A John Carpenter Poll

Keith David, actor of Shakespeare and August Wilson, is perhaps best known for this film and his Ken Burns voiceover work.

(yes, i know he was in The Thing and Platoon)

you came so close to him

my Paramount studio tour went all over the set on Tuesday. Have never seen the show.

― joyless shithead (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 15, 2011 8:00 PM (eight years ago)

They Live is probably neck-and-neck with The Thing as my most-watched Carpenter at this point.

i'd kill to see Keith David do Shakespeare

well maybe he's got a Lear in front of him

I saw him in Wilson's Seven Guitars

Is there a more influential director this decade than John Carpenter? Nope. The Carpenter renaissance happening is music to my ears. It's about time we acknowledge how The Thing, Escape from NY, They Live, Halloween & Assault on Precinct 13 have aged like fine wine over the years https://t.co/RaaQCy3MwA

— Jordan Ruimy (@mrRuimy) October 24, 2019

No Halloween thread? (Maybe I missed it wading through 10 screens of Halloween threads.)

A nearby Cineplex was running it all week--finally got out the final night. Recliner, $5, completely empty except me. Or so I thought--an hour into the film, some guy down near the screen got up and changed seats. A little unnerving.

I think I noticed P.J. Soles' platforms for the first time tonight. And I remembered how much significance I attached to the following exchange when I took an independent course in horror films back in 1979:

"I'm scared."
"Then why are you sitting there in the dark?"
"I don't know."

I liked The Thing, but not as much as Halloween

The fog is super lo fi fun

watched Body Bags the other night, it was also pretty entertaining... and it has John himself doing the linking material! plus a bunch of other horror movie and character actor luminaries

I liked Halloween much more than The Thing

I said that already

I liked Christine

it was kind of sexy for a horror movie, the beginning and especially the hospital scene with Dennis’s bare foot in the foreground, but really all throughout

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.)