A John Carpenter Poll

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

if tom atkins appeared in my life i would do the same thing xxp

He also hooks up with a much younger woman in Halloween III! I guess I just don't understand the Atkins effect.

the stache... the rugged masculinity... the alcoholism... swoon

not as dreamy as Nancy Loomis/Kyes

Prince of Darkness is in some ways the flipside of Big Trouble, a movie that doesn't really make a lick of sense, but this time played for mood and menace over adventure and comedy. In Big Trouble, Jack Burton is the guy that just can't process what's happening around him but barrels forward anyway, which is funny. In Prince of Darkness, it's scientists recognizing they're dealing with something over their heads, and it scares them.

Anyway, I love "The Fog," one of the few movie ghosts stories made like someone telling a ghost story (in this case, literally). And if there's something good that came out of the relatively pointless RLM three-parter it's a) recognizing how often Carpenter essentially made a zombie movie with no zombies b) how often he made a western with no horses and c) just how diverse his catalog actually is.

Blank Check is doing Carpenter too.

https://ultimateactionmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/They-Live-Roddy-Piper-Glasses.jpg

thing about Prince Of Darkness is the idea of Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong having long, cryptic dialogues slowly proving both scientifically and spiritually that we live in a fallen world sounds tailor made for me but I think that what happens when shit finally does start to go down towards the end will be too rich for my taste

Blank Check ep on They Live went into a tangent about how young kids on YouTube now put fake "sponsored content" in their videos - not as satire, they just do their best imitation of an ad read because having a sponsor is a sign of success and they're on a fake it till you make it kick

When my kids were younger and used to do goofy fake unboxings and stuff, they would always throw in a compulsory "be sure to click like and subscribe!"

I'd never seen a single Carpenter film until about a year ago, but now I've seen Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live. Most of those have been because I've been remote-watching movies with friends on Friday nights, and we've gravitated toward '70s-'90s genre classics, but I also watched Halloween for the first time specifically because I wanted to listen to the Blank Check episode about it.

They Live was not good like i was led to believe it was in fact bad, very bad- ambitious and endearing but bad

this guy wore some kind of reverse sunglasses while watching it

Wow classy move making it personal

*Raises fists*

Halloween has become my new favorite upon rewatching. So economical, nothing wasted, incredibly tense. SO scary. The sound of him breathing through the mask & first person POV still messes w me even now.

The Thing is still & will always be incredible and stands outside any list or ranking as my ideal perfect movie

Big Trouble is great & so enjoyable even in its silliest, weirdest moments

I saw Prince of Darkness once 10 years ago and was furious that it was so stupid and boring. Blank check made me want to revisit so it may be a “Halloween movie night” watch this year.

They Live is cool! Rowdy Roddy Piper & Keith David rule always but the main woman always weirds me out with her scary blue eyes, and it definitely plays a lot slower than i remember. The alien robot skeletons are creepy af, i love them. it’s cool 🕶

The only upcoming ones I haven’t seen are Memoirs of Invisible Man and The Ward, and its been a long time since I’ve seen all the others in between, most of which were bummers for me at the time. But I love the guy! How can you not.

The secret formula of They Live is that it is simultaneously very bad and very good. Carpenter knew what he was doing. I mean he put Rowdy Roddy Piper in the lead, for the love of pete.

apparently the Blank Check podcast is more popular than i assumed

The Thing is still & will always be incredible and stands outside any list or ranking as my ideal perfect movie

daaamn, so otm. What did you think of The Fog?

Simultaneously good and bad is fair, I think I was hitting for acknowledgement of this when I said "ambitious"

I don't think it cares whether or not it works as a movie

I love how from the very start, the scene of the old man telling a ghost story to children, it stays completely within that tone all the way through.

Xp re they live, to be clear

Also recently re-watched Escape From New York for the first time in years. I enjoyed the shit out of it, though it was emptier than I remember somehow - I had the impression of there being more in terms of pitched battles and set pieces? This was all street toughs being tough on the street (I swear one guy had a giant plug round his neck?) and hard-bitten dialogue. Kurt Russell is such a badass. I could have taken way more of him and Lee Van Cleef squaring off. And more Adrienne Barbeau in general.

Nb I immediately attached a couple of chandeliers to my car.

I like The Fog but I don’t love it … its overworked & weird, you can sorta see the seams? l the feel of trying to spin straw into gold, i guess.
Carpenter is great when you get sucked into the full illusion, like The Thing, no matter how often you watch you get sucked into the story while you are trying to work out how he did it.
And knowing that even carpenter was unhappy with his first attempt at it before they added the extra footage etc makes those “seams” stick out. but it’s hard to hate it: the cast is great so it kinda balances itself out. it’s like the little engine that sortof could lol

I've never seen The Fog but it's streaming for free on Amazon Prime, so I guess I'll check it out tonight.

I grew up watching The Fog with my old man and have no critical distance from it at all. It's like trying to judge an old blanket or something.

It's awesome, obviously.

fog and prince of darkness prob twinned for me in his filmography because from a distance parts of them can seem silly or flimsy but if you are particularly locked into the mood they are utterly perfect

love to fall asleep to both of them incidentally, even though prince of darkness inevitably wakes me up at the end, and it's the worst

I grew up watching The Fog with my old man and have no critical distance from it at all. It's like trying to judge an old blanket or something.

This is exactly how I feel about "The Fog," Halloween," "Escape from New York," "The Thing" and "Big Trouble." No matter how many times I see them it feels like the first time I'm seeing them, and at the same time also, you know, the 100th or whatever.

Been meaning to watch "Christine" for the first time in ages. Another one by Carpenter that I used to see all the time on broadcast TV.

Carpenter films I have never seen: "Memoirs of an Invisible Man," "Village of the Damned," "The Ward." Carpenter film everyone forgets is a Carpenter film: "Starman," which even earned Bridges an Oscar nom.

all the others in between, most of which were bummers for me at the time

Escape From LA plays way better now as a goofy “Los Angeles” take on the SPCU than as a long-awaited followup to Escape 1

Memoirs is basically good except for Chevy Chase. Like Starman, it’s J-Carps taking a years-in-development multi-times-rewritten studio script and trying to make a family-friendlyish Hollywood entertainment, with a little bit of his own flair in the special effects and casting.

Unfortunately Chase is onscreen p much the entire time, even when he’s meant to be invisible, and had a lot of input on the rewriting (cf Which Lie Did I Tell?)

xpost dumb question - what is SPCU?

The Stinky Poopy Cinematic Universe

I know that a lot about liking a film has to do with your mood and your frame of mind in the moment

I will give The Thing another chance, I remember liking the beginning part of it a lot

Was surprised by how much I liked Christine, it was silly and only a little scary, but was sexy

still planning to see Escape From New York, They Live, and Prince of Darkness

Veg - Snake Plissken Cinematic Universe :)

love you sic but you could have written that out so we wouldn't all be confused

lmao