John Carpenter

Happy 64th birthday to John Carpenter.

Thanks for some of my all-time favourite horror movies, sir!

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: Halloween

The problem with writing about a film as influential, much-imitated and downright iconic as ‘Halloween’ is trying to find something to say about it that hasn’t already been said. I could probably jot down a quick bullet-point checklist along the lines of:

• The subjective, prowling POV of the opening scene
• Dean Cundey’s cinematography
• Carpenter’s own score (minimalism at its eeriest)
• Pre-David Lynch Lynchian small town vibe
• Now you see Michael, now you don’t (repeat to increasingly nerve-shredding effect throughout the film then roll out as a horribly inevitable coda)
• Authentically buttock-clenching scare scenes
• The old ‘supposedly dead person out of focus in the background suddenly sits up’ routine done better than anywhere else in the history of scary movies
• The final girl sequence par excellence

… and it’d suffice. It’d certainly tick half a dozen or so of the boxes that make ‘Halloween’ a classic. But it wouldn’t touch on any of the things that make the film work on a primal level. Such as how much of it takes place in darkness, from Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) being driven through the grounds of an asylum in a nocturnal deluge, the wash of headlights illuminating the shambolic figures of inmates roaming around on the loose, to Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) fleeing the house she’s babysitting at into a street so deserted and devoid of sanctuary that it seems like she’s in a ghost town. Both of these scenes are shot through with the fractured and panicky immediacy of a nightmare.

Or the juxtaposition of the wide pavements and long avenues of Haddonfield with the tight interiors, characters continually trapped with the framework of doorways, windows, stairwells, corridors and – in one of the film’s most justifiably famous moments – a closet. And in both of these milieus, the implacable and seemingly unmotivated Michael Myers. A presence, a threat, a great hulking white-masking thing. Other horror movie antagonists benefit (or suffer, this latter usually exacerbated by sequilitis) from a personality, or at least some defining characteristic – from the overt theatrics and cheesy one-liners of Freddy Krueger to the grungy backwoods psychosis of Leatherface. Michael Myers – in this film at least; the sequels make the mistake of plumbing his backstory further than the simple act of childhood evil that kicks off Carpenter’s original – is basically a faceless, emotionless, unstoppable killing machine. Who thinks nothing of digging up his mother’s gravestone for use in a macabre little tableau.

And for this reason, Michael Myers is one of the great horror icons. He disturbs even when he’s doing nothing. Dude steps out silently behind a hedge to watch the retreating form of Laurie. Goosebumps. Dude stands motionless outside a window watching a girl disrobe. Hairs on the back of the neck moment. Dude drives past a school, driving real slow, keeping pace with a young boy walking home on his own. Squirmy sense of agitation. And when he does start getting his homicidal funk on, the absolute detachment he acts with is genuinely unsettling. Having knifed someone so viciously he leaves their body pinioned against a door, he stands there turning his head from side to side as if trying to figure out the meaning of a particularly obscure art gallery installation.

Best of all, though, is John Carpenter’s intuitive sense of pacing, his canny handling of the material. He knows to strip away everything from the narrative that’s extraneous. To keep things utterly simple. To set up a handful of characters, let them plan out their Halloween celebrations (whether they’re earning a little extra money babysitting or taking the opportunity to cop off with their dates) and then send Michael Myers on his unhurried but bloodily purposeful way right into the centre of their lives.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #7: Prince of Darkness

The key to John Carpenter’s underrated ‘Prince of Darkness’ is the pseudonym under which he took credit for the screenplay: Martin Quatermass. Carpenter cheekily alleged in the press notes that this personage was no less than the brother of renowned scientist Bernard Quatermass.

This latter Quatermass, of course, was the brainchild of Nigel Kneale whose fiendishly inventive and cleverly constructed ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ was an acknowledged influence on Carpenter. ‘Prince of Darkness’ can easily be read as a variation on ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, with a sprinkling of other Kneale homages – most specifically ‘The Stone Tape’ and ‘The Road’ – thrown in to intriguing effect.

On another level, ‘Prince of Darkness’ is also pure Carpenter, from Gary B. Kibbe’s geometrical cinematography which evokes Dean Cundey’s previous work for the director, to the incessant rhythms of the Carpenter/Howarth score; from the presence of Donald Pleasance (‘Halloween’, ‘Escape from New York’) to the narrative conflation of supernatural (‘The Fog’ etc) and siege (‘Assault on Precinct 13’) elements.

In an opening credit sequence that runs a couple of seconds shy of ten minutes, an elderly priest dies and the key to a dilapidated church passes into the hands of his colleague (Donald Pleasance); Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a lecturer at Kneale University, engages his students in sub-atomic theory; two unlikely-to-hook-up members of the student body – mustachioed He-man type Brian (Jameson Parker) and earnest intellectual Catherine (Lisa Blount) – find themselves on course towards hooking up; and the priest contacts Birack with a view to a scientific investigation of the McGuffin his predecessor – a member of the so-called Brotherhood of Sleep – was hiding in the church basement.

Intrigued, Birack corrals a group of his colleagues and his students into helping out. They haul their apparatus into the old church and set up shop there. Meanwhile, news broadcasts are full of the new discovery of a supernova, insects are multiplying and swarming everywhere and a group of homeless people suddenly turn all zombie-like and lay siege to the church. The McGuffin in the cellar turns out to be a huge glass vial full of swirling green fluid that looks like some weird version of a slushy maker that’s been filled with crème de menthe instead of orange juice. It’s secured by a seemingly impenetrable locking mechanism that, as one of the students discovers, can only be opened from the inside.

It contains something very ancient, very dangerous and very ready to embark on its comeback tour.

For its first hour, ‘Prince of Darkness’ moves and grooves quite nicely, getting its science vs superstition funk on in fine stylee. Carpenter keeps the tension on the backburner, gradually bringing the atmosphere inside the church to boiling point. The homeless (and now, presumably, soulless) amass outside to sinister effect and an early sequence that veers into outright horror boasts the genuinely unsettling image of a crucified bird followed by the almost-funny-but-not-quite image of a secondary character buying the farm in a bizarre death-by-unicycle set-piece.

Aye, for virtually two-thirds of the running time, Carpenter pulls off a virtuoso high-wire act between white-knuckle genre thrills and thinking man’s extrapolation of the age-old good vs evil conflict filtered through the logical perameters of scientific enquiry.

At which point Carpenter remembers he’s supposed to be making a horror film and it’s balls to the wall Satanic zombies from hereon in. Heads lopped off, see you at end. This, coupled with the functionality of the characters (for the most part they exist as expositional/theoretical mouthpieces rather than as fully rounded people whom we might actually give a shit about), pretty much boots ‘Prince of Darkness’ out of the first tier of John Carpenter’s filmography. And there are those who would kick it down even lower.

Still, for all that the acting performances range from bland (Parker) to phoned-in (Pleasance) to doing what she can with the material (Blount), ‘Prince of Darkness’ retains enough of the intelligence and intrigue of its first hour – particularly with regard to the authentically creepy dream sequences – to compensate for the slightly ropy pay-off. It’s given short shrift in the Carpenter canon, but it deserves better.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: Cigarette Burns

As ‘Jenifer’ and ‘Pelts’ provided a surprise (albeit small screen) return to form for Dario Argento, so ‘Cigarette Burns’ for John Carpenter, one of his two contributions to the TV series ‘Masters of Horror’.

Kirby (Norman Reedus), a film collector and owner/programmer of a run-down independent cinema, is hired by the effete but sinister Bellinger (Udo Kier) to track down the one existing print of a French art film so notorious that its only public screening incited sociopathic behaviour in its audience. ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (trans. ‘The Absolute End of the World’) is a film Kirby’s always been curious about, but apprehensive of. He recognizes in Bellinger an obsession with it that borders on addiction. Kirby knows all about an addiction. He’s a recovering drug addict (his wife – to whose antagonistic father he owes a fuckton of money invested in the cinema – was a victim to his lifestyle). He knows Bellinger and ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ spell trouble, particularly when he’s shown an, uh, “artefact” from the film as part of Bellinger’s private collection. But the money that’s being offered – more than enough to bale out the cinema – sways him.

Carpenter structures the first half of ‘Cigarette Burns’ almost as a slow-burn detective story with Kirby tracking down film historians and critics associated with the production and its disastrous debut, a trail that leads him from America to France and the troubled daughter of the film’s quixotic director. En route, Kirby is plagued with visions/recollections of his wife, disturbed by the subject matter of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (I don’t want to spoil anything so let’s just say it contains material that pretty much fits the definition of unholy), warned off by those with a vested interest in the film, and – albeit unwillingly – made complicit in the actions of certain parties who are perversely inspired by it.

“All this filming,” alcoholic landlady Mrs Stephens (Maxine Audley) says in Michael Powell’s career-destroying controversy-fest ‘Peeping Tom’ – “it isn’t healthy.” ‘Cigarette Burns’ could easily serve as an hour-long exposition of this sentiment. Leo Mark’s script for ‘Peeping Tom’ focused on scopophilia, defined medically as the morbid desire to watch. Obsession; addiction. Bellinger’s desperation to see ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ owes to a desire to experience art – cinema – on a visceral and dangerous level. Bellinger wants something stripped of the obvious safety net of fiction/fabrication. Kirby’s motives are those of professional interest tipped slightly too far by an admixture of financial necessity and morbid curiosity.

And that, in a nutshell, is the appeal of ‘Cigarette Burns’: it’s a morality tale for the cinephile; a ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ for every horror fan, obscurist or completist out there. If ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ existed, and its reputation was as tarnished by controversy and I had a copy within my grasp despite warnings against even thinking about watching it, would I walk away and always wonder, or sit down with a fearful tremor of anticipation and relish the possibility of reviewing it for The Agitation of the Mind?

No contest.

Christine

Dedicated to Stephen King on his 64th birthday. Thanks for all the scares.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m in the habit of posting birthday greetings to my favourite actresses in the form of triptychs of unapologetic cheesecake shots. These posts are normally cobbled together at a moment’s notice. They stem from a nightly ritual myself and Mrs F engage in. Based on IMDb’s “born today” section, we raised a glass to our favourite actors, actresses, directors, writers or cinematographers. And why the hell not? A shared love of films and books helped to bring us together.

So imagine the scene: we get home from work, fix a meal (a fillet of salmon cubed and stir-fried with seasonal vegetables and served with boiled rice), settle in for the evening, Paula fires up the PS3, yours truly fires up the internet … OMG, it’s Stephen King’s birthday. I had nothing planned for The Agitation of the Mind, but goddamn it if Stephen King wasn’t one of the crucial authors who really tripped me to reading when every shitty bone-dry text we read at school was trying to achieve the opposite.

I’ve always loved stories and the written word, but what those doofuses laid on me at school could have killed it stone dead. I owe my continued love of literature to three very diverse writers, without whom I could have all-so-easily tuned out: Hammond Innes (after devouring my dad’s Alistair MacLean collection, I turned to Innes and discovered that a tense thriller could be imbued with a genuine literary talent and an evocative sense of place), Alan Sillitoe (the pages of whose novels could have been inhabited by my dad and my granddad), and Stephen King.

The first Stephen King novel I read was ‘Christine’. I was fifteen. ‘Christine’ – a novel about cars, girls and rock ‘n’ roll – is the perfect novel for a fifteen year old. The doors of perception opened. King started every chapter with a quote from a classic golden oldie rock ‘n’ roll song. The nerd was made cool by a cool car. The bullies bought the farm – in gory style. Colour the 15-year-old me hooked. Even today, now I’ve had my ups and downs with King (my non-ownership of a crowbar is the only reason ‘The Dark Tower Volume 7’ is still in one piece; I gave up on ‘Lisey’s Story’ 200 pages in; I wish I’d been granted editing duties on ‘Dreamcatcher’ and been allowed to reduce the first 20 pages to two paragraphs), the appearance of a new King novel – or, better still, collection of short stories (‘Full Dark, No Stars’, the big man at his best in over a decade, oh thank you Lord, praise God, hallelujah) – is something to get excited about.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I felt the need to mark the occasion. I slung ‘Christine’ in the DVD player, watched it, and gave myself an hour to write a (pardon the pun) hit-and-run review. The first time I saw ‘Christine’, about three years after I originally read the book, I hated it. I hated the production line prologue that ham-fistedly explained the car’s bloodlust. I hated the reduction of Roland LeBay’s part in the story to a couple of minutes of ornery exposition. I hated the “god, I hate rock ‘n’ roll” ending. I hated the jettisoning of King’s (admittedly unfilmable) ending, seven or eight lines of prose that still send a shiver down my spine.

Later, approaching it as a fully-formed cineaste, and judging it as a John Carpenter film rather than a Stephen King adaptation, I still found it hard to love, as it came way down on the list of “John Carpenter films I’d rather be watching than doing anything else” – it came way, way lower than ‘The Thing’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Fog’, ‘Assault on Precinct 13’, ‘Dark Star’, ‘They Live’ or ‘Big Trouble in Little China’.

In fact, I didn’t reach a full appreciation of ‘Christine’ until I saw Frank Darabont’s third King adaptation ‘The Mist’. I already had a built-in appreciation of that movie: King’s description, in the introduction to ‘Skeleton Crew’, of ‘The Mist’ as having “a cheery cheesiness – you’re supposed to see this one in black-and-white … with a big speaker stuck in the window. You make up the second feature.”

Sure, ‘Christine’ the novel has a sophisticated structure and narrative complexities which allow the author to explore the thin line between passion and obsession, ownership and possession (to quote the tagline on the cover of my copy of the NEL paperback), but when you boil down the essential elements of the story to their base metals, you get the very trinity that appealed to me over twenty years ago: cars, girls and rock ‘n’ roll.

As Darabont tapped into the B-movie aesthetic of King’s fiction in ‘The Mist’, so did John Carpenter two decades earlier with ‘Christine’. Darabont rode the wave of a resurgence of the horror genre that alternated between post-modern irony and straight-faced throwbacks to the 70s. Carpenter, as with so many of his films, was ahead of his time and thus underappreciated. ‘Christine’ is a B-movie through and through, albeit with its tongue in cheek in the right places. But not all the time. Uh-huh. There are moments in Carpenter’s film that are as wrenching as its source material: Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon)’s familial rows; Dennis (John Stockwell)’s cringingly embarrassing attempt to hit on new schoolgirl hottie Leigh (Alexandra Paul) in the library; Arnie’s maltreatment at the hands of flick-knife wielding bully Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander).

Where Carpenter misjudges is in Gordon’s characterization of Cunningham. In the early scenes, he’s just too nerdy. His friendship with Dennis never convinces. Likewise, Repperton and his entourage come off not so much as a genuinely threatening cluster of antagonists as a borderline camp ‘Grease’-stylee approximation of bad boys, as if someone had decided to cast John Inman, Julian Clary and Alan Carr as dangerous types.

Elsewhere, though, Carpenter absolutely nails it, keying the film into the aesthetic of Americana – high school, auto shop, football games, drive-in movies, diners – that define the novel. Also, he rocks the finale. For a man who’s never made a western, Carpenter has drawn upon the tropes of the genre time and time again. ‘Christine’ posits its Caterpiller digger vs demon car smackdown in the unambiguous terms of white hat vs black hat, sheriff vs outlaw, good vs evil. The saloon has been replaced by a rickety garage, main street by a scrapyard, the good guy’s Smith & Wesson by a lumbering, chugging piece of heavy plant. The differences are merely generic. The stakes and the outcome are the same.

‘Christine’ is a film I’ve come to love over the years, despite its flaws, and despite its divergences from what is still one of my favourite Stephen King novels. And there is a lot to love about it: the pre-CGI set piece where Christine effects an act of self-renovation; the various dispatchings of Arnie’s antagonists; Robert Prosky’s magnificently curmudgeonly turn as phlegmatic garage owner Darnell; Dean Stockwell’s brief but effective appearance as a detective slowly linking the trail of mayhem; and the beautifully chosen repertoire of 50s and 60s rock ‘n’ roll songs which provide Christine with her psychotic soundtrack.

And then there’s Christine herself. The automotive equivalent of Angela in the ‘Night of the Demon’ movies: sexy and deadly in roughly equal measures. I don’t know if the Plymouth Fury they used in the film (one of several, given the amount of damage inflicted) even had a name – it sure doesn’t get a credit – but that chrome-laden, snarling-grilled, whitewall-tyred piece of fuck-off awesome engineering gets my vote as one of the great horror icons of all time.

Say what you like about where ‘Christine’ gets it right and/or gets it wrong, when you’ve got a 1950s muscle car in flames chasing someone down to their screamingly hideous demise, what the hell else do you want?

VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 1: Reasons to rebel

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.



What makes a revolutionary? What causes someone to rebel against the accepted (or enforced) order of things? Where exactly is the dividing line between the freedom fighter and the terrorist? How easy is it to cross the line? These questions occupy a middle ground between idealism and activism; between the realization that a government/system/establishment is oppressive and the reality of risking one’s life/taking up arms to do something about it. These are powerful and morally difficult questions. It’s no surprise, then, that filmmakers have responded to the dramatic potential of the revolutionary figure.

Over these next three days, I’m joining forces with Francisco at The Film Connoisseur to present a celebration of revolution on film. Francisco will be exploring the cinematic representation of real-life revolutionaries, including an in-depth appraisal of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara biopic. He’ll also be looking at films which celebrate the revolutionary achieving their political or social aims and instigating change.

Here on The Agitation of the Mind, I’ll be kicking things off today by considering what makes a rebel or a revolutionary. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting an article on depictions of revolutionary activity in my home country, with specific reference to movie adaptations of two of George Orwell’s most famous novels. On Wednesday, as a counterpoint to Francisco’s piece on successful revolutionaries, Agitation will sound a requiem for those who died for or because of their beliefs.

But let’s start by asking: what do we mean by “rebel” or “revolutionary”?

Personally, I don’t think anyone’s ever bettered Albert Camus’s eight-word definition: “A rebel is a man who says ‘no’.”

There’s a sliding scale to saying ‘no’. We’ve all probably done it at some point in our life. Ever sat through an appraisal at work that you’ve considered unjustly critical or had a complaint made against you by a colleague that was bullshit and as a result you’ve stood up against your line manager and spoken your mind and refused to take the crap that’s being dished out at you? You have? Congratulations: you’re a rebel. Now imagine that your firm is the government or your line manager is a corrupt despot. Imagine that instead of arguing the toss in a meeting room you’re carrying a gun and hiding in the forests or the mountains. Imagine that instead of possibly losing your job you could possibly lose your life.

Like I say: it’s a sliding scale. The point is, you don’t have to be political, idealistic or reactionary in your mindset. The average joe can become a revolutionary. It just takes a convergence of circumstances. Something that tests your mettle or opens your eyes to the truth. In John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’, transient labourer George Nada (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which filter out the sheen of “normality” behind which the truth of the world is revealed: everything is propaganda. Behind the images on advertising hoardings, behind the columns of print in newspapers, behind the glossy photos in magazines there are orders: OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT; the design on banknotes hides the reminder: MONEY IS YOUR GOD.

Although pitched, particularly in its second half, on a borderline comedic level, ‘They Live’ is as acerbic, bitter and righteously angry as, say, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Network’ (considered tomorrow and Wednesday respectively) in its depiction of a controlling oligarchy who deliberately subjugate and mislead the masses. Nada fights back as bluntly and unsubtly as one would expect of a working class hero, and the majority of his struggle is to open other people’s eyes. The scene where he gets into a five-minute punch-up with a friend who’s chary of donning the glasses is an hilariously satirical metaphor for the lengths to which some people will go for a quiet life – people who don’t want to see the truth and are more comfortable to accept things as they are.

John Carpenter’s work is full of rebellious characters who have no respect for authority and are willing to go the distance if provoked or disenfranchised. Arguably the most iconic of these characters is ‘Snake’ Plissken (Kurt Russell) in ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘Escape from L.A.’ The first film posits a dystopian future where the island of Manhattan has been turned into an open prison, walled off, the bridges leading to the mainland mined and escape attempts across the water quickly terminated by helicopter patrols. The prison, which contains only criminals, has developed its own form of society where the strongest, personified by The Duke (Isaac Hayes), rule and those with special abilities (such as Harry Dean Stanton’s Brain, who has refined the fuel that allows The Duke to run his ramshackle kingdom) are protected as long as their fealty is paid.

Into this environment hurtles an escape pod jettisoned from Air Force One: the President (Donald Pleasance), evading the freedom fighters who have gained control of his plane, finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. The establishment responds by recruiting recently arrested career criminal Plissken and coercing him into undertaking a suicide mission. The injection of a slow-acting poison into his bloodstream with the promise of the antidote once he delivers the President from harm – and, more importantly, the diplomatic MacGuffin the President alone has a copy of – is all the persuasion he needs.

‘Escape from New York’ flips the middle finger to the system during every minute of its running time, with Carpenter’s biggest “screw you” reserved for the finale in which, having made good on his side of the deal, Plissken scuppers the President’s ploy for a peaceable solution to the foreign problems threatening his administration. America, it is suggested, is in for one motherfucker of a shit-storm thanks to Plissken’s reactionary stunt; but everything that Plissken has gone through up till that moment leaves you in no doubt that the powers that be had it coming.

The sequel, while inferior on many levels and badly let down by embarrassingly shoddy effects work, certainly ups the ante in terms of Plissken’s final act of rebellion. In a film that follows its predecessor’s narrative arc with the slavish fidelity of a join-the-dots puzzle, Plissken strolls off into the end credits having not just fucked up world peace but pretty much sounded the death knoll for the planet’s future. The message is stark and brutal: shut down; start again.

‘Escape from New York’ was, of course, made as the 70s gave out to the 80s, the door just beginning to close on an astounding decade in American cinema where a new breed of directors were kicking down the doors and questioning the system. German cinema, in the last decade, has been demonstrating a similar renaissance, certainly in terms of movies which shine a penetrating and unflinching light on the darker aspects of Germany’s recent social and political history. ‘Downfall’ was the watershed film in this movement: the first German production ever to depict Hitler. What made it more thorny was that it was even-handed in its approach.

Just as thorny – and for the same reason – was Uli Edel’s ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’, which packs an immense amount of politics, ideology and compromised morality into its two and a half hours. The film charts the history of the group from Ulrike Meinhof (Martine Gedeck)’s transition from crusading journalist to activist, through Meinhof, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek)’s eventual arrest and trial, to the actions of the second generation members. Here, the focus is on explicitly political motives for revolution, and the sometimes awkward but always compelling combination of Bernd Eichinger’s incisive script and Edel’s bludgeoningly unsubtle direction present a depiction of the bastardization of ideology and the crossing of the line from revolutionary to terrorist.

An artistic/intellectual awakening is the focus of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘The Lives of Others’, in which Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi surveillance expert, is deployed by his weasly boss Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) – himself a tool of corpulent and eminently corrupt politican Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) – to stake out the home of playwright Georg Draymann (Sebastian Koch), who has come under suspicion because of his association with dissident artist Paul Hauser (Hans Euw-Bauer). The old saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” gets a two and a quarter hour exposition in von Donnersmarck’s astoundingly assured directorial debut. Essentially, the film is the story of two awakenings: that of Draymann, who is inspired by Hauser to write a potentially contentious article for publication in the west; and that of Wiesler, whose hitherto blind adherence to the party is challenged by the humanitarian values of the man he’s sent to spy on and a gradual realization of the venality of his superiors’ ulterior motives.

If ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ‘The Lives of Others’ represent a strand of cinema rooted in social realism and driven by the political failings of recent history, then themes of rebellion couched in sci-fi tropes recall the golden age of that genre when political protest, social disaffection and an exaggerated extrapolation of contemporary issues cast a shadow over filmmakers’ visions of the future. Examples are myriad both in cinema and literature: H.G. Wells contesting the arrogant complacency of the Victorian era in ‘War of the Worlds’ (a subtext utterly neglected by both Byron Haskins’ and Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptations); George Orwell contemplating the dark side of the socialist ideal in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ (of which more tomorrow); Evgeny Zamyatin contemplating a similar theme from within the system in ‘We’; Aldous Huxley pinpointing the production-line slavery of Henry T. Ford’s car manufacturing plants as the genesis of human slavery to the industrial impulse in ‘Brave New World’.

Science-fiction, at its best and most cerebral, has held up a mirror to contemporary issues and had the naked courage to accept that the future, whether postulated as utopian or dystopian, presents a worry prospect. A utopian society is depicted in the under-rated ‘Aeon Flux’. There is cleanliness, social order, and protection from an outside world, 99% of which has been destroyed by a viral pandemic. The ruling dynasty are “descended” from the scientist, Dr Goodchild, who developed a cure. And yet the Goodchilds have become a ruling class, their interests protected by a private army and their power built on a secret hidden for centuries. The eponymous Aeon (Charlize Theron) works for an underground movement, the Monicans, who are dedicated to challenging the status quo. The world of ‘Aeon Flux’ recalls that of ‘Logan’s Run’ (one of the films being considered by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur on Wednesday): aesthetically pleasing, peaceful and seemingly affluent, its citizens wanting for nothing … except personal freedom. And yet people disappear. The Goodchilds rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove. The populace are deceived as a matter of course.

The future of Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ – his big-screen farewell to the unjustly cancelled TV series ‘Firefly’ – is in sharp contrast to ‘Aeon Flux’. This is definitely a dystopia. How so? Well, our ostensible hero Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillon) is the leader of a ragtag group of outlaws reduced to robbing payrolls after fighting on the losing side against the Alliance, a patriarchal government who control a ring of inner planets where the younger generation are effectively brainwashed and “operatives” take care of anyone who questions or threatens governmental supremacy. The further flung planets are the province of Reivers, a vicious criminal society who practice their own form of despotism. Mal and his crew become unlikely rebels when they give passage to a psychic, River (Summer Glau), who has questioned the Alliance. As with the Goodchilds’ empire in ‘Aeon Flux’, the Alliance has been founded on a criminal act and a supposedly “better” society is the product of lies, whitewash and propaganda.

Every genre of cinema has had its share of cinematic rebels – I haven’t even touched on, say, the Zappata westerns; and biopics of revolutionaries, successful or not, seems to be a cottage industry in and of itself – and the films I’ve mentioned in this article are but a random sampling. Some of these I’ve already reviewed on the blog; others deserve in-depth stand-alone pieces.

Tomorrow, I’ll be narrowing the remit to a more specific selection of movies: those which consider an English perspective on revolution. In the meantime, don’t forget to head over to The Film Connoisseur - today, Francisco presents an in-depth and socially grounded analysis of the films 'Romero' and 'Salvador'.

They Live

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
- The Gospel According to Roddy Piper

From Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s coke and ego fuelled string of glossy ’80s money-makers to Michael Bay’s Mephistophelean relationship with the box office over the last decade or so, Hollywood has never been anything but priapic for a bit of high concept.

Well, stuff your big budgets and power ballads and dare-devil flyboys and mismatched cops and oil-pissing robots, because I’m here to tell you that the highest of high concepts is a pair of sunglasses donned by a professional wrestler who promptly gets a mite pissed off at the ensuing revelation that society is being manipulated by skull-faced aliens with a penchant for subliminal messaging; that money, promotions and status symbols are nothing but placebos; and that when a fella whose twin motivations are bubblegum chewing and ass kicking finds himself bereft of bubblegum, well his options are kind of narrowed down.

It’s a killer hook: put on a pair of shades and your perception shifts; you see things as they truly are. The world is black and white. Behind every billboard, every road sign, every poster, every page of every newspaper and magazine is an exhortation to OBEY. That wad of bank notes in your hand: just bits of paper emblazoned with THIS IS YOUR GOD. That guy next to you who got the promotion you were passed over for: don’t look now, but he’s not human. The woman in the beauty parlour with the bouffant hairdo and jewellery dripping from her: she’s not either. And, brother, you don’t want to know what they’re dripping into your subconscious while you’re watching TV.


John Carpenter’s masterstroke with ‘They Live’ is to take his time – and in a film that runs just an hour and a half, I do mean take his sweet time – establishing character, milieu and socio-economic context. Our hero, he of the bubblegum preference, is George Nada* (Piper), a blue-collar drifter looking for work and reduced to sleeping rough. Dossing down at a ramshackle encampment with fellow labourer Frank Armitage (Keith David), Nada becomes intrigued by the comings and goings at a nearby chapel. Finally venturing inside, he discovers not a congregation of worshippers but an underground political movement. A police raid dispels them from the chapel (as well as trashing the encampment) before Nada can do anything.

Then he discovers the sunglasses. And by extension the truth. His immediate priority is convincing Armitage to view the world through said eyewear. Armitage proves a tad reluctant. Nada insists. Cue one of the longest – and funniest – punch-ups in cinema.

Ah, yes. The fight scene. Just one of many great, great moments in this still strangely underrated film. The Nada-first-dons-the-glasses scene is also pitch perfect in its execution. Likewise an almost immediately subsequent moment where Nada, fighting off two cops (one an alien), arms himself with their weapons, strolls nonchalantly down a busy sidewalk and into a bank and delivers The Gospel as quoted above.

There are those who hone in on Roddy Piper’s limited acting range – and, let’s face it, the man’s no Olivier – as the film’s great flaw, but personally I find Piper’s rugged, slightly self-deprecating persona ideally suited to the story Carpenter is telling. With a more “actorly” actor in the lead, ‘They Live’ might easily have come across as over-egged, its slightly schizophrenic tone – social realism to high concept to broad comedy to sci-fi actioner – more nigglingly apparent than with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper striding John Wayne stylee through the midst of the mayhem, a lumberjack-shirt-wearing everyman out to chew bubblegum and kick ass on behalf of every poor sumbitch wage-slave in the audience. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, taking the fight to the extraterrestrial ad-men, kicking their corporate crap back into the cosmos. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, a man of the people and a hero of our time.

*The character is never name-checked during the film and only referred to as Nada (Spanish for “nothing”) in the end credits. I’ve taken the name George Nada from the Ray Nelson short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ which the film is based on.

Vampires

Posted as part of Radiator Heaven’s John Carpenter blog-a-thon

The accepted critical thinking is that John Carpenter directed a run of bona fide classics in the first eight years of his career, beginning with the uber-low-budget but bitingly funny ‘Dark Star’ in 1974 and peaking with ‘The Thing’ in 1984. This much is true.

The accepted critical thinking was that it was all downhill from there. Which has some basis, given that ‘The Thing’ remains – for me and for many Carpenter fans – his finest work. But how accurate is the critical shorthand that the 70s and early 80s were Carpenter’s golden years, the rest of the 80s were an exercise in diminishing returns and as for the 90s … fuhgeddabahtdit?

A friend of mine likened the experience of going to see a John Carpenter movie in the 90s to going to a Nottingham Forest match: “You remember the 70s when they were world class and you kid yourself that it can happen again, but at heart you know you’re going to be disappointed.”

And I must confess, that’s pretty much how I felt. ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ disappointed me first time I saw it. Likewise ‘Vampires’.

To this day, I haven’t seen Carpenter’s remake of ‘Village of the Damned’. First time I saw ‘Ghosts of Mars’ I wondered whether I was watching a feature film or a 100-minute video for some obscure Norwegian death metal band.

I’ve since come to appreciate ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ as a Lovecraftian nightmare, ‘Vampires’ as a horror-western and ‘Ghosts of Mars’ – for all its studio backlot aesthetic and fuck-awful soundtrack, as a massive deconstructionist joke at the expense of the studio, the critics and the audience. Small wonder Carpenter didn’t direct another film for a decade, but kudos to him for having the balls to fuck everybody off – and I mean everybody – in such iconoclastic style.

It’s worth noting that for everyone today who (rightly) hails ‘The Thing’ as a masterpiece, critics and audiences pissed on Carpenter’s chips when it was first released, voting with their greenbacks at the box office for Steven Spielberg’s cuddly, merchandising-friendly alien and giving the big fungoo to Carpenter’s ice-bound slab of paranoia.

What should have been a commercial safe bet – an adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘Christine’ – fared little better, even though the film features some brilliantly executed scenes of tension; nor did the character-driven, relationships-based ‘Starman’ find favour with audiences. Carpenter saw the 80s out with ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ (martial arts and fantasy all wrapped up in a bundle of genre-busting fun), ‘Prince of Darkness’ (think the dark religious secrets of ‘The Fog’ crossed with the besieged urban aesthetic of ‘Assault on Precinct 13’) and ‘They Live’ (the kind of dystopian satire George Orwell might have written if he’d demonstrated a facility for fight scenes and snappy one-liners). Granted, none of these films are quite up there with ‘The Thing’, but for fuck’s sake they’re kick-ass pieces of cinema. I honestly cannot understand why the cinema-going public of the day were so lukewarm.

However, they were; and it’s understandable that a certain cynicism crept in during Carpenter’s work in the 90s. Like I say, I never got round to seeing ‘Village of the Damned’, but I’m pegging 1996’s ‘Escape from L.A.’ as the first truly pitiful Carpenter film. The fact that he followed it, a year later, with ‘Vampires’ should have been a cause for celebration. Predictably, though, the critics got the knives out, audiences stayed away in droves and it was reckoned another dud.

Ladies and gentlemen, 600 words into this review I’m here to tell you that ‘Vampires’ – while not perfect – is still a decent chunk of red-blooded entertainment, nicely shot, peppered with jet black humour and boasting two stand-out set-pieces dragged out to squirmily tense effect. The first, taking up the first 15 minutes of the film, demonstrates vampire hunter Jack Crow (James Woods) and his team’s down-to-a-fine-art method of vampire killing: find a hive, go in slow and easy, spear any vampires you find with a crossbow bolt attached to a hawser and use the winch on the front of your pick-up truck to drag them out into the light. Result: bloodsucker flambé.

Their mission successfully completed, Jack frets that they didn’t find the master (kinda like the team leader of the undead). His colleagues are less concerned and they head back to their motel for an evening of drinking and carousing with hookers. (Vampire killers party hard, y’all.) Undercover of the night, vampire master Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith) crashes the party and lays waste to everyone but Crow, his right hand man Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) and party girl Katrina (Sheryl Lee) who has been bitten but provides a psychic link to Valek.

With Crow’s Catholic church paymasters tight-lipped as to Valek’s motives, new boy Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee) appointed to keep tabs on them, and a maximum of 48 hours until Katrina turns, Crow and Montoya set out to track down Valek. When they discover that he’s after an artefact that will allow vampires to walk in the sunlight, the pressure redoubles and all bets are off.

Here’s what’s wrong with ‘Vampires’: a mercifully short mid-section which is heavy on exposition, light on humour and not that engaging, and a gloves-off vampire-killing climax that’s so elliptically edited you have to wonder whether the original footage just didn’t work and Carpenter and his editor are doing their best to disguise the fact.

Here’s what’s fucking great about ‘Vampires’: an impressive opening sequence; a prolonged set-piece near the end where Guiteau acts as bait to lure vampires into an elevator shaft where Crow can harpoon them and Montoya haul them out into the light, the entire scene played out against the gradual onset of dusk; the eminently entertaining sight of James Woods slapping a priest around to get information …

… the luscious Sheryl Lee as the sexiest vampire this side of Soledad Miranda; some salty dialogue (“hey padre, when I was kicking your ass back there, did you get a little wood, a little mahogany?”); and a terrifically hissable villain in Thomas Ian Griffith.

‘Vampires’ is a guilty pleasure, a B-movie, an unapologetically politically incorrect throwback to the 70s. And why the hell not? That’s when Carpenter was in his element. Again, it’s an easy critical shortcut to call John Carpenter a throwback. It’s also kind of missing the point. He always was. In his 70s heyday, Carpenter was looking back to the 50s and the work of his hero Howard Hawks, particularly ‘Rio Bravo’.

It’s an irony that Carpenter has never made a western, since most of his films are westerns at heart. ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ substitutes cops for cowboys and hoods for Indians, but its condemned station house is every inch the besieged fort. Scientists and aliens in ‘The Thing’? Cowboys and Indians, but with the Antarctic standing in for the Plains. The implacable, unfeeling, unstoppable Michael Myers in ‘Halloween’? Every nameless stranger who’s ever ridden into town, faster on the draw than anyone else and driven by a vengeance unexplained until the final act. Zombie leper sailors in ‘The Fog’? The outlaw gang riding back into the town that turned them in. The iconography is explicit in ‘Vampires’.

There’s barely a single frame in Carpenter’s filmography that doesn’t owe to old school Hollywood’s vision of the Old West. Carpenter is making a comeback this year with ‘The Ward’. Here’s hoping it’s a success. Here’s hoping the man gets a chance to saddle up, pull those pistols and the make the western that’s always been inside him.