Vampires (1998)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, Sheryl Lee, Thomas Ian Griffith

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: And I’m not as frustrated with myself on that one, as I have been with my other blind spots in the Carpenter canon.

I’m never more struck by the idea of the alternative utopia than I am when watching movies. We think Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) would have been better if Colin Trevorrow had been allowed to make his version, but he also made Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), so it’s not like if his version of that other film came together, it wouldn’t be riddled with flaws, too. If Tim Burton had made a third Batman film, it would have been far superior to Batman Forever (1995), but I also have the suspicion that he would have tired of the series, been hamstrung by the studio, or both. I’m also tempted to think that Halloween H20 (1998) would have been much better if Carpenter had been involved, but his track record in the 90s was so thoroughly spotty, and with a climax that, we might be better off imagining Carpenter fixing every horror movie we thought went wrong than actually getting to see the movie.

This is all to say, I’m not really enjoying the film, and it only partially has to do with the fact that I can’t stand to look at James Woods for longer than a few minutes, anyway. Here, he’s offering the worst kind of self-conscious, affected performance. It’s no wonder that his greatest work has been as supporting heavies in other films. It’s also no wonder that he can’t get arrested anymore, but that’s another story all together. The best performance in the whole film is Daniel Baldwin, and that’s only because he takes a lighter to his arm in such a way that I’m left with the only conclusion that he felt every flick of that flame.

The movie is filled to the brim with too much meaningless exposition, and far too many bad special effects to have any hope to truly enjoy it. It’s a shame so many of Carpenters films in the 80s were great but under appreciated, marching through his 90s films is watching him become disenchanted with filmmaking all together.

At this point I almost don’t want to watch Ghosts of Mars (2001). I may not like any Carpenter movies after that… No, that’s crazy. I’ll always have The Thing (1982), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and of course, Halloween (1978).

Escape From L.A. (1996)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda

Have I Seen it Before: Admittedly, no. As much as I will spend my time professing love for Carpenter, I’ve had more than a few blind spots when it came to his later work, a set of blind spots I’ve been spending all summer trying to shore up.

Did I Like It: Carpenter proclaims that this is better than <Escape from New York (1981)> , which always seemed like the kind of thing the guy who apparently just directed an entire TV series from his couch would say…

But God help me, he might have been right. It wouldn’t be hard to write this film off as a remake-bordering-on-rip-off of New York, but I can’t avoid thinking about it as a real attempt to make the movie that Carpenter, Russell, and crew wanted to make all along. The original film takes place in a dystopia for the sake of dystopia, whereas the world of President Adam (Cliff Robertson) is an insane Christian Theocracy* that now feels less like speculative fiction, and more like sober reporting on the issues of the day.

Things start off here great stylistically from the opening credits. The cast is pound-for-pound surprisingly great, and Carpenter’s score is back in fine form. Carpenter’s melodies quickly take a back seat to the larger portion of Shirley Walker’s score, but the balance here is certainly better than in <Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)>, and if you’ve got to move away from a Carpenter score, you could do a lot worse than the musical voice behind Batman: The Animated Series.

Sure, there are some flaws here. The special effects are nearly wall-to-wall early CGI, where the original adventures of Snake Plisskin (Russell) were a triumph of practical effects, even in the parts of the film you thought were early, experimental CGI. Also, your individual mileage with the movie will vary directly with the degree to which you might enjoy depictions of surfing in movies, which isn’t really me.

*You know, as opposed to the really reasonable Christian theocracies that are out there.

Dark Star (1974)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Dan O’Bannon, Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. In my head, this movie is playing in my dorm room at some point, but any memories beyond the malevolent bouncing rubber ball (Nick Castle) have dimmed over time.

Did I Like It: I try not to look to other reviews as I begin my own. Too much seeps in and I wonder if I’m offering my own views. I couldn’t help, however, noting that star, screenwriter, production designer, and special effects technician Dan O’Bannon felt as if this collaboration with Carpenter started out as the greatest student film ever created, and ended up being one of the sloppier professional films ever released. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more aware self-assessment from a filmmaker.

And it’s interesting enough on that front. I would have loved to see more of the filmmaker Carpenter was about to become, but that doesn’t really come into play until <Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)>. Maybe if he had decided to remake <Forbidden Planet (1956)>* instead of <The Thing From Another World (1951)>, but that wasn’t the world we live in.

Thus, it ends up being a a pretty strong argument against the ubiquity of the auteur theory. This is largely O’Bannon’s film, and while it certainly reflects the work he would soon do in <Alien (1979)>, but there’s more than enough of <Total Recall (1990)> and his optical computer display work in <Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)> to see just where this film crawled so others could run. In fact it is the test run for so much of what becomes Alien, that those aforementioned fuzzy memories I had of the bouncing ball I thought were the crux of the film. Unfortunately, there are more than a few bits added in to pad out the running time, and not all of them work wit hthe same embryonic interest.

*A prospect which I’ve never found any evidence was ever on Carpenter’s radar, but he jammed two movies into <Halloween (1978)>, so don’t tell me I’m just pulling that thing out of nowhere.

Village of the Damned (1995)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Christopher Reeve, Linda Kozlowski, Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m not 100% sure how, when my average of watching some of Carpenter’s later films has been low for quite a while, but I imagine it showed up on a Netflix recommendation at some point, and the thought becomes, “John Carpenter and Christopher Reeve? What could possibly go wrong?”

Did I Like It: And nothing much really does go wrong, so there’s that, but I can’t report much goes right, either.

With every one of Carpenter’s later movies, I keep lamenting the fact that at a certain point Dean Cundey stopped shooting his pictures. I mean, I guess Cundey at this moment is off shooting movies for Spielberg and the like, but is it really that hard for him to make the time for his older friend Carpenter? It seems like Carpenter is in a pattern with every othe movie in this phase of his career. With They Live (1988), I’m very nearly prepared to let Cundey go the way he wants to go (which was apparently directing Honey We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)) and just go withe the flow and accept what Gary B. Kibbe has to offer. Then I’m struck with Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), and I yearn for Carpenter’s glory days. But then, right on schedule In The Mouth of Madness (1994) threatens me with a Carpenter renaissance.

And now we’re here. One might want to nitpick the little things that went wrong. The special effects aren’t anything beyond the 1960 original, which really leaves one to wonder why they felt the need to remake the story in the first place. Reeve is solid, but he managed to be solid in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), so that defense will hardly work in the film’s defense. Alley made her bones in genre movies (or rather the genre movie, by way of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and I can’t ever dismiss someone who was in that movie), but it feels like she has just spent too much time doing sitcoms (again, anyone on Cheers on which I cannot and will not turn my back) to bring any degree of earnestness to really much of anything.

Ultimately, there is one problem that governs the film’s failures. Carpenter has been on the record saying he was a gun-for-hire (despite him getting his name above the title once more) , but there is not a moment where I needed him to tell me that. Everything here is perfunctory, and that is the last thing one wants to see from a Carpenter film. Ultimately, it’s unfair to think that Cundey shooting the thing would have saved much of anything.

In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

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).>

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly (and somewhat horrifyingly, as it turns out) enough, I’m reasonably certain that this is the only of Carpenter’s directorial efforts (so far… he said somewhat hopefully, while at the same time ignoring The Ward (2010)) that I saw during its original theatrical run.

Did I Like It: I mean, I don’t want to knock a guy like Carpenter while he’s down. But if he were here, I can’t imagine he’d defend the movie. Hell, it appears to be his only directorial effort that doesn’t have his name above the title. Everything here seems like it almost works, which is all the more frustrating. Carpenter making what amounts to a loose remake of <North by Northwest (1959)> is strong enough of a pitch to paper over most problems in most movies. Now that I type this, I think we should all collectively let him just do that. He can do it from his couch. We’re not that picky.

The special effects are a unique blend. We have the pointedly retro, as Chase pulls a pretty eerie echo of Claude Rains unwrapping of the bandages from The Invisible Man (1933), and what I’m pretty sure is some stop motion animation when Chase tries to prove to a camera in an empty room that he is in fact invisible by chewing some gum. It also manage to display some more cutting edge tricks by animating just what happens to an invisible body when it tries to smoke or eat.

And that’s where things start to fall apart. There are few performers that come to mind who are more throughly dominated by their ego than Chevy Chase. Hence, any attempt the film makes to reach for tragedy or pathos in the plight of Nick Halloway have to be immediately undone because in the 90s Chase couldn’t possibly end a film without him successfully seducing his leading lady. He’s not very believable or interesting in the role, and in a trend that was going to come up a lot more as the 90s trudged on for him, he isn’t very funny, either. What else is there? Somewhere in that spectrum had to be where he was aiming.

They Live (1988)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, Raymond St. Jacques

Have I Seen it Before: I had to have, right? The images are so indelible that I know them as much as anyone. But it’s possible, and I’m just going to put it at “slightly possible” that I’ve never actually sat down and watched the film from beginning to end. I’m going to say yes, as that is the only way I think I can look at myself in the mirror anymore, but the doubt exists.

Did I Like It: Up until this point—and really, after it as well—I would never dream of describing Carpenter as a political filmmaker. Sure, Escape from New York (1981) has an institutional nihilism at its core, but that is a statement about politics and the establishment, not a specific statement at the expense of the politics of a particular age or the figures which dominated it.

Rejecting the excesses of the Reagan years and ensuring that it was out and available for people the week George H.W. Bush won the election to give everybody four more years of Reaganomics (you know, as a treat) is a ballsy move, and in doing so managed to find a new frontier in unpredictability in his work… that was sadly rapidly snuffed out by uncaring studios.

The film is not without its flaws. There’s a reason that Roddy Piper didn’t rise to the level of movie stardom enjoyed by a Rock or even a Hulk Hogan. He was probably a fine wrestler in his day, but that involves exhibiting an attitude, which he does here in spades. Unfortunately, he doesn’t embody a vibe, which movie stars both great and not-so-great manage to do. It might have been too much of a good thing, but Kurt Russell could have played the hell out of Nada, and reuniting him with David would have been icing on the cake.

Also, it’s a small moment, but I’ve got to wonder what Siskel thought about specifically being called out as a Ghoul. It was far subtler than the hits they took in <Godzilla (1998)>, but unfortunately the extensive archive of their reviews available on Youtube came up short in this regard. Even Ebert’s website would seem to indicate that he (and possibly Siskel) never reviewed the film at all.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know, I know. And in an interesting turn of events, I would normally watch this film later this year for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, but it is still up next on my summer of Carpenter re-watches, so that will certainly save me the time of having to do my podcast notes and review later.

Did I Like It: I had that sinking feeling about halfway through the film that I wasn’t going to enjoy this as much as some of Carpenter’s other films. I’ve said before that Carpenter works best in a milieu of ruthless simplicity, and this one may just have too many characters for its limited setting. To the film’s credit, there’s a running gag where even the characters—trying to wrap their heads around the scientific and theological implications of the apocalypse—can’t seem to remember names and faces of everyone involved in the plot.

Even in a lesser Carpenter film, there are joys to behold. For one thing, there are some legitimately bewildering things done with insects in the film, to the point where I somehow have an even lower opinion of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). And there frankly should be a lot more films that hinge on Donald Pleasance—here called simply “Priest,” just in case anyone was worried about Carpenter completely abandoning his ruthless simplicity—monologuing about the nature of “pure evil.”

These are perhaps trivial things to pick out, the kind of things a critic might reach for when discussing a film they don’t really like, but something happened to me as the film concludes. I started thinking of it less as an overstuffed, claustrophobic riff on The Exorcist (1973), and more of an Assault on Parish 13. I really started to like it, and the ending was so authentically unnerving that I couldn’t help but love it. Goddamnit, Carpenter. You got me again!

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah. Of all Carpenter’s films, this is the one I’ve never quite loved as much as other people (Some eagle-eyed readers will note I’ve always been a little cool on The Fog (1980), but I really do prefer to think people are more with me than not there.)

Did I Like It: That’s all different now. Where some of Carpenter’s best films are exercises in ruthless simplicity, this is a sometimes overwhelming feast for the senses, but in true Carpenter fashion, it wastes no time getting to what it promises, and seeing Russell let loose and have fun with Carpenter at his side.

And then I’m starting to run out of things to say about the film. Maybe I don’t like it as much as I want to. Is it because it might be a bit problematic around the edges, featuring an asian-influenced story brought to you by a white director and two white leads? It’s certainly possible, but I already had this reaction when I first saw the movie. Also, Burton is pretty thoroughly depicted as something of an idiot in over his head, so I think (read: want to believe) that counts for something.

Is the vibe of the film just a bit too aggressively 80s for my taste? Probably. I always blanche at that, wanting my films (and Carpenter certainly does this with many of his earlier works) to have a timeless quality to them.

Maybe the real problem is that Carpenter’s tough luck in the box office of this era, he couldn’t launch forth with the sequels he might have been actually interested in making. The Thing (1982) and Escape from New York (1981) (I know; bad example), but this is ultimately a good looking pilot for a series the network didn’t pick up. This is ultimately a beginning with—through no fault of Russell or Carpenter—no follow through.

Starman (1984)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: First of all, I’m just going to say this part simply and quickly. Any movie where the antagonist has a complete change of heart and helps the heroes escape after getting a dressing down from his superiors for being “a GS-11.” I like that a lot. I had forgotten about it. Even if this hadn’t been one of Carpenter’s films, I would have on the whole liked it quite a bit.

That being said, it’s weird to see Carpenter—and he really didn’t try it again, until Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) maybe—make a film that doesn’t have a pitch black heart.

It’s even weirder that Carpenter made this film shortly after—Christine (1983) only remains in the gap—he made the bleakest tale of alien visitation, The Thing (1982).

But, at his best, that’s what John Carpenter does: surprise.

It surprises not only in Carpenter’s choice of genre—alien invasion as hybrid of mediation on grief, romantic comedy, and road picture—but also in terms of casting. Carpenter would have been forgiven for using the Robert De Niro to his Scorsese and putting Kurt Russell in the role of Starman. That would have been a mistake, though. Whether Carpenter had the presence of mind to go another way, or he had the idea thrust upon him by the studio, but there’s an inquisitive, guileless innocence to Bridges that Russell didn’t even have when he was outwitting Cesar Romero.

It almost, just almost, makes one want to ignore that Carpenter isn’t using Dean Cundey as cinematographer. It might be a bit too much to allow for Carpenter to not writing the score. Unless you’ve managed to get Ennio Morricone, there’s really no excuse for that kind of mis-fire.

Christine (1983)

DIRECTOR: John Carpenter

CAST: Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Robert Prosky

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE: Funny you should mention that. (The answer is yes.)

But when I saw Halloween Ends (2022) last year, I even remarked at the time, “Oh. This one has an auto garage as one of the central locations. That must be a reference to Christine.”

At the time, it had probably been twenty years since I had last seen the film. Upon watching this film again, I realize I may have been underselling it. I even had the patently ridiculous thought while watching this that I wish the powers that be made legacy sequels to all of Carpenter’s library, when I realized that Ends is a slavishly devoted to this film, as Green’s Halloween (2018) was to Halloween (1978).

And that’s good. We may be slightly flirting with the period (long since gone now) where Carpenter could be talked into directing a movie for the money or to position himself better in his career. Dean Cundey might not be shooting things for him anymore (and would only intermittently return), but we have a full Carpenter score to feast our ears upon once again.

Is it a little silly (bordering on Love Bug-ish) to have a car be the unrelenting embodiment (a Carpenter archetype, to be sure) of death and chaos? Sure. That does sap the film of some scares, but there really wouldn’t be a way to adapt King’s novel without making it about a car, so I’m willing to give the man a pass, even though he took this movie as things had stalled on the eventual Firestarter (1984), which he was slated to direct at that point. Any improvement in Firestarter would have been a quantum leap forward (although the recent remake muddles that declaration somewhat).

And yet there is tension—if not terror—in a teenage guy getting his first taste of power and freedom behind the wheel, and that set of wheels eventually completely subsumes him. I can’t deny that.

The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Richard Dysart

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, of course. In fact, I was a little surprised that I hadn’t written a review of this one, as the we did do the show on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, but it must have been in that brief time between when I joined the show and when I started these reviews.

Did I Like It: An idiot out there might say—and probably did when this film was initially released—that decided that Carpenter had effectively run out of juice after Halloween (1978)*.

This film is an absolute triumph of everything Carpenter excels at. It is lean. It is mean. What it adds to the proceedings that Carpenter’s earlier films—largely out of necessity—lacked is a visceral (and I do mean of, pertaining to, or possessing qualities of viscera…) . The various Thing-creatures are some of the most nauseating and unnerving creature work in the movies. Those images stuck with me before I ever even managed to see the movie. I remember a kid’s book from the library I devoured when I couldn’t have been any older than six or seven featuring various movie monsters. Godzilla was there, and Dracula, but also the recently revealed Norris-Thing (Charles Hallahan), all contorted face and absurd limbs. It stuck with me then, and it sticks with me now.

What’s more, this film is still unnerving and still scary as hell. The scene where MacReady (Russell) is testing the blood of the other men. I’ve seen this film. I know how it ends. But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel every inch of the tension as it proceeds, and I’ll be doubly damned if I wasn’t completely thrown for a loop when the blood finally reacted.

If a movie can blow past forty and still hold power on multiple viewings, that’s magic of a high order, and no one can take that away from Carpenter. He certainly never ran out of juice by the time The Thing was released, and for my money he never did. He may have eventually given it up after he didn’t have any use for it anymore, but that’s up for debate.

*The original The Thing from Another World (1951) was, naturally one of the films playing on TV during Carpenter’s breakthrough hit. The other was Forbidden Planet (1956), and I’ll never not wonder what Carpenter’s remake of that film could have been like. Might even be better that it is always something that I’ll have to just imagine… Unless, you know, he decides to make one on his couch. It just now occurred to me that Russell would probably have to play the Walter Pidgeon role… Which, now that I think about it is essentially Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2019). God damn that was a long footnote…

The Fog (1980)

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.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Tony Burton

Have I Seen it Before: All right, fine. Confession time. Never. It’s always floated around the periphery for me, but I never got to it. One screening of the recent 4K restoration at Circle Cinema later, and there was little chance I was going to miss it.

Did I Like It: There’s something to be said for having staggering blind spots in your canon of. absolute greats. I’ve seen every Orson Welles film ever released, so I will never see Citizen Kane (1941), Touch of Evil (1958), or F for Fake (1973) for the first time.

So, here, to see a John Carpenter movie—and an early John Carpenter movie, at that—for the first time is a pleasure unique in the movies. The film is lean and angry, but hungry to impress, far before Carpenter had fallen out of love with making movies (I’m looking in your direction, The Ward (2010)). Every character, from the three leads down to the silent gang members and their poor, hapless target, oozes b-movie cool. In lesser hands, that B-quality is bound to make a film forgettable, but Carpenter has absolute, ruthless control over every image and sound you encounter that you suddenly remember why John Carpenter has deserved his name over the title of every feature he’s ever wrought.

I left the theater positively buzzing, and almost entirely not because of my caffeine intake that day. I immediately searched for the score on my phone to listen to as I drove home, but only found a few instances of the main title to slake my thirst. Had I not had other things to do, I probably would have gone to each and every one of the limited screenings going on that weekend.

But now I can never see it for the first time ever again. Well, crap.

*I might have been so enraptured of the film and taken leave of my senses, but did the precinct always have a sign on it that labeled it as number 14?

Escape from New York (1981)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I remember there was a stretch of time there during a particularly ice storm in 2007 where I was desperate to watch this film (in addition to Robocop 2 (1990) for reasons which are still unclear to me), but couldn’t get it running without power to a DVD player. Any time there is cold temperatures, I’m flooded with a desire to watch this movie. How I haven’t watched it since starting these reviews is beyond me.

Did I Like It: So much about this film feels like it is of the later Carpenter period, but it is only three years after he leapt on to the scene with Halloween (1978) almost immediately after The Fog (1980), almost immediately before Carpenter binge-drank his way through the screenwriting process which bound Michael Myers and Laurie Strode as siblings for decades in Halloween II (1981). Maybe it’s the presence of Kurt Russell, which more than any other single element props up Carpenter’s ambition to fuse westerns and sci-fi films together and for all time. Russell channels sufficient Clint Eastwood energy as Plissken and Carpenter wants to be—if not quite Sergio Leone—at least John Ford. They even managed to bring Lee Van Cleef along for the ride, for good measure. The two of them trying their best to be the second coming of that is not a complaint, by the way. Far from it. There are few things in movies I’d rather watch than that pairing with that ambition than almost any other movie combination. Ok, so I want to wrap up the review and watch The Thing (1982) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) as soon as possible, don’t I?

Other little parts of the film delight, and of course I’m talking mostly about the hilariously miscast, creepiest British man who ever lived Donald Pleasance as the President of the United States. I mean that sincerely. I love it. Pitching that man playing the American President is enough to sell a movie on its own merits.

The Ward (2010)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Jared Harris

Have I Seen it Before: No. I acquired it during one of my flea market runs for DVDs. Had it not had the Carpenter moniker on it, it would have never occurred to me to watch the film, much less own it.

Did I Like It: Without going into too much detail about the movie itself, as I finally watched the movie, I knew without any shred of doubt that I would never watch it again, thus it immediately went not on the shelf my standing disc collection, but instead on the pile of DVDs to be sold or donated somewhere.

Want to know more about the movie? The plot is barely non-existant, and the twist ending has the unusual distinction of feeling cliched, tacked on, and not actually mean anything in favor of one more jump scare in the film’s last moment. It’s barely an hour and a half, but feels much longer.

Carpenter hasn’t really made a good film since arguably In the Mouth of Madness (1994) and undeniably since They Live (1988). He had taken a ten-year break before coming back to direct here, He has yet to direct anything since, and I think that’s probably the right decision. He lost interest in making great films a long time ago.

But the elements that would have made this a diverting way to spend just over an hour weren’t even there. The film makes pretty good use of the wide screen format, but long gone are the days of his collaborations with cinematographer Dean Cundey. He didn’t even do the score. A thorough disappointment all around.

Is it sad or sort of okay if a once-great director just runs out of steam one day? I for one think that’s fine. The sentiment surely doesn’t save this film, but no one can take away the fact that John Carpenter made Halloween (1978).

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)

In my nearly fevered anticipation for the forthcoming rebootquel Halloween (2018), I thought I might re-watch all of the original series(es). My gushing in this entry leads me to think that I may not have the strength to suffer through Rob Zombie again, to say nothing of Paul Rudd. We’ll see.

Director: John Carpenter’s John Carpenter

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, and (ahem.) P.J. Soles.

Have I Seen it Before: I’ve at least seen it as many times as Anchor Bay has released it on either DVD or Blu Ray, so that’s got to put it somewhere in the 100s.

Did I Like It: Oh, how do I count the ways?

It will be supremely difficult to write thoughtful reviews about some of my greatest-of-all-time movies. John Carpenter’s Halloween is one of them. The acting is sublimely modulated cheese, especially with the world’s supreme scene chewer Donald “I SHOT HIM SIX TIMES” Pleasance. The cinematography is perfect. Each frame harnesses a perfect sublime banality, that when the horror really kicks into high gear, the tension is there, but there’s also a palpable sense of tragedy at the same time. The music is so beyond perfect that it a) completely removes any pretext at criticism I might hope to reach for, b) makes the film without this music unimaginable, and c) elevates the sequels and (ugh) remakes into (on average) watchability.

And all of it was made with next to nothing. It is an unbelievable achievement that no amount of sequels, copy-cats or (again, ugh) remakes could hope to replicate, nor ruin.

Now, the long arm of legacy is what this film consistently has to fight against, but if you can put yourself in the mindset of someone living in a universe where the other films don’t exist (a feat which I think is going to become significantly easier in a few weeks), the film is even more unnerving. Here Michael Myers (Will Sandin as a child, Tony Moran unmasked as the adult Myers, and Nick Castle as the form commonly referred to as “The Shape”) isn’t the Freshman Abnormal Psych paper of the latest Rob Zombie films, the scion of the Cult of Thorn, Laurie’s brother, Jamie’s uncle, or budding Dangertainment star*. He was purely a kid—and he could have been any kid you knew growing up—who one day picked up a really sharp knife and never looked back. He slithers through the vast majority of the movie simply watching his prey, and when the moment comes, he zeroes in to take what he wants, simply because he wants it, and should therefore be entitled. He is every man, and if we’ve learned anything recently, he cannot be stopped.

That’s the movie I love, and if you don’t… Well, then fuck you, Rob Zombie.

That may be harsh, but it’s not like I don’t totally mean it. Totally.

*God, when you really unpack Halloween: Resurrection (2002), the more of a headache it becomes.