years before Snake would return, and that, my friends, was way too long.
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I've been done with Stephen King adaptations for some time now, and watching Christine only served to remind me why.
This film opens on a automotive assembly line in the late 1950's, playing "Bad To The Bone" over the opening credits. That song would be driven into the ground by a film called Problem Child a decade later, and rendered songa-non-grata following the various Problem Child sequels. It's a song that screams hack, and too on the nose to put in any film where someone (or something) that should be innocent is an evil piece of shit. In this case it's a 1958 Plymouth Fury, and it murders a man, ridiculously during its detailing.
25 years later, the fury is a rust bucket that becomes the object of affection for prototypical dweebnerd Arnie Cunningham. Arnie starts to work the car, prettying it up, restoring it, and with the love he gives it, it in turn gives it back by murdering Arnie's tormenters. There obviously something evil about the car, but why? How? This film doesn't care.
Arnie ostensibly falls under the sway of the malicious red beast, to the point where Arnie becomes just as much a "shitter" as the bullies, if not moreso, being an atrocious friend to handsome popular jock Dennis, and an even worse boyfriend to Leigh.
The problem with this film is its entirely unlikeable cast of characters. Arnie's parents are kind of awful, so you feel for him on that, and his bullies are unusually cruel and vicious. But even Dennis, who becomes the de facto protagonist, is by modern standards the definition of toxic male, and this film is loaded wall-to-wall with toxic masculinity. Leigh has very little agency, and her becoming Arnie's girlfriend (after a boost of confidence from Christine) never really makes sense beyond the plot needs her to.
There's a couple stunning visual sequences in this, the scene of Christine chasing down one of the bullies, cornering him into a tractor trailer loading bay and then forcing herself deeper and deeper into the too-small bay is just a very intense and exciting scene. Christine's self-repair "show me" sequence is also just astounding marvel of 80's practical visual effects but they're not enough to make for an appealing, rewatchable film.
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As a kid, I contextualized the world through what I knew from
comic books. Therefore, Starman was a DC Comics superhero, and with that
context this movie was never not a disappointment to me. Jeff Bridges is
an alien with a limited supply of deus ex machina beads to use
throughout his journey, beads that are effectively his superpower. But
he's no hero, just an alien observer who gets stranded and needs a ride
from the grieving widow whose husband's form it has reconstructed. Of course he's
being chased by the government threatening his end goal, reaching a rendezvous point for a lift home before he dies.
It's two subgenres mashed into one, the good ol' American road trip, and the foreigner/alien learning to love America/Earth despite encountering so many awful things (eg. typical American/ human aggro bullshit). Carpenter's distaste for government and military structure are in fine form here, actively chasing the alien not as a threat but an object of study (the autopsy table was prepped). The threat is real.
At one point our two white leads manage to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup that is carrying Mexican immigrants. There's no allegory put into play here with Starman's illegal alien status but I really wish there was some engagement on that (the scene is mainly used to detail that Karen Allen's character wanted to have a baby but couldn't, foreshadowing a not-unexpected plot development).
I really didn't like Starman as a kid, Jeff Bridges character tics always bothered me, but mostly I found it boring. There's little action to speak of, it was just E.T.(another movie I wasn't fond of as a kid) but with grown ups. Watching it for the first time in maybe 30 years, I appreciate Bridges' performance more, and was a little more engaged with the emotional arc, but it's still 2 hours of cliches that remain pretty unexciting. Not unwatchable (Bridges is really hot, and Karen Allen is just an adorable freckleface and the two of them together could never be unwatchable), it's just unexciting. I think what it needed was a throughline of purposeful subtext, but it seems mostly to be a character driven story and genre exercise.
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I bought the special edition (Anchor Bay?) release of Big Trouble in Little China in the early 2000's without having ever seen the film. This was during a time where I was buying a lot of DVDs, amassing a collection particularly focused on films with genre or cult status, and the ones that had plenty of special features. I was a real sucker for special features.
I honestly don't remember watching Big Trouble, though, until years later when my wife (then still my girlfriend) looked through my collection and said we needed to watch it. Honestly I think I bought too many movies and just never got to watching it. Or maybe I did and it just didn't leave an impression.
That said, watching it with my wife, who was already a big fan, didn't transcend anything for me. I don't know what I thought of it, except that it was kind of disappointing for me. I saw in it ambition that fell short, a big action movie that had to be scaled small due to 80's budgetary concerns.
Rewatching it again for the first time in more than a decade, I realize now why it's the cult film it is, and I get it on a level I didn't get it before. It's a comedy, derived from the 1930's Howard Hawkes style that Carpenter reveres, with the two motor mouth romantic leads who can't shut up about themselves, but are completely in over their heads and oblivious to how out of their elements they are.
Jack Burton is the third great character in his trifecta of awesomeness with Carpenter. He's a loud-mouthed, high-on-himself truck driver who thinks he's the hero of every situation he enters. In this film he becomes embroiled in a kidnapping plot when he witnesses the kidnapping of his friend Wang Chi's (Dennis Dun) newly-arrived-from-China fiancee. Burton talks a big game, constantly trying to take the lead, despite not knowing the culture, the terrain, the people or the language. Wang Chi is the competent one in the pairing, the one with fighting skills and the one who's able to navigate through Little China, but he's also the one focused on the mission, with everything at stake, no ego involved. Wang is also stuck keeping Burton out of trouble, not only because of Jack's ineptness, but also because he's so distracted by Gracie (Kim Cattrall), a moon-eyed, tough talking modern woman who seems to be giving Burton every opportunity to play the knight in shining armor, but it's a task too much for him.
Carpenter was inspired by the more fantastical kung fu films like Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, and while, yes, there is definitely appropriation happening in the story from Carpenter and screenwriter W.D. Richtor (creator of Buckaroo Banzai) it's also one that's innately aware, and intentionally aimed to flip the script on how American appropriation of other cultures was handled on screen. While Jack Burton (with Russell adopting both the swagger and patois of John Wayne) believes he's the hero, the script and the story know better, that he's the sidekick at best. He's a tourist bumbling through a world beyond his understanding, and he's just a big dumb American galoot, too stupid to realize how big the trouble he's in is. The film is almost entirely devoid of racist or xenophobic sentiment and it generally respects the culture it is appropriating and the people its presenting on screen. Dun, Victor Wong, James Hong, Donald Li and even the three mystical elementals all get to be fun characters in their own right (and the elementals even change into suits out of their more traditional warrior garb), and really only Jack and Gracie are the butt of any jokes here.
A lot of the effects and action has aged poorly, but the greatest special effect is the rat-a-tat dialgue and the subversion of convention. Even by todays standards the subversion is still pretty sharp. This one's great, and pretty special. I need to watch some of these Howard Hawkes films Carpenter is so enamored with....
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I was absolutely certain heading into Prince of Darkness that I had seen it before, that at some point in my excursions into Carpenter's filmography. Nothing in the film was familiar to me, except that it was kind of a similar set-up to Assault on Precinct 13, with the protagonists trapped inside a building by outside forces, only for the malevolence to rise from within.
A priest like figure dies, the last of The Brotherhood of Sleep. He leaves behind a secret in an abandoned monestary, a vat of ooze, sealed from within. Donald Pleasance plays a different priest who enlists the help of quantum physics professor Victor Wong and his students to help scientifically understand. Once all the scientists have set up, the priest explains that within the vat is pure evil, and tells the story of the Devil and Jesus and aliens and oh my, that went off the rails quick. It's a delight. Not so delightful is the tedious romantic entanglement between the mustachioed Jameson Parker (Simon & Simon) and classmate Lisa Blount interrupts the first 20 minutes of the film (but then I've argued earlier about films without central characters ... what do you want me to say?) but once we start diving into the fantasy-religious exposition and the science gobblety-gook, it gets real good.
Soon the malevolent goop escapes and starts infecting people, turning them into killers, and people start getting picked off as the danger intensifies. Of course, they're getting picked off in isolation so for two acts, nobody is really fully aware of the threat beneath them.
This film toes a fine line between silly and creepy and it works regardless on which side of the line it steps on. I love the silly, overblown horror that is kind of laughable, but I also love the intensely creepy scenes like the ooze dripping upward to the ceiling, or the guy made out of bugs, but especially the effective and disturbing Brotherhood of Sleep dream sequences various characters keep having. Carpenter filmed the sequence on videotape, then filmed the videotape on a tv screen for the dream sequence and just aesthetically it's utterly creepy, the accompanying voice, with its manipulated pitch and static takes it over the edge...and each time we see this dream sequence, it gets a little longer, reveals a little more, until the final scene of the film where we get the whole message. What does it mean? I dunno, but it's creepy as shit and I love it. But the most disturbing effect in the entire film, above and beyond, is Parker's thick, blonde mustache. It's like something that shouldn't exist, and yet there it is.
It's far from a perfect film, but it's entertaining and it crafts its ensemble of characters 200% better than The Fog so there's a little more to connect with.
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They Live is so awkwardly thin in character and story, yet so
rich in subtext, style and world building, that it's easy to see why some find it so easily dismissable, and others think it's a classic.
Its message is sardonic and blunt without offering solutions or alternatives, but it's interesting(/depressing) that the same worries that we have today -- systemically classist structures, the environment, and a broken, abusive police system -- were just as evident 30 years ago. I do enjoy Carpenter's continued showcasing of anti-establishment behavior and his distrust of capitalism, although They Live certainly toes a line that makes it easy to see how the wrong people got the wrong message from it. Scenes of the protagonist shooting up a bank or media outlet are potent, especially given the hyperawareness of acts of gun violence that happens in America time and again.
Roddy Piper is the unlikely protagonist of the film, but, dare I say it, he's really good in the role. Apparently Carpenter gave Piper a lot of leeway in crafting his character, Nada, and Piper brought a lot of his own transient and road-weary experience to it. Piper's really great in his moments where he's observing, just a guy who's constantly checking the scene around him, having likely falling into a bad one more than a few times. He stumbles upon the resistance to the invisible, invading forces, and upon adopting a pair of their special glasses, begins to see the truth of the world: alien capitalists have come to Earth to take all out money, keep us placated with distractions, and change the environment to better suit them.
If only all our problems were so simply directed. That Carpenter points to an "other" as the cause of all the problems would be problematic if he didn't also identify the complicity of most of society to go along with and turn a blind eye to the greed, corruption, placation and not really desire change because it doesn't benefit them to. The conversation hasn't really shifted in 30 years.
Roddy Piper and Keith David's alley fight
remains one of the best cinematic fights ever, just absurd and creative,
with the make-up artist doing a, ahem, bang-up job showing the
progressing consequences of the fisticuffs. Even if the rest of the film didn't entertain, there's no way to not enjoy this sequence.
The opening ten minutes surprisingly reminded me of last year's Oscar winner Nomadland, as if Carpenter was ready to talk about the transient, displaced, exploited workforce decades ago, but also couldn't get past his genre impulses to make something more direct and dramatic.
Despite its iconic one liner about kicking ass and chewing bubblegum (as well as a few other classics from the Piper archives) this film doesn't aim for comedy, it's a satire, through and through.
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In The Mouth of Madness was another of those DVD acquisitions two decades ago, but one I did watch with relative immediacy, once. My longstanding memories are of it being effectively creepy in its depiction of someone going mad, and having a generally favorable impression of it.
In the years since, I built up the horror of In the Mouth of Madness to greater degrees than the film actually presents, which was kind of dismaying in returning to it. It's not nearly as grotesque or upsetting as I recalled, and to be honest, very little of the imagery of the film stuck in my mind. The rewatch, however, revealed that it has a very satisfying build-up, even in the midst of some disarmingly ugly 90's sets, wardrobe and hairstyles.
Sam Neill plays an insurance investigator who is checking into a publisher's claim that their number one selling author, a horror writer that exceeds even Stephen King within this reality, has disappeared with his new novel's deadline fast encroaching. Neill gets into some uncomfortably lumpy flirting with the author's editor, who has also been tasked with accompanying Neill on his seek-and-find mission. Meanwhile, in the early 90's that surrounds them, there's a hot streak of madness breaking out that may or may not be related to the missing author's output.
They wind up in the author's fictitious village where things take a turn for the unbelievably bizarre, the brazenly weird, and the gut-grindingly upsetting. Neill thinks it's all a put on, for show, a promotional trap, but the editor knows this place she's never physically been all too intimately, it's straight out of the novel, and ultimately we realize, so is Neill. He's a character who has broken into reality and brought madess with him. By the end, the snake eats its own tail.
A lot of films try to show a character's descent into insanity, but few are as effective at conveying the dizzying betrayal of logic and the world around them like this feature. Many directors, David Lynch for instance, play hard at trying to mess with the audience directly whereas this film messes with its character foremost and the audience vicariously.
It works best when Neill discovers the little nonsensical clues, a tear in the fabric of reality, the mad people with the double pupils, the person on the bike, the soft clues of weary, bleeding eyes. When it gets broad and overt it deflates the tension if only because the set lighting is too revealing.
Clearly this is Carpenter's tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, while also toying with Stephen King's mystique and story cliches. If anything, the film is too impatient, it gets to the darkness and the madness within its small town too quickly. There should be more awkward character interaction, more small-town weirdness to discover. Since it sets itself up as a mystery, there is an expectation as to how it plays out, but once the insanity kicks in, all the clues and weirdness and mystery don't amount to much but uncomfortable nonsense. It's the point but it's hard to accept
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PostscriptWhat surprised me most about following Carpenter's filmography along with Blank Check was the revelation of how generally unsuccessful Carpenter's films were at the box office. Halloween was naturally his largest hit, but he never really had another one of that same size or success. And yet, in spite of exceptionally low box office grosses, Carpenter has become a fan favourite director, with most of his films preceding the 90's having a cult following.
So glad you've finally come around to see the genius that is Big Trouble in Little China :)
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