A John Carpenter Poll

"Cigarette Burns" is about as good as the show got, I'd say. Not his best work, but at least he showed up the rest of them. "Pro-Life" is less good and more grisly.

oh wait shit i forgot to mention this:

my wife has been dealing with her folks' financial stuff for several years now, and the guy who is the financial advisor she's worked with is Richie Castle, all grown up

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/headhuntershorrorhouse/images/8/8f/Richie_meets_the_Shape.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141001142055

He doesn't appear to have grown up all that much tbh.

They Live gets deserved credit for a honest depiction of Reagan's America, it's worthwhile for that alone

They Live is worthwhile as a big dumb goofy fun genre movie, but I always thought it gets waayyyyy too much credit as political/social commentary. It was 1988 after all - like yes, at last, a piece of culture that's finally brave enough to critique the greed and excess of Reagan's America, only a mere 8 years into Reagan's presidency. It's fun to see people fight weird gross monsters or w/e, but the idea of it as a piece of Serious Subversive Commentary always seemed a little rich to me. Would have worked just as well or better as a music video or an episode of Amazing Stories or something imho

I always thought of The Thing as the quintessential 80's/"Reagan's America" movie in Carpenter's filmography.

I assume that you mean that the Thing was the brave conservative simply trying to survive an assault on its values by a bunch of godless beardo hippie liberals who refused to conform to its dream of uniformity through assimilation.

xp to Eric

I personally like to think James Woods died five minutes after the release of Videodrome. Tragic.

xp Old Lunch, plus theres the obvious reference to the time that William Casey's stomach opened up and bit the arms off Ed Meese

woods is good in salvador

I think the credit it gets is for the on-screen depiction of Reagan's America, not necessarily the critique

Love this pic of Dario Argento and John Carpenter at Cannes this year:

https://scontent.fman2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/60197465_2348460075235529_5242926505905881088_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_ht=scontent.fman2-1.fna&oh=ce89c4adecbbd30560327fc7abb37a3a&oe=5D71C203

they live

id never seen precinct 13

its bad

no movie which features a kid getting shot dead in the first couple of minutes can be entirely bad iirc

Nah, it's good, just kind of formative.

i promise you ive just seen it, its bad

Great score at least.

yep

and girl moment and slow setup are good

performances are shockin tho

dun-diddle-dun-dun a-dun-diddle-dun-dun dun-diddle-dun-dun dun-DUN-diddle-dun-dun

‘Assault.. ‘ is great! What a movie! I always loved the story of how it did nothing in the States but then became a big hit in Britain at festivals where everyone went crazy over it. I hated Dark Star which is about as funny as a pin through the eye, so it tickles me that his co-writer on that hated ‘Assault..’. Interesting to note it currently has 98% on Rotten tomatoes.

It was a cast of as-good-as-unknowns so that explains the unpolished acting I suppose.

feel i normally align with darragh on films but Assault on Precinct 13 is good and James Morrison makes an excellent point.

oh deems is talking about the *performances* lol.

ha, develop that

i love any other carpenter ive seen, and was really looking forward to this so am willing to be talked round a bit.

well i’m ion a train but yes i don’t think the performances are v good but probably don’t need to be.

saw this when i was 15 and that’s where it’s status for me comes from. but if i give it a bit of thought i’d say the escalation of violence, from initial incident to gradually coalescing threat is v well managed. that threat coalesces into the specific impacts of bullets etc on the claustrophobic precinct but they’re only ever loosely linked to that brooding presence just beyond the visible iirc. in that respect it’s much like the early parts of the fog.

hmm this is all fair tbh

i hate to be that person doing that thing where youve seen a genuinely bold and influential effort after all the movies that have done it since (and tbf often better, which of course given budget and a template is easy done) and therefore seeing mainly the faults...but i think im that person this time

As I'm sure has been mentioned somewhere on this thread already, Assault is basically Hawks' Rio Bravo transplanted to an urban modern-day setting - but I think knowledge of that actually makes the Carpenter seem more ingenious!

IIRC ex-ilxor Enrique tried to argue somewhere (again, maybe here) that the remake of Assault is better than the original, but he may have been provoking us complacent auteurist at the time.

i’ve only seen the remake once, back when it was released, but i remember it being pretty good

Obviously Carpenter loved Hawks and siege movies, and he would go to that well a lot - even Halloween is ultimately kind of a one-person siege movie - but Assault is also kind of a riff on zombie movies (minus the zombies).

right down to the weather/lubar radio reports at the start

lunar

feel i normally align with darragh on films but Assault on Precinct 13 is good and James Morrison makes an excellent point.

AOP13 is good but it's certainly this (relative to expectations) really understated and bleak and dim movie which i think works effectively as a mood flick more than a kinetic action movie, which is to its credit. i do remember the performances being blatant in terms of the lack of charisma happening onscreen, everything taken away from the performances but the words and the gestures. I mean practically Bressonian in a way tbh.

There's a quote from Simon Pegg on the wiki that sums that up, sort of:

"You wouldn't really call it an action film," claims Pegg, "because it was pre- the evolution of that kind of film. And yet it is kind of an action film in a way."

Which is party why it works as a kind of link between Night of the Living Dead and, I dunno, Die Hard.

Wikipedia says "Assault ... was shot in only 20 days, including Thanksgiving, on a budget of $100,000."

and you can see every dollar on the screen

Carpenter only ever makes siege movies, just sometimes the protagonists are under siege (they live, the fog, prince of darkness), and sometimes they're the ones conducting the siege (big trouble in little china, escape from new york, vampires). His is a world of fortresses.

in dark star the protagonists are under siege by their own bomb

Embarrassingly, I must confess that I only saw Escape From New York for the first time last night. Solid flick! Although not quite what I expected. I figured it would have the brash swagger of his mid-'80s action-oriented material, but falling as it does between The Fog and The Thing it makes sense in hindsight that it's actually a moodier and more meditative film than I'd imagined. Wanna see LA now even though I'm sure it isn't the sequel this thing deserved.

LA is bad

What's the word on Black Moon Rising? I was first alerted to its existence via a trailer compilation I own and thought 'THIS LOOKS AMAZING' even before I learned that there was a Carpenter connection.

Also need to get around to watching Somebody's Watching Me! so the title stops seeming like an indictment of my continued negligence.

FTR, I seem to enjoy Carpenter even when he is bad (eg Vampires and Ghosts of Mars).

Oh right, the other one I haven't seen and always forget he did: Memoirs of a See-Through Chevy Chase. Is there any point?

Nah, Carpenter didn't write it or do the soundtrack... it's pretty bad.

I've never seen Memoirs. I always forget about Starman (which is not a siege film).

Black Moon Rising he ... wrote? Like The Eyes of Laura Mars?

Yeah, he only wrote the screenplay (directed by the fella who helmed the feted Burt Reynolds vehicle Malone).But I mean just look at this thing and tell me it isn't simply drenched in unadulterated Carpenterism

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MFD9P-QupFs

They Live IS pretty good!

Kinda surprised you liked it!

Read the Lethem monograph on the film from several years back if you the chance.

*get the chance

well it's Carpenter at the limits of his talent, and he knew to give Roddy Piper fewer lines than he would Kurt Russell.

I'm here to chew bubble gum and listen to Morbs' insights into the horror genre, and Morbs is all outta insights into the horror genre.

yeah that famous one-liner is the kind that impresses lotsa 14-year-old boys

more scifi than horror, honeybunch

i did like that there isn't even a liplock with Meg Foster

Also that one-liner is the only memorable line in the whole movie, as far as I remember.