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Joined: 6/10/2005
From: London Violenta, UK
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I’ve always had a soft spot for Carpenter – his earlier work was effortless in its style and entertainment value but like many of the great directors of the 70s he seems to have lost his way, in recent years.
Like Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, Carpenter spent much of the 90s trying to hit big with a blockbuster and his later films seem castrated when compared to his best period (1976-1982). It’s obvious from looking at Memoirs Of An Invisible Man and his Village Of The Damned remake that he deliberately dumbed-down his formula for mass consumption – both films have a “made by committee” sensibility, as opposed to Halloween and Assault On Precinct 13, which bear his auteur fingerprints all over them.
The 70s saw the emergence of movie brats such as Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, et al – directors that were the first generation to have studied film before making the transition to filmmakers and Carpenter fits this profile but unlike his brethren, he’s happier to site the influence of Dario Argento and Mario Bava on Halloween than the likes of Truffaut, Bergman and Fellini that had motivated his contemporaries. Assault On Precinct 13 is his homage to Howard Hawkes and the film is practically a remake of Rio Bravo. Through his love for genre films and his homages to them, Carpenter’s career is the blue print for that of Quentin Tarantino’s – both are completely unashamed about their love for the sort of films that their peers would have sneered at.
Taking a look at his work, Halloween is probably his most perfect film and without a doubt, his most influential. Taking the premise of a masked madman stalking and murdering his victims that had been the staple of the Italian giallo (murder mysteries – the term is derived from the term given to the pulpy novels of Agatha Christie and the like which had been published in Italy with garish yellow covers – Giallo is Italian for yellow) made popular by Mario Bava during the 60s and continued throughout the 70s by the likes of Argento, Umberto Lenzi and Sergio Martino. Halloween’s killer, Michael Myers shares more than a passing resemblance to the faceless assailant from Bava’s Blood & Black Lace – black garments, clinical-white, featureless mask.
Halloween is a great example where all the elements come together to create an incredible whole – the casting of a then-unknown Jamie Lee Curtis, the pioneering use of steadicam (the Panaglide), the terrific opening POV (point-of-view) sequence that cuts to an incredible craneshot of the killer unmasked as a child. The use of POV to put the audience in the shoes of the killer was a strike of genius on Carpenter’s part and became the ‘bullet-time’ of its day, with every sub-par stalk n slash rip-off using it to the point of saturation.
If there were one thing that’s questionable about Halloween, it would be the film’s success. For a film that was rumoured to have cost just $300,000, it grossed back in excess of $80,000,000 and made it the most successful film (in terms of budget to gross ratio) of all time – later to be nixed by The Blair Witch Project in 1999. Because of the film’s popularity and due to the fact that it was made so cheaply, there was a whole rash of imitations – from Friday The 13th through to the lacklustre likes of My Bloody Valentine and Graduation Day – each of the rip offs centred on a well-known time of year and upped the ante in terms of onscreen violence but these thing would become the films’ undoing. With titles and scenarios to Halloween, these films were inevitable compared to Carpenter’s flick and IMO, all fail on almost every level. Carpenter was clever enough to keep the blood and guts to a bare minimum, choosing to build the suspense instead and leaving everything else to the audience’s imagination.
Halloween would remain unmade if it hadn’t been for Carpenter’s sophomore film, Assault On Precinct 13. Yet another of his low budget quickies, the film was met with little in the way of critical or commercial fanfare when it was released in the US. However, upon it’s release in the UK, the film garnered great reviews and an aggressive marketing campaign by its distributor. The film’s cult status was quickly assured and Carpenter was able to get the financing for Halloween. As a thank you to the British distributor that had released Assault On Precinct 13, Carpenter would name one of the integral characters in Halloween after him – Michael Myers…
Assault On Precinct 13 is a great, taut thriller. From the outset, Carpenter tells his audience that anything can happen and when we witness a pretty little girl being shot at point blank range, we believe him. Like Halloween, Assault On Precinct 13 sets its precedent very early on – there’s no cosy Hollywood-imposed safety nets – these are films that break taboos and what better way than to use children to emphasise the point.
Due to the fact that he was working with ridiculously small budgets and as a trained musician, Carpenter wrote and performed the scores to his early films. The use of simplistic synthesized chords was never done to greater effect than when applied to Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween – his best scores, IMO and yet another of Carpenter’s highly influential flourishes.
Escape From New York is less successful than Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween but is still a thoroughly enjoyable film. It was Carpenter’s first reasonable budget and you can see every penny onscreen. The concept is great – in a future where lawlessness has reached an all-time high, the island of Manhattan has become a maximum-security prison and Kurt Russell’s Snake Plisken is one of cinema’s greatest anti-heroes, it’s a shame that the film was soiled by a woefully misguided sequel.
The Thing is a wonderfully pessimistic film. Taking the claustrophobic and stagey feel of Assault On Precinct 13, Carpenter manages to heighten a sense of paranoia. The film marked Carpenter’s first foray into making films for a studio and was his most expensive film at that point but its dark, nihilistic ambience did not sit well among cinema-goers and critics and became one of its year’s biggest flops. Having weathered somewhat of a critical re-evaluation, the film has become well respected over the years and along with Prince Of Darkness and In The Mouth Of Madness, shows a darker, far less playful side to the director’s work.
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