Blu-Ray Review: Assault on Precinct 13 (Shout! Factory)

For a film that holds so few surprises, in which everything has been chosen for its economy, not its mystery, Assault on Precinct 13 nevertheless impresses itself on me even more with each new viewing. Contrary to Shout! revelatory work with neglected Carpenter masterworks like They Live and Prince of Darkness, Assault is on a disc that is only a marginal improvement over Anchor Bay's now-OOP disc, so those who have that are likely fine with what they've got. For everyone else, though, this is an essential purchase.

Read my review at Slant.

Blu-Ray Review: Prince of Darkness (Shout!)

I cannot recommend the new Blu-Ray of Prince of Darkness enough. Having seen it alternately on DVD and streaming services, I was blown away by how clean the film looked, how clear its black levels were and how detailed the low-budget film could look at times. Carpenter has enjoyed a solid spate of Blu-Ray releases lately, and Shout! Factory's Scream sublabel seems hellbent on giving us as many of his films in good condition as possible. Add in some solid extras (all Carpenter commentaries are great affairs) and you've got an essential release for genre fans.

Read my full post at Slant.

Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter, 1987)

My initial review of Prince of Darkness was mostly negative, but it is the Carpenter film I have returned to most often, and the one that has gradually emerged as my favorite of his. I was glad to get the chance to re-evaluate it, and though this is a belated link, it fits nicely within October viewing. I highly recommend the film, and its new Blu-Ray, which I also reviewed and will link to shortly.

Read my post at Spectrum Culture.

Carpenter's Tools: Escape from L.A.

[Note: This is a stupefyingly belated entry in my John Carpenter retrospective, which I intended to go all the way through his canon but could find scant enthusiasm to continue past In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter's last triumph before a series of mediocre-to-awful films leading up to his present condition. But I am curious to see if I can find redeeming qualities in his late-period work, and finishing his whole filmography will make writing about The Ward that much easier when the time comes. So, at last, I resume my retrospective, some two unnecessary years in the making, with Escape from L.A.]

By 1996, prospects had so soured for John Carpenter that he was reduced to making the sequel to one of his finest features, Escape from New York. Naturally, after the gradual "Disney terraforming" of New York that started in the '90s, the Big Apple no longer held the same reputation it did at the start of the '80s when one suspected that Carpenter did not even need to build sets to film in the urban decay he portrayed. In the mid-90s, Los Angeles, home of uncontrollable gang crime and pollution, became the place to be for hellish futuristic cities. Demolition Man presented an L.A. consumed in flames before an ultra-liberal thought police took over and bleached the place, and Escape from L.A. presents a Los Angeles separated from the mainland by a massive earthquake, leading to a theocratic takeover that condemns L.A. Island to the mythic realm of Sodom and Gomorrah. Where neo-hippie pacifism babied up the city in Stallone's action vehicle, Carpenter's film is the last reflection of his disgust with modern conservatism and its incorporation of the religious right into its framework. Los Angeles, it seems, can never win.

Carpenter's Tools: Village of the Damned

In the Mouth of Madness earned John Carpenter terrific write-ups from genre enthusiasts, and today it can easily be seen as one of the director's finest works. Combined with the underrated stab at comic-thriller, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Carpenter looked to be testing himself after the wavering quality of his late-'80s independent work. With Village of the Damned, however, Carpenter returned to his usual milieu, a small area terrorized by a supernatural force. It's certainly familiar territory for the director, but Village, a thoroughly unnecessary remake, lacks the with and the atmospheric efficacy of his previous work.

Why Carpenter even sticks to the title is questionable, as the hints of alien presence in the 1960 original are almost openly stated, thus removing the spiritual/religious implication of the title. The children are made to look more obviously strange, and so they wear ludicrous platinum wigs and sport fancier eye manipulation that funnily enough ends up looking silly compare to the sinister look of the dilated pupils and funky aura of the original animation. Maybe the story should have just stayed in black-and-white, when it was a simpler tale of Cold War fears of brainwashed children, but then Carpenter doesn't alter the story enough for it to lose its original meaning.

Given that his Village of the Damned came out in 1995, perhaps that's the root of the problem of a film so preternaturally so interesting I shan't be wasting much of your time on it. The only significant changes involve added gore, a sad devolution for the man whose manipulation of the mood of Halloween was so suggestive and gripping that, as they did with Tobe Hopper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, people assigned to it an outrageous gore it in no way contained. Indeed, lascivious shots of a man passed out on a sizzling grill when the alien force passes over the small American town of Midwich and renders every living organism unconscious, of a mother possessed by her mutated spawn into boiling her own hand as penance for serving soup that was too hot, or the leader of a mob who burns herself alive.

The best thing I can say for the film is that Carpenter gets competent work out of his actors despite his failure to smooth the more stilted dialogue that hindered the original. Christopher Reeve, in his last role before his horse accident, has all that Superman charm he just naturally emitted, while B-actors like Mark Hamill and Linda Kozlowski do not get much attention but put in some solid work. Even Kirstie Alley makes an impression, despite how miscast she is for the role of a government scientist tasked with monitoring the children and tacitly allowing their reign of terror to continue for the sake of research.

Carpenter's direction is of course pristine, featuring tracking shots so fluid that they become far more interesting than anything on-screen, and even even makes a high-angle shot, traditionally suggestive of the inferiority of what's being filmed, into sinister proof of the children's might as the camera itself almost withers in their glare. But apart from some interesting modernity -- the government offers to pay for the abortion of any impregnated woman who does not want to carry her mystery child to term, the implication à la Alien (a horror reworking of the space comedy that gave Carpenter his first feature) that the powers-that-be will sacrifice lives in order to harness a new weapon -- but these are fleeting moments of memorability in a film that passes so quickly out of mind that you might assume the children really existed and wiped your brain of the events. But then that would imply that they really can feel compassion after all.

Carpenter's Tools: In the Mouth of Madness

As I have said repeatedly in my trek through John Carpenter's filmography, the most entertaining and rewarding aspect of his filmmaking is his simplicity. In a time when every blockbuster is artificially inflated to 150 minutes without fail in order to fleetingly justify high ticket prices to complaining consumers, Carpenter's films recall a time when people actually accepted quality over quantity, finding a taut 90 minutes preferable to suffering through repetitive sequences and limp humor simply to get a better money:time ratio. (Heck, even comedies suffer from bloat; in the unofficial and unnecessary battle of the wheel-spinning slacker gurus, I will always side with Kevin Smith over Judd Apatow because Smith knows that brevity is the soul of wit.) Carpenter's films are direct, on-the-nose and predictable and they are often better for it.

That's what makes the unabashedly Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness such an anomaly in the director's canon, and such a delight. Here is a film that folds back on itself, that distorts perspective and, finally, pulls the rug out from under us before it, like its protagonist, cackles at itself. In true Lovecraftian fashion, it begins in a mental asylum, as its newest inhabitant, P.I. John Trent (Sam Neill), recounts the tale of what led him to his new abode. The first clues pointing to the film's cheeky nature come in a wonderfully pulpy tracking shot across cells of asylum and a quasi-self-reflexive spin of the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" as Neill, who'd worked on the director's previous film, sighs "not the Carpenters."

What follows is a delicious slice of metafiction, made all the more gleefully entertaining as filtered through Carpenter's matter-of-fact approach. Trent investigates the disappearance of one Sutter Crane, a massively popular horror writer who's become the most widely read author of the 20th century, according to his publishers. Before he meets them, Trent fields an attack from an ax-wielding madman who calmly asks the investigator, "Do you read Sutter Crane?" before lunging for him. Crane's editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), informs Trent that the man was Crane's agent. Within minutes, Trent manages to find clues in the book covers of Crane's novels that form a map of New Hampshire pointing to a location of his fictional setting Hobb's End (a nod to Stephen King and his fondness for fictional hamlets in Maine), and he and Styles head out to find the author.

Rapidly, things go awry. They cannot find Hobb's End because it doesn't exist, but Linda suffers a terrifying drive at night as John sleeps, at first passing by the same cyclist before accidentally striking him, driving on what appears to be the top of a storm cloud before somehow winding up in broad daylight in the town of Hobb's End. Naturally, Trent stirs only at the end and compliments Linda for finding the place.

From the start, everything in Hobb's End seems off, from the jittery old lady running the desk of a hotel (her name, Mrs. Pickman, a reference to Lovecraft's story "Pickman's Model," which somewhat informs the structure of this story) to a looming, black, Russian cathedral that we learn houses Crane. Linda begins to spot real-life corollaries between Crane's novels and events occurring in the town, and soon the two spot hideously mutated creatures roaming about causing violence. Crane shows Linda the manuscript for his new book, the titular, In the Mouth of Madness, as she sees both events that have already happened and events that will come to pass. In the process, she too becomes a monster.

Carpenter's cheek can be seen all over the place in the film, as Trent slowly realizes that everyone in the town, including himself, is a character written by Crane. A man in a bar kills himself in front of John, saying "I have to. He wrote me this way." This semi-religious speech is hinted at earlier when news briefs discuss the frenzy over Crane's books and the violence that erupts at bookstores when operators cannot meet the demands of his incensed fanbase and a pundit asks "When does fiction become religion?" I am reminded of the cases in the late-'80s and early-'90s when parents and distraction-hungry politicians railed against heavy metal for driving young fans to lives of debauchery and suicide, ignoring both the impact of Reagan's economic plan on the deification of fast, loose living involving a lot of spent cash and the unanswered question, "What band wants to kill its audience?" In Carpenter's metafilm, he parlays the hysteria over music into pulp fiction with a straight face that makes the whole gag that much funnier. Crane places something in his writing that causes hallucinations and paranoia in people's minds, leading them to tear humanity apart so that Crane might turn over the planet to a race of monsters he envisioned who worship him as a god. When the agent listening to Trent's story in the framing device asks Trent how Crane expects to control the world when so many don't read, John smiles and replies, "They're making a movie."

And so, the film ends with Trent, having walked out of the ransacked asylum and its massacred inhabitants and found his face on a movie billboard advertising the film we've been watching the whole time. As he sits in a vacant theater watching his own life played back to him, he begins to laugh maniacally. Is he insane? Is the entire film set inside Crane's novel and Trent is indeed the protagonist? Or is it all true, that Trent has been forced into bringing about the apocalypse and monsters are currently overrunning the humans that didn't already kill each other? John just laughs harder at the possibilities, a desperate final act to keep the darkness at bay for just a few more seconds.

Right behind him is Carpenter, laughing just as hard at his own demons. Carpenter had once again returned to horror after an attempt to branch out into another genre met with critical and commercial indifference, and the same fate would befall this feature. People were moving beyond Carpenter, even though most action/horror cinema of the '90s was a large step down from the quality of his best work, and Madness simply got lost in the shuffle. Yet Cahiers du Cinéma would place In the Mouth of Madness on their best of the year list, recognizing it as a top-notch oddity in the director's work that nevertheless displayed all his usual, blunt charm. For my money, it's Carpenter's finest since The Thing, and one of his key works.

Carpenter's Tools: Memoirs of an Invisible Man

When I say that John Carpenter is a director who does not try too hard, I mean that as a compliment. He manages an accomplished and tightly composed visual style without indulging himself, and he scripts his films with the barest of exposition. Hell, he's so taut he typically only has time for one or two good performances per film. When he quit the studio system for a time in the late '80s, you could hardly tell these lower budget films apart from the seminal cult work he made at the start of the decade.

However, you can see a massive difference in Carpenter's 1992 return to a major studio (Warner Bros): Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Given $40 million, almost twice the highest amount he'd previously enjoyed for a project, Carpenter could take advantages of breakthroughs in digital animation, which was so cheaply rendered in his other films that it looked outdated even compared to contemporaneous releases. With this extreme (for Carpenter) cash pile, the director and his effects team crafted one of the most impressive uses of digital animation in the early '90s, not as innovative or overwhelming as the work on James Cameron's Terminator 2 but nearly as clever.

Why, then, was the film such a big failure at the box office, halting Carpenter's momentum as he broke back into the system before he truly got started? Perhaps the casting of Chevy Chase and foreknowledge of the director's penchant for goofy, light satire doomed it, because it's important to note that Memoirs is not a comedy. Oh, it gets some laughs here and there, both from the script and Carpenter's sight gags, but Dana Olsen and William Goldman's screenplay is clearly meant to be a straightforward thriller built around the effects.

As such, it succeeds admirably. Chase plays Nick Halloway, a businessman without surviving family, a partner, many friends or even a committed work ethic. He simply is, until, after a particularly hard drinking session with a beautiful friend of a friend (Daryl Hannah), he passes out at the office as an experiment in one of its labs goes horribly awry. He wakes to find the building seemingly on the edge of collapse, missing huge chunks in the structure as if a bomb went off. Yet the walls are intact, merely invisible in places, along with our hapless protagonist.

Before any potentially comic situation arises, special agents arrive on the scene, headed by the amoral David Jenkins (Sam Neill, deliciously wicked without overplaying it). Jenkins and the rest of the response crew realize that a person has been affected when they spot a hat moving back and forth and screaming for help.

Jenkins sees the immense potential of Halloway as A) the best CIA agent the world has ever (not) seen or B) a ticket to big money for another country to take advantage of Nick's possibilities. Nick overhears David's plan and manages to escape and heads out on the lam, pursued by a team of government agents operating without clearance from Langley so Jenkins can catch his prize. Carpenter manages the chase with the same skill he displayed in thrillers like Escape from New York, flagging for an odd bit of comic relief that actually serves more to examine Nick's state of mind than to wreak repetitive gags based on the premise.

Chase has never been so reserved, and as a comic actor he always excelled by projecting an aura of "I don't give a damn if you like me or not" swagger. Basing his career on this style of acting allows him to slip into the drama of the story with ease. Nothing about the story is particularly deep, but Chase almost makes you care when he off-handedly mentions in the voiceover how he'd always dreamed of being invisible as a shy kid; indeed, Jenkins looks over his profile detailing his lack of emotional connections to anyone or anything, and he remarks "He was invisible before he was invisible."

Setting aside such moments, as well as a largely unnecessary romantic subplot between Hannah and Chase that is not grating but also not relevant in any way other than to give Halloway his first real emotional tether to the world, Memoirs of an Invisible Man caters entirely to its Hawksian take on a Hitchcock wrong man thriller. It moves so quickly that it has no time for Carpenter's usual satire: vague references are made to Jenkins' involvement in a notorious operation in Iran, but such brief references are straight-faced, not peevish.

But let's go back to those effects. The opening shot, of Nick setting up a video camera to tape his titular memoirs, sets the stage for what's to come. To prove that he's not simply recording a voiceover for a shot of an empty chair, Nick unwraps a piece of bubble gum and chews it, the perfect cube of gum squishing and twisting around in the air before the outline of a tongue stretches it out and blows a bubble. It's such a simple thing, yet so striking (certainly for its time period), and it shows what might have been the start of a brilliant new phase of a career for the director of a handful of the best low-budget genre pictures of all time. Shots of Nick drinking an the liquid sloshing around where his stomach should be recall a bit of Cameron's work on The Abyss, though I did find myself wondering why Nick couldn't eat solid foods to avoid the ungainly sight of meals digesting when the average human carries several pounds of undigested meat in his intestines. I suppose anything that was in him at the time of the accident was made invisible with the rest of him, and now I find myself wondering if his first few trips to the bathroom afterward resulted in invisible waste, but let us not dwell on such matters.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man is, like most of Carpenter's films, far from a masterpiece, but it's a terrific genre picture with enough twists to liven up the rigidity of the invisible man conceit. Hannah is a dynamic actress, too dynamic for a role as underwritten as Alice's, but Sam Neill is the best human villain in a Carpenter film since Isaac Hayes nearly stole the show in Escape from New York. Plus, it's interesting to see more comically oriented actors like Chase and Michael McKean of Spinal Tap fame (in a small role) either playing their laughs as semi-sophisticated -- a premature ejaculation gag involving McKean a notable exception -- and it's a shame the film tanked and earned such lousy reviews for Chase (just before his chat show came and went), who ran for cover to mugging goofiness and never looked back, only recently finding a good outlet for it on the show Community. It also must have stuck in Carpenter's craw something fierce, having won back some fans with They Live after Big Trouble in Little China underperformed and Prince of Darkness failed to make a splash, only to lose them once more here. But for those, like me, who assumed that the '90s were nothing but excruciating failure for the director, Memoirs is a nice riposte, not in the first tier of Carpenter's corpus but a surprisingly solid companion for a double-header with a good Hitchcock chaser.

Carpenter's Tools: They Live

Political undercurrents run under John Carpenter's films as far back as Assault on Precinct 13, its depiction of insatiable, plodding youths converging on a band of police officers and secretaries a subtle inversion of Kent State. Carpenter even scripted Escape from New York as a commentary on the Watergate scandal and the deep damage it caused to public perception of government. Yet They Live is his most political feature yet, a blisteringly funny look at Reagan's consumer America. Perfectly positioned as one of Carpenter's indie films, made after he temporarily quit the box-office-obsessed Hollywood for a few years, They Live carries that extra ounce of authenticity that gives its shamelessly B-movie slant a solid foundation.

They Live takes a bit of time to get off the ground, featuring the decidedly anti-thespian performance of professional wrestler Roddy Piper, who plays such a nobody that his name is Nada. Nada is a drifter who finds himself in L.A. on a construction site to earn some money but, of course, he begins to notice strange occurrences in the area. At night, televisions intercept a homemade channel of a man warning against climate change and materialistic societies, and a nearby church buzzes with activity by night and hosts criers spouting portents of doom by day.

One night, a sea of cops floods the area, beating the churchgoers and bulldozing the shantytown around it. Nada discovers a box filled with tacky sunglasses among the remains and takes a pair for himself. When he puts them on the next day, he sees the world in black and white, and advertisements and products suddenly lose their allure. When he gazes at billboards, he sees only stark messages like "Obey" or "Marry and Reproduce"; a dollar bill becomes a slip of paper that reads "This is your god." The glasses allow Nada to see the subliminal messages not only in ads, but in the products we're meant to consume and the means with which we acquire them. As the capitalist fervor reached its peak in the late '80s, Carpenter uses harsh, decisive black-and-white to reveal the basic truth of the celebration of materialism.

Soon, Nada runs into people who look grotesque and warped when viewed through the glasses. Eventually, he discerns that these people are actually aliens living among us and the force that orchestrated the commercialization of American life. Tellingly, the wealthy in society -- or at least the ones who handled the money, like lenders -- are the aliens, guiding humans like sheep through the numbing equalizer: television. Everywhere Nada looks, he sees nothing but the work of these invaders, entire buildings comprised of messages and desperate consumers slowly made into livestock.

Unfortunately, Carpenter never delves much deeper into the fantastic premise, and while it's clearly meant to serve as a Reagan-era update for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, substituting fear of communism with our own self-destructive greed. But Carpenter traces the root of the problem not to the institutions that ensure their survival by dumbing down the populace into blind conformity but simply to TV's corrosive influence, a conclusion akin to propping up Hitler as the root of anti-Semitism. Television is merely the modern means by which people are kept oblivious, and the idea that an assault on a TV station -- which informs the climax -- could suddenly free society is oversimplified to the point of being just as empty as the culture it seeks to lampoon.

It's even more frustrating when you realize how infuriatingly little we've advanced from the culture of mass consumerism. Early in the film, Nada speaks with another construction worker, Frank (Keith David, the only person who at least comes close to what one might call "acting" here), who discusses some of the problems he's faced, particularly involving the rusting of the steel industry. "We gave the steel companies a break when they needed it," he says, foretelling some of the outrages that exist today, "You know what they gave themselves? Raises."

Having said all that, as a giddy throwback to '50s science fiction and an action thriller, They Live is aces: for all the shortcomings and easy-way-outs Carpenter places into his commentary, his barbs have a genuine wit to them, and he hasn't scripted a film so tightly since Escape from New York. Once you get to the point about 15-20 minutes in, it never lets up, which is handy, because if you're allowed even a second to spare with these actors they whole damn thing might fall apart. There's a certain irony that Nada's response to reaching an epiphany with neo-con money worship consists of grabbing a shotgun and going on a killing spree, but I suppose most revolutions are waged the same way. Besides, it allows for some excellent choreographed action that's quick but steady and sure. Plus, They Live boasts one of the all-time best, longest and most ludicrous fistfights in film history. The sheer, absurd length of it is worth the price of admission (or rental, I suppose I should say).

I originally started this retrospective when my reviews were, on the whole, more basic and a great deal shorter than the ones I churn out now, and I find that I still don't have much to say when it comes to Carpenter's work. But that's because he's so wonderfully economic, not unskilled in flashy techniques but typically unconcerned with employing them. He's one of the great workhorses of modern cinema, and while his films lack the depth of those of his hero, Howard Hawks, he displays Hawks' ability to get in and get the job done without wasting time nor money. I've never seen so many brilliantly understated action thrillers as I have combing through his corpus, and his deep love for classic cinema is perhaps most clearly seen here, with his shameless use of old tinfoil discs-on-wires for flying saucers and his distrust of television, perhaps as a result of forcing movies to become short and stupid so they might easily make their way onto the small screen. His embrace of old B-movie tropes reveals his understanding of how narrow the gap between timeless cinema and trashy kitsch was in the old days, back when the real masterpieces were genre films made by directors who received heaps of scorn for toying with conventions. They Live doesn't really play with any of its contemporary conventions, but for all its thematic simplicity, this film, made by a disillusioned artist who once dreamed of becoming Hollywood's go-to journeyman for pictures of varying genres, deserves points not merely for being terrific fun but for attacking the vampirism of '80s abandon, and not in the salacious, too-stylized way that Bret Easton Ellis would eventually make the de facto form of criticism of Reagaonomic über-capitalism.

Carpenter's Tools: Prince of Darkness

As I work through John Carpenter's corpus, I find myself so taken with his sparse yet impeccable style that I tend to gawk over the details. Often, I focus so intently on his visuals that I forget to be scared by his horrors: Halloween is too aesthetically perfect to work as a piece of pure horror (though it does maintain a constant level of unease that works as a fine substitute to shocks), and the effects work on The Thing attracts me, like Dawn of the Dead before it, to marvel at the results over the impact of the gore. Prince of Darkness throws a monkey wrench into the gears: using anamorphic lenses, Carpenter distorts the image slightly. He intends the effect to reflect the nature of the film's supernatural element -- why he started now is anyone's guess, considering the presence of primal forces in all his other films -- but it speaks more to the sloppiness of the feature and its failure to make its ill-defined evil emotionally felt.

After the troubled production and bungled marketing of Big Trouble in Little China disenchanted Carpenter, he returned to independent filmmaking. In an attempt to prove that he could make quality work without the help of Hollywood, he swung for the fences with Prince of Darkness. The story of a group of academics and a holy man locked up in an abandoned church to investigate a cylinder of mysterious liquid that apparently contains the Antichrist, Darkness certainly doesn't pull any punches. And if Carpenter made the film to prove he could make the films he wanted without big (for him, anyway) budgets, he succeeded: while the effects are certainly dated -- more so even than some of the work in his earlier films -- nothing in the film suggests that the director lost his flair with a cut budget. It also proves, however, how a bad script is a bad script, no matter the cost.

There's always been a certain woodenness in Carpenter's films, yes, but he typically balanced out the static performances of his cheap supporting cast with a dynamic lead and/or a reliably loopy second-tier character who usually served as the film's primary source of exposition. Yet no character or actor particularly works in Prince of Darkness: the only emotional brunt of the film rests on a couple that has no implicit chemistry nor even enough explicit scenes of mutual attraction to fuel the emotions at the end. The rest of the characters are nothing more than props for the blocking, moving from scene to scene and delivering lines with such lackadaisical indifference that, in a film with zombies and the possessed, sorting out the normal humans is a chore.

Not even Carpenter's recycled actors -- Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun -- all of whom made such an impression elsewhere, jolt any energy into the cast. Somewhat interestingly, Pleasence and Wong reprise their roles from Halloween (the priest is even named after that film's Dr. Loomis) and Big Trouble in Little China, albeit with the roles reversed: Pleasence plays the spiritual guide, the one who knows something about the supernatural forces at work, while Wong appears as the scientist and analyst driven slightly mad by his brush with something that cannot be explained. Their subtle reprisals of their old parts, even if swapped, reflects the film's larger absorption of Carpenter's previous works: the appearance of a mob of possessed homeless people (led, hysterically, by Alice Cooper) recalls the zombie-like gang of Assault on Precinct 13, the gore obviously brings The Thing to mind, and the general tension -- when any exists -- mines the same territory of omnipresent, implacable terror of Halloween.

Carpenter doesn't simply plunder his own filmography, however: when the mysterious liquid infects unfortunate victims, it finds its way into other hosts via the streaming vomit of the possessed, a clear take on The Exorcist. One female student finds herself the chief host of the Antichrist, and her bloodsoaked body, combined with the telekinetic abilities naturally exhibited in the spawn of the "Anti-God," plays like a straight-faced version of Carrie.

You'd think, given the clear influence of some of the greatest horror films ever made (including a handful of his own films), that Carpenter might have generated more thrills and chills, or at least more unsettling vibes. Sadly, most of Prince of Darkness is so dull it doesn't even work as unintentional comedy; only in the final 15 minutes does it finally tap into some of the macabre magic of Halloween, mixing a reliably atmospheric Carpenter score with impressive low-budget effects and the suitably uneasy feeling of mounting evil. One effect in particular, of a watery space behind a mirror that the Antichrist uses in an attempt to summon its father, is as memorable as anything in The Thing. Yet Carpenter undermines the effect of the climax with a dénouement that makes a stab at conveying a sense of pain and loss before the director clearly realized he hadn't done anything with the characters to make those emotions felt and switches abruptly into one of those wearisome "The End...?" finales that, as far as endings involving the supernatural and mirrors go, couldn't stand in the same room as the later Twin Peaks cliffhanger.

One can fairly easily find the message in one of Carpenter's films, be it broad satire or a more dramatic thrust, but I confess I can't figure out the point of Prince of Darkness. The scientific angle from which Carpenter attacks the idea of the Antichrist is so thinly defined it leaves open the frightening possibility that Carpenter is equating the embodiment of evil with science, something that hardly jells with Carpenter's political and moral positions and smacks more of lazy writing than insidious messaging. I wouldn't call Prince of Darkness a failure -- like Carpenter's previous foray into mediocrity, Christine, it has its moments -- but if Big Trouble in Little China took the wind out of Carpenter's sails, this hinted at the coming downfall

Carpenter's Tools: Big Trouble in Little China

By the time John Carpenter made Big Trouble in Little China, the most successful independent filmmaker of all time had since acclimated into the studio system, and he never inflated his budgets to anything more significant than a fraction of what his fellow New Hollywood practitioners poured into their films, much less the filmmakers who'd since adopted the blockbuster spectacles reflective of '80s mainstream filmmaking. Yet his returns began to diminish as his budgets crawled upward, with the considerable success of Escape from New York giving way to The Thing and Starman, two of Carpenter's best-received films that nevertheless barely earned back their budgets. Big Trouble finally tipped the scales: working with his biggest budget to date (only about a million more than Starman), it earned approximately half its $25 million price tag in the States and Carpenter, soured by the studio's mismanagement and mis-marketing of the film, spent the next few years returning to more independent filmmaking.

As badly as 20th Century Fox might have bungled the marketing, Big Trouble lives on in cult superstardom, along with the rest of Carpenter's canon. It marked the final collaboration between Carpenter and Kurt Russell of the '80s, and indeed the film serves as a rough bricolage of their previous efforts: it contains the satirical broad strokes of Escape from New York, the innovative (and remarkably cheap) special effects work of The Thing, even the casting of Russell as an American icon in Elvis. For, while he plays fictional character Jack Burton, big rig driver extraordinaire, Russell is unabashedly, shamelessly portraying John Wayne.

As such, he adds a cheeky layer to what some dismissed as a simplistic homage to kung-fu B-pictures: Jack Burton is the ludicrous embodiment of that vaguely defined demographic collectively titled "Middle America" -- a working class master of his own morality who peddles the sort of shitkicker's wisdom that has been established as some sort of foil for "East Coast elitism" -- and his actions against the hordes of Asian characters who challenge him reflect our own disturbing predilection for tearing through swaths of non-white populations. He gets into scrapes without thinking it through -- or about it at all -- and maintains his arrogance no matter how many times he is shown to be a complete moron.

As Carpenter and Russell note in their uproarious commentary track -- one of the funniest you'll ever hear -- Jack is the hero, yet he only performs one identifiably heroic action in the entire film. He cares almost exclusively for his truck, stolen by the gang of the mysterious Lo Pan (James Wong), a staple of Chinese folklore, who also snatches the fiancée of Jack's affable, quick-witted Sino-American chum Wang (Dennis Dun). But it's all about the truck. He eventually warms to Gracie (Kim Cattrall), every bit as arbitrary to the film's narrative as the protagonist.

The actors all understand that Carpenter isn't treating any of this with any severity, and if Big Trouble in Little China treads in stereotypes, at least the people who play them embrace them fully. Cattrall plays the literally breathless ingénue, delivering every line as if she'd just sprinted three miles, while Dun provides a capable foil for the thickheaded Jack. In fact, the Asian actors appear to be having as much fun as Carpenter and Russell: they clearly grew up with the same kung-fu movies, and they take to their parts with aplomb. Russell, of course, is brilliant as the hapless goof Jack, so cocksure and so very wrong at every step. One of my all-time favorite line deliveries of any film involves him preparing to lead his motley crew to an escape, opening a door to reveal an army of Lo Pan's followers, slamming it and deadpanning, "We may be trapped."

The real draw here are the effects and the cheesy-yet-impressive use of wire works and martial arts, a sort of camp ancestor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Fighters leap about the screen, while good guys (chiefly Victor Wong) and baddies lob magic bombs and lightning and each other. Compared to the drab nightmares of his previous horror/action/fantasy pictures, Big Trouble is bright and shiny, filled with golden statues, rich costumes, neon lights and green flame. Starman showed Carpenter finally getting to branch out after Halloween altered his plans to follow in Hawks' journeyman footsteps, but, where Big Trouble takes him back to familiar ground, it features some of his most exciting direction. The camera still doesn't move a great deal, but it cuts with precision, quick without losing spatial relationships and peppered with instant pans to follow the coiled spring movements of the characters.

For many, Big Trouble in Little China stands as Carpenter's last outright classic, though They Live receives much love as well. For all of Carpenter's economical shots, you, as Russell rightly notes in the commentary, can always spot one of his films with only a few scenes. Big Trouble is chock full of action and effects, and it barely scratches the surface of any character, yet it always maintains a sense of place and time; never mind that each set is loopier than the last. Yet his graceful movements are somehow more viscerally enjoyable than most of the glorified music videos that pass for action movies these days: we may not care about these characters, but the simple act of being able to track them for more than 1.4 seconds at a time gives us more of a connection than all the phony empathy blasted at us in flashes. It may not be great, nor even brush against greatness, but you'll have to search long and far to find a better film to pass a lazy Sunday or entertain a group of buds than this oddball trip to Chinatown.

Carpenter's Tools: Someone's Watching Me!

In between 1978's Halloween and 19890's The Fog, John Carpenter directed two made-for-TV films, Someone's Watching Me! and an Elvis biopic. Despite Carpenter's enduring cult legacy, both of these films remained hard-to-find on home video for decades. (Elvis still hasn't made its way to DVD, all the more surprising considering it sparked the Carpenter-Russell collaboration). Someone's Watching Me! isn't quite as noteworthy or interesting as the first Carpenter film featuring Russell, but after watching Christine, I found this to be far more theatrical and fitting with Carpenter's style than that project.

As with Halloween, Someone's Watching Me! concerns a serial killer whose actions are never explained outside of a basic set-up for his methods. In this film, a mysterious man terrorizes the female inhabitants of apartments across the city. He watches them, calls them and ultimately drives them to suicide. No evidence exists to make these cases look like crimes, so the police force doesn't even realize they have a killer on their hands.

The voyeur's latest target is Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton), who moves into a luxurious high rise. She already has issues with men after a turbulent experience in the past, and she's not even ready to date yet. She spends most of her time hanging out with her co-worker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) and fending off flirtatious men. Sophie is a terrific touch, as she is clearly a lesbian though Carpenter never makes it "obvious"; Leigh herself seemingly hasn't a clue.

Soon, Leigh starts receiving calls at all hours from an unknown man. We see a bug left under her table and a figure dart behind her when she returns to find her apartment door open. Strange presents are delivered to Leigh, all of which come with their own threatening phone message. The constant calls drive Leigh mad, and she flinches whenever she runs into a man in her complex.

Plot-wise, this film is about as bare as they come. Halloween choreographed its attacks for maximum construction, but they were still frightening despite the convenient nature of the set-ups. Christine was far more forced, and this sits somewhere in the middle. It doesn't contain murder so much as a never-ending series of arbitrary plot devices that prevent anyone from doing anything about the situation. Though the constant calling clearly qualifies as harassment, the police "can't arrest a man for dialing the wrong number." When a suspect is arrested, the cops close the case even when Leigh receives more calls and spots an attack across the block through her telescope. Not to mention, if the pressure was that severe, why not move out of the high rise? Why didn't the other people, who ultimately committed suicide, do the same? Little to no interest comes from the dialogue or the plot, and these contrivances only further bog down the story.

Where it excels, though, is in its direction. Drawing from the POV giallo of Dario Argento and the atmospheric terror of Alfred Hitchcock, Carpenter crafts a hell of a gripping thriller with Someone's Watching Me! I can scarcely remember the characters' names, but I certainly recall how I jumped every time the phone rang (which is about once a minute on average), or the brilliant play on Rear Window in which the person being spied upon buys her own telescope and searches the apartments for her voyeur. The scene plays out like a battle between snipers, frantically scouring the windows of the opposite tower seeking an enemy.

Carpenter's ability to take his "all tension, all the time" approach of Halloween and apply it to this Hitchcock tribute gives Someone's Watching Me! an entertainment factor that its flat script wouldn't hint at. It's also nice to go back and watch this film after Kurt Russell introduced a more masculine feel to Carpenter's work; Leigh, though tormented and fearful, ultimately takes matters into her own hands, and the mere presence of Sophie's perfectly average, non-camp homosexual is a great delight in a late-'70s film. It's not top-tier Carpenter by any stretch, but this would make a fun double feature with one of Hitchcock's second rank thrillers.

Carpenter's Tools: Starman

What fresh Carpenter is this? After establishing himself as one of the best niche directors, well, ever, he stumbled slightly with the Stephen King adaptation Christine, a noticeably commercial attempt to make up for the tepid receipts from The Thing. Carpenter believed that The Thing fared poorly because it came out the same year as Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. How perfectly fitting, then, that he should direct perhaps the finest of the "E.T. clones" made throughout the mid-'80s to capitalize on the massive success of the benevolent alien story.

Working with a script by Bruce A. Evans (who would later find great success with his screenplay for Stand By Me, funnily enough another King adaptation), Carpenter placed himself far outside of his comfort zone. It probably irked the Hawks disciple to be placed into a niche in the first place, but he certainly made the most of his shifted career path. With this film, however, the director proved that he could hop genres with style, even if he rarely ventured outside horror-action again.

But stepping outside of the pigeonhole means little to the film in question. No, what makes Starman so wonderful, so light and so affecting are the superb performances Carpenter draws from his actors. After the embarrassing casting of Christine, Carpenter is back to drawing the finest from those in front of his lens, and he actually manages to get good performances from much of his secondary cast (remember how bad everyone who wasn't Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence and Nick Castle were in Halloween?). He also handles Evans' light, feel-good script with both the sweetness of that aspect as well as the tension of those who seek to hurt our benign visitor.

The Starman comes to Earth after intercepting the Voyager II probe, which contains selections of music as well as a recorded greeting from the head of the U.N. He crashes in Madison, Wisconsin, and assumes human form when he scans a lock of hair in a photo album and clones the DNA. Then a woman (Karen Allen) wakes up to find her dead husband in her living room. Understandably, this shakes poor Lisa up, and it likely doesn't help that this alien, who looks like her husband, bids her to take him to Arizona.

Jeff Bridges' performance as the Starman is nothing short of fantastic: he gleaned his only knowledge of Earth's languages and syntax from the recorded greetings and songs, so Bridges delivers his dialogue in halting, emphasized staccatos. Bridges is one of the best actors in the business because the very last thing he appears concerned with on-screen is his appearance. Not many actors could contort their faces as wildly as Bridges does when the Starman minces through a sentence, and fewer still could pull it off without desperately mugging for laughs. These moments are funny, yes, but only because Bridges sells them with sincerity and Allen plays the straight woman well.

This light tone defines even the film's serious moments, such as the Starman using his powers to bring a shot deer back to life or Lisa's struggle to separate the sight of her husband from this advanced life form. The military gets wind of the alien's presence, and of course it's run by a cold-hearted intelligence chief who wants to kill the Starman and then ask it questions. One of the scientists in his think-tank, though, voices dissent. "We invited him here!" Mark Shermin yells, referring to the Voyager II probe found in the Starman's ship.

These characters are all so much fun -- Carpenter's inherent flair for camp creeps through, certainly with Bridges but even the NSA chief Fox -- and the dialogue is charming and funny enough, that you can almost forget the compulsory nature of the script. Why does the Starman need to go to Arizona? Because that's where his brethren will meet him, and if he's not there in three days, he'll be abandoned to die on the planet. Why can't the all-powerful race, who have nothing to fear from humans and their silly missiles, wait a day or two? And I nearly winced when the Starman gives an uplifting mini-speech near the end to Shermin that not only casually drops the fact that these aliens visited Earth before and have been monitoring it for some time but lays on the saccharine goo with its exultation of mankind. "You are at your very best when things are at their worst," says the dying Starman. Dying must have clouded his memory somewhat because, apart from Lisa and Shermin, everyone he comes across on his journey tries to capture him, beat him or kill him.

Nevertheless, it earns its bittersweet ending, and Carpenter, the man who made a name for himself as a master of suspense, proves able to coax sweeter emotion from this film with only the slightest prodding. Jack Nitzsche's score sound reminiscent of Carpenter's usual style at first, but it morphs into a gentler soundtrack, in some ways an aural cue of Carpenter's transition in the film. As much as I wish that the plot didn't drive a story in which a woman has a chance to reconnect with a visage of her dead husband, even if that visage isn't him and never will be, is food enough for one film. Actually, Solaris already proved that. But with Bridges, Allen and Carpenter steering things, Starman achieves an honest sentimentality it doesn't quite deserve. Because let's face it: it takes a supreme coordination of talent on-set to make a line like, "I gave you a baby tonight" not doom a picture straight to the MST3K files.

Carpenter's Tools: Christine

The marriage of the horror kings of two media, film and literature, must have seemed a sure-fire hit back in 1983. Fresh off the disappointing receipts for The Thing, John Carpenter, perhaps looking to recover a bit, came aboard an adaptation of Stephen King's Christine. The Thing was the first Carpenter film that the director didn't at least co-write, but it at least felt like a Carpenter work. Christine, despite a few flashes of Carpenter's brilliance, looks and feels like the workman project that it is.

Christine sends Carpenter back to the suburbs after expanding his scope with Escape From New York and The Thing, which only adds to the promising quality of the film. As the film opens on a bookish nerd, Arnie (Keith Gordon), and his jock friend Dennis (John Stockwell), it's hard not to think excitedly of Halloween. Buddies since childhood, Dennis is the most popular (and also the nicest) stud in school, while Arnie is the tag-along who only holds any sort of conversation with Dennis.

Life changes for Arnie when, on the way home with Dennis, they stop at a junkyard and Arnie stumbles upon the decrepit shell of an old '58 Plymouth Fury. Inexplicably attached to the rusted shell, Arnie agrees to pay the creepy junkyard owner enough money to buy a new, working car, and proceeds to use his shop skills to fix the thing up. As repairing "Christine" consumes more and more of Arnie's time, he begins to change. He ditches the glasses, slicks back his hair and by all accounts becomes a bit of a jerk. Suddenly he's so confident he can even woo the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), the immediate crush object of every boy.

Meanwhile, the car takes on a certain sentience. Its radio, which plays only old '50s rock 'n' roll, plays at will, and it picks its songs to fit the mood. It displays an open jealousy toward Leigh, which even Leigh notices. When Dennis confronts the old man who sold Arnie the car, the vendor tells the kid how the car drove his brother insane. Some gangbangers take sledgehammers and knives to Christine as retribution for Arnie squealing on them earlier, and Christine responds by fixing itself and hunting down each of her attackers by "herself."

The problem here is that it takes some effort, not simply in direction but in design, to make an inanimate object vaguely anthropomorphic and especially scary. The smoke-belching semi in Spielberg's Duel is a good example. But Christine never really pops off the screen. There's nothing particularly creepy about the car itself, and it acts as little more than dead weight dragging down tension. Carpenter manages to make a few scenes work, though; Christine using the gang leader Buddy's car to trap people in a gas station and blow it up, then chasing Buddy down while on fire is just terrific.

But not even Carpenter can coax good performances out of this cast. Gordon does well enough as Arnie, but he never conveys obsession so much as oily snark. Paul and Stockwell turn every one of their scenes into soap-level melodrama, and let's not even start on William Ostrander's performance as Buddy. Even Shatner would have told him to be a little bit more subtle. Harry Dean Stanton livens up the proceedings as a cop investigating all of the mysterious deaths occurring in the small town, but he gets too little time to boost the cast.

On the plus side, Carpenter's score is one of his best, and if Christine wasn't such a tension zapper he could have used it to generate a nail-biter. Sadly, the weak script and nonthreatening villain, mixed with some cringe-worthy performances under the direction from someone who normally got the best out of his actors, sideline the director's work, which admittedly is far from his most effective. Christine is, to me, a metaphor for puberty, of the draw of your first car and of the ways that teens can go crazy just because they're teens. It's pretty thin, but it rarely appears on lists of King's best novels. It doesn't lend itself to a particularly chilling story though, and maybe that's why Christine feels more like a good TV movie and it's by far the weakest entry in his late '70s-late '80s gold run.

Carpenter's Tools: The Thing

I seem to admit my ignorance with film theory and (somewhat) history quite often in my reviews, which probably isn't too smart, but I do try to be honest with you. I've particularly detailed my unfamiliarity with the horror genre, so when I say that the only film outside of the work of David Cronenberg that has impressed me more with its special effects than John Carpenter's The Thing is Ridley Scott's Alien, I imagine it will carry little weight. So let me approach this from a different angle to give Rob Bottin's effects the credit they deserve: they are so convincing even in their leagues-beyond-OTT spectacle that they drive the film as much as the plot itself, even though Carpenter never lets them steal his movie away from him.

After alluding and paying homage to Howard Hawks' films his entire career, Carpenter finally went for the whole hog and adapted the director's science fiction foray The Thing From Another World, an interesting but dated offering that doesn't quite rank in the master's upper echelon. Carpenter's version improves upon it in nearly every way: it plays off of the isolation of a station situated in tundra and the un-glamorized portrayal of its crew, but it dispenses with lengthy (if matter-of-fact) scientific explanations and uses its modern effects to craft a far more sinister creature.

That creature makes its way to a US research station in Antarctica indistinguishable from a husky. A group of frantic Norwegian scientists frantically pursue it in helicopter and try to shoot the thing, only to die in accidents and misunderstandings with the American scientists. The researchers return to their tasks, choosing to forget the bizarre occurrences of the day. They put the dog in the kennel with their own, only to return to a pulsating mound of flesh slowly absorbing the caged dogs.

The researchers, naturally, accept this news with a certain concern. Upon giving the destroyed Norwegian camp a second examination, they find an excavation site that reveals a buried UFO. That doesn't give them many answers, however, and only through several more horrific incidents do they amass a rough understanding of the beast: it has the ability to assimilate and replicate any living creature, it can be damaged with fire, and any piece that survives can start the whole process over again.

As the Thing can be anything or anyone, suspicions mount among the researchers. Carpenter assembled a crackerjack team of character actors who are not only excellent in their roles but unknown enough to lend the cast a believable normalcy. Anyone could be the Thing, because, apart from Russell, no one brings any star quality to the film. Wilford Brimley's Dr. Blair goes mad when he sees a computer projection for what would happen to the world population ever got off the Antarctic, but his panic, along with that of station commander Garry (Donald Moffat), feels justified and realistic, given the fantastical circumstances. As they and other crew members spend much of their time looking anxiously at one another, Childs (Keith David) remains steely and calm, but his exterior only belies his own panic. When the others accuse pilot R.J. McCready for being just a little too quick with solutions, Childs falls in line with the consensus with noticeable speed.

Of the Carpenter-Russell collaborations, The Thing features Russell's most low-key performance. As Carpenter plays this body horror picture with a surprisingly straight face, Russell can't play the heroic buffoon that he does in Big Trouble or, to a more satiric extent, Escape From New York. Instead, he's the one who maintains a genuine calm, capable of assessing the situation and reacting to each problem. As he is assured of himself, he suspects Childs of being the Thing, given that Childs leads the accusations of suspicion against him. Their rivalry brings out some of the Plissken in Russell, and David holds his own with his deep baritone and commanding but funny presence.

As I said at the start of the review, the effects are simply fantastic. The gore arcs across the screen as webs of flesh draw in the next victim, and blood flows freely. In the confines of the station, the gore only entraps the characters further, and outside the splashes of blood clash disturbingly with the pure white snow (this would be played to much greater effect in the Coens' Fargo). Bottin's designs for the partly-assimilated beast and those unfortunate to get caught in its snare are ingenious: in one terrific scene, a copy's torso suddenly bursts open when shocked with a defibrillator, sprouts cartilage teeth, then closes on the helper's hands. When the others try to burn it, the copy's head comes off, grows spindly legs and scurries off to safety. It's some sort of schlock masterstroke.

Almost as noteworthy as the effects, though is the score. One of a precious few Carpenter films not to feature a self-composed score, The Thing instead boasts a track from legendary score composer Ennio Morricone. Carpenter contributes a few snippets for the more horrific moments, and his synthesizer blends wonderfully with Morricone's more traditional (yet no less tense) soundtrack.

The Thing cements John Carpenter's ability to make a small budget film (estimated at $10 million) feel like a proper blockbuster. Both this and Escape From New York are largely insular thanks to their budgets and Carpenter's writing, but they feel like large-scale action and horror pictures. That ability to spin straw into gold has endeared the director to me greatly as I work my way through old favorites and new experiences, and The Thing ranks as one of his finest achievements. Despite its quality, however, it marked the start of Carpenter's box office decline, barely earning back its low budget domestically. Eventually, commercial failure appeared to take its psychological toll on the director, and he's been in rough waters since the '90s, but naturally this excellent feature found a second life on home video. Thank God for nerds and shut-ins.

Carpenter's Tools: Escape From New York

I still can't believe how well I responded to Halloween, but for my money Carpenter hit his stride in the '80s. After the fun but staid Halloween follow-up The Fog, Carpenter broke out of the horror pigeonhole for a post-apocalyptic popcorn movie, one that married the talent for suspense he'd worked up over his previous two features with the bizarro shootout of Assault on Precinct 13. It's not exactly a Hawks-like genre leap, but it is one of the finest action flicks to come out of that testosterone- and cocaine-tinged haze of the '80s.

From the start, you can tell that Carpenter isn't taking himself too seriously. Set in the then-near future 1997, Escape From New York stinks to high heaven of '80s. Working, naturally, with a tight budget, Carpenter does not even attempt to make his New York look at all futuristic: the most discernible change in this city (which is actually bombed out and fetid) from its contemporary depictions in '70s cinema is the presence of large concrete walls around Manhattan.

In gloriously over-the-top fashion, Carpenter sets the film at the tail end of World War III; both America and the Soviets teeter on the edge after years of vicious warfare, and America must deal with massive civil turbulence. To deal with the massive spike in crime, the government coverts the wrecked New York into a giant prison: anyone sent there automatically receives life imprisonment, and various prisoner gangs have established controls over various sectors of the metropolis. On his way to a peace summit to end the war, the president (Donald Pleasence) ejects over New York in a pod when an American insurgent group hijacks Air Force One.

The government cannot move into the city without inadvertently killing the president, so police commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) deputizes Snake Plissken, an infamous ex-special forces operative now on his way to New York. Hauk instructs the laconic, venomous prisoner to find and extract the president before the planned summit meets. If he succeeds, he wins a pardon; if he fails to protect the president or to get him out before the summit, tiny charges injected into his carotid arteries will explode.

Had nothing else gone right in Escape From New York, the casting would likely have ensured it a long shelf life. Van Cleef excels in the role Pleasence played in Halloween, that of the primary source of exposition. His deep-voiced growl and stoicism give an air of credence to what easily could have been absurd lines. Pleasence himself doesn't have much to do, but in his one or two scenes of any substantive dialogue he shapes his terrified president into an uncaring, selfish man who seems so surprised by the horrors of New York likely because he never wasted his time learning the conditions of the prison. Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau all play characters wacky enough to live in this strange world, but they all just manage to keep their feet on the ground while their heads move through the clouds.

Above all else, though, stands one man: Kurt Russell. Then a fading star who'd known success throughout the '70s as one of Disney's more bankable young talents, Russell met Carpenter through the made-for-television film Elvis (which I shall review along with Someone's Watching Me! when I can get my hands on them). Carpenter went to bat for Russell, a has-been up against studio recommendations such as Charles Bronson or Tommy Lee Jones, and he cemented the B-movie equivalent of the Scorsese-De Niro match-up (or perhaps one of them alongside the Raimi-Campbell pairing). Russell crafts an iconic anti-hero, one who rasps his lines because he can't stand to speak to anyone: nearly all of his lines contain some angry dismissal of the person speaking to him. Russell plays the part to perfection, making Snake sufficiently intimidating and believably unstoppable while constantly placing his tongue firmly in cheek. The Russell-Carpenter pairing gave way to some shamelessly campy fare, but it worked because Russell knew how to toe the line like a master.

But the world Carpenter constructs around Russell and the other actors is equally captivating. Comparisons between New York and jungles have existed for decades, but Carpenter's dystopian iteration not only feels like one but looks the part. The various gangs pitted against Snake recall that familiar Carpenter trope, the one where the enemies of the film possess vaguely supernatural qualities. The residents of the prison have lived there so long that some devised means of generating power, re-fitting cars, even creating their own weapons, and each carry certain traits. The most memorable, of course, are the subway-dwelling "Crazies," zombie-like madmen who burst out of the ground and slice their way through all in their path.

Snake's adventures through this hell reflect both Carpenter's firm grasp on tension as well as his surprising gift for comedy: in the scene that introduces Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine's goofy grin is already enough to get you smiling), he cuts to show what's entertaining our friendly driver so: a crude musical theater performed by male inmates in drag. As Snake moves into the backrooms of the theater tracking the president's beacon, the scene changes to one of mounting unease and horror, only to end with another comic note. Snake must eventually face the "Duke" of New York (Isaac Hayes), only for him to pull up in a Cadillac with actual chandeliers as hood ornaments. It's just a fun gag, but I'd like to think that Carpenter was poking fun at the ostentatious glamor of late-'70s/early-'80s life, and I've never not laughed when the Duke pulls up in that ridiculous vehicle.

Carpenter uses tracking shots far more than in his previous efforts, presumably because a bigger budget ($6 million must have seemed a fortune to the low-budget auteur who made the most successful independent movie in history three years earlier) allowed him the use of a Steadicam. The moving shots contain all of the composition and unsettling quality of his prolonged static shots, and they add a level of thrill that his previous action flick, Assault on Precinct 13, never had.

Carpenter actually wrote the script for Escape From New York in 1976. Its pitch-black, violent take on post-Nixon distrust, however, didn't sell with the studios (and these are the people who financed Taxi Driver, for God's sake), especially when the only film he had under his belt was Dark Star. Perhaps the weirdness of the script threw the executives, as the political undertones of the film are not nearly as pronounced as countless films of the mid-'70s. Its ending does carry a tinge of anarchy, but one I find far funnier than it is political. I still think it's interesting that Carpenter wrote it (along with Nick Castle, who would play Michael Myers in Halloween) in 1976, as I can now understand why Escape feels so much like a bridge between his first three features -- it's got the strange, comic sci-fi of Dark Star, the pulse-pounding action of Assault and the heart-stopping suspense of Halloween.

I really don't know what to say about Escape From New York: a threadbare plot, goofy characters, absurd black comedy and bizarre science fiction elements could distract a casual moviegoer separately, and when Carpenter throws them all together it's a wonder he didn't alienate everyone. But, for me, it's a classic, one that contains all the film quotations you'd expect from a film school student (everyone telling Snake, "I heard you were dead" is a straight lift from the John Wayne vehicle Big Jake) as well as the formalist composition. The director gets marvelous performances from his actors because he gets all of them on the same page before shooting: everyone hams it up, but in a perversely plausible manner. The film also boasts Carpenter's finest score, tense but often playful without losing its edge moving between the two moods, and his finest direction.

Why would anyone attempt to remake this? I can sort of understand the desire to go back to Assault on Precinct 13 or The Fog (Carpenter himself helped the latter get off the ground, as he was dissatisfied with the low production values of the original). Those films are dated, if still readily enjoyable, and in the case of Assault it's hard to cite unoriginality when Carpenter so heavily mined Rio Bravo in the first place. I can even understand Rob Zombie's Halloween, as Carpenter's version is such a landmark that it's only natural that some young pup would put his spin on it. (And Zombie's Halloween is such an interesting take on a psycho that it likely would have been a great modern horror film if he didn't have to eventually get to the plot points of the original). Escape From New York, on the other hand, really hasn't dated, despite its '97 setting and its depiction of a hellish future as only slightly different aesthetically than the present. Its madcap combination of various moods and genres, combined with its crazy characters, do not present an easy opportunity for franchising -- case in point, watch the critically panned, commercial bomb Escape From L.A. (which I haven't seen and am currently dreading). I cannot pretend to be unbiased though; Escape From New York made me a John Carpenter fan, and I've yet to tire revisiting it nearly a dozen viewings later.

Carpenter's Tools: The Fog

In retrospect, Halloween was as damaging to John Carpenter's career as it was beneficial. It launched the director from low-budget film school graduate to the next great auteur, but it also forever skewed expectations of the man. Carpenter aspired to be the next Howard Hawks -- in style, not quality; regardless of his considerable skill, Carpenter is far too humble to equate himself with one of the all-time greats -- but the rampant success of Halloween forever labeled him as "the horror guy."

Indeed, Carpenter followed up the slasher masterpiece with The Fog, an entry into that curious subgenre of movies in which mist, fog or some other visual impediment brings with it terrible monsters hell-bent on killing anyone caught in the enveloping smoke. Carpenter has never been a particularly gifted writer (at least in terms of plotting; he's a borderline genius when it comes to writing intentionally cheesy dialogue), and such a rigid type of film offers him little leeway. Supposedly, the small town of Antonio Bay is attacked every 100 years by the ghosts of lepers who were led into rocky waters by the old townspeople, who stole their gold and prevented the establishment of a leper colony nearby. This background is explained in the Serious Tension moment of the show, but I can't understand how they know that ghosts return every 100 years to kill six townspeople when the film occurs on the town's centennial anniversary.

Why would Carpenter leave in such a glaring mistake, especially when he demonstrated with Halloween an admirable refusal to give us more information about Michael Myers than we needed (and all of that came in vague generalities about his pure evil)? Whatever the reason, it reflects the overall laziness of the writing, that same carelessness which pervades all of his films but never started detracting from his films until he moved into the turbulent later stage of his career.

Happily, he makes up for this by displaying all of the talent for creating and maintaining suspense that he perfected with Halloween. The ghosts of Blake and his leper crew return to Antonio Bay to claim six souls as vengeance for the six conspirators who led them to their deaths, and three people die in one fell swoop in the first 15 minutes. That slices the body count in half off the bat, yet the other hour of the film doesn't lag.

It also doesn't particularly stand out, either. The ghosts carry with them gruesome nautical instruments, from long knives to great hooks, and Carpenter shoots their murders with the same level of taste that defined Halloween (yes, you read that right: taste). The engulfing, creeping fog will make you sink your fingers ever so slightly into your seat. Naturally, the movie benefits greatly from Carpenter's minimalistic, electronic score. But it also lacks production values, an inexplicable flaw considering the massive success of the director's previous film.

Worst of all, the actors fail to make a lasting impression with their characters. A shame too, as the cast is more than solid: Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau, Janet Leigh and Hal Holbrook all have major roles, but they look decidedly uncomfortable with the expositional, cheesy dialogue. Curtis perfected the scream queen with Halloween, but she only gets two or three opportunities to properly use those powerful pipes of hers.

Still, I quite enjoyed this forgettable piece of genre fun. Halloween contained a few truly perfect shots (the best and most lasting of which of course being the scene where Michael's mask slowly illuminates behind Curtis), and The Fog has some great set-ups at the end. When the fog envelops the home of DJ Stevie (Barbeau) and threatens her young son, the tension is nearly unbearable thanks to some skillful editing and Carpenter's sense of composition. Likewise, the final onslaught in the church lacks any scale whatsoever but feels like a siege by a gargantuan force once the pacing, placement and music mix. These scenes buoy a decent horror film into an above-average thriller that overcomes its many flaws, but only just.

Carpenter's Tools: Halloween

John Carpenter's first two features showcased an impressive talent who had a knack for getting good-looking shots on a shoestring budget. He was a fair distance from his deliberately campy '80s era, the one that would define him for many, but he was already developing his signature style: stately, darkly lit static and smooth tracking shots, suspenseful POV angles and a refreshing inability to take himself too seriously. Carpenter's $100,000 low-key action film Assault on Precinct 13 paid homage to George A. Romero, but it is this follow-up, made for $300,000 -- is he like the McGuyver of filmmakers or something? -- which delved into his love of supernatural horror and forever established the director as a cult icon.

Halloween wasn't necessarily the first slasher picture: indeed, Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill freely admit borrowing from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas and Hitchcock's great Psycho, all of which contain a number of details that became future slasher tropes. But Carpenter's film kick-started the genre, previously explored almost exclusively in Italian Giallo films and the American grindhouse pictures they inspired. Those films, however, cared less for creating an atmosphere of tension like the more mainstream films just mentioned and instead simply strove to pour so much gore on the screen it practically splattered the actual print. Halloween, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before it, ran in the opposite direction, keeping gore to a minimum even as they sparked controversies for their alleged vulgar content.

Indeed, it's strange, though perhaps inevitable, that this film inspired countless imitations which all completely missed the point. Heck, the slasher genre has become so intertwined with gore and torture porn that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell this film would get made today. Consider this: for the first 50 minutes of the film, only a single murder occurs on-screen (well, unless you count a dog, and even then you just see its corpse). The rest is entirely devoted to establishing a mood. Name me one slasher film made since that devotes an entire half of its film to establishing character and tension.

Carpenter builds this atmosphere through a series of agonizingly long takes, ones with only brief glimpses of Michael Myers, who escaped his mental hospital in transit to a maximum security prison. 15 years ago, he brutally stabbed his sister -- which we see in a creepy POV shot through the slits of a Halloween mask -- and now he sets off to return home and kill again. Upon reaching town, he sets his sights on a gang of teenagers: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (P.J. Soles). They're set to baby-sit kids tonight, though I'm a bit confused why a parent would force their kids to stay inside while they went out on Halloween. Well, the backers wanted a movie about baby sitters, so I guess even independent films don't always guarantee total artistic freedom.

But story matters little in Halloween. Myers is, as the children aptly call him, "the Bogeyman," and he will stalk through the three houses occupied by his targets until he kills them all. That's not to say that there's nothing to the film, however, only that Carpenter devotes his time to creeping us out instead of piling on the endless exposition that absolutely destroys so many horror films today (see: The Unborn). Carpenter knows that the greatest fear is fear itself, the dread of the unknown, and so we are just given evil incarnate.

The only real exposition comes from Myers' psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance), comes after him and attempts to warn the police. "I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil." On paper, this seems a bit self-important and points toward some terrible overacting, but Pleasance absolutely nails his role. His speeches do not bog down the film because he delivers them on the verge of wild-eyed terror; he knows what's in store for this town if they don't find and stop Michael, and it chills him to his core.

The first hour is an outright masterpiece of pacing and direction. Those long takes give every scene a sense of dread with objects not suddenly popping up in the foreground so much as slowly materializing out of focus behind the characters. When Laurie sees Michael leering from behind a shrub near the beginning, she slowly walks toward him as the camera glides along in front of her slowly and the music builds, only to turn when Laurie reaches the hedge to reveal nothing. Later, Annie is on the phone with Laurie as Michael stands outside waiting to make his move. At several spots we expect him to burst through the open kitchen door and kill the prattling teen, and at one point she even looks out the door and we hear a sharp gasp, only for the shot to cut to reveal that it was just Laurie chuckling. Every single shot, it seems, raises the tension.

The teenagers are occasionally stilted, yet they act like real people, and Curtis is likable as the chaste, bookish gal who would become a staple of the genre. They treat the eerie atmosphere around them with the indifference that might strike an audience as stupidity, but honestly, how many of you assume that a soulless killer is coming for you when your hear a dog barking?

Sadly, when Myers gets down to the actual killing, the film loses its way a bit. His dispatches of the other teens are suggestive and horrifying -- particularly when he swiftly kills Lynda's boyfriend and we see only him looking quizzically into the victim's lifeless eyes. But his efficiency makes his inability to kill Laurie all the more glaring: in a fantastic scene, Laurie discovers all the bodies that Michael has set up in a bedroom and his white mask slowly reveals itself behind her. Then he goes to stab her and somehow misses. Later, he also launches a surprise attack, only to hit a spot on the couch nearly a foot away from her.

Setting those faults aside, however, Halloween is still a hell of a gripping ride, thanks largely to Carpenter's score. Carpenter's music is a big part of what makes his films so entertaining, but the soundtrack for Halloween must surely be his best. That simple piano theme is as iconic as Myers himself. The score isn't nearly as boisterous and manipulative as, say, Psycho's, yet it keeps you on the edge of your seat even when we never see the carnage to go along with it. Its simplicity, the simplicity of all of Carpenter's scores, complement his stark shooting style, and I've yet to see a better combination of the two in the man's work.

Because Halloween really launched the slasher genre as a mainstream genre and not simply an exploitation movie, it has been at the center of numerous debates over its content, as the genre as a whole is often prone to misogyny and sadism. Misogyny is indeed a terrible attribute of the genre, one that keeps me away from it as much as, well, the sadism. But Laurie is a resourceful person who fights back against this monster. Is she a genius? No, because she's a teenager. That sort of mentality that a woman who is not entirely self-sufficient is weak is ludicrous and I've even seen people attack Joss Whedon for writing female characters that need the help of others (never mind that that help comes from other women as it does men). Yes, Loomis appears at the end to shoot Myers and save her, but he doesn't kill Michael either. That doesn't diminish Laurie's impressive struggle with Myers at all.

Another reading suggests that the film celebrates conservative values. Of the teenagers, only Laurie, the one who looks after the kids, who studies and, most importantly, doesn't have sex, survives. But that does not take into account the fact that sexual repression is clearly a motivator in this film; the young Michael spots his sister fooling around with her boyfriend, so he follows her to her room, where she is topless, and murders her. In the film's present, he pursues the more promiscuous teens first before moving in on Laurie. Laurie, repressed herself, repeatedly stabs Myers with phallic objects. If you really want to make this film about sex, then I would say that Michael is a homosexual who couldn't handle his sexual identity because of, yep, conservative family values. I don't buy that however; I just think he's evil and, if anything, he's going after innocent youth. Besides, if Carpenter really wanted to tout conservative ideology, would he have really put them in a character openly referred to as "Evil Incarnate"?

As with his other films, Halloween overflows with references to his heroes. Laurie, of course, is the capable Howard Hawks leading lady, and the Hawks-produced (and largely directed) movie The Thing From Another World plays on the TV set at various points in the film. Sam Loomis is a direct pull from Psycho, where it was the name of Marion's boyfriend. And Jamie Lee Curtis was cast because she was Janet Leigh's daughter, giving the whole thing a borderline meta feel.

While aspects of it are noticeably dated and it loses its way a bit in the final 20 minutes, Halloween is still, in a way, a masterpiece. It has survived because its endless imitators never really figured out what made it so damn good in the first place. You don't need to watch a killer devise elaborate and grisly tortures for his victims to make him scary: the fine line Michael Myers walks between a realistic, psychotic killer and something supernatural and primal makes him far more foreboding and terrifying. With a heroine who holds her own and doesn't have to stoop to running around in panties to get our attention, the character aspect of the film is even better. I admit I was not really scared by the film, did not jump when something appeared; I was, however, digging my nails into my armrest by the end of it. Some might accuse the incessant tension of Halloween as some sort of tease, but I think it promotes a more interesting kind of horror, one in which the screams are actually a relief and not a payoff, and the withholding of them only makes the dread worse.