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: 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: 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.

Grindhouse

For whatever reason, I never caught "Grindhouse" in theaters. Perhaps it's my aversion to horror (read: childlike whimpering fear), or maybe just the fact that it bombed so quickly, but even when it hit a dollar theater my buddies couldn't convince me to go to a midnight showing (I am not sitting through a three hour movie starting at midnight). At any rate, when the individual DVDs came out I picked them up and was stunned: Rodriguez and Tarantino made a completely hilarious romp through the films of their childhood, ones I had never even heard of. Yet it didn't matter; their enthusiasm for the glorified detritus of the 70s was infectious.

Unfortunately, in their individual director's cuts, both films were noticeably bloated, crammed with so many in-jokes that only they would get that it got bogged down in nerdiness. They went so far out of their way to tribute the look, feel, and general (lack of) quality that, after a viewing or two, it became a chore to watch them. But now Netflix is offering the theatrical cut of "Grindhouse" in its "Instant Watch" queue, so I finally got a chance to see what I really missed. Turns out, I missed one of the best movies of 2007 and one of the single most fun movies ever made.

Of course, it opens with Robert Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," inarguably the more visceral and fun of the two. The plot seems simple (some sort of gas turns people into zombie-like things), but he adds layers of asinine backstory to make it seem deeper, just like a crap Grindhouse film. The hero is the mysterious Wray, and no one respects him until they learn he's "El Wray," at which point he's treated like a god. Dakota is leaving her husband for a woman. Cherry and Wray have a history. The hilarious reveal about Muldoon's contribution to the War on Terror.

These little threads make the movie more interesting, but really it just comes down to shooting zombies. Shooting zombies with pistols, shooting zombies with shotguns, shooting zombies with assault rifle legs; if it shuffles, it's getting shot. And really, that's what the movie's good for; it offers not even an ounce of depth, but then why would it? You get some funny lines and a nonstop series of explosions. The theatrical cut of "Planet Terror" doesn't change too wildly; there's a bit less gore and a few scenes are shorter. "Death Proof," on the other hand is a revelation.

When I compared the two separate films I found "Death Proof" to be the better entry because there was at least some story, but the version I saw was so endlessly drawn out on the uninteresting conversations of the first half that I can barely watch it after two viewings. But here, Tarantino reins it in; the conversations between the vapid, first set of girls are still boring and oddly devoid of wit, but he cuts out a great deal of their incessant prattling. Now I only had to wait 25-30 minutes for something interesting to happen rather than nearly an hour.

Many cite "Planet Terror" as the superior film, but in this trimmed version, "Death Proof" reigns triumphant. Apart from the fact that this shortened version is actually funny, DP wins (if I may be so simple) solely on the basis of Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike. One of the oddest, darkly funniest, and genuinely intimidating villains I've seen, Stuntman Mike makes not just DP but "Grindhouse."

Turns out Mike's been spying on these ladies all night and, after quickly crushing his hapless passenger's skull against the dash with a well-applied brake, he sets off into the night to more or less slash them with his car. A borderline stupid concept, Tarantino makes it work, mainly thanks to Russell's acting. When Mike first speaks he seems like such an amicable fellow: he doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, and offers a ride home (though admittedly he's offering the ride to a drunk, hot chick so maybe that's not so noble).

But Russell turns on a dime when he actually converses with the ladies he's been stalking all night. When they interrupt him or insult him, Russell's face changes ever so slightly, and suddenly a bottomless well of contempt springs from his eyes. You can tell here that he's going to do something bad.

Of course, the movie really picks up in the wake of the first set of girls. The most explanation we get for why this happened is that maybe Mike is a pervert who gets off on killing with his car, but there's no way to prove he did anything, so once he heals from his cuts and bruises he's free to go. When flash-forward to a new set of ladies, a group working on some movie. There's two stuntwomen, a makeup lady, and an actress, all out for a day off chatting over lunch and oh yeah test driving the car from "Vanishing Point."

The ending 20-minute car chash is just about the best thing Tarantino has ever filmed. Unlike seemingly every other car chase these days, he shows us what's going on. The man famed for his quick-cutting actually bothers to follow these cars. It's a ballet of metal and rubber, starting horrifying and thrilling, then turning the tables on Mike in hilarious and no less exhilarting fashion.

Complete with the fake trailers, "Grindhouse" is a pure romp, one that greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Separate, the two films are certainly fun, but together the flaws of both cancel each other out; if you didn't get the chance to watch this in theaters, go to Netflix now, even if you aren't a member; it's worth the fee.