Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Houseman, Janet Leigh
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. It’s not like there were Carpenter movies other than Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) that I have been spending all of these years missing.
Did I Like It: Here’s the problem: I never felt like I got this one entirely. It isn’t a slasher movie, but it wasn’t like people were going to give Carpenter big movie money in 1980 on the heels of Halloween (1978) for anything without stabbings. It’s a ghost story, one supposes, but those ghosts—when they aren’t silent guys who stab things—take the form of one of the most slowly moving, easily avoidable natural phenomena of which I can readily think.
Carpenter himself didn’t feel like the film worked on first blush, and who am I to argue with the master? It isn’t all that scary. Also, there’s no Donald Pleasance in sight, and there really is no excuse for a Carpenter movie to not have Donald Pleasance prior to 1995*. Most damningly, much of the third act groans from the weight of explaining just what is within that fog, and why it wants to wreak just that much havoc. Carpenter at his best, and certainly his two previous films benefit from a ruthless minimalism in their thrills. Maybe this motif was rendered against his better judgment, or perhaps the demands of the horror marketplace and success diminished him for a moment. Ultimately, it’s not so much a case of the difficult second album, but more of a case of the difficult second album about which anyone could be bothered to pay attention.
And yet, it is a Carpenter film and can never be fully dismissed. First of all, he scored the thing, and as much as I might lament him not directing anymore, the fact that he is still producing scores is a throughly satisfying consolation prize. Secondly, even though the fog and what lives within it never quite work, I recognize an idea of unknowable horror that exists in his previous work and that he continues to reckon with. It will never be top tier Carpenter, but him on his worst day (The Ward (2010) not withstanding) is better than almost anybody of his or anyone else’s era.
*Is there a correlation between Pleasance’s passing and the Carpenter’s severe waning interest in continuing to make movies? I’m not seeing a lack of one, to be sure. Not even an injection of Kurt Russell in his life could keep things from eventually unravelling.