4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we pay tribute to the year 1978! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 1978 Films
Halloween (1978, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Dean Cudney)
Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir by George Romero, DP: Michael Gornick)
Starcrash (1978, dir by Luigi Cozzi, DP: Paul Beeson and Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli)
Salem’s Lot (1978, dir by Tobe Hooper, DP: Jules Bremmer)
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we celebrate Bruce Campbell’s birthday! It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Bruce Campbell Films
Evil Dead II (1987, dir by Sam Raimi, DP: Peter Deming)
Army of Darkness (1992, dir by Sam Raimi, DP: Bill Pope)
Escape From L.A. (1996, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Gary B. Kibbe)
Bubba Ho-Tep (2002, dir by Don Coscarelli, DP: Adam Janiero)
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we pay tribute to the year 1981 with….
4 Shots From 4 1981 Films
Christiane F. (1981, dir b Uli Edel, DP: Justus Pankau and Jürgen Jürges)
The Beyond (1981, dir by Lucio Fulci, DP; Sergio Salvati)
Escape From New York (1981, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Dean Cundey)
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
The aliens are here …. or are they?
4 Shots From 4 Alien Invasion Films
It Came From Outer Space (1953, dir by Jack Arnold, DP: Clifford Stine)
It Conquered The World (1956, dir by Roger Corman, DP: Fred E. West)
Starman (1984, dir by John Carpenter. DP: Donald M. Morgan)
Predator (1987, directed by John McTiernan, DP: Donald McAlpine)
Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) is not a complicated person. He drives a truck for a living. He’s loyal to his friends. He likes a good beer and a pretty girl. He tries to do the right thing so when the fiancée of his best friend, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), is kidnapped, he teams up with Wang to rescue her. And when Jack’s truck gets stolen after he runs over an evil, ancient Chinese sorcerer named Lo Pan (James Hong), Jack just wants to get his truck back. Instead, Jack finds himself in the middle of an ancient battle between good and evil as Lo Pan searches for a green-eyed woman to sacrifice so that he can defeat a curse that was put upon him centuries ago.
Big Trouble In Little China is one of John Carpenter’s most exuberant films. It mixes kung fu action with special effects and a good dose of physical humor from Kurt Russell. When Lisa and I watched this movie a few months ago, Lisa commented that this film was Kurt Russell’s “Bruce Campbell movie,” and the more I think about it, the more I agree. Russell plays Jack with a mix of cockiness and klutziness that should be very familiar to anyone who has followed the adventures of Ash Williams. While Dennis Dun gets to do the typically heroic stuff that you would expect from the star of a movie like this, Russell is just someone who wants to get his truck back and who is consistently weirded-out by the magic around him. Carpenter makes sure that the movie is full of action as he pays tribute to the kung fu films that he watched when he was still in film school. James Hong is great villain and the rest of the cast, including Kim Cattrall as lawyer Gracie Law, all match the energy of Russell, Hong, and Dun. Complete with flying swordsmen, demons with glowing eyes, and a lightning-wielding warrior that probably inspired Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden, Big Trouble In Little China is a fun slice of 80s action.
Unfortunately, the film was not appreciated when it was first released. Stung by the critical reaction to the film, Carpenter abandoned working for the studios and instead become an independent filmmaker. Big Trouble In Little China, however, has stood the test of time and has become better appreciated with age. Today, it’s rightly viewed as one of Carpenter’s best films.
Made for television, it was the first of many biopics to be made about the King of Rock and Roll. Seeing as how it went into production just a year after Elvis’s death and that its script was vetted and approved by Priscilla Presley herself, it’s not surprising that Elvis doesn’t really delve into the darker aspects of his life. Elvis shoots a television, gets frustrated with his bad movies, and wonders who he can trust but we don’t see him get fat nor do we see him popping pills. The movie ends with Elvis making his comeback in 1969, allowing a happy ending for the title character.
The film was directed by John Carpenter. It was his first film to be released after the monster success of Halloween, though Carpenter actually started work on Elvis before Halloween was released. Though the film’s television origins means there aren’t many examples of Carpenter’s signature style in Elvis, Carpenter does a good job recreating Elvis’s performances and, most importantly, he comes up with a film that holds your interest for three hours.
Finally, the role of Elvis is played by Kurt Russell, who was at the time still struggling to prove himself as being something more than just a Disney star. Russell, who made his film debut kicking Elvis in the shins, throws himself into playing the role and captures the look, the swagger, and the voice of Elvis without ever descending into caricature. His singing voice is dubbed for the performances but Russell is still convincing as the King. It takes skill to wear that white jumpsuit without looking like you’re wearing a bad Halloween costume. While this film showed that Russell was capable of more than just Disney films, it even more importantly launched his friendship with John Carpenter. Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble In Little China all began with Elvis.
The movie doesn’t really tell us anything that we didn’t already know about Elvis but its entertaining and it has a big, colorful cast that include Pat Hingle as Tom Parker, Shelley Winters as Elvis’s mother, and Bing Russell (Kurt’s father) as Elvis’s father. Priscilla is played by the beautiful Season Hubley, who married Kurt Russell shortly after filming. (They divorced in 1983.) Joe Mantegna, Ed Begley Jr., Ellen Travolta, and Dennis Christopher all appear in small roles and do their part to bring Elvis’s world to life. Elvis is a fitting tribute to the King of Rock and Roll, one that gave Elvis a happy ending and started a great collaboration between a director and his star.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, #FridayNightFlix presents the original 1976 Assault on Precinct 13, from director John Carpenter!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Assault on Precinct 13 is available on Prime and Tubi! See you there!
John Carpenter has directed 18 features film, from 1974’s Dark Starto 2010’s The Ward. Some of his films have been huge box office successes. Some of his films, like The Thing, were box office flops that were later retroactive recognized as being classics. Carpenter has made mainstream films and he’s made cult favorites and, as he’s always the first to admit, he’s made a few films that just didn’t work. When it comes to evaluating his own work, Carpenter has always been one of the most honest directors around.
Amazingly, Carpenter has only directed one film that received an Oscar nomination.
That film was 1984’s Starman and the nomination was for Jeff Bridges, who was one of the five contenders for Best Actor. (The Oscar went to F. Murray Abraham for Amadeus.) Bridges played the title character, an alien who is sent to Earth to investigate the population and who takes on the form of the late husband of Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen). The Starman takes Jenny hostage, though its debatable whether or not he really understands what it means when he picks up her husband’s gun and points it at her. He and Jenny drive across the country, heading to Arizona so that he can return to his ship. Pursued by the government (represented by the sympathetic Charles Martin Smith and the far less sympathetic Richard Jaeckel), the Starman learns about emotions, eating, love, and more from Jenny. Jenny goes from being fearful of the Starman to loving him. Carpenter described the film as beingIt Happened One Night with an alien and it’s not a bad description.
After Jenny and the alien visitor make love in a boxcar, the Starman says, “I gave you a baby tonight,” and that would be an incredibly creepy line coming from a human but it’s oddly charming when uttered by an alien who looks like a youngish Jeff Bridges. Bridges definitely deserved his Oscar nomination for his role here. Speaking with an odd accent and moving like a bird who is searching for food, Bridges convincingly plays a being who is quickly learning how to be human. The Starman is constantly asking Jenny why she says, does, and feels certain things and it’s the sort of thing that would be annoying if not for the way that Bridges captures the Starman’s total innocence. He doesn’t mean to be a pest. He’s simply curious about everything.
Bridges deserved his nomination and I would say that Karen Allen deserved a nomination as well. In fact, it could be argued that Allen deserved a nomination even more than Bridges. It’s through Allen’s eyes that we see and eventually come to trust and then to love the Starman. Almost her entire performance is reactive but she makes those reactions compelling. I would say that Bridges and Allen deserved an Oscar for the “Yellow light …. go much faster” scene alone.
Carpenter agreed to make Starman because, believe it or not, The Thing had been such a critical and commercial flop that it had actually damaged his career. (If ever you need proof that its best to revisit even the films that don’t seem to work on first viewing, just consider Carpenter’s history of making films that were initially dismissed but later positively reevaluated. Today, The Thing, They Live, Prince of Darkness, and In The Mouth of Madness are all recognized as being brilliant films. When they were first released, they all got mixed reviews.) Carpenter did Starman because he wanted to show that he could do something other than grisly horror. Starman is one of Carpenter’s most heartfelt and heartwarming films. That said, it also features Carpenter’s trademark independent streak. Starman not only learns how to be human but, as a result of the government’s heavy-handed response to his arrival, one can only assume that he learns to be an anti-authoritarian as well.
Starman is one of Carpenter’s best films and also a wonderful showcase for both Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges.
Dark Star (1974, dir by John Carpenter, DP: Douglas Knapp)
What’s it like to live in outer space?
That’s the question posed by 1974’s Dark Star and the answer seems to be that it’s boring as Hell. Lt. Doolittle (Brian Narelle), Sgt. Pinback (future director and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon), Boiler (Cal Kuniholm), and Talby (Andreijah “Dre” Pahich) have been floating in their spaceship for over twenty years. (Because of the vagaries of the space-time continuum, they’ve only aged three years in all that time.) The leader of their mission, Commander Powell (Joe Saunders) was killed when he was accidentally electrocuted at the start of the mission. The crew put his body in suspended animation so that they could still ask him question despite the fact that he’s not quite alive. (When they do talk to Powell, Powell is very resentful about the whole situation.) Doolittle, a former surfer, has taken over as commander of the ship though no one seems to be quite sure what their mission is.
The men struggle to find ways to pass the time as they float endlessly through space. Some of them watch the asteroids in the distance. Doolittle fantasizes about surfing. Pinback plays jokes on people and claims to be an imposter who killed the real Pinback before the start of the mission. The spaceship is a cluttered mess and the crew looks more like a collection of long-haired hippies than a group of rigorously trained astronauts. They spend their time getting on each other’s nerves.
They do have a few things that they have to deal with over the course of the film. The men aren’t particularly smart and whatever discipline they had was abandoned long ago. As a result, their ship constantly seems to be on the verge of literally falling apart. A dangerous alien that looks like a beach ball gets loose on the ship. Even worse, one of the ship’s talking bomb is having an existential crisis. It’s been over 20 years and it has yet to be used to blow anything up. What, the bomb wonders, is the purpose of being a bomb if you can’t blow anything up? Then again, what is the purpose of being in space if there’s nothing left to explore or to discover?
Dark Star is a film that requires a bit of patience. It moves at its own deliberate pace and a lot of the humor comes from the contrast between the shabbiness of the film’s crew and Stanley Kubrick’s far sleeker vision of space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both Dark Star and 2001 are existential films about man’s search for meaning in the stars. In 2001, Dave Bowman finds that meaning, even if he doesn’t realize it. The crew of the Dark Star however have to deal with very real possibility that there is no meaning. Dark Star‘s comedy comes from poking fun at the concept that going into space would make people any less frustrated than they already are on Earth.
Essentially a stoner comedy set in space, Dark Star was John Carpenter’s feature debut. It started out as a student film but Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon were able to raise an extra $10,ooo to extend it to feature length. Largely overlooked when it was first released, it was re-released in 1979. By that point, Carpenter had directed Halloween and O’Bannon had written Alien, a film that had more than a little in common with Dark Star’s shabby future and its dangerous alien. While Dark Star definitely shows its origins as a student film, I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s hard not appreciate the film’s ambition. And, in its way, it’s probably one of the most realistic vision of life in space ever captured on film. Humans, the film says, will always be humans. They’ll always screw things up but occasionally, if they’re lucky, they’ll also get to surf amongst the stars.
An accident at a laboratory renders stock analyst Nick Holloway (Chevy Chase) invisible. CIA agent David Jenkins (Sam Neill) wants to recruit Nick to be an assassin but Nick doesn’t want to kill people. He just wants to make his date with Alice (Daryl Hannah). With Jenkins and his agents in pursuit, Nick flees to a beach house belonging to his friend George (Michael McKean) and tries to figure out what to do with his life now that no one can see him. Fortunately, Alice is staying at the beach house too. Nick and Alice fall in love but Jenkins is close behind.
Based on a science fiction novel by H.F. Saint, Memoirs of an Invisible Man started out as a vanity project for Chevy Chase, who felt that the film’s mix of comedy and drama would establish him as a serious actor. The project went through a series of directors, including Ivan Reitman and Richard Donner, but in the end no one wanted to work with the special effects necessary to create the impression of invisibility and, even more importantly, no one wanted to work with Chase. When the film was finally offered to John Carpenter, he was reluctant to do another studio film because of his bad experience with They Live. He finally agreed because it had been four years since his last film.
The special effects in Memoirs of an Invisible Man are still impressive and the chase scenes show off Carpenter’s abilities as an action director. The movie flopped with critics and audiences but that was not Carpenter’s fault. Carpenter keeps the story moving and gets good performances out of Sam Neill and even Daryl Hannah. The problem with the movie is that Chevy Chase is miscast as an action hero and he tries too hard to give a serious performance. Carpenter later said he wanted to add more comedy to the film and to emphasize Chase’s talent for physical comedy but Chase refused to do so. Chase also resented wearing the blue bodysuit that would be used to render him invisible onscreen and often removed the suit early, ruining whatever else Carpenter had planned to shoot during the day. You can add John Carpenter to the long list of directors who have said they will never work with Chevy Chase again.
One good thing did come out of Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Carpenter met and enjoyed working with Sam Neill. (Memoirs of an Invisible Man probably would have worked better in Neill and Chase had switched roles.) Neill would go on to star in Carpenter’s next film, In The Mouth of Madness.
Through the Shattered Lens 