Such was Stephen King's popularity in 1983, that work on the film version of his novel, Christine, began while the book was still being edited. 1983 offered a bumper crop of films based on the writer's work, including Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Christine. The later two were directed by two of the masters of late 70s/early 80s horror movies, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. Carpenter, for his part, was coming off the failure of The Thing, a financial disaster that saw him removed from the director's chair of another King project, Firestarter,* and desperate for a hit. Christine was fast-tracked and appeared in December of 1983, a mere eight months after the novel's publication.
Showing posts with label John Carpenter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Carpenter. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Still More of the Night HE Came Home
When last I bothered with the Halloween movies*, with Halloween: Resurrection, I lamented that the folks at Dimension films had only themselves to blame for its failure. It committed two cardinal sins: first it killed off Laurie Strode in the prologue, a callous fuck you to anyone who might have become invested in her character over the years. Second: it was released in July. You DON'T release a movie with the word "Halloween" in the title in the middle of summer. You just don't. The makers of the new film, simply titled Halloween (2018, directed by David Gordon Green) don't make either mistake. They've ignored all of the continuity between John Carpenter's original film and their own, so Laurie Strode is still alive and Michael has not been burned alive or beheaded as the case may be, and their film has a late October release date (when it is on track to make a shitload of money).
This film represents the rubber match between Laurie and Michael: Laurie "won" the first match in Halloween H20 when she took off his head with an ax, Michael "won" Resurrection when he killed her at the mental hospital. The retcon here doesn't really bother me, given that the history of the franchise is littered with retcons. Dr. Loomis was killed at the end of Halloween II (as was Michael), but that didn't stop him from coming back in Halloween 4 and 5. Laurie Strode seems a different character in each of her subsequent appearances, too, all suggesting differing timeline branches from her teenage encounter with Michael. In H20, she was a college professor with Josh Hartnett as a son. In Resurrection, she was a mental patient. In the new film, she's a doomsday prepper, a la Sarah Connor, no longer possessed of a son, but of an estranged daughter and granddaughter. This is a series that doesn't give two fucks for internal continuity. And so it goes.
Note: what follows contains spoilers.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
An October Challenge Trick or Treat Bag
I'm not "officially" doing The October Horror Movie Challenge this year. I'm not aiming to watch all the films and I'm definitely not going to break my back to blog about it all, but it's still October, and October still means horror movies here at Stately Krell Laboratories. Therefore...
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Second Verse Same as the First
Back when Escape from L.A. (1996, directed by John Carpenter) was in theaters, a friend of mine suggested that John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, and the late Debra Hill had photocopied the screenplay for Escape from New York, whited out all mentions of New York, and penciled "L.A." in its place. Certainly, the scenario is the same, if adapted for the left coast. The two films are similar, too, in so far as they're both films with ideas that exceed the reach of their available resources. This is perhaps an exaggeration. Escape from New York was a far more serious-minded exploitation film than its sequel. Escape from L.A., on the other hand, seems like some kind of demonic parody of the original film, of tough-guy action pictures in general, and of the body politic in 1996.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The Festival of Samhain
At one point in the first act of Livid (which I wrote about a couple of days ago), there's a scene where the main characters are accosted by a trio of trick or treaters wearing, respectively, a pumpkin mask, a skull mask, and a witch mask. Most of us (I saw that film in a kind of party atmosphere) sat up and took notice of the fact that this was a reference to Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace), the redheaded stepchild of the Halloween franchise. Halloween III has been reviled by horror fans for three decades now, and I understand it. I do. Horror fans, like most movie fans, are essentially conservative. They like seeing the same thing they saw last time when they shell out for a sequel, and filmmakers make fundamental changes at their peril. It doesn't help that the film isn't particularly good--though I'd stack it up against any of the other Halloween sequels in terms of the quality of the filmmaking. It IS daring though, and I love, LOVE the thinking behind it. Producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill conceived of this film as being akin to an edition of a magazine. Every year, their reasoning went, they would come up with a different story on the theme of Halloween, kind of like a yearly anthology. Have you seen 2007's Trick 'r Treat? That film is Halloween III's spiritual descendent, unencumbered by the expectations of franchise.
Monday, July 02, 2012
Ghost of a Chance
If its IMDB rating--currently at 4.8 out of 10--is any indication, John Carpenter's fanboys don't much like Ghosts of Mars (2001). Certainly, the film has been trampled by people who actually appeared in it (Ice Cube calls it "unwatchable") and it sent its director into a decade long retirement. So, yeah, it's a debacle. But is it any good? Well, I don't know that I'd go quite that far, but it's not as bad as all that. It's certainly a return to form of a type, given that its basic plot returns Carpenter to Assault on Precinct 13 and, ultimately, Rio Bravo.
The plot of the film finds badass cop Melanie Ballard dispatched with her team to escort accused murderer "Desolation" Williams to stand trial for his crimes. Melanie is actually second in command. Her superior on the team is Commander Helena Braddock. She's also paired with Sgt. Jericho Butler, a fellow badass. The other team members are rookies. Williams himself is being held at a remote mining outpost where scientists have made some kind of "significant" find. That find turns out to the "ghosts" of Mars, who are completely hostile to alien invaders. They "possess" unfortunate humans and drive them into a homicidal frenzy. Our heroes must make common cause with the prisoners in order to defend their position, then fight their way to safety...
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Slavery is Freedom
I've been kinda sorta doing a series on late John Carpenter movies. I'm not really a fan of Carpenter after, oh, say 1985 or so. Some ineffable quality present in his early films shuffled off and left his films after that point and his films diminished over time. I haven't seen most of these films since they were in theaters, so I'm going on twenty-plus year old memories of most of them. My own indifference to mid to late Carpenter, not withstanding, most of these movies have their defenders. One or two of them even play better today than they did when they were made. One of those movies is They Live (1988), which on balance seems like it was made last year rather than sometime in the last century.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Playing the Mind Guerrilla
How degenerate has the movie industry become that John Carpenter--John mother fucking Carpenter!--has to have the backing of b-movie actress Amber Heard to get a job directing a movie? Is this a reflection of how low Carpenter's own career has sunk or a reflection of the movies generally? Or both? I don't know. I DO know that I'm mad as hell that I never got to see his new film, The Ward (2010), in a theater. I mean, Carpenter's name alone would have guaranteed a decent release even a decade ago, but this film, like a LOT of independent films these days, is in the twilight zone between limited festival release and video on demand. It doesn't deserve it, either, because I think this would have played fine at the multiplex.
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
What Rough Beast?
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
--William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)
I think John Carpenter may have been broken on the wheel during his sojourn through studio filmmaking. Certainly, he was never the same filmmaker after the major studios spit him out at the end of the 1980s. Too much of a maverick, I presume. He couldn't help but chafe at the bit. And it's a shame, too, because early Carpenter was one of the most exciting filmmakers of the 1970s. In any event, after about 1986, Carpenter ceased being an interesting filmmaker. But the decline was slow.
I thought about all of this as I watched Prince of Darkness (1987) the director's first indie film following the financial debacle of Big Trouble in Little China. It's a strange film. On the face of it, it's not really very good. It cobbles together a bunch of sci fi horror ideas that are each suggestive in themselves, then resolutely fails to examine them. Instead, the film devolves into another variation on Night of the Living Dead, by way of Carpenter's own Assault on Precinct 13. It's an exercise in confinement and zombies. Most great films that utilize the ideas of confinement use their settings as a microcosm that lays bare the characters trapped within it. Prince of Darkness barely registers as having characters at all. It has types to feed to the meat grinder.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Madness Takes Its Toll
When it came out, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994) was thought to be something of a comeback after several indifferent films. Whatever their relative merits, movies like They Live and Prince of Darkness were a sad comedown from the glories of Carpenter's golden years. The title is evocative and the prospect of Carpenter playing in Lovecraft's wheelhouse was delicious. It still is, though I doubt Carpenter is capable of doing Lovecraft justice anymore. He might not have been capable of it in 1994. The burnout was already beginning to show.
The story here follows insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) as he looks into the disappearance of best-selling horror novelist Sutter Cane. Arcane Books, his publisher, wants to recover the manuscript to Cane's latest novel, In the Mouth of Madness, and teams him with Cane's editor, Linda Styles. Cane is described as a "billion dollar franchise," the best selling writer of the century. Styles tells Trent that Cane's writing has "an effect" on his less stable readers. Together, they trace Cane to the town of Hobbs End, New Hampshire, the heretofore fictional setting of Cane's books. Meanwhile, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Trent's own grasp of reality begins to slip after reading some of Cane's books. Cane's fiction, it seems, is becoming a going concern in the real world. Slowly but surely, it becomes clear to Trent that Cane's final novel represents the pending apocalypse.
This is a film over which I've had heated arguments. It's not a film that I like, and I think it represents a bullet in the brain of Carpenter's career as a horror filmmaker.
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