A John Carpenter Poll

this guy wore some kind of reverse sunglasses while watching it

Wow classy move making it personal

*Raises fists*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

apparently the Blank Check podcast is more popular than i assumed

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

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

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

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

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

Xp re they live, to be clear

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

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

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

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

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

It's awesome, obviously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xpost dumb question - what is SPCU?

The Stinky Poopy Cinematic Universe

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

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

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

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

Veg - Snake Plissken Cinematic Universe :)

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

lmao

yeah i can definitely see how the passage of time might help Escape from LA
god i had so much riding on it being awesome at the time, my ultimate disappointment was inevitable in a way

It's really not good, and unlike some of his other misfires, it doesn't even *look* good.

It’s silly on purpose, and the bad cgi compositing looks way better than the cgi-animated fights in Marvel Comic Books Cinematical Universe Film Company movies. Plus Bruce Campbell and Buscemi rule.

It would probably also have had its legacy helped if he’d been allowed to make Escape From Mars properly. Each movie just getting bigger and goofier, like the Fasts and Bond.

Escape From New York cast is all time - Russel, Van Cleef, Pleasance, Isaac Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Adrienne Barbeau, Harry Dean Stanton!

The HALLOWEEN wrap party at John Carpenter's apartment, 1978 pic.twitter.com/2SR22c260B

— Diane Doniol-Valcroze (@ddoniolvalcroze) October 16, 2021

xp don't forget fake Michael Biehn as the white haired weirdo.

(had to double check my gag in imdb and wow he was in Grease and Logan's Run?)

xp: The Coup de Villes! I love the spooky picture behind Nick.

So little discussion of In the Mouth of Madness in this revive. One of his best, imo.

watched it in the cinema at release, never seen it since. Warrants a rewatch for sure as I don't recall hating it at all.

I've seen it once. I remember not hating it, but at the time I had read so much Stephen King that I was really sick of horror media about horror authors.

This made my morning.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FCH9euAVEAcqznf.jpg

In the Mouth of Madness is actually pretty good.

And Escape from LA, sure, is silly on purpose, but it's more important to be good than silly and it is not good. And I know you're being somewhat facetious (xpost), but the composite FX are so bad you'd almost think they were bad on purpose. But they're not. Just like Ghosts of Mars is not bad on purpose, either.

Never forget:
https://i.makeagif.com/media/3-15-2016/miAlrn.gif

I was curious, and it looks like Carpenter more or less worked with the same DP from "Prince of Darkness" on, Gary Kibbe. I'm trying to figure out why his movies just keep looking flatter and flatter, and worse and worse. Maybe it was just the '90s, but it's possible Carpenter also just didn't give a shit.

Escape from New York has had a huge influence on video games. How many first person shooters out there seemingly start with the same premise Duke Nukeem onward?

Considering the stuff that gets made these days, I'd love for someone to be able to get OK to do a prequel streaming series about Snake Plisken outlining some of the stuff that gets discussed in the movie.

Hell, Escape from New York should *be* a video game.

Apparently it got a board game, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York_(game)

I believe there were a fair few side scrolling beatem ups in the Arcade/16 bit era that basically had the plot of "tough guy has to fight his way out of criminal ran city"

Considering the stuff that gets made these days, I'd love for someone to be able to get OK to do a prequel streaming series about Snake Plisken outlining some of the stuff that gets discussed in the movie.

― earlnash, Thursday, October 21, 2021 8:32 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't wanna know what happened to Fresno Bob. I just don't think I could take it.

Hell, Escape from New York should *be* a video game.

Apparently it got a board game, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York_(game)

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 21, 2021 8:36 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just went to look it up on ebay, for shits and giggles. Apparently doesn't fetch prices that are too insane? There's an opened, used one for $60, which you could buy plenty of new board games for these days. Unopened they are still mostly under $300. I mean, that's pretty expensive, but I've seen higher for some open-box games that I had been looking for.

apparently the Blank Check podcast is more popular than i assumed

If you land on the right one when you’re in the right mood, it can be sublime. For example, their review of Rise of Skywalker where they keep yelling “the Dead Speak!” off mic at each other, or gushing about Fury Road.

yeah the Halloween ep w Alex Ross Perry caught me in the right mood, loved it so much

Totally agree w/Chinaski upthread about The Fog.

BBC1 showed it a few days before Xmas in 1983, I would have been 11 years old and I still vividly remember the excitement of school breaking up for Christmas and taping/rewatching this strange movie, it just put me in the tank for any of JC's films I could get my hands on from that point.

Watched Village Of The Damned for the first time last night - now that really sucks. I was laughing at the extremely '90s TV-movie level cast, until reading Carpenter quoted during production that the wild expense of hiring Kirstie Alley, Mark Hamill, Christopher Reeve and Linda Kozlowski was why he was having to make a boring, studio-noted-to-death adaptation.

greatest Blank Check moment ever was Paul Scheer returning to the Used Cars episode after leaving to take a business meeting for close to an hour

Not to derail the JC thread, but not a fan of the How Did This Get Made? folks tbh. Like shit, how can they say the exact same 2-3 things for three hours and still come off like they didn’t get enough time. I thought that Big Trouble ep was kind of a drag because of them.

Blank Check is generally really good though. Beholden to the guests. The Halloween ep with Alex Ross
Perry is particularly great.

Anyway. I really wanna revisit Prince of Darkness. Seemed kinda dull/incomprehensible the two, way-too-late times I’ve seen it. My old-head Carpenter super fan friend has always maintained it’s secretly one of his best, I guess that’s not an uncommon opinion anymore.

i like scheer & mantzoukas mostly but yeah the big trouble ep was not as enjoyable as i hoped: it was mostly just obvious padding & digressions to make it longer than their prev appearance

i didnt like the escape from ny ep either, they love that girl (name escapes me) that was the guest but i dont enjoy her