HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU PIECE OF SHIT: FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009)

We're briefly hitting pause on Carptember in honor of today's date: Friday the 13th. And on this day, I like to kick back, watch a few of my favorite Friday titles from the Paramount era, and also talk about how fucking shitty the 2009 remake is. Plus it's somewhat Carpenter-related since he gets name-dropped in this piece while recognizing that the Friday the 13th series wouldn't exist were it not for him, anyway. 

Either way, let's get hatin'.

I’ve been watching Jason Voorhees murder human beings ever since I was a wee one. Too young and poor to own actual copies of the films, I was reduced to watching versions recorded off television from ABC’s “Million Dollar Movie” and USA’s “Up All Night.” The gore was heavily edited, the nudity had vanished, and even benign lines of dialogue like “thank God” were edited down to “thank ___.” But at that time, I took anything I could get, and I wore out those tapes without much effort.

Jason Voorhees, both pre- and post-zombie, was kind of my hero. He was a monstrous force of nature with which to be reckoned. He crushed heads and introduced axes to bodies without prejudice. He cared little for the half-naked nubiles that were helplessly straddled on the floor in front of him — he wanted nothing more than to throw them out the window, bash them against a tree, or stab them…you know…down there. The Friday the 13th series was even, in essence, my first exposure to sex (and in a largely overblown way, its consequences), since it predated my father’s birds-and-the-bees talk, the 37th-generation porn tape that circulated among my friends, and my public school’s laughably tardy sex ed class. No sir, I learned all about female anatomy from The Final Chapter.

Funny and inappropriate as it may sound, the series was a large part of my childhood, but despite my adoration, I would never describe the series as art — not even the first film. Slasher movies that result in legitimately good cinema are a rarity — John Carpenter's Halloween naturally comes to mind. Sure, slashers are “good” in the sense that you like them, and they are certainly entertaining, but they’re not written to trigger any emotional response other than screaming. They don’t want to push you to question society. They just want you to laugh as the fat chick on the side of the road gets a pick-axe through her neck, or to fear for Final Girl who is completely alone, knowing the masked maniac could be around any corner. Post-Halloween slashers were willing to show you anything to earn that response. They are buffalo wings and beer: they’re an option, they really hit the spot, but at the end of the day, they’re junk. (But that’s okay!)

Unlike Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th isn’t a series where most fans point to the first film as their favorite, simply because the series didn’t really come into its own until the sequel, which introduced a masked Jason as the primary maniac. Now that the baggage of “the original” was no longer on the table, fans were free to choose which chapter was their favorite. Pretty sure it’s The Final Chapter, and also pretty sure that’s because of all the Crispin Glover dancing. (It’s my preferred entry, anyway.)

Despite the lack of “quality” in each successive sequel, insofar as could be expected of Friday the 13th, and despite the stick-in-the-mud claims that each sequel was the same movie over and over, you can’t claim that each entry following The Final Chapter wasn’t trying something new.

A New Beginning pissed off fans by removing Jason from the equation and replacing him with a copycat killer. Luckily, the movie boasts a healthy amount of the red stuff, and director Danny Steiner leans on a slimy yet effective grindhouse aesthetic that feels right at home in the franchise. Even with the disappointing fake killer reveal, it’s a natural continuation of the Tommy Jarvis saga, which began in The Final Chapter. It’s effectively directed, and if the real Jason had actually been the killer, I’m confident A New Beginning would be considered a series high-point.

Jason Lives is the “funnest” of the series, with its tongue firmly planted in cheek, and it shows on both the page and the screen. Having said that, (and putting aside the goofy but lovable James Bond-esque opening title sequence), let it not be said that Jason Lives doesn’t live up to the Friday the 13th brand. Jason, newly resurrected, is back with a vengeance. People are smashed through RV walls, ripped apart, and bent in half. Heads are stabbed and triple decapitations are on the menu. “Fun” tone notwithstanding, the threat is still very real. Thom Mathews (Return of the Living Dead) caps off the Tommy Jarvis story with the best iteration of the character and puts Jason back in the lake for good (haha, not). Director Tom McLoughlin keeps things light, channeling Joe Dante and Amblin Films, delivering a hoot-and-a-half of a Friday. With a diverse cast that doesn’t just focus on teenagers, McLoughlin manages to make Jason Lives feel less like a slasher flick and more like an honest-to-gosh horror film geared toward everyone. (It actually got some decent reviews, too, which in the land of Friday the 13th is usually unheard of.)

The whole Jason vs. Carrie gimmick of The New Blood is a little absurd, but most fans have been pretty forgiving of that plot point. It’s what the MPAA did to poor director John Carl Buechler, and all his gory set pieces, that they can’t forgive. Still, despite being tame with the gore, The New Blood is fun, and if nothing else, depicted the most bad-ass Jason so far (played for the first of four times by fan favorite Kane Hodder) — exposed spine and all.

Jason Takes A Cruise Ship Toronto Manhattan would unceremoniously serve as the last entry produced by Paramount Pictures (the same studio that gave the world the Godfather trilogy), who had distributed the original and funded every sequel. Following the series’ declining box office receipts, Jason Takes Manhattan would prove to be the studio’s last go-around with their hideous and embarrassing cash cow. Unfortunately, what sounded like a clever and exciting script was hacked apart to reduce the budget, forcing writer/director Rob Hedden to sacrifice much of his vision, which included scenes in Madison Square Garden (where Julius was supposed to get his head punched off), a chase scene on the Brooklyn Bridge, and a finale in the Statue of Liberty. Instead, Hedden shifted most of the action to that goddamn cruise ship, where Jason miraculously negotiates tight hallways and cabins without anyone ever seeing him. (In case you were wondering, 34 minutes of the movie’s 96-minute running time “takes place” in New York, and two minutes of that time is actually shot there.) What Hedden can be blamed for, however, is shitting the Friday the 13th mythology bed by impossibly suggesting that Final Girl and Jason were children around the same time period, making Jason either both a zombie killer AND a lake-haunting boy ghost, or Final Girl the oldest high school senior on record. Also, while Jason’s uncanny talent for taking lives has always bordered on absurd, Jason Takes Manhattan takes it one step further and bestows on him the completely ludicrous ability to teleport.

At film’s end, Jason screams like an elephant and drowns in toxic waste.

It had a really fun teaser poster, though:

 

Once the Paramount reign of Friday the 13th ended and New Line Cinema stepped in to adopt the rotting hulk, Jason went to Hell, space, and Elm Street. Most would agree none of them were a return to form for the masked killer (though it’s easy to love Freddy vs. Jason).

And then 2009’s Friday the 13th happened to us all, which came out ten years ago.

Happy birthday, you piece of shit.

When the soulless production team of Platninum Dunes, headed by Michael Bay, announced the remake of Friday the 13th, every horror enthusiast and their decapitated mother knew they weren’t actually remaking the first film. Instead, they were remaking the concept of Friday the 13th —Jason, with mask, cutting down teens in the woods. But I’ll admit, when the remake of Friday the 13th was announced, I was excited. By this time, Platinum Dunes had already given the world the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which was shockingly good, along with The Amityville Horror and The Hitcher, which…weren’t, but each announcement in regards to Friday the 13th really seemed to indicate they knew what they were doing: the writers of Freddy Vs. Jason would be writing the script, Chainsaw director Marcus Nispel would be getting behind the camera, and Jared Padalecki, star of Supernatural, would be playing the lead role of Clay — basically a reiteration of Jason-hunter Rob from The Final Chapter. This trio of creative decisions tickled my horror fancy. In my eyes, that was some promising horror street cred all involved in this hotly anticipated remake, and this was only Friday the 13th — fucking that up would be like burning water. The movie was soon shot, set visit reports showed enthusiasm from all those involved, and the trailer masterfully captured the tone of the original movies, even going as far as mimicking the “thirteen deaths countdown” as the trailer for the original film did 30 years prior.

But the audience was doomed. They were alllll dooooomed. And on Friday the 13th, 2009, nothing would save them.

After all that, I have to ask…why? Why was the final product so awful? How did they get all of this seemingly so right and then flush it right down the toilet? How did the Friday the 13th flick with the highest budget, made by a studio finally unashamed of its ownership, and created by people who purported to love the franchise, become the worst entry in the series?

Let’s start with the script.

You’ll never (ever) have me bemoaning the lack of character development in a Friday the 13th because I don’t need that, and it’s not what I expect from a movie that’s essentially Part 12. Instead, I would have preferred a group of characters to be, in the most effortless way, at least a little bit likable. Ripping off my own face and begging for Jason to come down off the screen and vivisect me was tolerable compared to watching Funny Dick Guy say one putrid “the obnoxious character is always a gas!” line of dialogue after the other. Meanwhile, writers craft scripts like this and then grin at you and say, “These kids feel like real kids!” If Friday the 13th’s kids are based on real kids, Planet Earth is doomed.

And what’s with these kids and their utter masturbatory obsession with smoking weed? What’s with this needless, overbearing crusade to really reinforce that kids not only smoke week, but that smoking week is hysterical? Yeah, I get it. Teens smoke weed. Teens have always smoked weed, and will always smoke weed. You know who else smoked weed? My parents. And yours. We’re not doing anything new here, people. But Friday the 13th seems intent on beating their audience over the head with a thirty-pound bong. Not only does the movie open with kids hunting for a pot field, later on, an entirely different group of kids come along and smoke weed and laugh a lot, because weed is the BEST. Listen, the original Friday the 13th entries are horrendously dated, I’ll freely admit it. The environments are free of cell phones and flat screens. Kids dance “the robot” and have gigantic hair. The guys wear shorter shorts than the girls. For an entry or two, punk was “in.” But they were still way cooler than the kids of Friday the 13th 2009. They didn’t make their bongs and pipes do puppet shows. They didn’t go “awwww yeaaaah!” when someone took out an ounce and waved it around like a Polaroid. They didn’t say “this is some good shit!” or bellow “I am so stoned!” for comedic effect. They passed the joint, smoked, and played some acoustic. The end.

And if you think the film’s immature look at marijuana is the last of the pitfalls, think again.

Why does every single character in the film lack the social skills of a zoo-born gorilla? Did you really just take your tits out for no reason, Dumb Girl? Were you seriously going to do some common-area masturbating since no one was around, Other Kid? Are we really watching a redneck about to masturbate all over a naked mannequin as he feels its chest? To quote that YouTube child, is this real life?

Worse, most of the deaths are incredibly lazy, while some border on the kind of discomfort-causing dispatches from the world of Saw, Hostel, and all of those imitators so popular during the 2000s, which ain’t the Friday the 13th way. As a result, the deaths look merely unpleasant and somehow simultaneously boring. Case in point: Stoner Kid wanders around a dark garage looking for god-knows-what, spending almost five straight minutes talking to himself. The music is mounting, and you know Jason’s about to pop up and give this moron a death we all hope is glorious. And then…

Jason shoves a screwdriver into his neck.

Slowly.

As Stoner Kid begs for his life.

It’s not fun, but boring — and uncomfortable. That’s not why we’re here. We’ve come for titillation, not revulsion. For the first time in a Friday the 13th, watching teens get slaughtered isn’t…fun.

As far as Jason’s killing capabilities go, I’m a little more lenient than some other fans. If Jason wants to shoot an arrow into some girl’s skull, that’s fine. In previous entries, I’ve seen him throw spikes directly into people’s faces from afar with deadly precision, so I won’t complain about the method, but to then flash to Jason’s old room and show us an archery trophy? Who fucking cares? Astoundingly, the writers thought they were clever enough to “explain” why Jason is good with a bow-and-arrow, yet when it came time for him to find his hockey mask for the first time — in a moment that should have been iconic — they write a scene where he literally finds the thing on the floor. Come on guys, really? That’s like Bruce Wayne deciding what his Batman costume will look like by buying a fucking Batman costume on Amazon.

Not helping matters is the lifeless “bum-bum-bum-bum” film score by Steve Jablonksy, who unfortunately sees fit to keep “ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma” and toss the rest — unaware of the effectiveness of Harry Manfredini’s original music. Manfredini’s awesome original score isn’t music you can hum, like Halloween, Phantasm, or JAWS. Notes are all over the place, and hardly repetitive — more Herrmann than Carpenter—and the collection of harsh strings, harps, and low brass is what made the not-that-scary events unfolding on screen seem pretty scary. It’s a superior film score that deserved just as much respect as Jason himself, but given the complete lack of understanding as to what made Jason a great character, it would seem the score never had a chance. (For an example of how to do this the right way, see Graeme Revell’s score for Freddy vs. Jason, which effectively marries Manfredini’s Friday stuff with Charles Bernstein’s Nightmare stuff, all while writing original compositions.)

The only worthy kudos is entirely dedicated to Derek Mears as Jason. A longtime fan of the series, he understood that — despite what people think — Jason Voorhees really is a “character,” and he did a great job bringing him to life. 

After a great opening weekend, Friday the 13th suffered such poor word of mouth that the following weekend saw a severe drop-off in box office, thus killing any plans for a follow up. (It takes a special kind of talent to make a lot of money from a Friday the 13th movie and not parlay that into an immediate sequel.)

Fans all have their own ideas for what makes or breaks a Friday the 13th entry, with many of the criticisms leveled at the remake being things I don’t have the time to care about. Jason runs and that’s weird? I don’t care, and no, it’s not, because he ran in the first three Jason chapters. How does he know how to keep his electricity running in his childhood home? I dunno, ask the Jason who had a working toilet in the second entry. I tend to overlook these details and focus on things that are obviously dumb, like establishing that the town of Crystal Lake knows that Jason is running around in the woods, but aren’t that concerned about it. Or that Jason doesn’t kill one particular female character because she resembles his mother, yet he does chain her up in a dungeon, which seems like a very bizarre way to treat a mother. Or that an abandoned summer camp is infested with a series of underground tunnels which the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to explain with one line of dialogue.

How did making a Jason film get so hard? Why is the concept of a masked killer cutting off heads so uncrackable? (How did a bunch of kids make the Friday the 13th fan film Never Hike Alone with a fraction of the remake’s budget, resources, and Hollywood talent, and still create something vastly superior?)

Guys, this isn’t Don Corleone we’re talking about here. Nor Indiana Jones, John McClane, or the aforementioned Batman. It’s Jason Voorhees. Put a mask on him, dump him in the woods, give him some unannoying kids to kill in clever ways, add a twist of lemon for freshness, and holy shit, make it fun. As a lifelong Friday the 13th fan, who was able to find merit in every single entry up to Jason X (and I really had to reach for that one), 2009’s Friday the 13th was the first time I ever recall feeling embarrassed by my love for the franchise.

To all the folks who mucked this up: this is such an easy wheel to keep turning, and somehow, you totally blew it.

[Reprinted from Daily Grindhouse.]

LORD FORGIVE US

December 9, 1879:

Met with Blake this evening for the first time. He stood in the shadows to prevent me from getting a clear look at his face. What a vile disease this is. He is a rich man with a cursed condition, but this does not prevent him from trying to better his situation and that of his comrades at the colony.

December 11, 1879:

Blake's proposition is simple: He wants to move off Tanzier Island and re-locate the entire colony just north of here. He has purchased a clipper ship called the Elizabeth Dane with part of his fortune and asks only for permission to settle here.

I must balance my feelings of mercy and compassion for this poor man, with my revulsion at the thought of a leper colony only a mile distant.

April 20, 1880:

The six of us met tonight. From midnight until one o'clock, we planned the death of Blake and his comrades. I tell myself that Blake's gold will allow the church to be built, and our small settlement to become a township, but it does not soothe the horror that I feel being an accomplice to murder.

April 21, 1880:

The deed is done. Blake followed our false fire on shore and the ship broke apart on the rocks off Spivey Point. We were aided by an unearthly fog that rolled in, as if Heaven sent, although God had no part in our actions tonight. Blake's gold will be recovered tomorrow, but may the Lord forgive us for what we've done.

SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! (1978)

Someone’s Watching Me! is a very different kind of Carpenter film — one that lands squarely in thriller territory; it features absolutely no blood and just a handful of non-squeamish violent scenes. When Halloween was released, film critic Roger Ebert gave it a very favorable review, comparing it to Psycho, so it’s appropriate that Someone’s Watching Me! slyly plays around with Hitchcock conventions by fashioning a sort of reverse-Rear Window: instead of a home-bound city dweller using a pair of binoculars to spy on his neighbors in the apartment building across the courtyard and discovering one of them might be a murderer, Lauren Hutton’s Leigh is a home-bound city dweller being spied on by someone living in the high-rise building across the street — someone who watches her with a high-powered telescope, and who begins stalking her by leaving gifts, making threatening phone calls, and entering her apartment — all in an effort to drive her crazy before trying to kill her and staging her suicide.

Much of Someone’s Watching Me! is a one-woman show, with Hutton (who is still acting today, and seen as recently as Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty) spending most of her screen time alone in her apartment having conversations with herself as she deals with the increasingly strange attention from her anonymous neighbor. For the most part, Hutton shoulders this burden well, although some of the dialogue Carpenter wrote for her, when heard with modern ears, can sometimes be corny, or the least bit…off color. (There’s a joke in there somewhere about her being raped by midgets and it makes me wince every time I hear it.)

Frequent Carpenter collaborator and one-time wife, Adrienne Barbeau, is also along for the ride, playing the spunky sidekick who helps move the plot along into more dangerous territory. Notably, Carpenter writes her character, Sophie, as a lesbian; refreshingly, this never enters into the plot, and never becomes notable beyond the one-time mention, which helps to make things feel just a bit more realistic. Sure, one could argue it doesn't serve a purpose as far as the plot goes, but it's the smaller details that don't necessarily contribute anything substantial that help to ground small-scale and intimate stories like this. We should also note that this creative choice was made long before the push for all-inclusive atmospheres in films and television featuring females and members of the LBGTQ community. 

Someone’s Watching Me! starts off somewhat slow; Carpenter takes his time introducing Leigh, allowing her affability and subtle painful emotional history to earn the audience’s sympathies — this so Carpenter can methodically turn on the creep and raise the stakes a little at a time. He wrings genuine suspense during several key moments, one of which takes place in a desolate parking garage. Though Leigh falters a handful of times, coming close to emotionally surrendering to her tormentor, she refuses to be run out of her new home. Someone’s Watching Me! isn’t a slasher flick, but Hutton is definitely a final girl, and she’s one of the strongest the genre has ever seen (and she’s got the ultimate bad-ass line, which ends the film).

Though this was still very early on in Carpenter’s career, and he was working with a cast and crew outside of his usual repertoire (no Carpenter score for this one, and no D.P. Dean Cundey), Someone’s Watching Me! still manages to feel like a Carpenter film, especially when it comes to the camerawork. Also, look for an appearance from Len Lesser, Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo himself (“Hello!”) as one of the film’s handful of suspects.

JOHN CARPENTER'S OTHER HALLOWEEN

The Ghost Maker: A Halloween Tale

By John Carpenter

I live my days in silence, behind the barred in windows of this asylum, in a cell of shadows. Until this moment I have spoken to no living person of the events of that Halloween night five years ago - because I could neither ask for nor expect belief.

But today, my doctor has given me paper and a pen, as he hopes I shall be compelled to write out my tale of horror and madness - once and for all expelling the demons that hold me in their catatonic embrace. I know this horror shall never leave me.

So my purpose, Dear Reader, is to finally put before the world the events of Oct. 31, five years past, as I experienced them, that no man may follow me to this hideous darkness in which I dwell, awaiting the only mercy I shall ever know - my release - the moment of death.

It was a bitterly cold night and I welcomed the warmth of the hearth in Howard Necron's study that All Hallow's Eve five years ago. I settled myself comfortably into an armchair by the crackling fireplace and waited as Necron poured two large snifters of brandy. He then turned to me with the oddest smile...

"I suppose, William, that you wonder why I have asked you here this evening," Necron said as he poured the amber liquid.

I admitted that I had been somewhat curious, as for the last 15 years we had been bitter professional rivals. We had once been partners in science and the closest of friends as well, but a dark schism had developed over our opposing research ethics. Necron had always wanted to prove that which should have, to my mind at least, remained in the ephemeral world of mathematics and theory. Disagreement had turned to debate, which in turn had become cold enmity.

"What would you say, William, if I told you that using universally accepted scientific principles, I could create a ghost?"

"I would say, Necron, that you were as mad as a March hare." My smile of derision must have been obvious, for he turned quickly away, pausing for a moment with his back to me before he slowly crossed the study to hand me the brandy snifter.

"To science, eh, William?" As he raised his glass to mine, his gaze seemed to burn into me, as if a shrewd smokey secret passed behind his eyes. I nodded and took a sip of the brandy. It had a sharp undertaste, and as I started to mention something about it, Necron settled himself closer to me on the ottoman at my feet.

"What is Schrodinger's cat?" he asked in a whisper.

"There's no need for this. We both know what it is." I suddenly felt unfocused. Drowsy. Probably the heat from the fire, making me sleepy. "It is a... a... thought experiment used to demonstrate the paradox of observer-created reality," I answered.

Necron seemed unbearably close to me now, his face but inches from my own.

"Yes," he said, "Nothing is real until you observe it."

Necron now stood, staring down at me with triumph and ice, the fire flickering on his face, shadows squirming like mad, devouring insects. A wave of dizziness washed through me.

Necron continued: "Imagine a box. The size of a coffin. Inside it is a radioactive particle with a 50-50 chance of decaying in, say, one minute. Also in the box is a glass bottle containing cyanide gas, and a Geiger counter. And, finally, into the box, is placed - an unconscious man."

"A cat, wasn't it?" I broke in. I was having a difficult time maintaining any line of reasoning, but there was a chill to his words.

His eyes began to drift strangely above me, as I sipped once again from my drink. That metallic undertaste assaulted me again. What had he put in my brandy? Could Necron be that insane? I tried to focus on his face. His features seemed to melt in the heat of the fire.

"If the radioactive particle decays, the Geiger counter so records it, trips a hammer, smashes the glass bottle, thus allowing the cyanide gas to escape and kill the man."

Necron's words were running all together.

"You mean... the cat," I mumbled weakly.

"Or," he said, "if the particle does not decay, the Geiger counter is silent, the hammer not tripped, the man allowed to live."

The room was spinning like a child's music box. The heat from the fireplace... Necron looming above me... My eyes bobbed open, closed. "What did you put... in my drink?"

But Necron ignored my slurred question.

"Don't you see, William? I could be either a murderer or a savior, because until human eyes see inside the box, the man inside is both dead and alive at the same time - a complex, linear combination of the two. The man in the box is a ghost of all possibilities of dead and alive, condemned to live in a limbo until the box is opened and he is observed by human eyes." His voice had dropped to a sibilant rasp, eyes glowing with a fury.

The snifter of brandy suddenly fell from my fingers. As I lost consciousness Necron's face was the last thing I saw.

"I am the ghost maker," he said, grinning. Then there was nothing. Blackness. Silence.

I awoke. I was lying down. Enclosed. Trapped. I couldn't move. Listening. Trying to breath. Then suddenly I threw up my arms. Touched a solid surface above me, no more than a foot away from my face. A lid. I was buried. In a coffin. A box.

I pushed up the lid a fraction of an inch.

A sliver of morning sunlight appeared as the lid opened, illuminating the inside of the box.

I suddenly saw the thing above me. It was hovering, just a foot away. Its body prone, it was staring down at me. Fuzzy. Indistinct. Its arms reached for me and at the same time another pair of arms lay at its side.

It was a blurred composite. A living transition. A contradiction. All possibilities, dead and alive. It undulated. Gazing eyes. Dead eyes. Living eyes. Blue decaying flesh.

In the fraction of a second before it disappeared I saw the creature's shape crawling, diffracting - indefinite, exploding anew out of rippling flesh.

A leering death's head began to scream down at me, disintegrating, crumbling and decomposing, growing and rejuvenating, humanity degraded and corrupted, dead and alive, revealed in an instant.

And then it was over. The thing disappeared. Its features settled, collapsed into definition. I looked around - the glass bottle at my feet was unbroken, the cyanide gas contained. The Geiger counter at my side was silent.

My mind raced frantically. Dead plus alive. Alive minus dead. Dead plus the square root of minus alive.

And then, as I continued to push upward, the impact of Necron's experiment hit me. As my fingers lifted the underside of the lid, the thing made man stared back at me in horror, screaming a long, sustained shriek of utter annihilation. Touching the unfeeling surface of a mirror - I realized the hideous image had been a reflection.

It was I.

 









© 1988, John Carpenter and The New York Times

NADA

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (2015)

It sounds depressing to say this, considering we have to go back over 25 years to 1995, but In the Mouth of Madness is, and probably will be, John Carpenter’s genuinely last great film as a director. Following that would come a string of underwhelming and critically derided titles like Village of the Damned, Escape from L.A., Vampires (underrated!), Ghosts of Mars, and then, after a seven-year break, The Ward. Unless you’re a devout Carpenterphile, it’s likely that more people know about the bad reputation of Escape from L.A. than who know that In the Mouth of Madness exists at all. 

And that’s a crime.

Unexpectedly written by Michael DeLuca, who is known more as a producer and New Line Cinema’s former President of Production than as a screenwriter, In the Mouth of Madness is a Lovecraftian love letter to the genre – one filtered through the use of a purposely Stephen King-ish horror writer, here called Sutter Cane (and played by Das Boot’s Jürgen Prochnow). It’s a Lovecraft monster movie, a mind-bending psychological thriller, a satire on the power of pop culture, but most interesting, it’s also a clever take on film noir. International treasure Sam Neill (the U.S. definitely has joint custody with New Zealand) is John Trent, a private investigator hired to find a missing author, who is forced to work alongside Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), your proto-femme fatale – someone who cannot be entirely trusted. Together they’re tasked with solving the mystery of Sutter Cane’s alleged disappearance, but more importantly, trying to navigate the highly distressing question: what is reality?

This combination of genres boosts In the Mouth of Madness and offers it a non-derivative identity, but the most gleeful aspect is Carpenter’s sheer desire to scare his audience. In spite of the few moments of purposeful comedy (Sam Neill lazily singing “America the Beautiful” and intermittently staring out the passenger-side window during the duo’s very long car ride to Hobb’s End absolutely kills me), you can sense the intent for terror in every frame. Prior to 1995, the last time Carpenter was this dedicated to scaring his audience was maybe 1987’s Prince of Darkness, but definitely 1982’s The Thing. Though the mid-90s and beyond is the era during which the director would begin to embrace graphic violence (Vampires is ridiculous, and his Masters of Horror entries are very icky), In the Mouth of Madness relies mostly on eerie and somewhat abstract images – the former courtesy of KNB FX’s Lovecraftian creations and Carpenter’s simplistic editing tricks, and the latter courtesy of the production’s various Toronto shooting locales, which appear so majestic yet isolated that they feel plucked from a dream. Something as simply rendered as a disembodied hand knocking on a window or touching someone’s shoulder from behind, only to immediately disappear, is almost embarrassingly rudimentary considering its effectiveness. That’s not to say there isn’t bloody mayhem — it wouldn’t be a Carpenter film without at least a bit of the red stuff — but it’s noticeably dialed down in favor of a different kind of horror experience.

In the Mouth of Madness is the most undervalued film of Carpenter’s career. Like many of his other titles, appreciation for the film has grown over the years, having a strong presence on video and benefiting from its association with the very genre-friendly studio of New Line Cinema.

THE ANNIHILATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

ONE GOOD SCARE

Excellent stuff.

DO YOU WATCH SUTTER CANE?

Very cool custom-made DVD insert. Props to its (unknown) artist.

THE WARD (2010)

(Spoilers for The Ward can be found throughout. Read with caution.)

Listen, after 2001’s Ghost of Mars, John Carpenter’s previous theatrical feature, we all wanted to love The Ward. We wanted it to be worth the ten-year wait. After all, it was directed by a living legend who has been consistently five years too early for all the concepts he's introduced to the genre. Many of his most heralded films received lukewarm-to-middling reviews at the time of their release, but slowly and steadily began to be recognized for the genius (or just downright fun) little tales of beautiful nastiness that they were. Halloween received ho-hum reviews for several months until a positive one by The Village Voice turned it all around. The Thing, now rightly hailed as a classic and a defining moment in the horror genre – having inspired filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo Del Toro, Eli Roth, and so many others – was vilified upon its release. Critics called The Thing a porno of violence and accused Carpenter of filling his movie with irredeemable set pieces. David Ansen of Newsweek called it "an example of the New Aesthetic - atrocity for atrocity's sake" while Alan Spencer for Starlog contended that "John Carpenter was never meant to direct science fiction horror movies. He's better suited to direct traffic accidents, train wrecks and public floggings" (IMDB).

Despite his consistent post-Thing filmography, Carpenter openly states that his remake of the Howard Hawks 1951 classic nearly destroyed his career. It forced him on a path to grin and bear safer studio projects before fleeing back into the world of independent filmmaking, thanks to a distribution-only deal with Universal (which resulted in both Prince of Darkness and They Live, both considered among the master’s best).

So, the question remains: How will The Ward be looked upon in ten years from now? Will people’s general indifference and disappointment toward it subside? Will it be elevated and looked at with a new pair of eyes? Well, considering the director’s own and aforementioned Ghosts of Mars is still considered the dung pile most said it was in 2001, the jury can and will be out on that for the next decade.

But here’s the thing about The Ward, people. It ain’t that bad. It really, really isn’t. Yes, the script could have been stronger and a bit more unique. And yeah, it would’ve been nice to have a better twist ending than, “oh, she’s a crazy split personality.” Many negative reviews for the film have pointed to the script as the main reason for the film’s failure. And I will not sit here and try to convince you otherwise. No, the script is not very good. It's a convoluted amalgamation of J-horror, typical slashers, a bit of the ol' torture porn, and psychological thrillers. But I really take offense to the claims that The Ward is point and shoot; uninspired looking and almost TV-movie in scope—that Carpenter’s ever-dependable look and feel were completely absent from the film.

Guys, when I read those claims, I really have to wonder what fucking movie it was you watched.

After the movie’s initial opening, in which we see Amber Heard’s Kristen fleeing through the woods after having burned down a house, we cut to the psychiatric institution where our characters are committed. And the camera slowly pushes down a long hallway, inches off the ground, as background music echoes off the wall. We’re not even five minutes in, people, and it sure feels like a fucking Carpenter movie to me.

Except for the director’s most unheralded movie, In the Mouth of Madness, he’s never made a movie that actually fucked with your mind—that showed you only pieces of the overall puzzle as you sat back and tried to make sense of it all. And that’s precisely what The Ward is: a puzzle, being slowly put together by Kristen. While the destination may be all-too-often traveled, at least the intent is to shock and surprise you.

As to the claims that the film lacks energy and enthusiasm from the director (one report actually had the audacity to claim he was directing the movie from his trailer), I can only point to the impromptu dance the girls share in the common area of the hospital. The sequence is directed with, at first, such an infectious sense of enthusiasm that you can’t help but smile as you see these girls trying to exorcise themselves of all the bad mojo hanging over their heads and just, for once, get some enjoyment out of life; and that’s of course before the scene quickly takes a turn for the worst, showing in brief, nearly-subliminal images the ghoulish face of the ghost that is haunting them all. It’s a new bag of tricks that Carpenter is trying out, and I, for one, welcome the change. Much as I’d like for him to consistently churn out the types of movies that he made in the ‘80s, well…that would be boring after a while, wouldn’t it? Don’t you want to see growth from your filmmakers? Don’t you want to see them leave their comfort zone and try something new (at least, new to them)? That's up for debate. He could announce tomorrow the long-mooted Escape from Earth and people’s boners would shoot through their computer screens, but he tried revisiting Snake Plissken once before, didn’t he? And that didn’t turn out all that great.

Plus, I could think of worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching Danielle Panabaker run around in that Daphne-from-"Scooby-Doo" outfit.

"Mind if I titillate?"

Carpenter, his old age having caught up with him, is no longer the jack-of-all-trades he used to be.  Instead of editing, writing, producing, scoring, and directing, he has, in recent years, opted only to go with the latter, leaving everything else up to his colleagues. And yes, that has changed (not destroyed) the look and feel of his films. But not in any way that makes them less deserving of our attention. They're different, but not inferior. They reflect a Carpenter in his golden age. They reflect a man who doesn't want to entirely throw in the towel, but just wants to make it a little bit easier on himself. He's put in the time, had his battles with studios (Universal) and ego-maniacal actors (Chevy Chase). He's earned the chance to take it easy. If we want to experience a great Carpenter screenplay, there's always Halloween, and if we're jonesing for an iconic score, there is always The Fog.

Speaking of music, Mark Killian's haunting, ethereal, and unusual score for The Ward picks up where Carpenter left off, who'd scored his previous (and probably last) film Ghosts of Mars. But Killian knows what makes Carpenter's music so effective: It's simple, to the point, but ever-present.

If nothing else, The Ward should be considered a potential conduit to getting Carpenter back behind the camera for more features. Apparently (and disappointingly) The Benders has been appropriated by Guillermo Del Toro, man of a thousand announced projects, and I don't know what's going on with Darkchylde, but Carpenter is ready and willing to get back behind the camera, should the circumstances be right.

Lazy script or not, inconsistent or not, The Ward brought our director back to us. For that, I’ll always be grateful.

FILMOGRAPHY

THE THINGS

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase.  I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

 

Read the rest.

SEPTEMBER IS CARPTEMBER

In honor of the quickly coming Halloween season (yay!), it seems fitting to dedicate an entire month to the man who wrote and directed the ultimate October homage: 1978's Halloween.

Every day of September will serve up a slice of that wonderful Carpenter flavor, leading us into another celebration: the Halloween season (my fave). Check back here tomorrow and every day after to get your Carpenter fix. The plan is to cover some of Carpenter's less discussed films in hopes of mixing things up a bit. (I won't be writing in detail about Halloween or The Thing. I'm not sure I could ever possibly add anything else to what's already been written about them.)

In the meantime, feel free to hang out here and ogle that young, virile stud in his prime! (He's 71 now, btw.)

‘THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK’ AND THE PARANOID THRILLER

Distrust peaked during the 1970s across a variety of arenas: domestically, societally, and politically. Multiple facets of life had been disrupted by the scathing publication of the Pentagon Papers regarding the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, the ongoing Cold War, fallout from the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family, and the list goes on. Trust in the individual and the institution was at an all-time low, and art on the screen began imitating life on the street and in the home. 

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek is a modern production, but it’s cut, utterly, from the 1970s paranoid thriller. And there’s been no better era in which to resurrect the sub-genre than right now: current trust in the government is at the lowest it’s ever been. And it’s not just the White House we can’t trust, but the very news media that reports on it -- peppered with the president’s constant slogans of “Fake News!” and “Witch Hunt!” -- as well as the people who subscribe to their reality of choice and sell it as truth to someone who might not know any better. We live in an age where the news media you consume determines the philosophies and ideologies you align with, but it also determines that the people who watch those other kinds of news media already have a preconceived notion of you: if you’re a hard-right conservative, you watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal; if you’re a hard-left liberal “snowflake,” you watch MSNBC and read the New York Times – these are the new “rules.”

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek was likely inspired by the 2016 Bundy standoff, which saw a family-led militia taking control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 40 days over a dispute regarding a million-dollar payment to the government. Militia culture had been prevalent in U.S. culture at least since the Clinton Administration, although there seemed to be a spike during the Obama era due in part to the disinformation campaign accented with the constant proclamations of “they’re coming for your guns!” (Raise your hand if you still have your guns.) (You should be raising your hand.) Doomsday Preppers, though not militia-based, shares the same militia mindset, which is that the government and/or civilized order is going to collapse, and once that happens, it’s very man for himself. 

Interestingly, The Standoff at Sparrow Creek plays twice with the concept of paranoia. That the men have joined a militia at all, choosing a dilapidated warehouse as a home-base cache for their firearms, explosives, bottled water, and CB radio, is the first touch of this. The second, which embodies the main conflict, is that one of their numbers has attacked a nearby police funeral, killing several attendees, and it’s a race against time to out the shooter among them and turn him over to authorities before they all go down in a hail of gunfire. 

The Standoff at Sparrow Creek plays out like a clever combination of Quentin Tarantino’s first low-fi feature, Reservoir Dogs -- about a group of robbers whose diamond heist goes wrong and leads to belief of an undercover cop among them -- and John Carpenter’s The Thing -- about a group of men marooned by the elements and forced to locate the shape-shifting alien lifeform hiding behind one of their faces. There’s very little trust among the men of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, not helped by their overly radical philosophies, their former professional ties to the police, and the fact that some of them are just friggin’ weird. Take a group of men already paranoid enough to join a militia, insert a reason for them to suspect each other, and you’ve got yourself a situation that’s rife with conflict and wholly removes predictability from the table. 

Director Henry Dunham presents The Standoff at Sparrow Creek as realistically as possible, bringing together a parliament of personalities to embody the different kinds of people who would be attracted to joining a militia: a former cop disillusioned with the system, a man whose daughter suffered a vicious attack and for whom the government provided no justice, and a young man so detached that he keeps a manifesto of anger scrawled between the printed lines of Catcher in the Rye.  (A weird mystique has always hung over this particular novel, likely due to it being found in the homes of John Hinkley, Mark David Chapman, and Robert John Bardo.) Certain members of the militia are more eccentric than others, while some are more bloodthirsty. One of them, which the film subtly suggests is the leader, comes off as more of a crime boss than a redneck good ol’ boy with a burly beard. What unites them is the belief that not only do they have the right to assemble arms and prepare for conflict, but that it’s their duty to do so. “We always knew this was going to happen,” says one of the more unhinged members of the militia regarding the massacre at the police funeral, which visibly sets some of the other members at unease. Their similar philosophies has brought them together, but their unique dedications to their philosophies is going to be what tears them apart.

 A conceit of the paranoid thriller is the isolation of the main protagonist, who is forced to act alone to shed light on the truth of the conspiracy afoot. Francis Ford Coppola did this masterfully with 1974’s The Conversation, about a CIA surveillance expert who becomes convinced he’s the one being surveilled. 1976’s infamous Marathon Man, directed by John Schlesinger, permanently bequeathed to the world two mainstays: fear of the dentist, and “Is it safe?” Next came the game-changing, real-life All The President’s Men, about journalistic duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein chasing down leads and consorting with shadowy men in parking garages to irrefutably prove President Nixon’s ties to the Watergate Hotel break-in; however, the reporters are soon the ones being investigated, themselves followed and their home phones bugged. 1977 was an ideal time for Philip Kaufman to remake Invasion Of The Body Snatchers; the amassing pod people were perfect metaphors for so many things that the American people felt were threatening their society: the Soviets, gay culture, the sexual revolution, the hippie movement (the film is set in San Francisco), all worsening the ongoing alienation caused by urbanization. The list of paranoid thrillers continues, with George A. Romero’s The Crazies, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, James Bridges’s The China Syndrome, and Franklin J. Schaffner’s bizarre Nazi tale The Boys From Brazil.

 

Following its birth in the ‘70s, the paranoid thriller has never gone away, and has since been explored in every genre. In the ‘80s, we had Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (one of the all-time best), George Lucas’s THX 1138, and Richard Badham’s Wargames. In the ‘90s came Oliver Stone’s JFK, Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, and even comedy satires like Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and the All The President’s Men spoof Dick, directed by The Craft’s Andrew Fleming. The 2000s gave us Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity, a redo of The Manchurian Candidate by Jonathan Demme, Chan-wook Park’s wicked Oldboy, and the most unnerving sequence in Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds involving an unhinged Tim Robbins. Echoes of this continued in the 2010’s with Martin Scorsese’s underrated Shutter Island and Dan Trachtenberg’s Ten Cloverfield Lane. And let’s not forget the juggernaut that dominated the ‘90s before returning just a couple years ago – the pop culture phenomenon heavily inspired by All The President’s Men and The Andromeda Strain known as The X-Files.  

Mistrust is part of human nature. We exist in a cloud of paranoia where there’s plenty of reason not to put trust in anything or anyone. On personal levels, we’ve been betrayed by those we love. On professional levels, especially for those of us still existing in work landscapes that haven’t quite bounced back from the 2008 recession, the threat of being unceremoniously laid off feels constant. And as for the government, forget it: we can only see so many clips of the president saying something incriminating, only for him to later on swear he never said it, before we totally give up on putting our faith in him, his administration, or in the loyal congregation who reject reality just to believe him. In the age of “fake news,” disinformation campaigns across social media, and the ensuing threat of video manipulation techniques known as “deep fakes” (Google it if you’re not familiar, and be terrified), there’s never been less trust to go around. If the 1970s were any indication, we’ll soon be inundated by films in which the principle cast exists entirely in their own self-made isolation, grasping their guns, peering out of their fortified homes between the slats of their window shades, and asking….“Is it safe?”

 

[Reprinted from The Daily Grindhouse.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANTONIO BAY

 

"In five minutes, it will be the 21st of April. One hundred years ago on the 21st of April, out in the waters around Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot in front of them. Then, they saw a light. By God, it was a fire burning on the shore, strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. They steered a course toward the light. But it was a campfire, like this one. The ship crashed against the rocks, the hull sheared in two, mars snapped like a twig. The wreckage sank, with all the men aboard. At the bottom of the sea, lay the Elizabeth Dane, with her crew, their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open, staring to the darkness. And above, as suddenly as it come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean and never came again. But it is told by the fishermen, and their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea, out in the water by Spivey Point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death."

CARPENTER IN FOUR TONES

I really love this.

Art by Kid Eternity via Deviant Art.