Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

Classic Moment of Cinema: Escape from New York (1981)

Jamie Lee Curtis explains the world of Escape from New York.

Escape from New York trailer

Escape from New York (1981) poster

Escape from New York: Main Title - Music Composed and Performed by John Carpenter, in Association with Alan Howarth

A Moment of LOL: John Carpenter's The Thing: The Musical

The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror - Edited by Ian Conrich & David Woods

Is it at all possible to over think a particular subject?  Even if you have not managed to slog through the needlessly dense study The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror, you should be able to figure out my question is a rhetorical one.  Of course one can over think a subject, any subject.  The subject of this particular study says that very thing at the close of the book, during an interview.  "People see things in films that are very odd to me."

Well, they are odd to me, too.  Very odd.  One of the oddest things in the book, and one that sums up my issues with it, is the last sentence of Suzie Wong's essay Restorative and Destructive: Carpenter and Maternal Authority.  "Nostalgic for a humanity that precedes the social contract and exceeds its repressive discipline, Carpenter's cinema celebrates the subversion of patriarchy but, in the end, does not resist the age-old, misogynist question of how to build a man, rationally and efficiently, on a feminine foundation."  I have no idea what that sentence is supposed to mean.  I also have to say that, for an essay that tries to examine Carpenter's ideal of Maternal Authority, the absence of the matriarchal Ghosts of Mars, a film that Carpenter reportedly made in response to numerous claims of misogyny in his work, to be rather disingenuous, at best.  How does that film fit into the almost comical Freudian symbolism (The KAB lighthouse as a giant phallus?  Christine as a womb-tomb?) the author tosses around with joyous abandon.  I really would have loved to have known.  But it is destined to remain just another unanswered question cluttering up my already hopelessly cluttered mind.

Before I get accused of sexism for pointing out a single essay written by a woman, I need to point out that the entire book is like that.  It is peppered with quotable chestnuts of intellectual verbosity that, every so often, I had to read aloud to my wife.  Stuff like this rather convoluted comment regarding The Fog, "Plotted as a mariner's ghost story, peopled with nautical lepers, a female disc jockey and a dipsomaniac Catholic priest, its hybridity conjures up the difficulties of classifying the Gothic caught in the act of endlessly deconstructing itself."  Huh?  My wife would hear that and just give me a comically puzzled look and ask, "Why are you still reading that book?"  Why?  Because I am a huge fan of John Carpenter's films and, despite being befuddled by some of the criticism, I really wanted to read something scholarly about the man and his films.

The problem, and it is a problem that I have had with a quite a few pieces of film criticism, is that the material being referenced is not diligently checked to see if the actual text conforms to how it being represented in the essay.  My inner error gong sounded when I read Father Malone described as a "dipsomaniac Catholic priest," something that is just not true.  Yes, Father Malone is both a drunk and a priest, but he also states that his very own Grandfather was also a priest in the Antonio Bay church.  That makes Father Malone an alcoholic Episcopalian priest, since Catholic priests are not allowed to marry.  A minor, albeit critical, descriptive error.

But a page or so later, in the same essay, A Spook Ride on Film: Carpenter and the Gothic, the author states, in regards to the golden cross hidden within the walls of the Antonio Bay church, "The priest who clutches it to his breast unknowingly embraces hs death warrant in the final scene."  When I read this I wondered if author Marie Mulvey-Roberts had ever even bothered to watch John Carpenter's The Fog.  Nowhere in the film is it said, or even hinted, that the gold cross would afford any sort of protection against the fog's inhabitants.  The cross is made from the very gold that was stolen from them and Father Malone clutches it to his breast not for protection, but to carry it out and return it to Blake and offer himself for sacrifice.  "I'm the sixth conspirator.  I'm Father Malone, take me."

John Carpenter is not a classically trained musician or composer, a fact that is relentlessly and ruthlessly pounded home in the essay Fast and Cheap? The Film Music of John Carpenter.  It takes several pages and compositional examples to say the exact same thing that Carpenter once said in one or two sentences in an interview.  "I think of film music as carpeting," Carpenter told the interviewer.  "You notice carpeting when you first walk in, but after awhile it just fades into the design of the house and no longer stands out."

The essays collected in this anthology all vacillate between being frustrating, obvious, and humorously over thought or painfully under researched (see above example).  In the introduction, and in more than a few of the gathered essays, it is pointed out that John Carpenter has repeatedly stated that he does not consider himself to be an intellectual film maker.  That he is only interested in eliciting an emotional response from the viewers of his films.  Perhaps it is that approach that makes a search for any deeper intellectual meaning in Carpenter's body of work so frustrating and silly sounding.  Because there really isn't any.

TV Stuff: Phantasm/The Fog double feature TV spots

I remembering sing this double bill when I was a kid, and it was AWESOME!

Halloween (1978)

"You can't kill the bogeyman."

October 31, 1963:

Judith Myers has stayed home to neck with her boyfriend while her little brother Michael has gone out trick or treating.  Taking advantage of Michael's absence, Judith takes her boyfriend upstairs, to her bedroom, so they can have sex.

What Judith does not know is that she and her boyfriend are being watched.

After watching Judith and her boyfriend run upstairs, the mysterious peeping tom sneaks into the house, through the unlocked back door, and removes a large knife from a kitchen drawer.  After waiting for Judith's boyfriend to leave, the peeping tom creeps upstairs to Judith's bedroom.  The girl is blissfully unaware of the intruder's presence, until she glimpses a reflection in her vanity mirror.

Judith covers her bared breasts with her hands and shouts "Michael!"  The mysterious intruder is her brother.

Michael stabs Judith to death and leaves the house.  As Michael walks out the front door, a car parks in front of the house and a man and woman climb out and approach him.  The man asks "Michael?" and removes the mask.

Everything up until this point has been filmed entirely from Michael's point of view.  Once the mask is removed, though, the point of view switches to the more conventional third person and it is revealed that Michael Myers is a six year old boy.

October 31, 1978:

Michael Myers is now twenty-one years old and being prepared for transfer to another mental health facility.  Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), Myers' psychiatrist, is supervising the transfer.  Although Myers has not said a word "in over fifteen years" Loomis believes that the man is incredibly dangerous and not to be underestimated.

Myers is underestimated, however, and he is able to make an escape.  Although no one else believes Loomis, the man knows that there is only one place on earth that Michael Myers would go after his escape.

He would go home.

Halloween is, arguably, one of the very best (and if not the very best, at least the very best known) cinematic versions of the Tale of the Hook ever made.

At the beginning of Danse Macabre, Stephen King's highly opinionated and somewhat seminal examination of the horror genre, the Tale of the Hook is described and discussed in detail.  The tale, simplified and condensed for this review, goes something like this:  

A teenage couple are out at the local Lover's Lane, enjoying some much needed alone time.  The radio is turned on, so they hear a news bulletin warning that a dangerous psychopath, who has a hook for a hand, has escaped from the local asylum.  After hearing this, the girl wants to go home.  Because the Lover's Lane they're at just so happens to be said psychopath's old killing ground.  The guy really wants his date's girlish goodies, though.  So he keeps reassuring her that everything is okay, that the asylum is miles and miles away and, even though they are all alone in a dark and deserted wooded area, they are quite safe.  The girl tries to calm down, but she keeps hearing things.  At one point she sees someone lurking outside, in the shadows.  She freaks and the guy gives up, starts the car, and takes off.  When they get to the girl's home, they find that there is a hook caught on one of the car's door handles.

King describes the Tale of the Hook as "a simple, brutal classic of horror."  One that "exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down."  A tale that "offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit."  

The very same thing could be said about Halloween.  The surface similarities between the Tale of the Hook and Halloween are so obvious that, during his critique of the Tale of the Hook, King states outright that, "in its direct point-to-point progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in the last sentence, [the Tale of the Hook] is remarkably similar to John Carpenter's Halloween."

That is because they are the same story.  Let's strip away all of the cosmetic narrative modifications that John Carpenter and Debra Hill made to the story in their screenplay and see what we have left:

1.  A guy and girl out on a date.  CHECK.  [Bob and Lynda, Laurie has a babysitting "date" with Tommy Doyle]

2.  A dangerous psychopath escapes from a lunatic asylum.  CHECK.

3.  Said dangerous psychopath returns to the scene of his crime.  CHECK.

4.  Dangerous psychopath hides in shadows and stalks guy and girl.  CHECK.

5.  After "escaping" dangerous psychopath, a chilling discovery is made.  CHECK.

The End.

But what does all that mean, really?  I think it shows that John Carpenter and Debra Hill knew what they were doing.  That they purposefully used a popular and well known Urban Legend and/or Campfire Story as the story template for their cinematic tale of terror.  While I am certain that Carpenter and Hill's decision to use the Tale of the Hook as a story template had more to do with it being a relatively "easy" and "cheap" story to tell, I am also certain that they were also well aware that doing so would give their movie an almost primal aura of myth.

That aura of myth coalesces around the mysterious and sinister character of Michael Myers.  From the very start of the film it is clear that he is no ordinary psychopath.  (If such a thing could be described as ordinary.)  Carpenter only reveals Myers actual face twice.  Once as a child, right after he murders his older sister, and once as an adult, just before Loomis shoots him.  Both times Myers' facial expression is not that much different from the Halloween mask that he is wearing throughout most of the film.  Blank and emotionless.  

Yet it is Myers' now distinctive mask that one thinks of when Loomis describes Myers to Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) as having a "blank, pale, emotionless face."  During his description of Myers, Loomis also makes a comment about Myers' eyes.  He calls them "the blackest eyes, the Devil's eyes."  I think it should be noted that, for almost the entire film, Myers' mask obscures his eyes.  They only thing the viewer can see are two black, empty sockets.  Make of that what you will.

From the moment that Loomis is first introduced, up until the very last line of the movie, Loomis is continually and constantly warning those around him of Myers absolute evil.  He refers to Myers as an it almost as often as him.  When Sheriff Brackett voices doubt when Loomis suspects that Myers has torn apart and ate a dog raw, because he got hungry, Loomis snaps "this is not a man."  Later he tells Brackett that "death [itself] has come to your town." 

Because of storytelling (and budgetary) restraints Loomis cannot interact with the film's other predominant character, the babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), until the very end of the film.  Although Loomis pops up periodically to warn of the evil that has returned to the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, at no point in the remainder of the film is Michael Myers ever not shown or characterized as something of this world.  Carpenter and Hill pull off this narrative trick by having Laurie babysit a young boy named Tommy Doyle.

Tommy Doyle is the little kid in the audience, or the inner child inside of each member of the audience, that has heard all of the spooky stories about the haunted houses in the neighborhood, the escaped lunatics, and who fears that there is a very real bogeyman lurking in the shadows.  This allows Tommy to pick up the "Michael Myers is Pure Evil" idea (albeit redressed as "the bogeyman") and weave it through Laurie's section of the story.

Unfortunately it is the Laurie Strode section of Halloween that has been most damaged by the inane plot twist that Carpenter and Hill cooked up to explain why Myers appears to focus on and stalk Laurie throughout the movie.  Since I no longer recognize that any of the sequels (save for Part 3) have happened, Halloween can exist in its own perfect little world.  One where my original theory for Myers' fixation on Laurie can play out without sequel interference.

I think the reason for Myers' fixation is easy to spot, but also quite subtle.  Myers has returned to the scene of his crime, his childhood home.  Laurie has to stop by the old Myers house, because she is running an errand for her dad.  Laurie has to leave a key under the door mat.  Before Laurie does so, she is warned by young Tommy Doyle that the Myers house is haunted, that evil things are inside of it.  The irony is that Tommy is correct, Myers [Evil] is actually lurking inside the house.  The moment also serves as the official starting point for Tommy becoming the film's Loomis substitute.  Laurie scoffs at the warning, goes up onto the porch, and places the key under the door mat.  Myers watches her from inside the house.  Tommy and Laurie go their separate ways.  As Laurie walks off, she begins to sing.  Myers then steps into the frame and watches Laurie walk away.  While much has been made of the suggestive song that Laurie is singing, I think the real point is that Myers hears Laurie singing.  Judith Myers was singing just before Michael killed her.  Micheal hears this girl singing, like his sister was singing, and he simply imprints on her.  It's easy and makes a lot more sense than the asinine idea of having Laurie be...

Nope, not going to say it.  That didn't happen.

Most of Halloween is cat and mouse games.  Michael Myers is never in a rush to kill.  He even shows a penchant for toying with his victims.  He does not speak, something that implies an inability to reason.  Save for the single moment where he climbs on top of a car while making his escape, Michael Myers does not run.  He just walks.  Although he has no problem moving around in broad daylight, he waits until nightfall to strike.  He hides in the shadows and just watches his unsuspecting victims.  He is relentless.  He is remorseless.  He is unstoppable.

Michael Myers really is the bogeyman.

In 1978, or even 1979, when I first saw Halloween, during one of its many re-releases, the film's "shock" ending could still be considered to be something akin to surprising, or even frightening.  Now, I am afraid, Halloween's ending is nothing but a tired genre cliche.  It is something that the countless rip-offs and far too numerous sequels have, to paraphrase co-screenwriter/director John Carpenter's own words, "carbon copied all of the effectiveness out of."

So it goes.

But I will always have, and relish, the memory of having the ever living shit scared out of me while watching this movie on the big screen, back in 1979, when I was all of 12 years old.  Nothing can ever take that away from me.

Four stars out of four.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Halloween (1978)

TV Stuff: Halloween TV premiere intro

Halloween (1978) poster

Halloween (1978) - Main Title theme - Composed and Performed by John Carpenter

Classic Moment of Cinema: Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II (1981) poster

Halloween II (1981) trailer

"More of the night HE came home."

Halloween II (1981) - Main Title theme - Music Composed and Performed by John Carpenter in association with Alan Howarth

Halloween II (1981)

"You don't know what death is."

Although he has just been shot seven times at close range with a 357 Magnum six shooter (just one of this movie's many continuity errors) Micheal Myers (stuntman/actor Dick Warlock) gets up and walks off to continue his October 31, 1978 killing spree.

Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) gives chase, but he loses Myers in the dark October night.  Myers is nearby though, watching Loomis from the shadows.  Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) rushes onto the scene and, while he and Loomis continue to hunt for Myers, numerous Haddonfield Sheriff deputies and two EMTs from Haddonfield Memorial Hospital (Lance Guest, Leo Rossi) descend upon the Doyle house. 

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to Haddonfield Memorial, where she is sedated to help deal with the pain of her fractured ankle and the severe shock that she has undergone.

While Loomis, Brackett and the rest of the Sheriff's department scour Haddonfield looking for Myers, the mass murderer turned indestructible bogeyman follows Laurie to the hospital, where he begins to stalk empty corridors and kill staff.  

It's a good thing that there does not appear to be all that many patients in the under lit hospital, or Myers would be killing well into the Christmas season...

There was a time, not too long ago, when I considered Halloween II to be the only direct sequel to Halloween that was truly worth acknowledging.  As far as I was concerned Michael Myers and Dr. Sam Loomis both died in a fire at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital some time during the late night hours of October 31, 1978 or the early pre-dawn hours of November 1, 1978.  The much better than it was expected to be (but nonetheless still lackluster) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and all of the increasingly crappy sequels that followed it, ceased to exist for me.  The Halloween saga (the Michael Myers portion of it, at least) ended at Halloween II.

Not anymore.

Over time it has become impossible for me to look past my grievances with Halloween II and to "just enjoy the movie for what it is."  I have lost my ability to sit all the way through this cinematic train wreck of a sequel, because I can no longer lie to myself by thinking "While it's no Halloween, it's still an above average slasher movie."  Because it isn't.

One thing that needs to be stated outright, and something that clearly shows in the finsihed product, is that neither John Carpenter or Debra Hill really wanted to make Halloween II.  The only reason that Halloween II even exists today is because, after some three years of being told "No" by John Carpenter, the original film's producers/financiers, Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans, who shared a controlling interest in the film with Carpenter, filed a lawsuit.  Akkad and Yablans claimed that Carpenter's continued refusal to sign-off on the production of a sequel was barring them from rightfully profiting from a product that they had a legal right to exploit.  (This legal action was discussed in "Making Of" articles that were published, prior to the film's release, in the magazines Fangoria and The Twilight Zone.)  Knowing that he was fighting a losing battle, Carpenter re-teamed with Debra Hill to produce what the two hoped would be a "good" sequel to their horror classic.

They failed.

I guess one could try and argue that Halloween II is to Halloween what Jaws 2 was to Jaws.  A serviceable genre movie that, taken on its own terms and divorced from the pop cinema icon that it is tasked with following, is really not all that bad.  But, truth be told, Jaws 2 is much easier to divorce from Jaws because that film did not reinvent the narrative of the first film in the destructive way that Halloween II did.

Long before George Lucas suffered the slings and arrows of countless irate Star Wars fans screaming "You raped my childhood!" because of his endless tinkering and changing of the original Star Wars trilogy to conform with the prequel trilogy, John Carpenter and Debra Hill did the very same thing with Halloween and Halloween II.

In the original film Michael Myers was meant to be the embodiment of pure evil.  By the end of the movie it was understood by the viewer that Myers was not just some escaped lunatic robotically killing random teenagers.  He was the bogeyman itself.  He was not human, but a mythic entity of darkness and nightmare.  Symbolically speaking, where the first Halloween ended, the first Nightmare on Elm Street began.

Halloween II erases the mythic power of the first film's ending in irritating and confusing ways.  The most famous being the giving of a human motivation to Myers mysterious fascination with Laurie Strode.  She turns out to be Michael Myers' sister.  In after the fact interviews John Carpenter admitted that the twist was created by a late night marriage of a desperate screenwriter and a six pack of beer.  Also worth noting is that the year before Halloween II went into production, audiences across the globe were shocked by the stunning revelation that Darth Vader was actually Luke Skywalker's father.  

Again with the Star Wars comparison?

Just wait, it gets worse.  It turned out that the first film would be making its network television debut around the time that Halloween II would be opening in theaters.  While that was a great marketing tie-in, the original film was a tad too short for a two-hour network television time slot.  So Carpenter shot additional footage* (with the Halloween II crew) that weaved the new plot twist into the narrative of the first film, decades before George Lucas stapled the Young Annakin over the Old Annakin in Return of the Jedi.

While Carpenter and Hill give an adequate explanation for why Michael Myers returned to Haddonfield and for his obsession with Laurie Strode, they offer no explanation whatsoever as to how the man manages to be an unkillable juggernaut of pure evil.  He just is.  Because of this Halloween II makes no sense whatsoever as either a direct sequel to Halloween or as a "stand alone" slasher movie.  While unkillable juggernauts of pure evil had become the norm for slasher movies by the time of Halloween II's release, that unfortunate fact of lazy storytelling does not excuse the screenwriters primarily responsible for the creation of that cliche (John Carpenter and Debra Hill) from expanding upon or even acknowledging the obvious supernatural undertones of Michael Myers' transformation into the Bogeyman.

Carpenter and Hill's back story tinkering explains something that did not need explaining and not only ignores, but flat out disposes of, the very elements that made the first Halloween work so well.  By doing this they wrote themselves into a narrative corner.  By un-creating their unstoppable bogeyman, Carpenter and Hill left themselves with no compelling story to tell.  There is no framework upon which to build upon or even continue the myth they created in their classic horror tale.  They have nothing interesting for their returning characters to do or say.  (Although the moment that Sheriff Brackett first learns that his daughter is one of Myers' victims, and when he identifies her body, is a well scripted and beautifully acted moment.)  There is nothing left for the movie to do but become a parade of needlessly graphic kill sequences.  Something that makes it utterly indistinguishable from any other "slasher movie" of its time period.

One star out of four.

* Carpenter also shot additional scenes/footage for Halloween II.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) poster

TV Stuff: Halloween III: Season of the Witch TV spot

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) - Main Title theme - Music Composed and Performed by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth

Escape from L.A. (1996): Snake's Uniform - by John Carpenter

The Ward (2011)

"Let's see how long this one lasts."

The year is 1966.  After setting fire to an isolated farm house, Kristen (Amber Heard) is arrested and placed in a special ward of a Psychiatric Hospital located just outside of North Bend, Oregon.  There she is placed under the care of the kindly appearing Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris) and becomes acquainted with the other patients housed in the ward.  Kristen also becomes aware that a mysterious and extremely malevolent ghostly figure is stalking the halls of the ward at night.  But no one listens to her (of course) and the other patients begin to disappear, one by one...

I know that at some point I voiced my concern about John Carpenter's The Ward possibly being the horror equivalent of Zack Snyder's atrocious Sucker Punch, and it turns out that I was almost right.  But only "just" almost.  The Ward is really a more traditional horror movie equivalent of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a film that I liked very much, but that others hated because of the obvious nature of the supposed "twist" ending.  I always thought (and still do) that the obvious nature of Shutter Island's supposed twist was what made the movie work so beautifully.  It was never about the twist, it was all about Teddy Daniels' forced journey through his inner self and his discovery of its wounds.

The same thing cannot be said about The Ward, though.  The screenplay treats its virtually identical twist as if it were as fresh as just baked bread and John Carpenter, who has never been what could be described as an "intellectual" auteur film maker, lets the tired twist ending play out as if it were that fresh.  I do not think it possible that even the staunchest Carpenter apologist or even the most forgiving fan that hated Shutter Island will be able to mount a defense of The Ward.  Fortunately I am not in that position. 

Carpenter has made no secret that he is not a "big idea" film maker.  That he is far more interested in creating a sustained atmosphere and emotional mood in his films and not a thought provoking viewing experience.  Yet he is also an admitted firm believer in the Auteur Theory, so there are quite a few reoccurring thoughts, ideas, concepts and themes in Carpenter's work that make his films unique and identifiable.  While his films do not truly explore those thoughts, ideas, concepts and themes in any kind of depth whatsoever, they are what helped create and fuel his ardent fan base (to which I admit to belonging).  Those reoccurring qualities are also what makes appreciation of Carpenter's films grow over time.  

Once the disappointment at Carpenter's perceived failure to, yet again, scratch beneath the surface and truly do something "new" or "interesting" with the material has faded, the film is reevaluated as a smaller part of a much larger whole and, yet again, it is easier to see where the smaller part fits into the larger tapestry of the whole and the film is then rediscovered as a "minor" classic.

Then again, I don't think that happened with Ghosts of Mars, so what the Hell do I know?

Well, what I do know is that it is very easy to see why The Ward did not get any kind of significant theatrical release.  While it is most certainly a well polished and atmospheric little movie (one that also does an admirable job of hiding its very low budget) filled with a palpable aura of dread, The Ward really doesn't do anything all that interesting beyond trying to be creepy and look spooky.  But, sometimes, that is enough.

Three out of four stars might sound overly generous, but, remember, I loved Shutter Island.

John Carpenter's The Ward U.S. trailer

This is the trailer for the stateside release of John Carpenter's The Ward:

It doesn't look all that different from the UK trailer to me.

UK Poster for John Carpenter's The Ward

 

John Carpenter's The Ward UK trailer

While there is still no distribution deal for John Carpenter's The Ward in the United States, Warner Brothers is releasing the film overseas and here is their trailer for it:

The Films of John Carpenter - by John Kenneth Muir

Let me begin my review by repeating a statement of the obvious: I idolize John Carpenter.  I will watch any film that features the man's name in the credits.  I have read countless articles about and interviews with the man.  I have also amassed a nice amount of memoribilia (soundtracks, novelizations, lobby cards, movie posters, etc.) from his films.  I have also, from the mid to late eighties through to today, believed that the man is a genuine genre autuer.

So it should not come as a surprise for me to tell you that I pretty much completely agree with most, if not all, of John Kenneth Muir's critical arguements in regards to John Carpenter's body of work.  Whether you like John Carpenter's cinematic output or you loathe it, after finishing The Films of John Carpenter it will be difficult to argue that the man is not an autuer.  Once Muir has finished having his say, then arguing John Carpenter's body of work becomes about whether or not he is a good (or, as Muir emphatically argues, great) genre autuer.  Needless as it is to say, but if you are a fan of John Carpenter, then this book is both essential reading and an essential part of your film library.

Muir makes numerous interesting and well-argued points from the pro-greatness side of the arguement and, from Dark Star through to In the Mouth of Madness, he has plenty of thematic and stylistic examples to choose from.  But when Muir reaches Carpenter's lackluster to the point of lifelessness remake of Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned and the self-indulgent sequel-turned-remake Escape from L.A. his arguements weaken, as there is nothing in the cinematic text for him to draw upon.  Not helping is Muir's own admission as to how unimaginative and pointless Carpenter's post-In the Mouth of Madness films are in comparison to the ones that came before them. 

I do have to give Muir points for making a game try at turning the perceived cinematic sow's ear of Escape from L.A. into an autuer's silk purse of self-parody by arguing that Carpenter's cinematic idol of Howard Hawks did the exact same thing when he remade Rio Bravo as El Dorado and Rio Lobo.  What weakens Muir arguement is the fact that Hawks' Rio Bravo remakes were not sold as direct sequels to Rio Bravo, nor even as remakes of it.  They were self contained and stand alone films that retold a tale drawn from the richly detailed Myth of the American West and the archtypes (or stereotypes) that populate it.  Not unlike many lesser westerns that recycled the same elements and stories.  Escape from L.A. did not have the luxury of being a self-contained story.  Although my bitter disappointment with the film (I was one of those Escape from New York fans hoping for an all-new adventure that continued Snake's story, not a self-mocking remake) has faded and I am beginning to appreciate the film's satire and self-parody, the simple fact remains that Escape from L.A. is no El Dorado or Rio Lobo.

The Films of John Carpenter was first published in 1999 and the last film it discusses in detail is Carpenter's 1998 film Vampires, which Muir savages mercilessly.  While Vampires is certainly not one of Carpenter's stronger efforts, I do think that it is a far better film than Muir does.  Since 1999 the semi-retired John Carpenter has not been too idle.  He made the autuer analysis friendly Ghosts of Mars in 2001, directed two episodes for the Showtime series Masters of Horror (the above average Cigarette Burns and the wretched Pro-Life), and has recently completed the yet to be released film The Ward.  A revised edition that discusses and analysizes these efforts is needed.

There Are Worse Things I Could Do - by Adrienne Barbeau

Adrienne Barbeau pulled me through puberty.

How is that for an attention grabbing opener?

Too much information, you say?  Bah!  Any and all that were ever a teenager knows of the desires of which I blog...

But Barbeau was more than just a beautiful face (with, to be despicably honest, some big and just as beautiful boobs beneath it) that appeared in several of my all time favorite movies (The Fog, Escape from New York, and Creepshow) and guilty pleasures (The Cannonball Run, Swamp Thing).  She was also married - for a time - to my biggest childhood idol, genre film maker John Carpenter.   This made her, to my hormonal crush fogged mind, something akin to an angelic supreme being.  She had, I believed, the perfect life and the perfect career.  If I had been born a girl, I would have wanted to be her.

I am much older and the rose tint to my world vision has long since faded, so I began There Are Worse Things I Could Do with no small amount of trepidation.  There was what I knew of the world and the reality of what (thanks to reading countless interviews, books and magazines and listening to numerous commentaries) making the movies was like, but I did not want too much reality shattering some of things that I have held most dear for most of my life.

Those concerns turned out to be completely unfounded.  There Are Worse Things I Could Do is an engaging and entertaining memoir.  One that focuses less on dishing dirt about celebrities (although there are some choice revelations about the bad behavior of Maude star Bill Macy and action-comedy superstar Burt Reynolds) and more on the author's personal journey, and what a journey it was/is.  Adrienne Barbeau has lived (and is still living) quite the life.  A life that her engaging and conversational writing style makes easy to relate to.  

Barbeau's memoir is not the self-aggrandizing work of an attention starved narcissist.  She presents herself as a fairly down-to-Earth person, one that has worked very hard to get to that point.  She is also fairly diplomatic about some of her more negative experiences in the film industry.  Although no amount of diplomacy can polish the pile of human crap that is Burt Reynolds (I also noticed - long ago - that she was not at all amused by Reynolds' slapping and hitting the late Dom DeLusie during the filming of The Cannonball Run, but I am glad that she went on the record about Reynolds' horrible behavior) and she knows when to just forgo the diplomacy and just give the unvarnished and unpleasant truth (such as the hilarious chapter devoted to the nightmarish filming of what Barbeau only refers to as The Rat Movie, the ordeal of making it sounds like something worthy of Dante).

All of that was interesting and entertaining to read, but I have to be honest that my biggest interest in reading the book was to learn Barbeau's personal perspective and her feelings about making Creepshow with George Romero and co-stars Hal Holbrook and Fritz Weaver, and also what working with (and being married to) John Carpenter had been like.  I will be honest and admit to dreading reading about the latter.  Yes, people have plenty of warts and dirty laundry, but Carpenter was (and pretty much remains) an idol to me and I really did not want to read about what an asshole he was.

Turns out that (as far as Barbeau is concerned) John Carpenter is decent guy (whew!) and working on Creepshow (although she makes no secret as to not getting the script or her character) was a complete and utter hoot.  Even if that had not been the case, however, I would still recommend the book, for it is well worth reading.

Promotional poster for John Carpenter's Darkchylde

As of October 31, 2010, this potentially creature laden dark fantasy adventure looks to be John Carpenter's next movie:

 

Nice poster.  Real nice.  If you are at all curious about this (and I know I am) then you can pre-order a trade paperback collection of the comic book series that the film is based on right here.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

When it comes to sequels, there are pretty much only three options available to those that make them:

They can continue and expand upon the original story, taking it into new and (one always hopes) interesting new directions. Sequels like Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Godfather Part II all being excellent examples of film makers doing that very thing.

Or the creative team can just make the exact same kind of movie all over again, only "different." Retreads like Friday the 13th Part 2, Jaws 2, Airport '75, or Beyond the Poseidon Adventure being just a few examples of that far more common than not approach.

OR the producers just staple the franchise title onto an entirely different movie that may (or may not) have something in common with the previous film(s), which brings me to Halloween III: Season Of The Witch.

 
John Carpenter and Debra Hill, having reluctantly made a direct sequel to their cult horror smash Halloween, were eager to explore new territory with the requested second sequel. Since they had just (they thought) killed off the mysteriously un-kill-able Michael Myers at the end of Halloween II, Carpenter and Hill thought it would be fun to turn the franchise into an anthology type of series of non-related horror films that would only have one thing in common: they would all be set on, or around, Halloween night.

At the time that they made the decision, both Carpenter and Hill were box office powerhouses to be reckoned with. Their movie Halloween remained the top grossing independent film of all time (a title that would later be taken by The Blair Witch Project, then by Paranormal Activity, horror films both) and their follow-up efforts, The Fog and Escape from New York, had both done very well. The box office catastrophe that would be The Thing had yet to blind side Carpenter and his career.*

[*The perceived box-office failure of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, it was really more of a modest hit that disappointed and confused horror fans, in the wake of The Thing’s disastrous reception certainly did not help. Neither did Moustapha Akkad’s blisteringly critique of the in-name-only sequel as the movie that "destroyed Halloween!"]

For this all new sequel, Carpenter and Hill decided to go back to the origins of Halloween itself. This was something that apparently fascinated either Carpenter or Hill, because the Celtic term samhain (pronounced sow-en) had been showcased and explained, kind of, in Halloween II; as if the term had some kind of relevance to the ongoing, and by now meandering, slaughter filled story line.*

[*I should also note that author Curtis Richards, in his novelization of the first Halloweenmovie, also made both the cultural history of Halloween and the term samhain important plot points, go figure.]

A huge fan of the Quatermass science-fiction/horror series (The Quatermass Xperiment [The Creeping Unknown], Quatermass 2, and the excellent Quatermass and The Pit) Carpenter hired Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale to pen an all new type of Halloween horror story.  A story that would draw on Halloween's true history.

A panicked man runs through the dead of night, pursued by a group of silent and composed men wearing gray suits.  The frightened man is cornered and attacked in a junkyard lot by one of his silent pursuers.  The man fights back and manages to kill his attacker.  He then escapes to a nearby gas station, where the kindly night attendant drives the exhausted man to the local hospital.  The gray suited men follow and one enters the hospital and kills the man.  Upon being discovered committing the crime, the gray suited man then calmly strolls out of the hospital and proceeds to kill himself in the parking lot.

The murdered man turns out to be one Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry), a local retailer of novelties (such as Halloween masks) and toys.  His daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) enlists the aid of Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) the emergency room doctor that treated her father on the night he was murdered, to help investigate the bizarre crime.  The soon to be romantic couple start by looking into the last appointment Grimbridge was known to have kept: a trip to the Silver Shamrock factory in nearby Santa Mira...

There are two villains in Halloween III: first are the silent and murderous gray-suited henchmen (who are undoubtedly meant to be stand-ins for the almost as silent and every bit as murderous "shape" of Michael Myers) that work for the film's primary villain, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herilhy).  Cochran is the man behind Silver Shamrock Novelties, manufacturer of the insanely popular Silver Shamrock Halloween masks.  Masks that are actually demonic time bombs set to detonate during Silver Shamrock's "Big Giveaway" at nine o'clock on Halloween night.  The explosive charge in the masks come from a stolen piece of Stonehenge (you wouldn't believe how the bad guys got it from England to the United States) that is infused with Dark Magic.

What the Dark Magic does to those unlucky enough to be wearing a Silver Shamrock mask during the lethal Big Giveaway makes for one of Halloween III's most memorable set pieces.

Halloween III is a silly movie.  Its biggest problem, however, is not its silliness.  That is what makes the movie so much fun to watch.  No, the biggest problem is that the only person that seems to know just how silly the whole endeavor is, is actor Dan O'Herilhy.  O'Herilhy infuses his characterization of Conal Cochran with just the right amounts of charm and insane glee.  He knows the whole thing is one big joke and he treats it as such.  Everyone else seems to be approaching the movie as if they were working on something that is not only deadly serious, but truly terrifying.  How anybody could have thought that a movie featuring killer robots (for that is precisely what the gray-suited men are) and Halloween masks that make children's heads explode with all manner of nasty and venomous things during a television commercial, could be anything other than deadly serious is beyond me.

Not too many people liked Halloween III when it first came out (I clearly recall fellow students at the high school I was attending complaining about how stupid it was that Michael Myers had somehow become "an old man" in the film) but I liked (and still like) it.  Halloween III is just silly enough and exciting enough to grab and keep my attention.  The plot, as you can no doubt tell, really is just an insane load of hogwash.  Hogwash that writer Nigel Kneale, reportedly disgusted with the amount of gore that was going to be put in the film, had his name removed from, allowing director (and one time Michael Myers) Tommy Lee Wallace to both get a writing credit and to shoulder most, if not all, of the blame for all the samhain-themed silliness.

As I said before, there are no "good" sequels to Halloween.  But of all the sequels, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the best, and it is the most fun to watch.

Two and a half stars out of four.

They Live (1988) trailer

Carpenter's political satire hasn't aged a day, unfortunately.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness is a Final Girl Film Club selection.

"What is it?"

A priest (Donald Pleasence) asks a distinguished scientist (Victor Wong) to investigate a strange substance hidden in the basement of a Los Angeles church.  What the scientist and his team discover is a very old and very real evil.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness is a nifty little tribute to the classic thriller Quatermass and the Pit.  (Carpenter even went so far as to use the pseudonym Martin Quatermass, to let the genre geeks in the audience know well in advance just what kind of horror movie he was making.)  Although the characters and events are quite different, both films do share an almost identical plot concept: an otherworldly object is discovered beneath a major city, said object has links to an extraterrestrial intelligence that can best be described as Evil, and said object is capable of turning people into murderous automatons.  But the similarities end there.

Prince of Darkness certainly gets off to a strong start, with plenty of mysterious and foreboding imagery as an English priest (he is never given a name) discovers the devastating secret behind "The Brotherhood of Sleep," while the distinguished scientist warns his students that Classical Reality ceases to exist on the subatomic particle level.  From the start, Prince of Darkness drops some sizable visual and dialog hints that, just like Quatermass and the Pit, a scientific reason for our religious/spiritual beliefs (the Judeo-Christian ones, at least) will be offered up.  Unfortunately Carpenter's narrative focus quickly drifts away from that intriguing concept and instead moves into far too familiar "jump scare" zombie movie territory.  The film's third act really isn't anything more than a cross pollination of the third acts of two of Carpenter's earlier films, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog.  Instead of an atomic cross, this time it's an atomic mirror.  Instead of glowing red eyes, it's a demon hand that looks like something purchased at a Halloween Superstore.

Not that Prince of Darkness is an utter failure (although some do consider it to be one), it's really nothing more than modestly effective thriller from a director who stopped taking serious cinematic risks after the thrashing he took for making The Thing.

Classic Moment of Cinema: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

"I wanted Vanilla Twist."

Soundtrack Review: Ghosts of Mars (2001) - Music by John Carpenter

When it comes to his film scores, John Carpenter's career can be separated into three distinct phases.

The first is best described as his Classic Era.  Working in what Carpenter called "double-blind mode" (no visual reference to, thus being unable to synchronize the music with, the actual movie) with his creative consultant Dan Wyman, Carpenter crafted the simplistic, yet incredibly potent, scores that rank as his most memorable.  The Classic Era scores are Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog.  (I don't include Carpenter's score for Dark Star for the simple reason that it was not a professional film, but an expanded student project.)

Next comes The Howarth Era, which encapsulates Carpenter's scores through the 1980s.  While the music for Escape From New York and Halloween II seemed to have been composed in "double-blind" mode, everything after those two seemed to utilize a synchronized "play it to TV" method.  Alan Howarth described the method in the liner notes for the Halloween III: The Season Of The Witch soundtrack:

"The film is first transferred to a time coded video tape and synchronized to a 24-track master audio recorder; then while watching the film we compose the music to these visual images.  The entire process goes quite rapidly and has "instant gratification," allowing us to evaluate the score in synch to the picture."

The result of this new method was a drifting away from the stark, staccato themes of Carpenter's earlier work with Dan Wyman.  The scores of the Howarth Era, Halloween III, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live are more impressionistic, invoking mood through a complex tonal tapestry rather than via a collection of simplistic and repetitious themes.

The third and, to date, final Carpenter "Era" is what I call the Hodgepodge, because Carpenter's composing partners have changed with each film.  Having broken ties with Alan Howarth after They Live, Carpenter hired Shirley Walker to compose an orchestral score for his 1990 film Memoirs of an Invisible Man. (It was the first of his movies since 1982's The Thing to have such a score.)  Carpenter returned to the composing keyboard, assisted by Jim Lang, for his next film, In The Mouth Of Madness.  Dave Davies assisted with the composing chores for Village Of The Damned, while Shirley Walker returned for Escape From L.A.  Carpenter hired several well known rock and blues musicians and formed an actual band, The Texas Toad Lickers, to flavor up his score for Vampires.  The approach worked so well that Carpenter brought in another crew of musicians, this time from the heavy metal section, for his next score, Ghosts of Mars.

Film music exists to enhance a visual story.  Being able to enjoy the music outside of the film, as its own stand alone composition, is a statement to the quality of the composer's work, more-so than of the film the work was composed for.  (Jerry Goldsmith was well known for giving terrible movies wonderful, if not out and out classic, music.)  While the Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre as a whole is filled with memorable themes, sadly the music for Ghosts of Mars is not.  If fact, it doesn't play all that well outside of the movie it was composed for. 

It has been over a year, perhaps even two, since I last watched John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.  While listening to its soundtrack over and over again this past week, I seriously considered watching the movie again, just so I could place the music I was listening to into some kind of context.  Of its twelve tracks, there are only two that I can actually place in the film from memory, the rest of it just sounds like a bunch of metal musicians jamming to Carpenter's simplistic keyboard arrangements.  If you like that kind of music, and I don't, then, maybe, this soundtrack might turn out to be a good investment.

Track #1: Ghosts of Mars.  This is the film's Opening Credit theme, playing as a seemingly abandoned train travels over the desolate landscape of Mars.  It's a six-note rhythm, clearly invoking the repetitious rattle of a train's wheels rolling over the tracks, decorated with ominous tones and melodies that hint something bad has either happened on the train, or is hiding in it.  The mood changes about two minutes in, when Steve Vai cuts loose on the guitar.

Track #2: Love Siege.  Judging by its quiet opening and then percussive build-up to the pounding guitar thrashing of Buckethead, Robin Finck, and Scott Ian, my guess is that the music plays over the intro to some serious ass-kicking.  (Though it is hard, at times, to figure out who is kicking who.)

Track #3: Fight Train.  This track, along with Ghosts of Mars, is the only one that I can place in the film.  Tough as nails Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Hestridge) and Snake Pliss..uh...I mean, Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) face down Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone) and a few other Martian possessed zombies.  Fight Train opens, as did Love Siege, with some ominous keyboard work from Carpenter (which plays under Ballard searching a supposedly deserted train car).  That doesn't last long, though.  A zombie pops out and the fighting begins.  The best thing about this track is Charlie Benante's excellent drum work.  At key moments he cuts loose, pounding out a rhythm that, like the slower Ghosts of Mars, invokes the steady beat of a fast moving train.

Track #4: Visions of Earth.  Coming off of two rather hard hitting action cues, Visions of Earth is a change of pace.  It's a soft, almost gentle piece that, like Ghosts and Train, contains the distinct rhythm of the train that plays an important role in the story.  So I figure it to be early in the film, when Ballard and the other Mars Colonial Police Force troops are en route (via train) to the isolated town jail that supposedly holds the wanted criminal Desolation Williams.  At the two minute mark the tone changes, which seems to be a moment when Ballard sneaks in a hit of some kind of synthetic designer drug.  After that interlude, the cue returns to its pulsing, gentle rhythm.

Track #5: Slashing Void.  At one point Ballard becomes possessed by a Martian spirit spore (don't ask) and, thanks to Jericho Butler (Jason Statham) giving her a farewell does of the synthetic designer drug she is hooked on, Ballard has a vision of the previous inhabitants prior to her body rejecting the spore.  This music seems a good fit for that scene, but I don't know for sure.

Track #6: Kick Ass.  As the title of this track so subtly puts it, this is an action cue.  There is a two minute build-up before the track really cuts loose, but it could go anywhere in the movie, which is filled with fights using both gun and fist.

Track #7: Power Station.  This location plays an important part in the latter half of the film, with the characters fighting their way to get to, then away from, it.  The cue could be playing at any point in those action packed scenes.

Track #8: Can't Let You Go.  Considering the tone of the track, I'm pretty sure it underscores a scene that addresses the constantly changing relationship between Ballard and Desolation.  She's a cop and he's a criminal, so she can't let him go.  Get it?

Track #9: Dismemberment Blues.  This is one of the soundtrack's darkest and most distinctly John Carpenter tracks.  I'm pretty sure it underscores the sequence wherein the mining camp inhabitants are infected with the Martian spores, then turn on, and slaughter, those in the camp that were uninfected.

Track #10: Fightin' Mad.  Yeah, it's another action cue, how'd you manage to guess that?  But, like Dismemberment Blues, it is a piece that is distinctly Carpenter's.

Track #11: Pam Grier's Head.  Now I could be wrong (it has been known to happen), but I'm thinking that this cue is for when Jericho finds the head of Commander Braddock (Pam Grier, natch) impaled on the top of a stick.  Can't really call it a spoiler, what with the track title being about as clear about a decapitation as it can be.

Track #12: Ghost Poppin'.  Well, if you going to pop some ghosts, then what better way than to have heavy metal guitars thrashing in the background?

As with just about everything Carpenter has done since Halloween III: The Season Of The Witch, the music for Ghosts of Mars lacks a unifying structure or dominant theme.  The music is more impressionistic, invoking the mood of a particular scene rather than creating a theme or motif to characterize the film as a whole.  This is probably due to the fact that Carpenter is still using the "play it to TV" method to compose his scores.  Not helping is that so much of the score feels buried under thrashing guitars.  I can only recommend this soundtrack to those that like to scrunch their faces into one of those "Damn, these roids itch!" expressions while playing air guitar. Those wanting a memorable score from a memorable movie need to look somewhere else, it isn't here.

Soundtrack Review: The Fog (1980) - Music Composed and Performed by John Carpenter

Is it too much to ask, when releasing a soundtrack album of music from a film, that it contain the music actually used in the film?

When Varese Sarabande finally released a soundtrack album for John Carpenter's The Fog back in the mid 1980s, I was thrilled.  John Carpenter's subtle and spooky score for his 1980 follow up to his 1978 hit, Halloween, is my personal favorite of all his work.  When I finally heard the album, the disappointment was crushing.  Only a handful of the tracks sounded like anything from the score I knew and loved, the rest were a bunch of clumsy remixes and, even worse, there was stuff on the album that wasn't even in the movie.  Had Varese Sarabande gotten the "heavy handed and obvious" score that Carpenter mentioned in his liner notes by mistake?  That would explain the missing gaps in the score's presentation.

Then, ten or fifteen years later, Silva America released a "new expanded edition" of Carpenter's score, and my hopes were again raised, only to be dashed once more.  Silva America did manage to include some music that was recognizable from the film, but, as was the case with the Varese Sarabande album, a large portion of the new material were irritating remixes of used and unused cues.

Track #1: Prologue narrated by John Houseman.  Varese Sarabande claimed that one of the things that kept a soundtrack album for The Fog being released during its original theatrical run was an inability to secure the rights for Houseman's splendid opening story to be included.  I guess all that got cleared up.  I would have preferred the music cue to play in its entirety, rather than getting lopped off when Houseman's story begins and ends.  It would have set a better tone for the album to come.

Track #2: Theme from The Fog.  This is a five minute remix of The Fog's end title theme, cluttered up with needless stingers (the shock cues heard whenever the ghosts lunged out of either the fog itself, or a darkened doorway).  It also goes on far too long, wearing out its welcome at about the three minute mark.

Track #3: Matthew Ghost Story.  Who the hell is Matthew?  There wasn't any character named Matthew in The Fog.  The proper title for this track should be Machen's Ghost Story, as it is the haunting melody that plays over the AVCO Embassy logo, Machen's yarn, and the film's title credit.  When this track started the Varese Sarabande album, I almost sighed with the pleasure of hearing it.  When the tackiness of Theme from The Fog followed it, my reaction became "...the hell?"

Track #4: Walk to the Lighthouse.  This is probably one of The Fog's best and most memorable cues, heard when Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) arrives at her lighthouse turned radio station and, at the end of the film, when the fog retreats and Wayne gives her memorable speech.  This three line melody (a high flute, a mid-range counterpoint, and a low bass support) is Carpenter's favorite.

Track #5: Rocks At Drake's Bay.  This opens with the bell/harpsichord 'round' (which doubles as the Theme from The Fog) that plays over Andy's finding the driftwood and returning home to share his discovery with his mom, Stevie Wayne.  Following it is a quick reprise of the opening melody, which I believe is heard just after Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) tells Mrs. Williams (Janet Leigh), "I have something to show you."  After that is a sample of music that was unused in the film, which is good.  Because it's terrible and shatters the mood built by Walk to the Lighthouse and Rocks at Drake's Bay first two segments.

Track #6: The Fog.  Humming, thumping, and bumping music.  Three minutes and fifteen seconds of it, and not a bit of it used in the film.  It has to be more of that "heavy handed and obvious" stuff, because it sure sounds like it.

Track #7: Antonio Bay.  Just after Dick Baxter's body collapses onto an unsuspecting Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), a portion of this track's bass rhythm is heard as Father Malone finishes reading his Grandfather's journal to Mrs. Williams and Sandy.  It's a great cue.  Here it is dragged out for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, after a haunting variation of the bell/harpsichord 'round' sets the mood.  That variation is not used in the movie, but it would have fit rather nicely in a scene or two.

Track #8: Tommy Tells of Ghost Ships.  Okay, who the hell is Tommy?  First Matthew, now Tommy.  Did anyone that worked on these soundtracks even see the movie?  Nick tells Elizabeth of a ghost ship, and I am pretty sure that the music heard here was not used in that scene.  The opening segment of the track actually sounds like the music heard at the bridge of the film's second and third act, when Nick (Tom Atkins), Dr. Phibes (Darwin Joston) and Elizabeth see that Dick Baxter's briefly revived corpse had written the number 3 on the floor with a scalpel.  The cue continues over a montage of the Point Reyes region at dusk, the mournful bleat of a foghorn moaning across the landscape.  Following that is a brief and unwelcome reprise of Track Six's stupid humming, thumping, and bumping.

Track #9: Reel 9.  The opening is a mix of some humming synthesizers (some of which 'sounds' like it was in the film) mixed with those ghost lunging stingers, many of which sound like they are looped from the scene where Nick rescues Andy and the ghosts shamble toward his stranded truck.  About three minutes in another familiar, and my favorite, cue from The Fog begins.  This is a bell/heartbeat round driven by rising and falling tones.  It plays while the fog rolls into town and Nick, Elizabeth, Mrs. Williams and Sandy all flee to Father Malone's church.  It's a great cue, too bad it's cluttered up with needless stingers that constantly interrupt the flow of the music.

So far the Silva release has just been a reissue of Varese Sarabande's disappointing soundtrack album.  Only Track #1 is anything new, Tracks 2 - 9 are just the Varese Sarabande album in a slightly different order.  (Matthew Ghost Story came before Theme from 'The Fog', not after)  So all my hopes for a restored soundtrack for The Fog hinged on what Tracks 10 - 13 contained.

Track #10: Main Theme - Reprise.  Ah, The Fog's end title theme as heard in the movie, almost.  I say almost because the track contains only two repetitions of the bell/harpsichord round while the actual end credit theme had three, the third featuring a melodic line.  Still, my hopes were up.

Track #11: The Fog Rolls In.  And my hopes roll out.  This sounds like more of that "heavy handed and obvious" music, not anything from the film.

Track #12: Blake in the Sanctuary.  Argh, yet another remix of cues!  The track opens with several stingers and assorted bric-brac from Reel 9 cluttering up the music heard when Dan the Weatherman (Charles Cyphers) first tells Stevie Wayne about "another fog bank."  Later on the pinging heard when Father Malone carries the gold cross into the Church to confront Blake appears, as does the music that plays under The Fog's "Gotcha!" ending.

Track #13: Finale.  Nothing of the sort.  This is just a reprise of the Second/Third Act Bridge heard in Tommy Tells of Ghost Ships.

Track #14: Radio Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis about The Fog.  Good thing it's about The Fog and not Halloween, or something else off topic.  I'm sorry, but this filler is just a complete waste of time.  If dialog must be included, please have it be from the film.  The KAB Radio station identification at the beginning was nice, but it would have been nicer if it had been followed by some of Stevie Wayne's dialog and, maybe, one of the stock music cues the movie used for KAB's broadcasts.  An album of The Fog's stock music would be quite the collectible, I think.

Still missing are two wonderful tracks, the music that underscores the boarding of the Sea Grass and Mrs. Williams and Sandy drive up to the church, and the cue when the fog rolls over Stevie Wayne's house.  I was really hoping that this (now out of print) "new expanded edition" would at least contain that music.  It does not.  It's just more of the same and, considering how disappointing it was the first time, this needless rehash only makes it doubly so the second.

Original vs. Remake: The Fog (1980/2005)

"Get inside and lock your doors, close your windows.  There's something in the fog."

Antonio Bay's centennial celebration is ruined when the angry ghosts of the town's dark past rise up to seek revenge.

John Carpenter's The Fog may not be one of the director's best movies, those would be Halloween and The Thing, but it is my personal favorite of his early work.  Yet my affection for The Fog does not hide its many flaws from my critical gaze.  The film's story structure is marred by an illogic no doubt brought upon both by its low budget (just under a million dollars) and the 11th hour re-shoots that Carpenter made to salvage what he thought to be a very unfrightening horror movie.  He had aimed to make a PG rated ghost story in the Val Lewton mode of implying the horror, but what resulted was a soft film that was desperately in need of some "punching up."

Considering the professional pressure Carpenter must have been under, what with having to follow up his box office smash horror movie Halloween with yet another horror movie, it is easy to understand that the writer/director would judge his work on The Fog far more harshly than most critics would.  He knew that the audience would come in expecting something truly frightening from the director of Halloween.  Even the film's ad campaign promised "the ultimate experience in horror."  Carpenter knew that The Fog had to deliver something a lot stronger than it had.  So select cast and crew went out and shot some harder edged stuff, like showing the attack on the Sea Grass instead of leaving it to the audience's imagination.  The Fog wound up being a movie filled with as many cheap scares (i.e. sudden loud noises and figures lunging out of darkened doorways) as it was with solidly crafted moments of genuine suspense (i.e. the ghost walking up behind Dick Baxter on the Sea Grass or the attack on Stevie Wayne's house and subsequent rescue of her son Andy).

Carpenter and producer Debra Hill's script lacks the character development that gave their work on Halloween such power, but they do season it with some fine ghost stories.  Mr. Machen's opening campfire yarn, Nick telling Elizabeth about his father finding a gold doubloon on a mysteriously deserted ship, and Father Malone reading his grandfather's journal about the betrayal of Blake and the strange fog that assisted them in the deed.  All are fine, spooky seasonings for the movie.  Carpenter and Hill also name many of their characters and locations after famous horror writers and said writers fictional story settings.  I would also like to point out just how much Hal Holbrook's character of Father Malone seems to resemble the famous poet/short story writer Edgar Allan Poe.

The down side of The Fog's script is that it largely cobbles together the successful elements and concepts from Carpenter's previous two movies, Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13.  Like Halloween, The Fog revolves around the anniversary of a terrible event in a small town's past.  Malone is another Loomis like voice of warning.  Heck, even a babysitter (Mrs. Kobritz) is killed by the faceless, mostly silent ghosts.  (Who, like Michael Myers, walk, don't run, and simply stand around looking menacing before sneaking and/or popping up behind their victims.)  What The Fog takes from Assault on Precinct 13 is the multiple character storylines that converge at a central location (Antonio Bay's isolated church), where they are laid siege to.  (The hands of the ghosts breaking through the windows also echo Street Thunder's climbing through the precinct's windows in Assault as well.)  For those that think I might be stretching, I can only point to how much Carpenter cannibalized his previous work in his maligned Ghosts of Mars as evidence.  And yes, I do need to get out more often.

But this doesn't make The Fog a bad movie, for me at least.  Its individual moments are far better than the total sum of its disjointed parts.  Dean Cundy's cinematography is excellent, Carpenter's score is one of his best, the acting is uniformly fine, and there are enough genuinely frightening moments to make at least one viewing worthwhile.  But it is clear why someone would want to remake it.

Which brings me to...

"Now what kind of fog moves against the wind?"

A mere six months after leaving Antonio Island, young Elizabeth Williams feels compelled to return to her hometown.  Plagued by vivid nightmares, Elizabeth begins to experience otherworldly phenomenon even as she renews an affair with her boyfriend, Nick Castle.  As a commemoration honoring the town's founding fathers gets underway, a large fog bank rolls towards the island.

This movie is terrible.  It is a complete and utter waste of time and money to watch, in fact I resent having to think about its stupidity while I put together this review.

Think of the dumbest, most inane plot and character changes that could have been made to John Carpenter and Debra Hill's original story.  What screenwriter Cooper Layne did was worse.  He took a modestly successful horror movie and turned it into a bland, young adult version that never once made any kind of narrative sense.  The fog kills people in different ways each time.  It hurls a knife into one character, has another one set himself on fire, drags one guy out to sea, melts another person, and one is diced by flying glass.  At least Carpenter's version played by the rules its story set, the ghosts did the killing.

All the characters are significantly younger as well.  While the characters in Carpenter's version may have been underdeveloped, they nonetheless believably lived in the story that was being told.  This new version looks like children play acting at being in a ghost story.  The attack on the Sea Grass is now a group of kids out for a party.  Dan the weather man looks more like Dan the intern.  Stevie Wayne still has Andy, but she looks way too young to have a child his age, and the kid could have been dropped from the story and not missed, because he serves no purpose in it.  This is another huge beef I had with the movie.  Layne and director Rupert Wainwright have jettisoned the ensemble approach to the story that gave Carpenter's version the illusion of a much larger scope.  Elizabeth is now the focal point of the story.  She hears Machen's story, she finds Malone's journal, when the ghosts come calling at Nick's it is Elizabeth that comes to the door.  Father Malone is all but cut from the movie, he's just a drunken cameo that, again, serves no real purpose in the story.  Neither does Stevie Wayne for that matter, she could have stayed at the lighthouse for all the good her leaving it does.  The movie more or less forgets she exists, save for a lame ass attempt at yet another cheap jump scare.  Then there's that ending, which is a complete rip-off of Kubrick's The Shining.

Then there was that fisherman guy who got leprosy.  What was up with him?  Why was he the only one who got it?  Why is it brought up if nothing was to be done with it?  Why?  Why?  Why?

Director Rupert Wainwright re-stages all of the memorable set pieces from Carpenter's version, but "with a twist."  All it did was remind what a great job Carpenter did turning a flawed movie into a highly entertaining one.  Wainwright goes over the top with the stylistic visuals.  Carpenter knew when enough was enough.  He was telling a story, not trying to hide behind a bunch a visual pizazz.

This movie needs to be hidden and forgotten, hands down it's the worst movie of the year.