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Nov 28th 2006

Pro-Life Review

Tom Alaerts has kindly sent us his thoughts on Pro-Life. I haven't watched it myself yet...

The general background of the story, about pro and contra abortion is quite well done, with Ron Perlman as a believable anti-abortion father. The director doesn't take a side. At first sight it may seem that it is a pro-abortion movie, but in my opinion it isn't that clear-cut. Of course, being a JC movie, it had to be something more special than a classic abortion drama: could it be that the girl is pregnant from a demonic origin? All this leads to a suspenseful start, then partly scary scenes (the echography on the girl), moving into violent action (the effects of gunshots are shown much more graphically than the average Hollywood movie) and culminating with gross scenes, e.g. what the father does to the abortion doctor (actually, you would expect the father to search for his girl first instead of applying gruesome revenge) and quite a lot of SFX. But, was it any good?
For me it was a mix between good story ideas (even if not completely original, think the much subtler "Rosemary's baby"), some good suspense early in the movie and all that was half-spoiled with a rather silly finale of the movie.
There are very few actors or extras in Pro-Life. Too few in my opinion, making the abortion clinic look not realistic. Except Perlman, the other actors were weak. The girl wasn't too bad but no viewer will believe that she's only 15. And in general the actors are not helped by the mediocre dialogue. Did anyone else find it ironic that Perlman is confronted here by a "hellboy" baby?
From a visual point of view, you would rarely guess that this is a JC movie. On the whole the movie looks flat and cheap. In the approach there similarities with various older JC works: The suspense of the early scenes was similar to JC's early work like Halloween. The theme of isolation and the cold violence reminds of Assault. The demonic element remind of Prince of Darkness, with also black inhuman hands coming "from beyond". The demonic baby will remind all JC fans of The Thing. But somehow all these elements don't really come together. It looks as if young film fans without a real budget wanted to make a tribute to JC; it never feels like the real thing.
Considering the special effects: JC has shown in the past to be a master of suggestion, and if he does show the horror, he typically makes it truly creepy. In Pro-Life, the demonic baby looks suitably awful. All the scenes where it appears were creepy. But on the other hand the baby's father looks cheesy, as if a refugee from a computer game (I was thinking of the hell knight in the original Doom). A man in a rubber monster suit: not scary at all, and it adds to a cheap impression of the movie.
Just as in Cigarette burns, the music is by Carpenter's son Cody, and it resembles JC's own music but it is far less haunting than the typical JC score.
So, all in all it's a movie that the JC fan will want to see, it has some good elements but all the time you have that nagging, unsatisfied feeling that the director is capable of so much more.
Tom

Nov 25th 2006

Hollywood Outlaw - Films & Fragments of John Carpenter

I mentioned this book a couple of days ago and like a few people who have emailed me I have been unable to find any mention of it online or find it for sale. So to try and be helpful here is a poor picture of the cover and as much bibliographic detail as I can find:

Martin Schmidt
Hollywood Outlaw - Films and Fragments of John Carpenter
Printed by FilmWorks 2006
ISBN 87-991147-0-4
258 pages.

Pro-Life screened last night....

I haven't read any reviews myself, want to come to it fresh, so look out for spoilers if like me you are still waiting to see it. I'd love to hear from anyone who did see it.

Nov 22nd 2006

Someone's Watching Me DVD

Sadly it's not an official release of this great, little seen JC TV movie from the early 70s. Rather monstersinmotion.com are selling what they state is a region 1 NTSC DVD of the film. I've ordered mine. I'm not affiliated with them at all and I suspect when I recieve the disc it will turn out to be a homemade VHS>DVD transfer but to be honest I don't care. That'll be good enough for me. Excellent.

Nov 21st 2006

Pro-Life Premiere Nov 24th

This Friday, JCs first directorial effort since the very well recieved (and much appreciated by me) Cigarette Burns will debut on HBO as part of the Masters of Horror series. I am looking forward to this immensely even though as a UK citizen I'll have to wait until BitTo... cough cough ... I mean the DVD comes out here. The series so far has been very interesting. It didn't start off with as much of a bang as the last one (I loved Incident On And Off A Mountain Road) but it has been entertaining and seems to have better production values (bigger budgets?) than the last series. All of which bodes well for this JC production which has been surrounded by a lot of rumours about it being the best thing JC has done for ages ... well, the only thing he's done for ages.

Psychopath is still "in development"...

Those great folks over at The John Carpenter Forum had this to say

I am the admin for the John Carpenter Forum and one of my moderators managed to get an interview with John where we selected the 10 best questions from our members and had John Carpenter answer them. Please feel free to quote the interview if you wish. There are some answers to what he is up to and the status on The 13th Apostle and Psychopath, but of course done in John's usual way! :)

The Thing Remake

I'm not sure what ever happened to that Frank Darabont penned remake mini-series that was supposed to be being made for the Sci-Fi channel, anyone know? Anyway, Mats Larsson kindly let me know this:

Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment will work together on a The Thing remake (the carpenter version). The script will be written by Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek (TV-series) and Roswell). Producer of John Carpenters version David Foster will be the executive producer of the new movie. Partners from Strice Entertainment marc Abraham and Eric Newman will produce and the new company will finance the movie. Source www.filmtipset.se (Swedish)

JC is not scoring Tarantino's latest

Hmm, this Grindhouse sounds like it could be great or the ultimate vanity project. I love Tarantino's stuff but Rodriguez can too often be swamped by his own fanboy excesses, too desperate to make "cool" scenes without stringing together an emotionally involving movie. Anyway, I also heard that JC was in line to score it (they wanted that classic AOP13 70s synth sound) but now it seems that he just didn't get the time due to Pro-Life commitments. A shame. Thanks to Lode for sharing.

This might be interesting trivia: Quinten Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are making two horror movies that is going to be released as Grindhouse. The trivia on this movie says: John Carpenter, who composed to scores to his own films, was originally chosen to compose the score to this movie (Rodriguez ended up taking over the job as composer). Too bad that Rodriguez ended up taking over... I would have loved it if John made it. Btw, Kurt Russel is acting in the movie (Tarantino's part).

The Rise And Fall Of the Slasher Movie

Or, to give it it's full title "Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film". I stumbled across this fantastic sounding documentary while trawling through JCs entries on IMDB. Apparently based on a book (or is the book based on this?), this sounds like a fantastic document of an oft under apreciated genre and needless to say contains a lot about JC. This blog piece has a good summary of it. Currently it only seems to have been shown on TV but hopefully it'll come out on DVD sometime?

Fantastic JC Video on You Tube

Mick Garris, John Landis, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter discussing movies for 25 minutes in the eighties, while JC was making the thing. Nerd heaven! Go and watch it now. Fantastic stuff.

Nov 13th 2006

General Roundup

"I thought you were dead...." - but I'm not. I'm still here, waiting for something cool to happen so I can report on it but JC does definitely seem to have slipped into semi-retirement quite nicely now so the news tends to be tiny rumours or fake Thing sequel info that isn't juicy enough to get me in front of the computer as much as it used to. Getting old I guess. So what's happening? We are still waiting for JCs entry in the new Masters of Horror series, Pro-Life. That's about it for solid developments. 13th Apostle is still technically "in development" but doesn't seem to have actually started shooting (and what's worse is that this page used to list it as in development but now there is mention of it on the site at all). What's really got me excited right now is this new JC book: Hollywood Outlaw - Films and Fragments of John Carpenter.

It's a great book by director Martin Schmidt that analyses JCs movies in chronological order with a large helping of JCs own comments to enrich the experience. A great read. I'll be writing a more complete review when I finish it but I urge any JC fan to track it down.