LESSONS IN CARPENTERY: Part 1 – The Slow Climb To The Edge Of Hell
I started out with a desire to take part in the ultimate one man movie marathon… … Well over twenty four hours later I had lowered myself to verbally urinating on the grave of Christopher Reeve, whilst obsessing over gratituous sexual liasons with any and all females that had ever starred in a John Carpenter film! Even the ugly ones!
Let us begin:
0700 – 0820: Dark Star
Truth be told I’ve never watched John Carpenter’s student film stretched into a cinematic debut without being inebriated in some form or another and whilst it’s too early to start knocking back the beers, watching it this early in the morning is a sort of weak equivalent to being a bit ‘head-smashed’.
Trying to follow in the footsteps of George Lucas – another film school graduate who was lucky enough to get his student project, THX 1138, financially backed into a full length movie – Carpenter was lucky enough to cross paths with exploitation distributor, Jack H. Harris, who did the very same only to go bust in the process. Satirising Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Carpenter has four bored astronauts on an epic space journey to destroy unstable planets along the path of star systems soon to be colonised. As they come to the end of their mission, they find themselves having to contend with their dead commander suddenly becoming capable of dispensing advice from his deep freeze lock-up, a runaway beach-ball alien, a temperamental and argumentative computer system and a bomb that comes to think it is God.
The film is intermittently amusing and has flashes of genuine talent (Dan O. Bannon – the future scribe and creator of the Alien franchise – getting stuck in the elevator shaft whilst trying to recapture the beach-ball like alien he has inadvertently set free is one such example!) but does not hold up that well as a clear-headed film viewing experience. I don’t know whether it’s the ideal film to watch first thing on a Saturday morning but the moments where it misses seem to far outweigh the moments where it hits; although when it does hit, it hits hard!
0825 – 0952: Assault on Precinct 13
Quite simply one of the best films ever made and, had it not been for us Brits, it certainly would not be considered the classic that it is. The film flopped and was buried without a trace in the US, only to become a massive festival hit over here in the UK. Following it’s critical lauding, the US came to reappreciate and rerelease Carpenter’s superb play on Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. Casting against then cinematic stereotypes, Carpenter has a black man portray the heroic policeman and a white man play the notorious criminal – something the much underrated and actually rather good recent remake rather stupidly reversed!
Austin Stoker is a cop forced to oversee the final stages of closure of a small police station in one of the back streets of Los Angeles. When a deeply traumatised man, having witnessed the assassination of his young daughter at the hands of a street gang, barges into and collapses in the police station AND a police van drops of two high-level criminals for an overnight stay, Stoker’s cop finds his quiet night suddenly become anything but. Things get quickly out of hand when the now multiplied street gang lay siege to the police station in order to get their hands on the dead girl’s father and Stoker’s character has to decide whether to release and arm the criminals in order to defend their territory.
Carpenter’s talent as a director is as strongly evident here as it was with Spielberg’s Duel. Its a taut, well paced and extremely tension soaked slice of cinema. Carpenter’s use of shadows and minimal dialogue serve the film well and its a real sign of how brilliant the film is that, despite repeated viewings, I find something new to enjoy every time I watch it. A real treat that sets this epic movie marathon off and running.
1000 – 1132: Halloween
Not exactly the right time of day to be watching it, I suppose, but with the first beer well and truly cracked open and sank back, its time to sit back and revel in one of the greatest horror movies ever made – a true genre defining slice of cinema! Everyone knows the plot – there’s no point wasting precious time on going through it in too much detail – so let’s just hand out the basics:
Fifteen years earlier Michael Myers butchered his older sister and was locked up in a mental institute as a result. Now, in the lead up to Halloween night, he escapes and returns to his hometown to relive his horrific crime with only his obsessed Doctor (Donald Pleasance) on his trail and an innocent babysitter (Jamie Lee Curtis) standing in his way.
Carpenter plays with typical horror conventions with abandonment here, whether its showing his killer in broad daylight, having the nerd instead of the popular girl become the heroine or introduce new and unexpected means of murder to shock and delight his audience. What you don’t realise on first viewing is just how timed and effectively precise Carpenter has marked the whole running time. Unlike something recent like, say, Neil Marshall’s The Descent (which puts us through an hour and a bit of characterisation and false scares before getting down to the meat of the movie, but boy what meat it is!), Carpenter hands out the minimal amount of screen time needed to get us invested then starts up the slaughter and rather amazingly does not let up.
To this day, still containing some of the best scares in the horror genre, Halloween is an undisputed masterpiece from it’s defining stedicam opening through to it’s ‘Oh Fuck He’s Disappeared’ ending! On this particular movie, I leave you with my rather embarrassing Dictaphone entry from the scene when Jamie has first discovered her friend’s bodies: “Turn round! Jamie, turn round! He’s going to come up behind you! Shit, there’s his face! Turn round you stupid bitch! No! No! No! Aaarrggh! Sweet Jesus! Like mother like fucking daughter I suppose – I mean who else wouldn’t spot a dirty great big shadow looming up on them when they’re showering? Not Janet Leigh in Psycho, clearly! Bugger, I’m going off the point. Shit – he’s coming down the stairs. Get up! Get up! Get up you stupid bitch!”
1140 – 1306: The Fog
Ah, The Fog! Looking back now we can see that the flaws in this film would intensify and become ever more apparent in Carpenter’s much later output. Here is a film awash with ideas and self-imposed challenges. Too many in fact! Carpenter is playing with both the iconography of both Assault and Halloween within the framework of this film, along with trying to balance a mythical ghost story and a much wider set of characters then he is genuinely used to handling. Although having come to this following his acclaimed TV movie Elvis (with his soon-to-be-regular-everyman Kurt Russell) where he worked with a staggering 130 characters with speaking parts, he obviously thought he was more than capable.
The Fog is in effect a slightly flawed masterpiece that takes horror off in a semi fresh direction after Carpenter’s superb Halloween saw the genre become drowned in rip-offs and extremely inferior carbon copies within the short two year time period that had passed. It immerses the slasher movie within an atmospheric ghost story that tells of Antonio Bay, a quaint seaside town that is soon to be celebrating its 100th anniversary. When a mysterious, thick fog rolls into the town and people are left dead when it clears, rumours begin to circulate of a town curse. Soon the townsfolk come to realise that they are victims of long dead sailors who have come to avenge their own murders at the hands of the town’s founding fathers.
Maybe its the beer but its whilst watching this that I came to realise just how Goddamn sexy Adrienne Barbeau actually is. I must be slightly drunk as the scene in which her character hangs to the top of the lighthouse while decomposed sailor hands claw at her, substitutes my usual open-mouthed horror for thoughts of how much I really want to fuck her… even her modern day sixty odd year old self! Adrienne Barbeau is one sexy lady! And John Carpenter married her, which gives us another reason as to why this marathon is worthwhile. But then he fucked it up and she divorced him… maybe we should stop watching his back catalogue right now eh?
Breaktime! A spot of lunch! A quick walk around the block and a much needed expunging of faecal matter! Take a spot of paper; write the word “Intermission” (or “Interlude” if you are middle class!) on it and hold it up to your monitor. Now hum some music to yourself! See? Its just like you’re back in good ol’ 1960 watching Spartacus eh? And… we’re back!
1330 – 1505: Escape From New York
What with it being the Winter Season and the sun going down earlier, what a perfect film to watch as we go into darkness. Carpenter’s Escape From New York is the very definition of a cult movie and it is one of a select few films within his filmmaking catalogue that expresses exactly what he is all about – a cracking idea, cast it well, film it with a low enough budget to force creative thinking, release it, watch it get mauled and sit back and wait for the audiences to catch up with it a few years down the line and finally ‘really’ get it!
Kurt Russell in his first big screen partnership with Carpenter, channels Clint Eastwood in his portrayal of Snake Plisskin – the definitive anti-hero! The year is the future of 1997. The world is ravaged by crime and the entire New York Island has been converted into a high security, walled prison where the absolute worst scumbags, criminals and lowlifes are dropped into and left to rot. When the US president (Donald Pleasence) crash lands inside New York, he and his black box are captured by the psychopathic Duke of New York (Issac Hayes). Snake Plisskin is a former Special Forces war hero who has become disgusted by his own government and has turned to a life of crime. Now a notorious outlaw he is captured and handed two choices; die or go into New York and get the president out with an explosive device implanted in his neck that forces him to act within a timely manner.
It is absolutely ridiculous just how fast paced and entertaining this film is. The action set pieces and the set designs are extremely impressive and when you realise the entire film was made for just over $5 million dollars it all becomes even more impressive! I know I’m drunk now because every time the Duke comes on screen I keep singing the theme song from Shaft. This is the first example of Carpenter going back to the well of talented actors he’d worked with before and re-employing them – Donald Pleasence returns, as does the gorgeous Adrienne Barbeau. Please, allow me to just pause a moment! Ahhh… Anyway, this film is a genuine cult classic – I mean, look at the rest of the cast: Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, Harry Dean Stanton. Come on? What an absolute great slice of entertainment. Thoroughly enjoyed watching this!
1510 – 1654: The Thing
What a brilliant double bill eh? To go from something like Escape From New York straight into this? One of the top ten greatest horror movies of all time, expertly directed within an inch of its life, containing some of the best hand-created and stop motion FX ever committed to celluloid and… it’s also technically a remake too! The sun is now well and truly dropped from the sky, I’m drunker then Brigette Nielson on a fucking reality TV show and I’m actually pretty pumped up about watching this. It has been a while!
Its set in the winter of 1982 and a twelve man research team at a remote Antarctic research station discovers an alien that has been buried deep within the snow for over 100,000 years. Somewhat unofficially led by McReady (Kurt Russell), the team unfreeze the life form only for it to reveal itself as a shapeshifter with malevolent intentions. As it slowly unleashes a wave of terror within the outpost, coming to infiltrate members of the team one by one, McReady and a small band of men come to question who is human, who is not and which of them if any is going to make it out alive!
What a rollercoaster ride of a film eh? The wave of paranoia that exists in every single shot from the minute the alien is unfrozen is expertly done. Russell gives what still stands to be one of his best performances ever. Although it is much discussed, the scene in which the head tears itself from the body, sprouts legs and runs off across the room is pitch-perfectly nailed by Russell’s dead-pan delivery of “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” The make-up in this film is just timeless. Unlike say the work Rob Bottin did in The Howling, the make-up FX here just does not somewhat reluctantly embarrass in that early-80s kind of way you would expect it to (despite being, in the case of The Howling, very impressive for the time period I should really add!).
I don’t exactly know why but at this point I have to address the fact that every time Wilford Brimley’s character appeared on screen, I have addressed the Dictaphone with the following message “Note to self, mentally replace Brimley’s character with Judd Nelson’s from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. ‘Let’s go back to the station and cornhole ourselves some drunks!’ It brings a nice level of suitable light relief!”
1700 – 1846: Christine
It was probably around this time that the over-used label Master of Horror was assigned to and stabled to the head of Carpenter. After all if he can scare the crap out of the kids with a William Shatner mask, or fucking weather, and now he’s doing it to them again with a bloody car then… you know… he must be good!
Taking Stephen King’s pulp novel (and come on, if you’ve read the source novel it’s no work of genius is it? Its an entertaining read but it ain’t nothing special!) and bringing it to the screen, Carpenter presents us with the story of Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) a typical high-school nerd who buys and repairs a red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury automobile. However, no sooner has he got ‘her’ up and running does he find himself inexplicably seduced and consumed with passion for the car. As the car demands his absolute and unquestionable devotion, she returns the favour with unwavering protection from anyone who dares to question or upset Arnie – even if it means murder!
No matter how drunk you get pre-viewing, and I’m pretty topped up by this point, when you go into watching Christine for the first time you can’t get over just how ridiculously daft the whole concept is. A killer car? A demonic car? It doesn’t matter how you write it up, it just sounds really, really silly! But Carpenter really comes into his own here. He takes the preposterous one-note concept and onto he grafts set pieces and sequences we can all associate with. Who hasn’t been walking along the street in the dead of night only to see a set of headlights light up behind you and for you to get stung by just a very tiny pang of paranoia about whose in the car and where are they going at this time of night? Are they coming for you? Who doesn’t get themselves even just the tiniest little bit wound up so that when said car does drive past you find yourself wincing ever so slightly until it is completely past and you are certain there is no impact upon yourself? Come on, be honest! I’m pissed as a fart by this point and even I can’t help shouting, “Run fat boy run!” at even the most unlikable of characters as ‘Christine’ veers up behind them!
This is Carpenter on autopilot following the inexplicable failing of his previous movie but he manages to pull an entertaining enough genre piece out of a silly one-note concept. Not only that put he really captures a great performance out of Gordon who portrays Arnie’s descent into complete insanity (something I’m becoming all too familiar with at the moment!) with more grit and conviction then is required for this sort of film. A recommendable slice of nonsense only marred by that selfish bitch Alexandra Paul not getting her titties out! Spoilsport!
1850 – 2040: Starman
Following the commercial success of Christine, Carpenter found himself momentarily semi-A-listed by the studios. Having been offered Top Gun, an Exorcist sequel and… allegedly… Beverly Hills Cop amongst others to direct, he turned them all down. He was finding himself in the same ‘club’ as fellow director David Cronenberg: a director who the studios had been weary of for some time but following one of his ‘mainstream’ movies actually making money, they were coming calling with all sorts of projects. He instead opted to make a romantic science fiction odyssey with Tom Cruise. Cruise, however, found the project clashed with the making of the very movie Carpenter had turned down: Top Gun!
Carpenter retooled the script and went for Jeff Bridges instead, and cast then suitably hot, post-Raiders of the Lost Ark, Karen Allen in the story of Starman (Bridges), an innocent, inquisitive alien life form that has been shot down over Wisconsin. When he arrives at the remote cabin of Jenny Hayden (Allen), a grieving young widow, he clones himself in the form of her recently dead husband in an attempt not to scare her. Eventually convincing her of his plight, the Starman explains that if he does not get to Arizona in order to meet his mothership within three days he will die, and in turn the pair set off on a road trip across America. En route, despite being chased by government agents (led by Charles Martin Smith) who want to capture the alien dead or alive for experimentation, Jenny finds herself becoming able to connect and love again with the innocent soul inside the body of the man she thought she had lost forever.
At first glance Starman smacks a little of Carpenter replying to the audience that didn’t find his last science-fiction effort, The Thing, to be the classic that it so clearly is. Carpenter commented at the time and has done repeatedly since that the problem with The Thing was that it was released at the time of Spielberg’s ET and the audience couldn’t cope with the idea of aliens actually being ‘nasty’. Here he embraces Spielberg’s notion and runs with it.
I hadn’t seen this movie in a long, long, long, long time. I’ve had it on DVD for a while now and never really dove into it apart from that initial first viewing when I brought it home. I’ve always discounted it as the runt of Carpenter’s early litter and an attempt to keep the mainstream momentum going for himself following the success of Christine. Drunk or not and despite being a little distracted by why the pizza delivery guy hadn’t arrived yet, I fell hugely in love with this film. The note perfect performances, the subtle direction, the achingly lovely romance at the core of the film, it just all really took me by surprise. By the time Starman and Jenny come to make love in the train carriage, I found myself drunkenly slurring into the Dictaphone “Man, this is really surprisingly fucking touching stuff!”
The big surprise of the marathon so far is definitely this film. A severely under-rated piece of 80s cinema, in my humble opinion! Bridges is awesome in this film. He really doesn’t overplay the whole ‘alien on earth’ thing! And Allen? Karen Allen is a forgotten hottie! I think I was drunk enough to be able to cry at the rather touching ending had it not been for the fact that I allowed myself to get distracted by what a threesome with Karen Allen and Adrienne Barbeau would be like. Adrienne could balance herself on Karen’s back whilst I take her from behind and I could put my face in her… Pizza man is here! Damn it!
Breaktime again! Have you all still got your bits of paper from the first intermission? Ok, hold them up to the screen again! Pizza eating, toilet usuage, stretch of the legs, quick run down the street to get some more cigarettes and…
TO BE CONTINUED
2 Responses to “LESSONS IN CARPENTERY: Part 1 – The Slow Climb To The Edge Of Hell”
This was a film that I loved a lot when I was a kid. I preferred it to ET because Jeff Bridges was in it and even then I knew he was great. It’s really great and not revered enough. I think The Fog is ace too, partly because I quite fancy one of Carpenter’s favourite actresses (her name escapes me) but she’s killed in both Assault and Halloween and yet survives The Fog, yay!
Adrienne’s Barbeau-bots get me everytime in The Fog!
Hell, right up to Starman is pretty much Hitchcock perfect as far as Carpenter’s filmography goes.
He’s one of the best directors of all time. He just got a little left behind although he did make Ghosts of Mars, which had the ultimate action pairing of Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube so, uh, he’s still got it! Ha ha ha!
Trackbacks
What's Your Opinion?