John Carpenter: Elvis

If you’re a fan of Elvis and like to think of him only as the hip-swayin’, Cadillac buyin’, white jumpsuit wearin’ showman, then John Carpenter’s Elvis is the Elvis biopic. There’s nothing in this movie that even hints at the darker side of Elvis’ life. Similar to the rags-to-riches story arc that is found in other Rock and Roll biopics like The Buddy Holly Story, Carpenter’s film is a hagiographic retelling of the life of one of music’s greatest performers. It’s not an overarching biopic seeing...

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Side Effects

On the off-chance that I actually do get to a movie theater and see a movie, I usually have high expectations for what gets my time and money. I maybe see two or three movies in the theater a year, so when I go, I want I want it to be worth my while. In other words, it takes a special movie made by a special filmmaker to get me out to the theater. I can think of no better dangling carrot to get me out to the theater than Side Effects, for it is being marketed as “Steven Soderbergh’s final film.”...

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John Carpenter: Halloween

I'm always amazed with Halloween. Here's a film that I could easily write about from memory, yet I was glad to give it another viewing for this retrospective. I found myself pulled into it yet again. I wrote about Halloween a couple years ago for the great blog Wonders in the Dark as a part of their Horror countdown. My dilemma then revolved around two assignments I had: write about Alien and write about Halloween (the two are natural companions, actually, despite the former taking in place in...

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John Carpenter: Someone's Watching Me!

Even though John Carpenter had himself a cult hit with the wacky sci-fi spoof Dark Star, and found success in Europe with the critically loved but little seen Assault on Precinct 13 (he also wrote the script for The Eyes of Laura Mars), he still wouldn’t be a hot commodity until he made Halloween. In between Assault and Halloween Carpenter took a job on television, making a thriller for NBC. Someone’s Watching Me! (yes, there is an exclamation point in the title, and it makes me laugh every time...

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John Carpenter: Assault on Precinct 13

Throughout Carpenter’s career, he has stated that many of his films are just westerns disguised as something else, specifically westerns modeled after his idol Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. Whether Carpenter uses aliens, gangsters, or characters in a Mars prison, the director has made no bones about the fact that Hawks’ film pervades much of his work. Perhaps the most overt of these versions of Rio Bravo is Carpenter’s second film, Assault on Precinct 13. The best of Carpenter’s “siege” films (or...

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John Carpenter: Dark Star

Dark Star is the very definition of a seminal film. It predates things audiences would later associate with more popular, bigger budget science-fiction films like Alien and Blade Runner, yes, but one can also see the seeds of the themes prominent throughout the rest of Carpenter’s work. There’s really no need for a Paul Harvey-esque “and now you know the rest of the story” introduction here; the names John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon need no context for fans of the horror/sci-fi genre. So, I’ll...

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