The Thing

The Fog is scary as shit, and totally slept on by fans and director alike. Carpenter considers is a failure!

it's kinda hokey imo

Fog missing something ... like the action is spread too wide. Carpenter works better in closed quarters.

pink poop!

gah why haven't i ever seen the fog?? must correct this immediately!

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, August 26, 2011 8:18 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

same

The Fog is awesome! It was on all of the time when our family first got cable and it seemed so completely terrifying.

And it's on Netflix instant view. Housebound due to hurricane movie watching weekend material - yes!

I think it lends itself to stormy weather watching.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking too.

I like the Fog but it's no Thing.

Back in the 80s when I shared a flat with my sister and this French dude, we had gone off to Shropshire for xmas with mum and dad, and Philippe was watching The Fog alone in the TV room. He went to bed already quite scared, and as he was dropping off the ceiling fell in on the sofa he's been sitting on, like half a ton of bricks!

He told us he lay in bed staring into the dark for about three hours before he plucked up courage to investigate.

watched the Fog recently actually - there's good stuff in it but the pacing is very strange, probably due to the brutal last-minute re-editing

Oh, yeah. I admire it despite its flaws. Carpenter originally wanted it to be more of a spooky ghost story, which it is, but they made him add some shocks and grue.

Personal Life

Carpenter is a Godzilla fan.[citation needed]

What's his actual worse film? I've never got very far with "In the Mouth of Madness" or whatever its called.

Worst film he's been in is "Silence of the Hams", which may actually be the worst film I ever had to sit to the end of, ftb reviewing it.

Carpenter? He's made a lot of shot lately. "Ghosts of Mars?" Never seen "Memoirs of an Invisible Man." I thought "Mouth of Madness" was OK.

Shit, not shot.

carpenter's most recent flick, the ward, is p bad, sadly :-(

his contrib to the portmanteau 'Body Bags' flick is also the weakest segment, imho

b-but i was actually coming here to say that 'In the Mouth of Madness' is his most underrated movie, so...

Village of the Damned is similar to The Fog (sleepy village horror) but I think is a notch better.

Cigarette Burns is totally over-the-top creepy and gruesome.

I think that I quite liked Ghosts of Mars -- on the nothing-Nastassia-does-is-non-excellent principle -- but I actually can't remember much about it: I saw it on TV and probably skipped over to CSI in the middle.

Natasha not Nastassia. My typing is gone to shot today.

his vampires movie with James Woods was AWFUL. there's a few of his I still haven't seen (Ghosts of Mars - which reads like a retread of Assault on Precinct 13, and Mouth of Madness which was on TV the other day and looked pretty terrible). but the vampire movie... ugh

bah i am going to have start 'refining' my 'all horror movies w sam neil in them are grate' theory eg possession, in the mouth of madness, dead calm, the omen 3 (hang on...)

you watched the Omen 3

I mean, that's REAL dedication

dedication to ART

vampires is awful, yes -- hadn't even twigged that was him

haha the only halloween i have seen is "III: Season of the Witch" <-- it is p silly but quite watchable

that's the non-Mike Meyers one right? v odd entry.

WATCH HALLOWEEN MARK S

yeah the first one is unfuckwithable

Yes, Halloween is wonderful.

Vampires is probably the worst movie I have ever seen at a theater.

Halloween 3 was originally written by Nigel Kneale, who take his name off the credits once Carpenter and his producers started tinkering with the script. It still has its moments.

Vampires is probably the worst movie I have ever seen at a theater.

ugh I saw this in the theater too. was actively angry/irritated when it was over

I remember feeling aggravated when it was done as well. It was just so aggressively dumb and terrible.

Vampires and Ghost of Mars were both total shit, and each time they underperformed and got terrible reviews, Carpenter started whoa is me-ing. Oh, my budget was too small, oh they were mismarketed, oh we didn't get the cut we wanted, oh, you should have seen the original script. Romero pulls the same shit, too. And then they inevitably make a come-back low-budget return to roots movie that sucks, too. At least Carpenter doesn't pretend to be anything other than totally burnt out.

Carpenter slagging off Cronenberg as being too high-falutin for his own good these days is lolzy

Also, Carpenter in particular seems very happy to accept checks after people remake his films. Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Precinct 13. Even an Escape from New York remake has been in the works for a while.

xpost To be fair, Cronenberg is totally in I Want an Oscar mode these days.

well whatever, Cronenberg has also continued to make decent movies, unlike Carpenter.

No contest! Cronenberg in Oscar mode has been great!

But unlike Carpenter, he totally bristles at being pegged a horror director. Which Carpenter reads as an implicit slight.

yeah, Carpenter gives him shit for considering himself an "artiste"

first viewing of mouth of madness left me flat, but i recall i was all 'ooh a new carpenter film it will be great'. then of course second viewing was more of a neutral position and i actually enjoyed it.

can't say the same for mars and vampire, they are awful.

The whole spooky recorded sections in Prince of Darkness still crop up in my mind as one of the creepiest things i've seen in movies ever.

Ghosts Of Mars isn't *bad* per se - it's just a rewrite of Precinct 13 with a little bit of Outland thrown in. Vampires is still the bottom point.

but there was no ice cream van scene!

In Darwinian terms: How would a Thing even evolve? Would it evolve intelligence? Would it need to?

Interesting exploration of this by excellent biologist and sci-fi author Peter Watts in his story 'The THings', which won all sorts of awards/nominations last year. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

vampires has some cool gore effects and a fun james woods performance going for it, but the second half is awful. ghosts of mars doesnt have a single creative or interesting moment in it, and to me signals the moment where he was no longer capable of making energetic movies on low budgets. then again, i thought his masters of horror ep was pretty good. memoirs is pretty bad all the way through. christine isnt very good by the standards of his early stuff. havent seen The Ward yet but i havent heard anything good.

bah i am going to have start 'refining' my 'all horror movies w sam neil in them are grate' theory eg possession, in the mouth of madness, dead calm, the omen 3 (hang on...)

― Ward Fowler, Friday, August 26, 2011 11:54 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

EVENT HORIZON explodes that theory :(

the omen 3 does rule though

Cronenberg always watchably entertaining and interesting, even when he's committing an "honorable failure" (filming unfilmable novels! the clue is in the word "unfilmable"!)*, but -- big caveat: existenZ was the last i saw -- he's NEVER made a film as flawless as The Thing.

*Even as failures, Crash and Naked Lunch aren't remotely down in a league with Vampires: I'm glad they were made, and both have excellent individual scenes, they just don't really gel, in themselves or as translations of the source material. With NL this is as much as anything an allergy on my part to the RoboCop guy, actually.