Classic Movie Review: Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness (1987) 

Directed by: John Carpenter.

Written by: John Carpenter (as Martin Quatermass).

Starring: Donald Pleasence (Priest), Jameson Parker (Brian Marsh), Victor Wong (Prof. Howard Birack), Lisa Blount (Catherine Danforth), Dennis Dun (Walter), Susan Blanchard (Kelly), Anne Marie Howard (Susan Cabot), Ann Yen (Lisa), Ken Wright (Lomax), Dirk Blocker (Mullins), Jessie Lawrence Ferguson (Calder), Peter Jason (Dr. Paul Leahy), Robert Grasmere (Frank Wyndham), Thom Bray (Etchinson), Joanna Merlin (Bag Lady), Alice Cooper (Street Schizo), Betty Ramey (Nun). 

 

No one thinks that Prince of Darkness is one of John Carpenter’s masterpieces- although it has gained a cult following after an initially bad reception when it released in 1987. This was Carpenter returning to his lower budget horror roots after Starman and Big Trouble in Little China – two bigger budget films, that weren’t huge hits at the time. In many ways, it does feel like Carpenter playing homage to himself – he has a group of people trapped in a single building by the hordes outside a la Assault on Precinct 13, and has a villain that can end up inhabiting the people, one at a time, so you’re not quite sure who to trust a la The Thing. Hell, it has Donald Pleasance in it as a Priest, and while his name isn’t said in the movie itself, in the credits, it is Father Loomis – which of course is the name of his Halloween character. In some ways, the character is the same as well – this Priest knows that evil is coming, but cannot get people to believe him.

 

Prince of Darkness is an odd film indeed. Carpenter had an interest in quantum mechanics and physics at the time, and he seems to be setting up the age-old conflict between science and religion. There is something locked in the basement of this church (considering the title of the movie, no points for guessing what) – and it has awoken, and is ready to come out. Instead of just counting on religion however to keep it contained – he calls on Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), a physics professor at a local university who enlists the help of his best students, complete with all the technology that the cast of Strange Things could dream of, to find a scientific solution to their problems. Science and religion are both in conflict in this movie, but also working together in a strange way.

 

Carpenter’s basic strategy here is the same as it was in The Thing – he wanted to build a mounting sense of dread in the movie, moving slowly, building suspense before the climax. That it isn’t as successful as it was in The Thing is obvious. Mainly that’s because Carpenter’s screenplay strains with unnecessary exposition and scientific explanations – dialogue that is deadly to deliver. The cast is mainly fairly dull – they never are able to bring to life what are basically archetypes. The couple at the center is Brian (Jameson Parker) and Catherine (Lisa Blount) – a pair of students who fall in bed, and then in love, in short order – a movie meant to make the ending hit harder, so it’s not just a bunch of cookie cutter characters being offed one by one. Blount fares better than Parker here – he really is the most bland of all bland leading men – so the ultimate ending certainly does have a kick, particularly the final shot.

 

But the star here really is Carpenter – who despite the flaws in the narrative, really does nail the mounting dread. I think some work needed to be done perhaps on the homeless horde outside to make them more menacing (and believable) than they are here. But Carpenter’s slow mounting dread is expertly handled, his score his excellent. His best decision is to shoot the dreams the team has – radio transmission from the future – or consumer grade VHS – the grainy, fuzzy look working perfect to make them even creepier. Prince of Darkness still isn’t one of Carpenter’s best films – it doesn’t hold a candle to Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Thing or Christine – and it doesn’t have the ambition of its follow-up – They Live – but it’s better than they gave it credit for in 1987 – and worth the attention of the horror auteur’s fans.

Classic Movie Review: The Thing (1982)

The Thing (1982)

Directed by: John Carpenter.

Written by: Bill Lancaster based on the story by John W. Campbell Jr.

Starring: Kurt Russell (MacReady), Wilford Brimley (Dr. Blair), T.K. Carter (Nauls), David Clennon (Palmer), Keith David (Childs), Richard Dysart (Dr. Copper), Charles Hallahan (Vance Norris), Peter Maloney (George Bennings), Richard Masur (Clark), Donald Moffat (Garry), Joel Polis (Fuchs).

 

The first film I thought to rewatch when a global pandemic trapped us all in our homes with our loved ones for days, weeks, perhaps months on end was not Steven Soderberg’s Contagion – I still haven’t ventured back into that one yet, but likely will this week, but John Carpenter’s The Thing instead. This is perhaps Carpenter’s best film (Halloween can also credibly make that claim) – a paranoid creature feature with great special effects, but is all the scarier simply when it traps its characters in a room together, no one quite sure if the others are still who they say they are, with no way to escape. Like much of Carpenter’s work, The Thing wasn’t quite a critical or commercial hit when it came out in 1982 – maybe it was the odd decision to release this cold, snowbound movie in June, maybe it was because the film came out just three weeks after Poltergeist and two weeks after E.T. (when was the last time we had a summer with a trio of mainstream movies that stellar?) – but it has rightly gone onto be recognized as the horror classic it so clearly is.

 

The story is simple enough – a group of men are stuck at an Antarctic science station – prepared, already, to spend many long claustrophobic months together, when something strange happens – a dog comes running into camp, followed by a helicopter, who has one very determined Norwegian leaning out the side trying to gun down the dog. Needless to say, it is the dog who survives – not the Norwegians – but the dog isn’t really a dog anymore – but instead is something the Norwegians found frozen in the ice, that has no dethawed. And it can take the shape of anyone it so desires. It takes the men a while to realize this of course – but once they do, they don’t handle it well.

 

What’s remarkable about The Thing is how much Carpenter is able to convey, while telling us so little. He dives into the story headlong, right with that dog running across the snowy terrain, being chased by the helicopter, and unlike say Alien or Jaws, he doesn’t take his time revealing the monster itself. It’s that same night, when the dog keeper places their new arrival with the other that it is revealed to be not like other dogs – in a virtuoso special effects sequence that surely could be done with CGI now, but wouldn’t have the same impact. Often when filmmakers attempt this – diving into the story, getting to the “good stuff” quickly – they sacrificed elements like story and character. Not for Carpenter – it helps that the narrative is relatively simple and straight forward, but as the movie progresses you certainly understand all you need to know about the main characters – Kurt Russell’s MacReady, the closest thing the film has to a hero, although that may be because we spend the most time with him, since he also does things that if he wasn’t out hero, would make him the villain. Or Wilford Brimley’s Dr. Blair – who seems, well, like a warm Wilford Brimley character until he isn’t. Or the hotheaded Childs played by Keith David – who remains mysterious to the end. And on and on – I’m not suggesting that these are particularly deep characterizations, just that they are as deep as they need to be to make them not just interchangeable characters, simply there to increase the blood flow – sacrificial lambs to the slaughter, even if in effect they kind of are.

 

The special effects, strangely, seem to be what drew the ire of contemporary film critics at the time – Roger Ebert called it a “geek show,  gross out movie … it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary” in his 2.5 star (thumbs down) review, Vincent Canby completely dismissed it “The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk”. Even reviewers who got what Carpenter were going for, didn’t seem to like it – Dave Kehr said “he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness”. I bring this up not to shit on the reviewers who either didn’t get or didn’t like The Thing in 1982 (nothing is more tiresome to me than pieces like that) – because on one level, I get them. I do wonder what movies in the CGI age will end up being regarded like The Thing is today – and whether when that movie emerges, it will be one that I dismissed as more CGI soup. When you watch lot of movie with special effects, they can blend together to a certain degree – you can roll your eyes and think “here we go again” when the same visuals come onto the screen. Special effects can do that now – and it seems like it did it make in 1982 as well. It wasn’t even like the horror community embraced it that much – only two Saturn nominations (Best Horror Film, and Best Special Effects) – hell, the idiots at the Razzies nominated the brilliant Ennio Morricone score for Worst Score of the year.

 

But it isn’t the special effects – as wonderful as they are – that I think when I think of The Thing. It’s the long sequences of paranoid men together in a room, sizing each other up, trying to figure out who is real, and who is the Thing. The blood test sequence is the best, most sustained example of this – a sequence that goes on minute after agonizing minute, you’re starting to doubt the whole thing, they whole process, before the big reveal. It is perfectly played by the cast – but then it all is. Even the effects heavy climax is nailed by Russell, Brimley, David and T.K. Carter – the fact Carter’s Nauls simply vanishes, and we never see what happened (a budgetary restriction, which works to make the film’s ending even more ambiguous than intended. Carpenter’s The Thing is a triumph of 1980s special effects – I know some will snicker at them now, but they still work on me (and compare them to other special effects at the time – no, it isn’t Cronenberg’s The Fly level, but it’s close) – but the reason the film has lasted is because it is the exact opposite of a “geek show, a gross out movie”. Sorry Roger, you were wrong on this one.

Classic Movie Review: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Assault on Precinct 13

Directed by: John Carpenter.

Written by: John Carpenter.

Starring: Austin Stoker (Ethan Bishop), Darwin Joston (Napoleon Wilson), Laurie Zimmer (Leigh), Martin West (Lawson), Tony Burton (Wells), Charles Cyphers (Starker), Nancy Kyes (Julie), Henry Brandon (Chaney), Kim Richards (Kathy).

 

In 1976, John Carpenter was still two years away from making one of the biggest indie films of all time with Halloween, a film that would really kick off the slasher film era in earnest, and come to define his career – for good and bad. He had directed the low budget sci fi film, Dark Star (1974) before – and what he really wanted to do is make a Western – a remake of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) in fact – about a group of men (and women) holed up in a Sheriff’s office fending off a group trying to get in and kill them (Hawks had, in some ways, remade this film already – twice with El Dorado and Rio Lobo). But Carpenter knew he could never get the money to make a period piece – so instead he opted for a modern update of the Rio Bravo formula – setting his film in contemporary L.A. – at an all but abandoned Police Station in an era of town that is all but deserted – and even those who are around, are likely not to be too fond of the police, or too shocked by the sound of gunshots. If the Western genre is about how the West was won – how people took over a lawless land and imposed order on it, than Assault on Precinct 13 is almost the opposite – how they are giving the area back to lawlessness.

 

The film opens with a sequence that shows cops gunning down any number of L.A. gang members – perhaps justifiably, perhaps not, but the cops don’t seem to have much on their mind other than killing the gang members who, to be fair, are just as violent in return. From there, the main story is setup. There is a desolate L.A. police station on its last night – almost everyone else has moved to a newer one a few miles away. Ethan Wilson (Austin Stoker) is the officer tasked with being on duty at that station that night, and it’s supposed to be a quiet one. Other than a spunky secretary named Leigh (Laurie Zimmer), there isn’t many other people around. Meanwhile, a group of prisoners is set to be transported to prison hours away on a bus – including the infamous Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) – on his way to death row. Another prisoner gets sick, and the bus pulls into the all but abandoned police station – as it’s the closest one around.  Meanwhile, an asshole father is riding around with his little girl, who will not stop pestering him. The see an ice cream man – and stop to get her  some. We already know that the violent street gang is around – watching that same ice cream man – and the little girl makes a tragic decision to come back and complain about her cone – and ends up shot. The father decides to take revenge – which he does – and ends up running away from the gang, and ending up at that police station – the gang descends on the people holed up in the station, who have no way of contacting the outside world.

 

Hawks’ influence on Carpenter is clear pretty much from the beginning of the film. His characters are ones that are defined by their actions, not their words, and the people inside that building come to depend and trust each other – even if they are on opposite sides of the law. Laurie Zimmer’s Leigh is a classic Hawks-ian woman – tough and sexy in equal doses. There are recurring jokes to lighten the mood at times. The last hour of the film is basically the siege – where the nameless, faceless gang descend on the survivors, and try to wipe them out.  Its non-stop violence and bloodshed, handled with great skill by Carpenter, who shows he was already adept at staging action and violence.

 

There could have been some sort of political relevance to the film – but Carpenter seems to almost go out of his way to avoid it – particularly in terms of race. He makes the hero, Ethan Bishop a black cop, the violence killer, Napoleon, a white man and the gang that descends on them is multi-ethnic. Like Scorsese’ s Taxi Driver, released the same year, where the ending was originally written to be Travis Bickle killing all black men (it was changed to avoid more controversy), Carpenter seemingly doesn’t want to engage in the issue of race  - but in doing so, he deals with it anyway.

 

The killing of the little girl will always be the most iconic image of the film (it has certainly stayed with me) – and lets the audience know, fairly early in the proceedings that in this movie, there are no rules, and that Carpenter will do pretty much anything. It’s only after the movie that you realize that he never really does anything that shocking again.

 

Assault on Precinct 13 is ultimately a rather simple movie – bad guys want in, good guys don’t want to let them in, chaos ensues. Carpenter would, later in his career, strive for films with more subtext than this film contains – sometimes their detriment (I know They Live has a lot of fans – I’m not one of them). Here, I think there is a little bit of subtext – but I almost read it as more accidental than anything else – and ultimately unnecessary. The film is brutally effective from beginning to end, violent, entertaining and downright fun. Carpenter has made more ambitious films in his career – but not many that are better than this. No, it doesn’t quite reach the levels of Halloween or The Thing – but it comes damn close.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: They Live (1988)

They Live (1988)
Directed by: John Carpenter.
Written by: John Carpenter based on the short story by Ray Nelson.
Starring: Roddy Piper (John Nada), Keith David (Frank Armitage), Meg Foster (Holly Thompson), George 'Buck' Flower (The Drifter), Peter Jason (Gilbert), Raymond St. Jacques (Street Preacher).

I have long been a fan of John Carpenter. Films like Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Halloween (1978), The Thing (1981), Escape from New York (1982) and even, dare I saw it, Ghosts of Mars (2001) are great throwbacks to the days of Howard Hawks. His films, like the work of Hawks, has largely been conservative or right leaning. Which makes his 1988 horror-satire They Live all the more confusing, as it is certainly a left leaning movie, even as it disguises itself with right wing tropes and clichés. They Live was a reaction to 8 years of Ronald Reagan as President, and (at that time) possibly four more years under Reagon’s VP George Bush. Carpenter, who maybe more conservative than most Hollywood filmmakers, was no fan of Reagan, and he compared his Presidency to fascism and wanted to show the hypocrisy in it. Perhaps that’s why They Live is often celebrated as one of Carpenter’s best films. But to me, the satire is rather tame and toothless, the movie confused, and weighed down by clichés and a central performance by a wrestler, who let’s face it, cannot act to save his life. They are some great moments in They Live. But the whole movie adds up to very little.

Homeless after being fired from his job, construction worker John Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper) walks from Denver to L.A. looking for work. He finds it, working under the table on a construction site, but the job doesn’t pay well, so he ends up living in a shanty town that fellow worker Frank (Keith David) invites him along. Depite being homeless and unemployed John “still believes in America”, that if you work hard, you can make a success of yourself. But then he starts noticing some strange things going on in a church across the street. When he goes to investigate, he finds the constantly singing choir is just a recording. When the police invade the church – and then destroy the shanty town – John finds a box full of sunglasses, and puts a pair on. Immediately, his world changes. It goes from color to black and white. Ads no longer look the same and are now just single words or phrases that give their underlying message “Consume”, “Marry and Reproduce”, “Watch TV”, “Don’t Question Authority”, “Obey”, etc. More shockingly, some of the people he sees aren’t really people, but hideous, bug eyed aliens. It turns out that aliens have already taken over America, invisible to the naked eye. They want to make Earth into “their third world”, and all humans are either controlled by the messages in their TVs, or willing collaborators with the regime for financial payoff. The church was the headquarters of the only group committed to fighting the aliens.

I don’t know – maybe this all seemed radical back in 1988, but to me, it seems rather tame. Carpenter is obviously comparing the aliens to Reagan and his administration, who was trying to brainwash people into accepting whatever he put out there. And that’s a little bit of a stretch. But it could have easily worked. But I think Carpenter, so beholden to genres clichés, can never really get out of his own way. The film echoes Carpenter’s idol Hawks far too much – the endless fight scene between John and Frank before they can become friends, is a typical Hawks trait. As are the snappy, sexist one liners that Piper spews (which is supposed to be okay, I guess, because they’re directed at aliens posing as women, and not women themselves). Piper is essentially playing the role that Kurt Russell usually played for Carpenter. The difference is that Russell made it work, and Piper doesn’t. When he delivers the films most famous line - “I’ve come here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all out of bubble gum” –Piper cannot make it work. It just sounds dumb.

There are still some great moments in They Live – as there are in any Carpenter film. The first is the sequence following Piper first putting on the sunglasses, which is a small tour de force for Carpenter behind the camera. The sequence that ends the film is full of some great, comedic moments as well. But these moments are few and far between.

Near the end of They Live, John Carpenter has two film critics on TV (obviously meant to be Siskel and Ebert) who are exposed as aliens and complaining about “filmmakers like George A. Romero and John Carpenter” who have gone too far. This shout out to Romero, as well as putting his name in the same sentence, is supposed to signal that Carpenter wanted to make a film like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (or its sequels Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead), which combined social commentary with horror. The difference between what Romero achieved in those films (and later in Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, and even in parts of the most recent, Survival of the Dead), is that while Romero is using the zombie genre to comment on things like racism, the demise of the American family, consumerism, the military industrial complex, capitalism and war, the satire is never pushed to the front of the movie like Carpenter has done with They Live. It’s both more subtle, yet more on target and incisive than Carpenter has pulled off with They Live. That’s why Romero is a master. And why Carpenter, as good as he can be, is a step or two behind him.

DVD Review: The Ward

The Ward ** ½

Directed by: John Carpenter.

Written by: Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen.

Starring: Amber Heard (Kristen), Mamie Gummer (Emily), Danielle Panabaker (Sarah), Laura-Leigh (Zoey), Lyndsy Fonseca (Iris), Jared Harris (Dr. Stringer), Sydney Sweeney (Young Alice), Mika Boorem (Alice), Susanna Burney (Nurse Lundt), Sean Cook (Jimmy).

John Carpenter was one of the few people involved with the short lived horror series “Masters of Horror” to truly earn that title. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Carpenter was responsible for some of the truly creepiest, scariest movies around with films like Halloween and The Thing. He even proved he can stretch beyond horror, into action and science fiction with equal skill. His films feel refreshingly old fashioned, even when they are set in the future – Westerns are an obvious favorite of his, even when set in modern day LA (Assault on Precinct 13) or Mars (his last theatrical film before this, a decade ago, Ghosts of Mars). Carpenter was a true horror auteur – you could always tell his films apart for his contemporaries, and his steadfast refusal to change could be the reason why aside from those two Master of Horror episodes he made, we have not really heard from him in 10 years. So, I think many horror fans like myself were eagerly anticipating his latest film The Ward. I have a feeling that like me, they will end up disappointed.

Set in the 1960s, The Ward is about a young woman, Kristen (Amber Heard), who we first see setting fire to a farmhouse while scantily clad, and then carted off to the most under populated mental ward in movie history. Here she meets here new ward mates – Emily (Mamie Gummer), who is clearly insane in some way, Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), who bats her eyes at every male orderly in sight, Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), who draws everything and Zoey (Laura-Leigh) who acts like a little girl. They are overseen by a Nurse Ratched type, and a psychiatrist who we don’t really trust, since he is played by Jared Harris. He wants to cure Kristen, of what we’re not at first sure, but she only wants out. And soon, she wants to know who the ghost she keeps seeing around the ward is – especially when her ward mates start disappearing.

Before watching The Ward, I was hoping for an old fashioned horror movie from Carpenter. I am tired of the overly graphic, so called torture porn movies that aim to disgust viewers rather than scare them. These started with the Saw series, and continued to devolve into the Hostel films, and other horrid movies. American horror films are once again at a crossroads, because it seems like people are just as tired as I am with all these torture films, but nothing really has come into to replace them (but if we get more films like James Wan’s Insidious earlier this year, an example of how to do an old fashioned ghost story right, I’ll be happy). To be fair, I think Carpenter wants to do old fashioned horror, but for the first time, he seems to have relented a bit. I am tired of seeing pretty young girls strapped to gurneys and brutally murdered, and while Carpenter accomplishes this much more skill, and much less graphic bloodletting, than many contemporary filmmakers, I still had a hard time caring that much about it, and after a promising start got increasingly bored with The Ward as it went along.

It must be noted that the performances in the film are actually quite good – especially Heard who has skill to match her beauty, and seems comfortable in exploitation films like this – although she is much better in Drive Angry, one of my biggest guilty pleasures of this year. And Carpenter is still a striking visual filmmaking, so while the story creaks along to its inevitable conclusion (which really, you should seem coming way before the character do), the film is always interesting to look at. I’m not sure if The Ward is proof that Carpenter has finally lost his edge, or just evidence that someone needs to give him a better screenplay. Either way, The Ward ultimately, disappoints.