Posts Tagged ‘John Carpenter’

  
Friday, October 30th, 2009

The Friday Mixtape: All Souls Edition, 10/30/09

by Dw. Dunphy

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Welcome back.

Are you feeling comfortable? Good. Right about now, you’re sitting casually in your seat, perhaps in a chair staring at the monitor, perhaps bundled up on the couch, wrapped in your Snuggie, your laptop buzzing on your lap with the warmth of its underside providing a pleasant sensation there. Occasionally the hard drive skitters and skates, trying to access some connection inside of this digital field of play.

And it is a field of play, don’t let it fool you otherwise. Take a good long look at the screen, for instance. Sure, your conscious, active mind sees black letters spelling out the very words you’re reading, but let your eyes haze a moment. Don’t think about meaning so much — just see the black squiggles on the expanse of white, amassed like battalions, one paragraph against another, staring each other down, preparing for the moment to bolt in attack, random “s” characters raising their swords against the myriad numbers of “m,” not to mention the machinations of those vowels, so kind to link consonants into those words that spill into your head as you read them but, as we well know, they are Machiavellian, yes they are. Those “A” “I” and “E” shapes poised to kill their counterparts, running headlong with a blood-curdling scream of  “Aiiiieeeeee!!”

You could almost hear that scream as you read it, that “Aiiieeeee…” couldn’t you? It’s amazing the information the brain fills in with the absence of a direct descriptor to clarify it. Take, oh, I don’t know, that voice in your mind as you’re reading. It sounds like your voice, has all the cadence and nuance of your voice and, even, those words you mispronounce in your regular day-to-day speech are mispronounced by the narrator in your mind, the one you think is you — but it’s not you. These are my thoughts, my words, and in truth, at this very moment, it is me who is in your head right now, telling this tale, pulling these strings. Are you wondering perhaps, how long have I been in here?

You should.

Are you feeling comfortable now? Good. Let’s begin.

Metamorphosis by David Eagleman, read by Jeffrey Tambor (2009)

Harvest Moon, Blue Oyster Cult from Heaven Forbid (1998)

Harvest Festival, XTC from Apple Venus Volume 1 (1999)

The Ethics Of Jokes by Garrison Keillor from Horrors! A Prairie Home Companion(1996)

Earth Died Screaming, Tom Waits from Bone Machine (1992)

Prelude, Bernard Herrmann from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

Humanity Part II, Ennio Morricone from The Thing: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1982)

Through The Mirror, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth from Prince of Darkness (1987)

Fat Albert, Bill Cosby from The Best of Bill Cosby (1969)

Cold Colours, Neil Gaiman from Warning: Contains Language (1995)

The Hearts Filthy Lesson, David Bowie from Outside (1995)

Vampira, The Devin Townsend Band from Synchestra (2006)

Dark Carnival, Resurrection Band from Lament (1995)

Limbo, Rush from Test for Echo (1996)

The Invisible Man, Marillion from Marbles (2004)

…and we saved the best, scariest and spookiest track for last. It’s buried in the cobwebs, inch-depth dust and dark thickness of a dank, humid night. Beware of clicking on it just in case you’re weak of heart or fearful of mind, for it has the power to instigate nothing less than utter madness.

Happy Halloween!

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Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Revival House: “The Night HE Came Home!”

by Jeff Johnson

A few months back, I sat in a crowded theater on opening night of My Bloody Valentine 3D. As I was sitting there waiting for the movie to start, it occurred to me that I was the only one in the audience who was old enough to have seen the original in the theater. All of this reminded me how I felt about slasher films as a teenager, which is basically the same way I feel about them now: I love them — and yet I hate them, because there are far too few good ones. I went to these movies hoping to be scared but the TV ads usually frightened me more than the actual movies. The aforementioned original My Bloody Valentine (1981) turned out to be kind of lame. Even the ultimate ’80s slasher movie Friday the 13th (1980) didn’t scare me all that much. Sure, I jumped at the end like everyone else when Jason’s corpse came out of the water, but the ending still made no sense whatsoever.

HalloweenThe problem for most of these movies is that the bar had been set tremendously high by John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. Shot on a reported $320,000 budget, Halloween raked in $70 million worldwide and spawned a wave of slasher film imitators that lasted most of the ’80s.

Previous to Halloween, Carpenter had made Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Dark Star began as a USC film school project shot on 16mm, a very funny black comedy sci-fi tale about hippies in space who are on a mission to destroy unstable planets. Assault on Precinct 13 is a tense low-budget action flick about a police precinct under siege by a street gang seeking retribution, in which cops and prisoners have no choice but to fight side-by-side to fend off the attack.

So what makes Halloween succeed on a level that its later imitators could never quite match? To be fair, Halloween was in many ways the first of its kind so many elements that would later become cliché (such as camerawork from the POV of the killer, teenagers being murdered after having sex or a “boogeyman” killer that won’t seem to ever die) weren’t cliché yet. But the true reason for its success is the level of filmmaking. (more…)

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Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Revival House: Ten Great Remakes

by Jeff Johnson

With all this talk about remakes in various stages of production, from rumored to released, I’ve received a couple of suggestions that I do a list of needless remakes. But because (to sort-of quote Robert Stack in Airplane!) “That’s just what they’re expecting me to do,” I decided to flip it around and do a list of great remakes. Because let’s face it, none of us want these movies to turn out bad — we’d all rather they be good. When I hear of a remake in the works, such as 2008’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, when I’m finished rolling my eyes there is a gullible part of me that thinks “wait a minute, Keanu Reeves is an interesting casting choice and the themes of the original are still relevant today — this might work!” But then the movie gets released and the reviews are so universally awful, I decide to skip it. That’s typically what happens, but there is always a twinge of hope that the remake will be good.

So what constitutes a great remake? I’d define it as a movie that takes the original premise, makes it its own and in no way tarnishes the memory of the original. Here are ten films that I feel do exactly that. I know it’s sacrilege to say, but some of these I think are even better movies than their inspirations.

ThingThe Thing (1982). From the very opening, with the desolate shots of the Antarctic and the Norwegian helicopter pilot trying desperately to kill a dog running in the snow, we can tell we’re in for a different ride than the 1951 Howard Hawks original The Thing from Another World. Director John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster take the story in a more psychological direction — as the men become infected by the “thing” they show no outward signs and the paranoia grows as they begin to point fingers at each other. The good old early 80’s makeup effects by Rob Bottin still hold up beautifully, especially that defibrillator gag. The great cast includes Kurt Russell, Richard Dysart, Wilfred “I’m all better now” Brimley and Donald “I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch” Moffat. By the way, John Carpenter has had good luck remaking Howard Hawks’ films — if his 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 had “officially” been a remake of Hawks’ 1959 Rio Bravo, I would have included it on this list. (Now if only people would have luck remaking Carpenter’s own films!) (more…)

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Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Revival House: “I’ll Be Back”

by Jeff Johnson

TerminatorIf you’re like me, when you see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in shades, a certain five-note rhythm comes to mind. There’s no denying composer Brad Fiedel kicks things off in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) with a great main title, letting us know we’re building to something awesome here.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was a wave of low-budget films hitting theaters, but they didn’t feel low-budget — they all had the aura of expensive blockbusters. I’m talking about flicks like The Howling, Scanners, and Escape From New York (all 1981), and directors like Joe Dante, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, and of course Cameron — directors who knew enough about the craft of filmmaking to stretch their shoestring budgets and create cool-looking movies.

Carpenter’s Escape From New York is a good example. The dilemma: how to make New York City look like a maximum-security prison in the near future with very little money? The early establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline is a matte painting. But more important is the way Carpenter pans up from the set — created in Sepulveda Basin, California — to the night sky, then cuts from blackness to the matte shot, perfectly matching the lighting and camera movement so it appears to be one continuous shot.

Cameron served as a matte painter and special-effects cameraman on Escape From New York, but before that, he was a model builder who was quickly promoted to art director on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), produced by Roger Corman. Cameron literally stapled empty egg cartons to the back wall of one of his alien-spaceship sets because it was cheap and he thought it would look cool. It was around this time that he met Gale Anne Hurd, who served as an assistant production manager on the film. A few years later, when Cameron started developing his idea about a cyborg assassin from the future, he brought Hurd on board to cowrite and produce.

(more…)

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