Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Porchnow, Charlton Heston
Have I seen it Before: Oh, sure. Oddly enough, my strongest memory of the film comes not from the film itself, but from the TV spots, ominously warning a ten-year-old me that, “In 1978, he scared you with… <Halloween>… In 1983, he terrified you with… <Christine>… His name is John Carpenter. It’s 1995.” Definitely inflamed the imagination, considering that was at a time when I had seen none of those films. Then again, if the ad campaign only served to entrance ten-year-old boys who couldn’t get a ticket under their own power, no wonder the film (yet again, for Carpenter) tanked at the box office.
Did I Like It: The man was ahead of his time, though. This would be right at home with many of the elevated horror films coming out today. No wonder Carpenter doesn’t really want to make films anymore. He’s pretty much already made every kind of film that might be able to get any kind of money behind it*.
Or maybe Carpenter was at exactly the right place and time to make this movie. Between this and <Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)>, there was a brief moment, just post-proper-Krueger where New Line was willing to embrace meta-horror before the movies really hadn’t even tried to grasp such a concept.
Philosophically, I’d say it’s a good thing that Memoirs of an Invisible Man happened, even if that film doesn’t amount to much of anything. It brough Neill and Carpenter together. Given Neill’s association with <Jurassic Park (1993)>, he was probably able to get any number of films off the ground, and that he was more into the idea of a Lovecraft-infused Carpenter horror picture. He provides an interesting counterpoint to Carpenter’s normal muse, Kurt Russell. It’s nice when Number 1 on the call sheet is an Olympic level asshole, but number 2 becomes your buddy.
My only qualm, and it is a minor one, is that the climax feels alternately cheap and rushed, to the point where the eldritch-y horror of the whole thing culminates in what amounts to a clip show of the movie I just watched. A constraint of budget, or a nervous studio dealing with an auteur who hadn’t had a hit in a number of years**, but I smell a film whose true ambitions for Weird-with-a-capital-w didn’t make it to opening weekend. Somebody ought to write a book about all the films of the early-to-mid nineties that mutated heavily in the editing room. Maybe I should…?
*Other than a superhero film. Could you imagine? Then again, <Starman (1992)> and <Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)> are out there. That probably shouldn’t count.
**Doubtful, as the head of production at the studio was the screenwriter, although a quick look at IMDB might point to some New Nightmare envy, especially after one of the only films for the studio he wrote was <Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).>