A John Carpenter Poll

My favourite Carpenter score.

Entertaining current interview:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-capitol-riot-was-too-dystopian-for-even-john-carpenter

Starman was pretty dumb I thought. still haven't seen Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, They Live, or Escape From L.A.

Starman is just a quick director-for-hire job, not a Carpenter project.

Big Trouble is v good at what it's doing, but designed to be watched in a group of children-plus-adults. Escape From LA is not in any way good per se, but entertaining as long as you're prepared for something sillier than Escape from NY (the increase in ludicrousness would also have been a reasonable step between NY and Escape From Mars, if that had happened). They Live is a masterpiece, that fits its budget better than Carpenters usually manage, and can play equally well as a savage, literate (and furious) satire on Reaganite capitalism, or as a Friday-night-beer action movie.

Rewatched The Fog last night. It’s gorgeous to look at.

i just watched starman for the first time - i enjoyed the first hour or so of it. bridges and allen are great throughout and the special effects are fantastic. unfortunately the end both got bogged down in the romance storyline while still feeling rushed and the motivations of the military bad guys never really made any sense.

i remember the fog being kind of boring but it's been a while since i watched it.

the fog is kind of boring but imo that's a feature not a flaw

also it's a good argument for radio station horror being the best kind of horror

Dan S -

Read the discussion of Prince of Darkness upthread and then see it ASAP. It's an amazing, genuinely terrifying movie.

I sometimes feel like Prince of Darkness is sort of ... ahead of its time?

i really think it was

Dan S -

Read the discussion of Prince of Darkness upthread and then see it ASAP. It's an amazing, genuinely terrifying movie.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Friday, January 29, 2021 11:30 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean, don't read too much of the discussion upthread because a few of us were dropping spoilers like nobody's business. But yeah, definitely see it.

I agree with Brad's assessment of "mortally terrifying". It's always landed that way for me.

Boring is fair but I prefer stately.

I love The Fog, agree that it is a bit boring at points, and think the problem is that it should have been about an hour longer.

This poll really needs to have Elvis on it too

― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, September 4, 2007 11:35 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

My 2007-era mistake, apologies

My favorite parts are probably the most “boring” i.e. Adrienne Barbeau’s endless walk down the steps to tge lighthouse, which come to think of it yeah please give me an hour more of that stuff ... Abbas Kiarostami’s The Fog.

re that interview, he seems like a real mensch

Watched the Fog remake over the holidays, and it wasn't too terrible - it was less boring but also less scary. You need to be able to stretch out a bit to feel scared, so as noted the boring is necessary.

The Fog tries in a way to split the difference between an old-fashioned atmospheric ghost story and a King-style monsters vs. small town horror show, landing, predictably for Carpenter, much harder on the latter, with occasional longueurs that suggest rather than realize ghost story effects. I would love a version with an extra hour of gratuitous moody shots of foggy landscapes, creepily sustained slow builds, and a more traumatic ending.

I don't ever get scared by horror movies anymore, so "less scary" is a non-entity for judging. But, yes, it's especially not very scary.

also the original Fog is loaded up with great character actors!

maybe ILX likes it because we also secretly want to be DJs at that badass radio station on the water

The Fog was interesting I thought. Big Trouble in Little China only had remote charms for me

! Big Trouble is all charms! That's the best thing it has going for it! Then again, maybe you had to see it first at 13 or something.

I really can't understand watching Big Trouble in Little China and not just instantly loving it.

I first watched it as an adult and it took a few times to get really into it, love it now.

The comic series was surprisingly fun.

there have been multiple new comic series of BTiLC as of late btw
https://www.boom-studios.com/wordpress/series/bigtrouble/

I'm an enormous fan of BTiLC, so when the comic was announced I was very excited. I just remember picking up the first issue and it didn't really gel with me. I think it was that the artwork was too cartoony or something? Maybe I'll have to dig it out of storage and give it another try.

i can't really speak to the quality of them but there's been quite a few runs!

looking for a free way to watch The Fog remake so I can hate it

The artwork is very cartoony, but surely BTiLC is a very cartoony film?

The Snake Plisskin series they started at the same time was a snooze tho.

Big Trouble is a film that revels in physicality, I can see light 2D-styled drawing not connecting with someone trying to evoke the film in their reading (the text on that page said Eric Powell, but the image clearly wasn't Powell).

fyi Boom is one of the most outrageously exploitative publishers in the field, reading their output from your municipal library is a better option if you have it.

That's a bummer - I've really been enjoying Something is Killing the Children. How outrageously exploitative are they?

They pay $35 a page for scripts, $100 a page for writing & drawing. Make t-shirts and merch of artists' work without compensation. Underpay invoices, pay months late, sometimes ghost artists altogether. Recruitment model is largely to give young artists their first jobs so it's easier to rip them off. "Some shady stuff in their contracts, and sometimes tries to secretly annul contracts by slipping extra clauses into the fine print of their payment vouchers," per one former worker.

(I assume Tynion is treated better, likewise John Allison - but I have also assumed that Allison stopped drawing Giant Days himself when it went to Boom bcz their rates weren't worth it.)

Ugh, that sucks. Thanks for the tip.

Watched Big Trouble in Little China, which I don't think I'd seen in maybe 25 years. So much fun and went way further than I remembered in terms of being utterly batshit. I think the wildman monster that kidnaps Gracie and leaves on Russell's truck at the end might be one of my favourite screen monsters of ever.

https://monsterlegacy.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/bigtroublewildmanyehe.jpg?w=768&h=508

Its a masterpiece

I saw that at the cinema when I was a kid. It's ok but I wouldn't go that far!

Give it another crack, its the biggest, funnest pisspull of a movie, great performances and effects

I will do cos I just re-watched The Fog recently and that was fun.

RLM did a three-parter on Carpenter films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSuKs44w_vI

Big Trouble in Little China was imo a better 'best' John Carpenter film than The Thing

Halloween was the best, though

Blank Check is doing Carpenter too. Quality varies according to guests but it's pretty joyful and man, what a streak that guy had.

I'm in a weird place because I love Carpenter a lot but am a giant coward when it comes to horror, can't really do anything more extreme than like 60's Hammer. So I don't think I'll ever watch Halloween but I'll admit The Fog and Prince Of Darkness have been calling out to me.

(I did see The Thing, it's great but that scene w/ the dogs means I'll probably never revisit)

The Fog has some jump scares and overall quite chilling, I love it.

Prince of Darkness I haven't seen for years so I'm struggling to recall the scares, unless you count seeing Alice Cooper in yer back yard, still a great film though.

Big Trouble in Little China is very not-my-speed Carpenter.

daniel you may have been inured to halloween's scariness by forty years of slasher movie cliches. or maybe not! movie is far scarier to me now than it was when i first saw it in college

prince of darkness has three scenes that are scarier than anything in the carpenter filmography tho, fair warning

I revisited The Fog over the weekend. It's cozy, not too scary, and a bit slow. Was very distracted by Jamie Lee Curtis's character hooking up with Tom Atkins' character and then just being like "I'm going to follow you around like a puppy for the rest of this movie even though I'm a young free-spirited hitch-hiker and you're a middle-aged man and everything in your life seems to be falling dangerously apart at this precise moment..."

movie is far scarier to me now than it was when i first saw it in college

This is very true and I'm somehow surprised each time I watch it. Not a drop of '80s slasher laziness/crassness in it.

STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson) at 9:22 20 Oct 21
prince of darkness has three scenes that are scarier than anything in the carpenter filmography tho, fair warning