Top five John Carpenter movies

Over at The Death Rattle, me and Aaron are counting down our top five John Carpenter movies this week.

The inaugural countdown was last week where he and Carl from I Like Horror Movies enumerated their top five most overrated horror movies. The countdown begins with number five on Monday and continues throughout the week, culminating in the number one slot on Friday.

Aaron’s devised a great format. It’d make for a great read if it was just Aaron listing his top fives each week, but contrasting them with the opinions/perceptions of a guest blogger makes things much more interesting.

Head over to Aaron’s site to check it out, and feel free to email him if you’d like to participate.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Thing

Right. I’m going to kick off this piece with a bit of straight-up, unapologetic opinionism:

‘The Thing’ is to the horror movie what Beethoven’s 9th is to the symphony, what Henri Cartier-Bresson is to photography and what Talisker is to single malt whisky. It’s the bee’s knees; the mutt’s nuts; the daddy; da bomb.

I dig ‘The Thing’. Here’s a few equally superlative-laden paragraphs to explain why.

Did I mention that Dean Cundey’s cinematography was one of the chief assets of ‘The Fog’? That goes double here. Of the five John Carpenter films he shot – and all of them look amazing – ‘The Thing’ boasts easily the most impressive visuals. The anamorphic ratio is used to astounding effect. Cundey’s work here puts him in the same league as Lucien Ballard, Vittorio Storaro or Roger Deakins. Besides, you’ve got to love someone who has ‘Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ on their CV.

Bill Lancaster’s script is tight as a snare-drum, shucking off the McCarthyist undertones of Howard Hughes’ original (‘The Thing From Another World’) and getting back to the isolationism and clammy paranoia of the source material, the short story ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell. It avoids politics other than to have Nauls (T.K. Carter) speculate, “Maybe we’re at war with Norway.”

The incident that occasions this conjecture is a superbly realised set-piece which opens the film. A husky runs panting through the wastes of Antarctica, towards United States National Science Institute Station 4, whose mismatched occupants are weathering a particularly ferocious winter and unable to effect radio contact with the outside world. The husky is being pursued by a helicopter from a Scandinavian research complex. The two Norwegians in said whirlybird use semi-automatic rifles and grenades against it, but demonstrate terminal incompetency. Not only does every shot miss, but one of them drops a grenade into the snow as the helicopter sets down, blowing up both ’copter and pilot and barely escaping with his own life. When he stalks the husky into Station 4, letting rip with another pathetically aimed burst of fire, base commander Garry (Donald Moffat) proves himself a considerably better shot and the Norwegian is despatched before anyone can ask themselves – and they certainly can’t ask him now – just why it was so important to whack the dog.

While pilot MacCready (Kurt Russell) and medico Dr Copper (Richard Dysart) brave the bad weather and fly to the Norwegian base – they find everyone dead, the place half burned to the ground, and the remains of something that doesn’t look human – tensions rise at Station 4 and it’s not long before Garry’s crew have more to worry about than Nauls playing his music too loud or MacCready accusing the computer of cheating at a chess game and tipping a glass of J&B into the mainframe.

If the presence of J&B evokes the giallo, then the ice station is as effective a backdrop to the carnage that ensues as any fashion house or stylish apartment building, and who needs a black-gloved killer with a fetish for broken dolls and sharp knives when a shape-changing alien thingie is running around killing the cast off in a various horrific ways, assimilating them into its physiognomy and imitating them in order to get close to its next intended victim.

One of the scientists, Blair (Wilford Brimley), postulates that if the creature were to make contact with a heavily populated area the effects on humankind would be apocalyptic: mass infection within 27,000 hours. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and Blair reacts by going loco, smashing the radio to pieces, destroying supplies and equipment, and disabling the snow-cat.

MacCready, coming to the fore as a leader when Garry almost shoots Childs (Keith David) and resigns his position professing no further confidence in himself, overpowers Blair and orders him locked away. Urging everyone to stay together and “watch who you’re with”, MacCready is nonetheless powerless to prevent further deaths. Mistrust runs rife. Rivalries surface. There is speculation that MacCready himself is the thing.

The blood reaction test MacCready devises to prove who’s who is a showstopper in a film wall-to-wall with tense set-pieces, edgy confrontations and jump-out-of-your seat moment. Carpenter generates tension worthy of Hitchcock. Elsewhere, Rob Bottin’s FX work is nothing short of miraculous for a film made twenty-seven years ago and without a pixel of CGI. If H.R. Giger’s work on ‘Alien’ was terrifying, Bottin’s achieves the sweaty clamminess of a waking nightmare, grotesqueries out of Hieronymus Bosch come to life.

‘The Thing’ is Carpenter’s masterwork: there isn’t an ounce of flab on the film; there isn’t an image or a line of dialogue that doesn’t empirically contribute to the overall sense of gnawing tension and unremitting dread. ‘The Thing’ is one of the darkest horror films there is – not because it’s visceral, unflinching and dripping with gruesome effects (although it certainly ticks all of those boxes and then some), but because the horror comes from the darkest place of all: the human condition.

‘The Thing’ throws a group of ordinary people (ordinary in the sense that, while they might be pilots, doctors or scientists, they’re ultimately just a bunch of guys doing a job and it’s generally a shitty job and they bitch about it and bitch at each other and in short behave exactly how men in any job behave) – next to Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘The Thing’ is one of cinema’s most acutely-observed statements on masculine interaction – into an extraordinary situation and observes how little friendship, camaraderie and calm, reasonable behaviour count for anything once a huge dose of paranoia has been injected into the proceedings.

And having done this, it segues from an explosive denouement to an open-ended coda, signing off with an enigma in place of an ending, and making sure ‘The Thing’ will rattle around in your mind, in your imagination, in your subconscious for plenty of time to come. Years, in my case.

The Fog

Posted to coincide with Adrienne Barbeau’s 64th birthday.

There is much to like about ‘The Fog’ – its effortlessly eerie atmosphere, Dean Cundey’s glorious widescreen cinematography, Carpenter’s minimalist score – but where it excels is in its economy of narrative and characterisation.

A pre-credits sequence in which old-timer Mr Machen (John Houseman) tells a campfire tale to a group of children pretty much sets the whole film up in less than five minutes. This done, we’re introduced in quick succession to our half-dozen protagonists: DJ Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau), hitchhiker Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), boatman Nick (Tom Atkins), mayor Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh), her PA Sandy (Nancy Loomis) and alcoholic priest Father Malone (Hal Holbrook).

These characters and their interactions (in more ways than one in the case of Nick and Elizabeth who, unlike Kelly Clarkson, do hook up – and do so without any preliminaries) also help establish the film’s locale. Antonio Bay is a coastal town on the eve of its 100th anniversary celebrations. While Kathy oversees the preparations, Stevie broadcasts about the event from her station (housed in an isolated lighthouse). One person not in a party mood is Father Malone, whose discovery of his grandfather’s journal reveals that the town was founded on an act of murder.

In brief, a rich leper named Blake pays good money to Antonio Bay’s founding fathers so he could establish a colony nearby. Horrified at the prospect, but seduced by greed, they ruthlessly betray him. Fires lit on the beaches – ostensibly to guide Blake’s ship, the ‘Elizabeth Dane’, to safe mooring – lure it onto the rocks. All onboard perish. One hundred years later, the sea gives up its dead (well, Blake’s contingent of them anyway) and it’s vengeance-a-go-go.

John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s script is a symphony of spooky set-pieces, often leapfrogging from one ghostly bit of business to the next with such single-mindedness that the plot devices connecting them have a wonderfully admirable sense of honesty about them when, by any set of objective critical perameters, they ought seem hokey, contrived and laughable.

Need a piece of exposition vis-a-vis the dark secret the township was built on and the relevance of it being the 100th anniversary – one, moreover, that implicates Father Malone’s grandfather? Have a brick fall out of the rectory wall revealing granddad’s diary shortly before Kathy and Sandy turn up for no other reason than Malone can sit them down and read the pertinent entries to them. Oh yeah, and have this happen just after midnight on the day of the anniversary.

Need a primer that the vengeful ghosts will take their cutlasses and fish-hooks to six unlucky individuals, this being the number of original conspirators? Have someone find a piece of driftwood bearing the lettering ‘DANE’ (guess where it came from? and while you’re guessing, please overlook the fact that the ship went down a century ago!) and then have the lettering change mysteriously to ‘SIX MUST DIE’.

Okay, those last couple of paragraphs are as redolent with nitpicking as they are with cheap sarcasm and probably make it sound like I’m knocking ‘The Fog’. Far from it. It’s one of my favourite Carpenter movies, the equal of ‘Halloween’ and surpassed only by ‘The Thing’; and it speaks for itself that the contrivances of its construction – which would annoy the hell out of me in any other movie – somehow add to the pleasure of ‘The Fog’.

I think this owes to seeing it at a young age. ‘The Fog’ was one of the rare horror films my father let me stay up and watch. War movies and westerns were his preference – staying up was permissible when ‘Where Eagles Dare’ or ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ were on – but he didn’t like horror. A child’s imagination is an open window and for me ‘The Fog’ wasn’t just a horror film: it was a distillation of all the horror films the old man hadn’t let me watch. It was everything I’d imagined they were like.

I don’t tend to get misty-eyed over my childhood or spend time dwelling on the past, but in some respects it was great being a kid. Particularly where movies were concerned. Staying up late to watch a “grown up” movie – awesome! – and not having my enjoyment spoiled because I had the critical facilities to deconstruct, analyse and weigh up whether it was good or bad. I had no idea back then of what a plot device was, or a plot hole, or a contrivance. The “why?” of things never mattered. It was all about getting caught up in what was happening, holding your breath during the scary bits and relishing that delicious shiver when something creeped you out.