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?