The Essential Directors: # 2 John Carpenter

John Carpenter

While the Examiner Essentials celebrates unique and classic film, the Essential Directors are the people who can fill a whole Examiner Essentials list on their own. While it may be very difficult to succinctly explain why some of these film makers are essential, an attempt shall still be made. And here it is.

John Carpenter

These days, the only projects with John Carpenter’s name attached seem to be remakes of his own films. Halloween, The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13 have been put through the remake wringer, and for a few years there has been talk of remaking Escape From New York (essentially already done with Neil Marshall’s Doomsday) and The Thing (itself not a terrible idea considering Carpenter’s original film is a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks’ movie The Thing From Another World).

But the Carpenter Legacy means more than just feeding the remake beast; Carpenter’s filmography shows him to be a low-budget indie film master. His first several films were made on the cheap, and his most immediately successful films were those that he made on a shoestring budget and would go on to make millions at the box office (Halloween made $47 million at the box office based on a $325,000 budget). Only thanks to the wonders of home video (and the VHS boom of the 1980’s) did some of Carpenter’s originally derided work find an appreciative audience, and now, with over thirty years of cinema to put everything in perspective, we can look back and see just how essential Mr. Carpenter is.

1. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)The 1970’s saw two evil forces terrorizing the public. The emergence of street gangs were a big deal, as they went from the tough guy 50’s greasers to the more violent and criminal minded gangs of today, and public interest and fear of satanic occults was intense. So leave it to John Carpenter to combine the two evils into one super evil. The story centers around Precinct 9 in District 13 (the title was made up by the distributor, who liked the more ominous sounding Precinct 13 for maximum marketing power), and Precinct 9 is shutting down and moving to a newer and nicer place. So the only people in there are an old cop, a couple of secretaries and a highway patrol officer who is helping out. They are soon joined by a small police escort of death row inmates and a catatonic man running away from a street gang called Street Thunder. This particular gang has sworn out a cholo, or a blood oath, against both the police and any citizens they come across, and most of the movie is spent with the gang trying to kill everyone inside the nearly empty precinct, while the people inside have to deal with each other. This movie gets pretty tense, and might be one of the finest, least trashy, most palatable exploitation movies ever made. It’s a B-movie, but Carpenter somehow knows how to bring a better sensibility to the story than most other directors would.

2. Escape From New York (1981)After Carpenter’s modern western that was Assault, and after his first horror film helped birth the slasher genre (a style of movie whose roots actually go as far back as Mike Powell’s Peeping Tom), Carpenter decided to try his hand at dystopian science fiction. Set in 1997, Escape From New York takes place in a world where crime has gotten completely out of hand and the best solution was to wall off Manhattan Island and turn it into a prison. A great idea until Air Force One crashes in the city and the US President (Donald Pleasence) is taken hostage by the crazy inmates inside. Fortunately for the US Police Force Commander (Lee Van Cleef), infamous special forces soldier turned criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) has been recently arrested, and is the perfect candidate to drop into New York to find the President. Plissken very reluctantly agrees (under explosive duress) and the movie is underway. Despite the limitations of the budget, Carpenter does as much as possible with the story and pulls a very satisfying and unique film out of his hat. And for the first time in his career he has a few big names to put into his cast, like Ernest Borgnine, Adrienne Barbeau, Harry Dean Stanton and Isaac Hayes, which definitely helps make the movie more enjoyable. But in the end, it is Kurt Russell’s movie, and not only was it Russell’s first of four theatrical films made with Carpenter, but it was also his announcement to the world that he was more than a former Disney child actor.

3. Big Trouble in Little China (1986)Following his most critically acclaimed film Starman, Carpenter agreed to work for the Hollywood system and direct a film already in development. Big Trouble in Little China had already gone through several script iterations (having started life as a Chinese-influenced Western) and other directors had signed on, worked on the project and then dropped out, so when Carpenter came along, he already had a Frankenstein’s monster of a story to work with. Though the movie had a relatively small budget of $15 million, it was the largest budget Carpenter had worked with. So when the public soundly rejected Carpenter’s action-comedy (mixed with martial arts and Chinese mysticism) and it fell far short of making its money back, Carpenter was very dejected and swore off the Hollywood big budget system, which is a shame because it is easy to see in retrospect how ballsy of a move making this film was. By this point, the world had taken notice of Russell, but otherwise, the biggest name in the cast was Kim Cattrell, who was known at the time for her work in raunchy comedies like Porky’s and Police Academy. On top of this lack of star power, most of the actors in the movie were Asian, which is a nightmare for studio execs who prefer their movies to have mostly white casts (with some vague notion that most of their possible audience consists of white people who don’t care for movie starring non-white folk). All of this mixed with a weird story about sacrificing a girl with green eyes made for a very off the wall film. There are loads of crazy looking special effects, some of the awesome-looking and some of them considerably wonkier, and plenty of memorable characters (including one that would greatly inspire the creators of the video game Mortal Kombat). Carpenter tells a fun and crazy story with precision and what we have is yet another ridiculous B-movie made by an A-director.

4. They Live (1988)They Live is Carpenter’s most outspoken and “messagey” movie. Starring WWF wrestler “Hot Rod” Roddy Rowdy Piper and bad ass actor Keith David (who also appeared in The Thing), this is the story of transient homeless worker George Nada (Piper), who finds a job at a construction site in Los Angeles. At the site he meets Frank (David), who takes him to a shantytown of other homeless folk. Across the street from the shantytown is a little church, in which Nada make a small, seemingly insignificant discovery, which in turn leads him to make a much larger and scarier discovery. The beauty of They Live is how, over twenty years later, the themes of consumer over-consumption and questions of who is ruling the populace are still very relevant. Also still relevant today: the amazing five and a half minute fist fight between Nada and Frank, which is ridiculously brutal, seems to go on forever and will go down in movie history as one of the greatest fight scenes ever.

5. Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)Actors aren’t the only movie professionals to be type cast (I’m willing to bet that James Gandolfini has a room in his house filled to the ceiling with screenplays for mob movies). Even film directors get backed into a corner after making a couple of films and people expect them to toil in the same genre forever. All of Carpenter’s films to this point had been B-movie style horror and science fiction films, and while Memoirs of an Invisible Man is still a science fiction film, Carpenter tries to do a little more than just present a sci-fi thriller. With this movie, Carpenter actually gets into the physical and psychological effects of being an actual invisible man. Most people thin “oh it would be awesome if I could be invisible, I would do so much!” But no one thinks this idea through. This movie does, however, and shows that life as an invisible man might not be too hot. Carpenter also cast Chevy Chase in the lead, a person who also tried to use this movie to break out of his usual comedic groove. And Chase is charismatic enough to make an invisible man the center of attention and a very interesting focal point for a film.

In Summation

Carpenter has managed to forge a career out of successful B-movies, and has proven himself to be a master of genre movie making. Horror, action, science fiction, thrillers, they are all there in his filmography. His villains run the gamut from street gangs to aliens to corrupt governments and everything in between, and while the individual films themselves range in quality from weak to amazing, his overall body of work can not be denied.