Someone’s Watching Me (1978)

Someone’s Watching Me is an early John Carpenter film (he wrote and directed it). It’s a made-for-TV movie and it’s a suspense thriller.

This is obviously Carpenter doing a riff on Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This is Carpenter’s voyeurism film.

Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) has just arrived in LA to start a job as a live TV director. Using a generous bonus from her previous job she takes a luxury apartment in the swanky Arkham Towers (and yes I’m sure the Lovecraft reference is deliberate). This is an enormous high rise apartment building and it’s very high-tech. It has elaborate security.

But as Leigh finds out she is not safe there at all.

She gets creepy nuisance phone calls. Not threatening or obscene, but subtly creepy. She gets mysterious notes delivered to her. She receives expensive gifts, supposedly from a travel company. She starts to suspect that this guy knows all about her. He knows everything that she does.

The scary part is that he makes no direct threats. She has no idea what he actually wants. He might be a relatively harmless weirdo. He might be very dangerous. There’s no way of knowing.

It takes her a while but eventually she figures out that the guy is watching her from another apartment building. But it’s a high-rise building as well. This guy could be in any one of hundreds of apartments.

The police can’t help because she doesn’t know who the guy is and he has not yet broken any actual laws.

Her new boyfriend Paul (David Birney) is sympathetic but he’s a philosophy professor not an action hero.

Her best friend Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) is very supportive but it’s difficult for any of them to do anything really useful.

Of course everybody who has ever discussed the subject of movies about voyeurism has made the very obvious point that all movies are voyeuristic - we are watching other people’s lives. And of course a film director is not just watching the lives of the characters but also manipulating them. An interesting twist that Carpenter adds here is that Leigh is a television director, so she herself is a kind of voyeur and a kind of manipulator.

Technically this movie is impressive. Carpenter does a more than competent job as director. He understands pacing and he understands the basic techniques of suspense. The suspense scenes work. The basic setup is very promising.

There are however major flaws. There is not a single interesting characters in the movie, and not one of the characters really comes to life. By the end of the movie we do not know a single thing about Leigh. She’s a complete blank. Her apartment looks like a hotel room. It does not look like someone actually lives there. There are no personal touches.

Her friend Sophie is pleasant but she really just functions as a plot device.

Leigh’s boyfriend Paul is a harmless nonentity. We learn nothing about him. There is no erotic or romantic heat between Leigh and Paul. Even after they begin an affair they behave more like casual acquaintances.

This is an extraordinarily lifeless sexless movie. Maybe Carpenter wanted to avoid making an exploitation movie but the problem is that as a result the stalker’s motivation remains inexplicable. There is not the slightest indication that he has even the mildest sexual interest in her. So what is his motivation? OK, he wants to control her, but why? His notes to her are polite but impersonal. Maybe he hates women, but we get no indications that this is so. Maybe he has a romantic obsession with her, but we also get no indications that this might be the case. Maybe he feels powerless? Maybe, but we’re offered no evidence.

The idea that the stalker wants to stalk Leigh from a safe distance and is afraid to get close to her is a good one. Unfortunately it isn’t developed.

The vagueness of his motivation somehow makes the threat less scary.

It’s difficult to judge the acting since the characters are so underwritten.

I’m a huge admirer of Carpenter’s work but I’m inclined to think that realistic thrillers about real people were definitely not his forte. It’s easy to see why he moved rapidly away from this type of movie.

Someone’s Watching Me is well-crafted and reasonably entertaining but there’s something missing. Carpenter completists will want to seek it out and it is interesting as a movie made before Carpenter really found his voice, but it is very much lesser Carpenter.

The Scream Factory Blu-Ray offers both 1.33:1 and widescreen aspect ratios. Both look terrific. 1.33:1 is how it was originally broadcast.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Prince of Darkness is a 1987 movie written and directed by John Carpenter that could be described as a return to the supernatural horror of The Fog but with some important differences.

Donald Pleasence is a very worried Catholic priest. An older priest has just died. That priest had belonged to an order called the Brotherhood of Sleep. For two thousand years a priest from that order has acted as a guardian of a terrible secret. Something that must remain confined. But it appears to be breaking out of its confinement.

Odd things are happening. Insects are behaving strangely. Homeless people are behaving very strangely indeed, as if they had some mysterious common purpose. The sky looks a bit funny. Everything just seems a tiny bit wrong somehow.

There’s also the old deceased priest’s diary, and a very ancient manuscript.

The priest begs Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) for help. Birack believes in science not religion but he works on the frontiers of theoretical physics so he’s rather open-minded about ideas that sound crazy. Birack recruits a team of graduate students. They are going to investigate this matter scientifically.

What they have to investigate is a very ancient cylinder in a 500-year-old church crypt. They’ll need someone with experience in translating ancient religious texts as well. That manuscript may contain vital clues. In fact it contains things you would not expect in an ancient religious manuscript.

Donald Pleasence knows something of the history of the Brotherhood of Sleep. It’s very disturbing. It casts doubt not just on the accepted version of Christianity but on accepted scientific principles as well. There is a very ancient evil which is not the evil in which everyone has always believed. That evil is now awakening.

Or investigators do not even know what they’re dealing with much less what to do about it. And that evil may be intent on picking them off one by one. Maybe not killing them. Maybe something much worse.

This is a kind of variant on the classic haunted house story in which a group of people are stuck in a house in which ghostly manifestations are happening. The differences being that this is a haunted church and while the manifestations might be supernatural they are not ghostly as such.

Of course it could be debated whether this is a supernatural horror movie or a science fiction horror movie.

The ideas here are very cool and very frightening. The enigmatic nature of the evil makes it more scary. Carpenter builds the tension very effectively.

The special effects are generally impressive. This was 1987 and for commercial reasons there were going to have to be gross-out gore scenes. I always find such scenes to be cheesy even when they’re done well. Gore is just something that doesn’t impress me. I think that the ideas here are clever enough and creepy enough to make the gore unnecessary. I am of course in the minority on this issue and in strictly commercial terms Carpenter knew what he was doing.

I rarely notice film music but Carpenter’s music for this movie (which he composed himself) is memorable and very disturbing.

Donald Pleasence is of course very good, and Victor Wong is marvellous as the eccentric but brilliant and determined Professor Birack. The other cast members are all very solid. Look out for Alice Cooper in a memorable appearance as a terrifying homeless person.

Prince of Darkness has some affinities with Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing in that both movies deal with possession, of sorts. It also has definite affinities with The Legend of Hell House (1973) with its scientific investigation of a haunted house.

Prince of Darkness is a fine creepy horror film. John Carpenter really was on fire in the 80. Highly recommended.

I had previously only seen this movie in a terrible pan-and-scanned VHS release so seeing it on Studiocanal’s Blu-Ray release was a revelation. This release is packed to the gills with extras.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is a science fiction zombie western set on Mars in 2176. It’s a movie that nobody much liked at the time although it does have its admirers. Carpenter directed and co-wrote the screenplay (and of course provided the music).

Carpenter’s career was starting to look a bit rocky by this time and both this film and the slightly earlier (1998) Vampires tend to polarise audiences. After Ghosts of Mars his career more or less faded away.

Mars in 2176 is in the early stages of colonisation. Terraforming has produced an environment that is barely liveable, the planet now has a population of 640,000 and is ruled by a matriarchy. Mining seems to be the main industry. Most of the colonists bitterly regret signing the contracts that brought them to Mars and would leave if they could. It’s not exactly a utopia. I love the fact that the main form of transportation is trains, and the inhabitants of Mars still use real money.

A train arrives at the station at the main city, Chryse. Apart from its load of ore it contains a five-member police squad who had been detailed to bring in a murder suspect from the mining town of Shining Canyon. But now there’s only one person alive on the train, Police Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge). She is called before a hearing to explain what happened to the rest of the squad, the train crew and the prisoner. The story of the film is then told in flashback, with lots of flashbacks within flashbacks.

Everything went fine until the train left them at Shining Canyon. 

They find the place apparently deserted. The few people left alive are either crazed lunatics or seriously frightened. Even the prisoner, notorious criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube), is not exactly easy in his mind.  

It seems that everyone has gone crazy. Homicidally crazy. The chopping people’s heads off kind of crazy. As to what caused everyone to start lopping each other’s heads off, that remains a mystery (although it does get explained later). It seems that Mars does not want to be colonised and is taking its revenge.

The five cops, along with Desolation and his three gang members and a lady scientist (who eventually reveals the secret behind the disasters), are under siege in Shining Canyon and they will have to fight their way to the train when it arrives back at Shining Canyon.

The movie starts well, with a slow atmospheric buildup as the five cops discover one disturbing fact after another. Then the movie devolves into a zombie apocalypse gorefest, although this being a John Carpenter film it is at least done with some style.

The cast is certainly interesting. Natasha Henstridge is OK as the very serious non-nonsense but troubled cop who copes with her life by escaping into drug-fuelled dreams. Ice Cube is pretty good as Desolation Williams. It’s fun to see Pam Grier as the leader of the police squad, the lesbian Commander Braddock (whose main interest seems to be trying to seduce Melanie Ballard). Sergeant Jericho (Jason Statham) shares Commander Braddock’s obsession with getting into Melanie’s pants.

It’s the characters who are the problem. I don’t have a particular problem with Natasha Henstridge’s acting. What she does she does well enough. It’s what she’s chosen to do with the character (or what Carpenter asked her to do with the character) that is the problem. Melanie is a real ice queen. She appears to have no emotions and no sexual feelings. She is incredibly detached and remote. Her drug usage may well be connected with this but that possibility is never explored. Her motivations for escaping into drug dreams are never explored. It’s an interesting performance but it leaves the film without an emotional centre. We see everything through Melanie’s eyes but it’s as if she’s just a recording device. We have no idea what she is thinking, or feeling.

Unfortunately Ice Cube takes a similar approach with his characterisation of Desolation Williams. Why does Desolation decide to throw in his lot with the cops even though he hates and mistrusts them? Does he have some feelings for Melanie? That would explain his actions, but we aren’t shown any evidence that would support that theory. Maybe she reminds him of a woman he once cared about? Again, we’re shown nothing to indicate this might be the case. He simply goes from being a bad guy to being a good guy. There’s nothing wrong with Ice Cube’s performance but the part is badly underwritten.

We know more about Commander Braddock. We know she’s a lesbian and she wants to get Melanie into bed. But that’s all we know about her. Apart from that she’s a closed book. We don’t even get any sense of whether she’s a good cop or not.

The minor characters are just there to get killed (which is not a spoiler since we know at the beginning who is going to survive and who isn’t). There are a couple of death scenes that might have had an impact but the characters are such zeroes that the viewer is unlikely even to remember their names. Consequently we don’t care when they get killed. And none of the other characters cares when one of their own gets killed.

What this movie really needed was Snake Plissken. I believe that at one stage Carpenter considered making it the third Snake Plissken film. Kurt Russell would at least have breathed some life into the film.  

I do like the look of this movie, with everything red or in reddish shades. The locations (mostly in New Mexico) are excellent and brilliantly utilised. The movie has the right atmosphere. Ghosts of Mars borrows heavily from lots of other Carpenter films (everything from Escape from New York to Vampires to Assault on Precinct 13 to The Thing).

This is not a terrible movie by any means. It’s quite fun in its own way. But, like Lieutenant Melanie Ballard, it’s detached and remote. There’s a fair amount of excitement but it just doesn’t get the viewer really engaged. It’s frustrating because the ideas aren’t bad.

The DVD includes an audio commentary by John Carpenter (who is always fun to listen to) and Natasha Henstridge, plus a number of other extras.

Ghosts of Mars is worth a rental.

They Live (1988)

John Carpenter’s They Live came out in 1988 and it’s an odd mixture of political satire, action movie and 1950-style monster movie.

It’s also a classic paranoia movie.

We start with an ordinary working class guy named Nada who is down on his luck. He’s desperate to get a job and he gets one, on a construction site. He also finds a place to live, in a shanty town in Los Angeles. The early part of the movie is extremely interesting. There’s a very strong sense of unease. We also get the feeling that this is not quite our world. There’s an incredible gulf between rich and poor. There’s massive unemployment and poverty and there’s homelessness on an enormous scale. The police behave more like an occupying army than a police force.

Television is everywhere. Even in the shanty town there are TV sets. TV programs focus on the lifestyles of the rich and on conspicuous and extravagant consumption. The shanty town dwellers have nothing but they watch TV shows about people who have everything.

There’s a lowly building atmosphere of unease. Something is wrong. People know that something has gone wrong but they have no idea what it is.

The unease gradually changes to outright menace. The church across the road from the shanty town is raided by the police who start shooting people and then demolish the shanty town. The police have lots of helicopters. They watch everything.

Nada was already rather curious about that church. For one thing he’s puzzled that any church would be hosting choir practice at 4 o’clock in the morning. He decides to take a look around. lt turns out that there’s no choir practice going on - that’s just a tape that’s playing. Then he finds a hidden compartment behind a wall, filled with boxes. Nada is no thief but his curiosity is not going to let him leave without taking one of the boxes with them. When he opens the box he’s disappointed that it contains nothing but sunglasses. Then he puts one of the pairs of sunglasses on and everything changes for him. And the movie changes gears dramatically. They’re not ordinary sunglasses. They allow the wearer to see reality. What everyone is seeing is not reality but a kind of hypnotically induced dream state. Reality is very different.

The advertising posters don’t actually advertise anything. They carry messages and the messages are relentless - obey, consume, keep sleeping, conform. Even worse, the people of L.A. aren’t all humans. Many are monsters, clearly aliens. The rich people are mostly aliens. The poor people are all humans. Earth has been occupied by invaders from outer space. Their intention does not appear to be to massacre us but to exploit us for profit.

Nada and Frank intend to fight back. They find a resistance group but the aliens know all about it.

Having started as a fascinating mix of science fiction and politics it becomes an action movie. Which was deliberate - Carpenter understands that if you’re going to deal with such subjects you’d be well advised to wrap it up in an entertaining package.

They Live is based on a short story by Ray Nelson, Eight o’clock in the morning.

Carpenter rather boldly cast professional wrestler Roddy Piper as his hero Nada. The casting works. Piper can't act but he looks right - he looks like a really ordinary working-class guy- and he has the right persona. And he knows how to deliver one-liners. He wrote much of his own dialogue, including some of the movie’s best lines. As is made clear in the 2013 interview with Carpenter included in the DVD he made a deliberate and conscious choice to tell the story from the point of view of the working class, and to have a hero who is very much working class.

Keith David is equally good as Frank. Meg Foster as Holly, a woman Nada is determined to save, has an odd screen presence but in a movie like this it works.

Carpenter was notorious for his absolute insistence on retaining creative control, even if it meant making low budget movies. They Live is certainly a low budget movie but Carpenter is a master at stretching a limited budget and making cheap movies that look great.

The movie was intended as a response to the 80s in general and to Reagan’s economic policies in particular. Despite this it’s a movie that doesn’t seem dated. It’s possibly more relevant today than it was in 1988. As Carpenter puts it in the accompanying interview, in many ways the 80s never ended. Consumerism and social control are arguably much bigger problems today than in 1988.

The aliens obviously represent the ruling class, interested in ordinary people solely as a source of profit. There’s nothing subtle about the satire here. It’s delivered with a sledge hammer.

Among other things They Live is famous for the epic fight scene between Nada and Frank. Piper had told Carpenter that if he wanted a really really good fight scene then it was going to need to be intricately choreographed and rehearsed. It was going to take a long time. Carpenter adjusted his shooting schedule to make sure that the time was available, and it pays off.

The influence of the classic 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is obvious. That film remains the greatest of all paranoia movies but They Live is a pretty respectable paranoia flick in its own right. As far as its politics is concerned it absolutely nails its colours to the mast. It’s an interesting movie that mostly works. Highly recommended.

Escape from New York (1981)

Escape from New York is John Carpenter’s iconic 1981 science fiction action adventure flick about breaking into the world’s toughest prison. The prison is Manhattan. In the future world of the movie the whole of Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison, this being seen as the only answer to the ever-increasing crime problem.

This is a prison that nobody ever leaves. Once you’re there you’re there for life. There are no guards on the island. The prisoners can do whatever the hell they like. Nobody cares. The whole island is surrounded by walls, minefields, sophisticated surveillance system, helicopter patrols, you name it. No-one has managed to escape. Escape truly is impossible.

But in this story the problem is that first it’s going to be necessary not to break out but to break into the prison, and then get out again. The reason it’s necessary to get in is that the President of the United States is there. His plane was hijacked by urban terrorists. Not only that, the President has with him an incredibly vital recording and that recording is going to be needed within 24 hours at a major international conference. The fate of the world depends on that recording. Which means there’s a time limit. The President has to be extracted and it has to be done within 24 hours.

And it can’t be done by conventional means because the President has fallen into the hands of some very nasty people and if they see a single helicopter or a single soldier trying to mount a rescue mission they’ll kill the President immediately.

The man in charge of the prison is Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) and he has a plan. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is a slightly psychotic ex-special forces guy turned bank robber and he’s about to be sent to the Manhattan Prison. Hauk offers him a full pardon if he can get the President out. The task is impossible but Snake Plissken may just be mean enough and crazy enough to pull it off.

Needless to say there’s a fair amount of mayhem once Snake is infiltrated into the prison (by glider). Snake manages to accumulate a number of allies. They’re vicious and/or entirely untrustworthy but that doesn’t bother Snake. What matters is that they may be useful to him. These allies include Cabby (Ernest Borgnine) who seems to be New York’s only surviving cab driver, and also Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau). Brain is a kind of scientific advisor to the self-appointed Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes).

There’s plenty of violence and it can get fairly brutal at times although it’s not as extreme as you might expect. There’s certainly no actual gore.

The acting is a major strength of the film. Kurt Russell is terrific as the totally amoral totally ruthless Snake, a man more cut out to be a villain but in the insane and evil world of the movie he’s the closest thing there is to a hero. Snake just doesn’t care about anything, which is why he has a chance of succeeding. Lee Van Cleef as Hauk is pretty similar to Snake. He’s ruthless and amoral but he happens to be, technically at least, one of the good guys. Isaac Hayes is suitably malevolent. Ernest Borgnine and Harry Dean Stanton both put plenty of enthusiasm into their performances.

Donald Pleasence plays the President. He’s also technically one of the good guys, and he’s also in reality just as ruthless and amoral as Snake Plissken. The only difference is that being a politician he adds hypocrisy to the mix of endearing personality features.

The movie was made on a budget of around six-and-a-half million dollars. That was a lot more than Carpenter’s previous films but Escape from New York is an insanely ambitious movie for such a budget. The extraordinary thing is that visually it works, and works very well indeed. The special effects were done ultra cheaply and they look splendid. The whole look of the movie is dark and sinister and incredibly hostile. The visual style has been copied countless times since.

This is a move made entirely with old school special effects. Everything is done with animation, or miniatures, or matte paintings or the other techniques that pre-dated CGI. When you take this, and the low budget, into consideration Carpenter’s achievement really is phenomenal. This movie is an object lesson in what you can achieve visually with talent, imagination and hard work.

Insofar as the movie has a message it seems to be that the only thing that does more harm to society than out-of-control violence is out-of-control law enforcement. The world of Escape from New York is a complete moral vacuum. When men like Snake Plissken and Hauk look like heroes you have a society that has a lot of problems. This is a fairly bleak dystopian tale. What’s interesting is that we don’t get any glimpses of what “normal” society looks like.

I’m not saying that it’s all that profound in the political and social points it makes. It does have a fair amount of leftover 70s cynicism and paranoia. At least we don’t get any speeches.

The Region 4 Special Edition DVD comes with a pleasing swag of extras including two audio commentaries. The really good news is that one of the commentary tracks features John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. There’s nothing more enjoyable than hearing Carpenter and Russell talking about the movies they made together.

This movie is stylish and it’s fun and it was a definite hit. There would be lots of violent action movies made in the following couple of decades but Escape from New York has a bit more class than most of them, and Snake Plissken as played by Kurt Russell is one of the great action heroes. Highly recommended.

The Village of the Damned (1995)

There are certain movies that I tend to go out of my way to avoid seeing, for varying reasons. One of the movies I’ve avoided is John Carpenter’s 1995 version of The Village of the Damned. In this particular case my reasons for avoiding the movie were quite clear-cut. First off, I liked Wolf Rilla’s 1960 version so much I couldn’t see how anyone could possibly improve on it. Secondly, I’ve always disliked movies that Americanise English subject matter. In this case my second objection is even stronger than usual, given that John Wyndham was perhaps the most quintessentially English of all science fiction writers. And The Midwich Cuckoos was the most quintessentially English of Wyndham’s novels. An adaptation of that novel set in the United States sounded like a seriously poor idea.

Nonetheless the 1995 version of The Village of the Damned is a John Carpenter movie and I do generally like John Carpenter movies, so I have set aside my prejudices and here I am reviewing it.

One day everybody in the town of Midwich loses consciousness. All the animals lose consciousness as well. Some hours later they all regain consciousness. No-one has any idea what has happened or why. The government has sent Dr Susan Verner (Kirstie Alley) to investigate. While she’s certainly a doctor it’s reasonable to assume that she has some intimate connections with the intelligence community.

It soon becomes apparent that every single woman of child-bearing age in Midwich is pregnant and they all fell pregnant on the day of the unexplained blackout. It’s obvious that something very strange is going on. There is simply no possible way that some of these women could be pregnant, but they are. And they all decide to keep their babies.

The children grow up very fast. They are extremely bright but lack any kind of empathy. They’re not actually emotionless - in fact they display an excessively emotional need for revenge if they suffer any injury or even a minor inconvenience. This is one of the elements in the story that worked fine in the 1960 movie but seems inconsistent and meddled in this version.

Dr Verner is still hanging around and giving the impression she knows more than she’s prepared to reveal publicly. She seems to have been added to the story to give it a bit of an X-Files vibe, with a vague suggestion that maybe the government knows more than it’s prepared to let on as well. She chain smokes through the move so you could describe her as the movie’s faintly sinister Cigarette Smoking Woman.

The children become more obviously evil. It’s not just Midwich’s future that looks bleak, these kids could be a threat to the whole planet.

There are so many things wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s no subtlety in the portrayal of the children. Right from the start they are clearly Demon Children From Hell and their evilness is so blatant you have to wonder why everybody else in the town doesn’t just leave. For the story to work it’s necessary that the women should make serious attempts to bond with the children and should be genuinely emotionally conflicted about them. Nobody could be emotionally conflicted about these little horrors. It’s also necessary that the strangeness of the children should be revealed slowly, so that at first it’s still possible for people to convince themselves that they’re just normal kids. All of this was done successfully in the 1960 film and the 1995 film fails on every count.

There’s a much bigger problem. John Wyndham had a deep love for traditional English society, and he felt that things were changing rapidly and not necessarily for the better. The Midwich Cuckoos is a kind of allegory of the rise of soulless mass society. The Midwich of his novel was a creation that the author cared about and the reader cannot help feeling emotionally involved in the tragic fate that seems to be the village’s destiny. All of that is lost in Carpenter’s film. His Midwich is already soulless so why would anybody care if it’s threatened?

The characters are dull and the acting is dull. Terrible things happen to the local doctor, Dr Chaffee, but Christopher Reeve’s performance is so colourless and uninvolved that Dr Chaffee is even more robotic than the demon children. The other actors make no impression whatsoever and their characters are so uninteresting that I found it difficult to keep track of them.

Kirstie Alley tries to be cynical and sinister but she doesn’t really have the acting chops to make Dr Verner anything more than a cipher.

The special effects are OK but they’re not really any improvement on the 1960 movie.

There are some minor changes to the story, notably in regard to the David character, but they’re muddled and unconvincing.

By 1995 Carpenter’s once promising career was definitely on the skids. He no longer had enough commercial clout to be given the level of creative control necessary to do something interesting with the material and he knew it. He didn’t want to make The Village of the Damned and he didn’t have final cut and he had major disagreements with the studio and it seems likely that he just lost interest and was only thinking of the pay cheque. It’s ironic that the commercial failures that derailed his career were in fact some of the best and most interesting movies of his career (movies like The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China). This must have been more than a little disillusioning. Unfortunately The Village of the Damned was not the sort of movie that was going to get his career back on track.

The overwhelming impression I get from this movie is pointlessness. It’s inferior in every way to the 1960 film and it adds absolutely nothing of value to the story.

I found myself not caring what happened to Midwich or its inhabitants who seemed no more convincingly human than the evil alien children.

I really can’t think of any reason whatsoever why anyone would want to see this movie.

The Fog (1980)

The Fog is an early John Carpenter film that manages to be classic gothic horror whilst still having a very contemporary feel. It’s an old-fashioned ghost story but with some of the techniques of the slasher film. When the movie was completed it was realised that a 1980 audience was going to expect much more overt thrills so extensive reshoots were done. The movie ended up doing surprisingly well at the box office despite being a bit of a hybrid.

The little seaside town of Antonio Bay in northern California is celebrating its one hundredth birthday. Antonio Bay is a quiet little town. In fact the last time anything exciting happened here was a hundred years go when a ship called the Elizabeth Dane was wrecked in the bay, the disaster being caused by a mysterious fog. That event led to the foundation of the town.

Gothic horror often involves a curse, and the curse is often a collective one, falling upon an entire family. In this case it’s the entire town that is under the curse. That curse is the consequence of certain terrible things that happened exactly a century ago.

It starts with odd things happening. Car alarms going off for no reason, windows shattering, lights inexplicably flashing on and off. And there’s a fog, just as there had been in 1880. The fog is heading straight for a fishing trawler, the Sea Grass.

The local priest knows what’s going on. He’s found an old diary that recounts the events of that night in 1880 and reading that diary has almost sent the good priest over the edge of madness.

Now the unearthly fog of 1880 has returned and there’s something evil and deadly in that fog.

Carpenter started making horror movies at a time when a certain amount of gore was pretty much required if you expected to get a commercial release. While Carpenter didn’t seem to object to gore he didn’t really need it. He was good enough to scare us without the gore. In The Fog he doesn’t overdo it. In fact there’s a lot of implied gore. There are ultra-violent killings but you don’t really see much at all. The violence was mostly added in the reshoots.

What Carpenter did have was a very fine talent for atmosphere. In The Thing he uses the Arctic wastes and the horror of snow and ice with terrifying effectiveness. In The Fog his setting is a picturesque California seaside town but he still manages to build some incredibly creepy atmosphere.

And Carpenter certainly had the technical skills. He keeps the tension ratcheted up very nicely and when he throws in his scares they do scare.

The Fog has a pretty decent cast. Adrienne Barbeau as the radio station owner and operator (effectively it’s a one-woman radio station), Jamie Lee Curtis as hitch-hiker Elizabeth Solley, Janet Leigh (who was of course Jamie Lee’s real-life mom) as Antonio Bay’s chief civic booster Kathy Williams and Tom Atkins as the closest thing the film has to a conventional hero are all very solid and Hal Holbrook is fun as the well-meaning whisky priest.

The location shooting is impressive and even includes a couple of scenes shot at locations used by Hitchcock in The Birds. The radio station in the light house is a rather cool idea.

Carpenter’s biggest cinematic influence was not a horror director but Howard Hawks. Carpenter’s career has essentially been an attempt to do horror, sci-fi and adventure movies in the Hawks style.

Carpenter also cites Lovecraft as a major influence on The Fog, and there are certainly some Lovecraftian touches.

The Fog is a low-budget movie (it cost just over a million dollars at the time) but the special effects are very effective. Carpenter is smart enough not to try anything too ambitious. It’s better to stick to simple effects that work and that’s what he does. The ghosts look very creepy. The fog looks mysterious and menacing.

The Region 4 DVD offers a nice anamorphic transfer. The film was shot in the 2.35:1 aspect ration that Carpenter preferred (and used with such skill). There’s a lively and chatty and very worthwhile audio commentary by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill. Carpenter is a guy who gives the impression that he absolutely loves doing audio commentaries for his movies.

The Fog manages to combine the visceral thrills of the slasher film with the moodiness and spookiness of the traditional ghost story and it’s a blend that works very well indeed. One of Carpenter’s best, and certainly one of the best horror movies of its era. Highly recommended.