ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK @ 45

In the distant future of 1997 Manhattan Island has become America's prison. It's a massive Alcatraz surrounded by skyhigh walls all around it and lethal chopper patrols around the clock. That is where the hijacked Airforce One crashes as the president is on his way to avert a nuclear holocaust. Oops! Not to worry, war hero turned career criminal Snake Plissken is on hand to glide in, retreive the pres and his McGuffin cassette tape that will put an end to the simmering conflict. Oh, and just in case he thinks about his own escape, he's injected with a couple of lethal pellets that can only be neutralised by the folks in charge. He has less than twenty-four hours to do this before the pellets dissolve and the summit meeting ends in war. No pressure.

The deal is extortinate. The times are tough and urgent but this deal has the ring of privilege. We see nothing of the world beyond the penal system and the sense that legal presumption has morphed from innocence to guilt. If you're caught, it's the island. What kind of society is being suggested, here?

John Carpenter had already suggested a twisted public responsibility in his previous film The Fog. The possibility that the ancestry could rise in pain against injustice is an enjoyable fable. What Carpenter saw in the America of 1981 was a wave of authoritarianism in the guise of economic rationalism. It was the start of two terms of Reagan and another of Bush. Over a decade of sweeping problems under the carpet and calling it justice. The society outside the prison of Manhattan is only different from the gangster-led rule of force within it by the price of the suits of those calling the shots. I've always imagined it as a kind of rigid '50s utopianism masking runaway capitalism.

Carpenter's first attempts at the screenplay were not in response to Reagan but Nixon and the swelling cynicism that rose in self protection in the community. Who would bother trusting politicians? Donald Pleasance's President John Harker is played with all the tight lipped narcissism that a post-Nixon chief might express. He is a weasel who knows how to be nice and for how long.

Kurt Russell is given Snake Plissken which allowed him a launch pad away from his child star status. His matchstick chewing, eye patched leathery hide feels effortlessly donned. His serpentine hissing intimidating. Remember how Heath Ledger went from nice guy with muscle to the most memorable Joker to date? Same thing. Russell turned up toned to the last millimetre with a lion's mane and way with heavy personal artillery. 

Against him, the grinning villain of countless spaghetti westerns, Lee Van Cleef presides over the operation without a beat's difference from those roles. Nor needs he to, Carpenter is happy to continue his exploration of the western through whatever other genre he chooses. The meeting between his Hauk and Plissken is one of those scenes you can replay like a favourite song.

On the island, The Duke of New York oversees. A granite Isaac Hayes, surrounded by Kinskyish punks and leering rags of humans, his chandelier-toting Cadillac proceeds through the streets like the entourage of a Byzantine monarch. Down at the trash fire street level, the information rich Cabbie and the slippery Brain deal with the day to day, offering essential services or knowledge in exchange for preservation. The world building with bizarre vaudeville shows and iron-age lethal sparring as well as gangs of the darkly insane in streets bright with car fires, is still impressive.

Carpenter, as usual, provides an action packed middle act that will lead to a white knuckle finale, this time careful to further expose the president and deliver a joke that works every time you see it again.

While it might get set up as a schlock bam bam movie, Escape From New York with its committed performances, commentary on the desperate unfairness of a brutal capitalism, ends up a wrenching and sincere gut punch at the worst Carpenter feared. It plays as a grim warning with its brooding score (one of Carpenter's very best) and desolate setting. The great city is a prison, the empire somewhere over there where you aren't allowed. We didn't get any of this by 1997 but we never have to. All we need to do is know that this is something we don't want now or ever. But we have to remember that.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS@35

In an extended title sequence we see disparate events coalesce as a grunting synthesiser motif plays over electronic choirs and flourishes. An old priest dies and a middle aged one takes a key from among the deceased's effects. A class of postgrad phsyics students receive a lecture about quantum from their professor. The latter visits the middle aged priest at a convent. Later they meet at an old church in Los Angeles, descend into well beneath it and find a strange elaborate bottle that contains a flourescent green substance. It has started moving in the container. The students meet at a noticeboard where they find they have all been pressed into a weekend of testing at the church. Bunk beds and technology are moved in as the students arrive and variously whinge about their cancelled weekends and puzzle over what they are doing there.

There are too many things to spoil in this film and if you were tempted to seek it out (I hope I can help that motivation) you will appreciate discovering them for yourself. I can say they involve a pop understanding of quantum science (made very accessible for the likes of me) an ingenious use of the notion of time travel, remote mind control, shared dreams, and an audacious weaving of those with some grand and strange concepts from religion. All of that with a large cast in a single location performing a talky screenplay and it still moves at a clip.

John Carpenter's mid '80s form a middling period. After stunning audiences with the likes of Halloween and The Thing his genius for lean horror cinema found less adaptability with the more sc-fi Starman and the Stephen King Christine. Because of this even Carpenter fans can overlook some treasure among the work that the mainstream productions toned down and Prince of Darkness, outside of a small subset of this, finds itself on skid row. But anyone adventurous with their movies enough to know the joys of finding the low budget/big ideas gems like Videodrome, Society or Cube with take to this one.

The action genre performances might stick out here and there and the horror effects were eclipsed by even mainstream genre films soon after this one but nothing can beat the immediate value of atmosphere from the first frame that happens here and is sustained the whole running time. Is Donald Pleasance's priest too starkly melodramatic? His counterpart in Victor Wong provides a sharp balance. Is the jokey character funny? No, but he's meant to be annoying which he is.  Is the central romance between Lisa Blount and Jameson Parker a little flavourless? Yes, unless you pay attention and know that he's going slow in respecting the pain of her past. Are some characters so obviously created for getting knocked off? It's a horror movie. Yes.

The sense of brooding and approaching cataclysm start even before the credits as the initial synthbass figure stutters over the Universal production badge. This is one of my favourite Carpenter scores and for sustained dread with a sense of epic it is matchless in his compositional work. The use of video for the dream sequences is such a stark contrast it brings a new element in that, while liberally used now, remains unnerving after many viewings. Practical effects as well, still impress like cockroach man and the bizarrely blistered skin of the possessed team member, the contrast between the red of her flesh and the crystal blue of her eyes still makes me squirm. 

The effectiveness of the atmosphere makes the film survive its own cliche. Another possessed character, fresh from having his neck bandaged after he tried to cut it open with a splintered chair leg, stands at the top of a staircase laughing. It should be corny but it's scary. The student staring at the computer screen and typing "I Live" over and over is eerie enough but then this turns into a message that kicks that out the door. The distressed audio of the voice in the communal dream. The death by bike frame scene should be funny but it's horrible. Too many to mention. If The Exorcist still works because of its intense gravity Prince of Darkness finds tonal success in embracing the generic traits it's found on the shelves and committing to them. They do, after all, bear the parade of big ideas and allow the film as a whole to work consistently, however odd that consistency is.

The big ideas here have a special context. Carpenter had wanted the Halloween franchise to develop beyond a single figure and explore more territory associated with the spirit of Halloween. The third entry dispenses with the slasher and takes up a plot that combines corporate amorality with supernatural maleficence and suggests an ancient connection. If that reminds you of things like The Stone Tape (and if it does, we're friends for life) then it's because master of the big idea melange Nigel Kneale was commissioned to write it. Call it a culture clash but the collaboration ended in acrimony (should point out that Carpenter was a producer, not director of this one) and the result was, while pretty good, far more conventional than Kneale would have written. Prince of Darkness with its big collision and then coherance of religion and science and the ghostly thought that we humans might not be nearly as important as we'd like to believe, is a tribute to Kneale. Carpenter's writer credit is under the nom de plume of Martin Quatermass, a clear bow to Kneale's proto Dr Who character and Kneale's work in general. It's a kind of apology by deed.

This film has a big significance for me and my cinephilia. After university I affected a ridicule of genre cinema and an annoyance at anyone who watched it to bolster their undergrad seminar papers. All through that I still had a love of the atmosphere it created. I didn't bother seeing Prince of Darkness at the cinema but a little over a decade later, out of curiosity more than anything, I set the VCR after seeing the title in the overnight listings in the Green Guide (couple of things there that seem to only exist in nostalgia). I watched it the following night and was completely wowed. Later, I woke at about three in the morning with a full understanding of the final dream and couldn't get back to sleep. If I'd been a closetted horror fan before that I burst through the doors armed with a lifelong committment. Oh, and Alice Cooper's in it.

Review: and another THING!

Did you ever wonder just what went on before the opening scene of John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing? Nor did I. It's really pretty well explained in the first act of that film and the ensuing acts demonstrate it. The dogs, the search through Norwegian station, the icebound spacecraft, the mayhem back at base. It's all there.

So, someone caught the now popular meme that the only two movies that have survived the remake treatment with honour are Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (twice!) and The Thing. Like a lot of people to whom that thought occured I believed I'd discovered it. It's a strong demonstration of exception proving rule. So what's to lose by taking that one up? Read on.

Ok, plot. Fade in to the great white Antarctic, sweeping strings whose tonality bears a striking resemblance to ... you get the idea. Three Norwegians are travelling o'er the ice in a truck with tracks. You know they're Norwegian because their unsubtitled dialogue sounds like the chef from the Muppets. But the guy in front is telling a joke to the driver and the guy in the back is getting worried about some readings on an instrument that we don't need identified. The truck suddenly falls through a thin stretch of ice and lodges between the walls of a huge fissure, through which we see a spacecraft the size of Greater Geelong. A light suddenly gleams from its centre.

Cut to a lab at McMurdo Station, home of the good guys, the people who speak 'mer'can. A young woman in Antarctic fatigues listens to a year-marking Men at Work track on her walkman headphones. Enter a clean, ash blonde, humourless and so immediately suspect older man who speaks in an accent which casts him far from the safety of 'mer'ca (ie he's the baddie and shall be hoist on his own petar in due course). He's one of the Norwegians and he's looking for a paleantologist. He's found one. Right! Everybody in the chopper!

Back at the Norwegian camp they find a creature, dig it up and suffer the consequences finding out along the way that it can replicate any living thing it comes across. This offers an opportunity for this film to replicate the earlier version's powerful blood test scene but wait, there's something clever they're doing with it. But it isn't really, it's just a way of acknowledging the source material and claiming a smidge of originality to keep the meme about remake-able films hale and hearty. End of original stamp. Everything else you see on screen in this outing was done in Carpenter's version. The SFX are superior but expectably so that they just run by. Oh that's happening. Oh that's happening. Right. There's a famous moment in the 1982 version where a character witnesses something bizarre and speaks for the audience when he intones: "you gotta be fucking kidding me!" No chance of that here.

There are two aspects of Carpenter's version that are notably absent here: he honed in on one theme, trust, and steered through it with an unflinching hand, knowing its potential to create situations of tension and horror; Carpenter was working with his first sizeable budget but still thought like an indy director, allowing for nothing that didn't serve to squeeze the narrative to claustrophobic tightness until the climax which blazed gigantically by comparison. This prequel, already hampered by its audience's guaranteed awareness of the groundbreaking earlier version, makes the mistake of both trying to extend the '82 one backwards as well as provide something new. It was doomed to fail on both accounts and does. Worse, it provides none of the suspense of the earlier film, keeping its unmanageably large cast muddling the waters until in desperation it has to remove them just to clear the stage for the great drama hiding at its centre. Trouble is when that happens there's nothing left but routine. The final scene of Carpenter's film is funny, unsettling and despairing all at once, an intimate and inesacpable truth delivered as a kind of joke. The ending of this one has already been told in the beginning of that one. I know that's the idea but I also know that when it happens it just ... happens.

I hate claiming expertise in what movies should be rather than what they present themselves to be but I can't help but feel that if anything it might have benefited from the weary found footage approach which can effectively withhold information until its potential matures. Not here.

The Thing's hold on the title of repeatable films (owner of said title since the 2000's remake of Bodysnatchers dropped the pod)  has loosened. Not forever perhaps but the only reason that Carpenter's is on a par with the Hawks/Nyby original is the further originality he poured into it. That's just not present here.

Oh (this time for real) and another thing! There's a great fact about the '82 version: finally having enough money to hire a great composer for the score he got Ennio Morricone on board who delivered exactly the kind of music Carpenter himself might have written for the movie. Morricone had been a fan of Carpenter's movie music for years (understandably, it's brilliant). The score to the 2011 film is like none of that ever happened. Someone picked it off a shelf at Woolies and gave it to an orchestra. It sounds like there's an old school action movie happening in the next soundstage. New approach? Nope, same damn Thing!