The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980)

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Tom Atkins, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Ty Mitchell, Hal Holbrook. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: Charles Bornstein, Tommy Lee Wallace. Music: John Carpenter. 

John Carpenter's The Fog gets off to a great start with John Houseman playing an old salt with a plummy voice, telling a fireside ghost story to a bunch of wide-eyed kids. It sets up the plot gimmick and announces exactly what the movie is supposed to be: the kind of story you tell around a campfire. Unfortunately, Carpenter can't seem to play it straight on from there, but keeps introducing irrelevant elements, starting with Elizabeth, the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis. What is Elizabeth doing, hitchhiking on a lonely California back road in the middle of the night? We never exactly find out because it's just a way of getting Curtis, who had just made Carpenter's 1978 Halloween into a smash hit, into the movie. Anyway, she gets picked up by Nick (Tom Atkins) just before the spooky stuff really starts, and winds up in his bed. And from then on, Elizabeth doesn't really contribute much to the story: She just rides around Port Antonio with Nick and gets in jeopardy as things happen. The real star of the movie is Adrienne Barbeau, making her transition from TV into movies, particularly movies by Carpenter, whom she married. She plays Stevie Wayne, a late night disc jockey who broadcasts out of a lighthouse she owns. When the creepy stuff begins to happen in the isolated little town of Port Antonio, she interrupts her easy-listening playlist to provide news and warnings, and eventually to become a target of the phantoms lurking in the titular mist. There are too many narrative threads that need to be followed, and the denouement has trouble unknotting them. But The Fog still generates a good bit of tension, and it's handsomely filmed, with a good use of the location: Port Antonio is actually Point Reyes and Inverness, north of San Francisco.

Someone's Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)

Adrienne Barbeau and Lauren Hutton in Someone's Watching Me!

Cast: Lauren Hutton, David Birney, Adrienne Barbeau, Charles Cyphers, Grainger Hines, Len Lesser, John Mahon, James Murtaugh, George Skaff. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Robert B. Hauser. Art direction: Philip Barber. Film editing: Jerry Taylor. Music: Harry Sukman. 

The hysterically titled Someone's Watching Me! (the working title was High Rise) was made for TV, and it's not up to John Carpenter's usual standards. But it's still a watchable thriller with a good performance by Lauren Hutton and some moments of genuine suspense. Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a director of live television who comes to LA for a new job and takes an apartment in a newly built high rise that the leasing agent assures her has state-of-the-art computer-controlled amenities. She quickly makes a new friend in coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau), who lets her know that she's a lesbian but that Leigh "isn't her type." She also lands a new boyfriend, Paul Winkless (David Birney), by hitting on him in a bar -- a spur-of-the-moment thing after she gets tired of being hit on herself. He's a philosophy professor at USC, of all things. But then creepy things start to happen to Leigh, and she realizes she's in some kind of danger. Sophie and Paul urge her to call the police, but when she does they say they can't help her until she's got better evidence that something truly criminal is going on. So everything is set up for a solid woman-in-jeopardy tale. The only thing that struck me as novel about the movie was that the introduction of a queer character in a strong second role was unusual for a major network like NBC as early as 1978. And then when we had a second scene in which Leigh shows her comfort with Sophie's sexual identity I realized what was going on: Sophie was being set up as the sacrificial character, the one who would fall victim to the harasser, thereby heightening Leigh's peril. The Kill-the-Queers trope loomed its tired old head again. Too bad, because otherwise Someone's Watching Me! smartly displays its debt to Rear Window (1954) and to Hitchcock in general, and Hutton is an attractive heroine (though she smokes too much). 

Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)

Austin Stoker, Laurie Zimmer, and Darwin Joston in Assault on Precinct 13

Cast: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Martin West, Tony Burton, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Peter Bruni, John J. Fox, Marc Ross, Alan Koss, Henry Brandon, Kim Richards. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Douglas Knapp. Art direction: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: John Carpenter. Music: John Carpenter. 

Jean-François Richet's 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13 makes a lot more narrative sense and has a much better cast (Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, etc.), but it feels routine in comparison with the laconic, low budget original, which John Carpenter admitted was a kind of mashup of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959) and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Which only goes to show that when it comes to thrillers, coherence and slick production values are not the top priorities. Setting the hook is what matters, and Carpenter's movie does that early with a shocker of a scene that almost earned the film an X rating -- one of the rare instances when the ratings board was upset by violence rather than sex. In this case, the film's rough edges and unknown actors somehow add a neo-realist touch to a movie in which the bad guys might as well be zombies or space aliens for all we get to know about them. 

In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)

Julie Carmen and Sam Neill in In the Mouth of Madness

Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, Charlton Heston, Frances Bay. Screenplay: Michael De Luca. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Production design: Jeff Ginn. Film editing: Edward Warschilka. Music: John Carpenter, Jim Lang.

A box office failure in its theatrical debut, John Carpenter's cleverly recursive In the Mouth of Madness has since gathered an enthusiastic following. I'm not one of the enthusiasts -- I find it much too frantic to be very scary, entertaining, or thought-provoking -- but I see what they like about it. It's partly a satiric look at the popularity of horror fiction and its movie spinoffs, centering on an obvious target: Stephen King. In the film, the horror writer is called Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), who lives in New Hampshire (next door to Maine, where King lives). Maybe to avoid any legal problems, the analogy is made explicit in the movie: King is name-checked several times. The other obvious horror writer target is H.P. Lovecraft, who isn't mentioned, but he's dead and can't sue. One reason for my discontent with In the Mouth of Madness is the miscasting of Sam Neill, who plays an insurance investigator who gets caught up in the search for Sutter Cane and his latest manuscript. Neill is one of my favorite underappreciated actors, but he seems all at sea here: Even his well-practiced American accent is sometimes clotted with his native New Zealand vowels. The role, which has a comic undertone, needs a more smart-alecky performer like Jim Carrey or Bill Murray. But then most of the cast -- including a cameo by Charlton Heston and a screen debut by Hayden Christensen as a paperboy -- is just along for the ride as the special effects and the plot kinks mount up. 

 

They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)

 Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George “Buck” Flower, Peter Jason, Raymond St. Jacques, Jason Robards III. Screenplay: John Carpenter, based on a story by Ray Nelson. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Art direction: William J. Durrell Jr., Daniel A. Lomino. Film editing: Gib Jaffe, Frank E. Jimenez. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth. 

Roddy Piper never made the leap from the wrestling ring to action movies with the success of, say, The Rock or John Cena. He might have, if They Live had been a bigger hit initially, but after debuting at No. 1, it faded in popularity, partly because the critics tore it to pieces. Now, of course, it’s joined the ranks of cult movie favorites, and even the critics are willing to admit it was underrated at the time. Still, it’s easy to pick out Piper as one of its weaknesses. He delivers his lines, even the oft-quoted “I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum”, as if he’s not quite sure why he’s saying them. And he doesn’t have the self-effacing wit that makes Cena and Dwayne Johnson such fun to watch. But there’s so much going on around Piper that it doesn’t really matter. A product of the Reagan era, or rather a reaction against it, They Live is an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian fable that may be even more relevant today. In fact, artist Mitch O'Connell created a billboard with an image of Donald Trump as one of the film’s skull-faced aliens. They Live isn’t a completely satisfactory movie: The fight between the characters played by Piper and Keith David goes on way too long. Would anyone really suffer such punishment rather than put on a pair of sunglasses? The sci-fi element and the violence undercut the political message more than reinforcing it. But John Carpenter (who used a pseudonym as its screenwriter) brings the message home again at the end, including a sly dig at himself and fellow cult-movie legend George Romero. 

Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981)

Kurt Russell in Escape From New York

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Season Hubley. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Nick Castle. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Joe Alves. Film editing: Todd C. Ramsay. Music: John Carpenter, Alan Howarth.

John Carpenter is a curious kind of auteur, best known for horror flicks and action thrillers that often feature his name before the title, as in "John Carpenter's Escape From New York." I'm not much of a fan of his work, except for his wonderful Starman (1984), which demonstrated once again what a fine actor Jeff Bridges is. Escape From New York stars Kurt Russell, making a determined attempt to escape from Walt Disney, who established him as an all-American boy type in movies and on TV in the 1960s. Here he goes to the other extreme as Snake Plissken, a once-heroic soldier turned criminal. The premise of the film is that crime in America has grown so bad that in 1988 the entire island of Manhattan was walled in as a maximum security prison -- a reflection of the bad rep that New York City got during the 1970s. In 1997, when the film takes place, Snake is arrested and sent to this prison, but at the same time Air Force One has been hijacked and though the president (Donald Pleasance? How did that happen?) bailed out in an escape pod as the plane crashed into the Manhattan prison, he has disappeared. Because of Snake's earlier exploits, he is given a chance to free himself by rescuing the president, but he's implanted with a device that will kill him if he doesn't succeed in the next 24 hours. So he pilots a glider to the top of one of the World Trade Center towers and descends into the anarchy and nightmare that the inmates have made of the city. It's all pretty entertaining slam-bang stuff, with a colorful cast: Lee Van Cleef as a tough cop, Ernest Borgnine as a cabbie who drives a beat-up taxi through what's left of the mean streets of the city-prison, Harry Dean Stanton as an inmate who lives in the public library, Isaac Hayes as the boss of the prison inmates, and Adrienne Barbeau as his mistress. There's a tight-budgeted look to the film, especially when viewed today after the CGI revolution, but it works.

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

Keith David, Richard Dysart, T.K. Carter, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and Kurt Russell in The Thing

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

Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: Bill Lancaster
Based on a story by John W. Campbell Jr.
Cinematography: Dean Cundey
Production design: John J. Lloyd
Creature design: Rob Bottin
Music: Ennio Morricone

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of those movies that have undergone radical re-evaluation over the years since it was released to mediocre box office and mostly scathing reviews. In the New York Times, for example, Vincent Canby panned it as "foolish, depressing, overproduced" and "instant junk." Today, however, it's regarded as a classic of the horror sci-fi genre and has an 83% "fresh" ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, with a whopping 92% audience score. My own evaluation would fall somewhere in between: The Thing does what it sets out to, i.e. scare us, with efficiency, but unlike the films to which it is often compared -- the Howard Hawks-produced The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), which was based on the same short story, and the more recent predecessor in the genre, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) -- it lacks heart. The Thing doesn't give us characters to root for. When successive members of its all-male cast are gobbled up by the monster, we don't feel any sense of loss -- except perhaps for the dogs, there's no one we feel a connection with. Kurt Russell is a very good action hero, but Bill Lancaster's script gives him no wit, no memorable lines other than shouting, "Yeah, fuck you, too!" at the monster when it roars at him. The real star of the film is Rob Bottin's creature, all gooshy innards, tentacles, and crablike legs. But once the monster gets going, there's no let-up. In Alien, for example, Ridley Scott very smartly created pauses in the action to lull us into complacency before pulling another shocker. Carpenter, however, gives us no time to breathe, and the piling-on of attacks becomes tiresome. Ennio Morricone's score is skillfully laid on, but unless you're in the mood for a freakout, The Thing offers few other lasting rewards.