Get the movie poster!
First, let me say that even though I am a huge Stephen King fan, I have
not as yet got around to reading Christine. This is a good thing
when looking at John Carpenter's Christine though, because it allows
me to look at the movie more objectively than I might had I read the book
and then seen the film. There is always a huge fuss made over novels becoming
films. "The book is always better," people say. That's not necessarily
true, and it's also unfair to the filmmakers. It is impossible for a story
to make a seamless transition from book to movie - the two formats are
just too different to be completely compatible. Besides, what filmmaker
would want to make a movie that is exactly the same as the book?
There's no creativity there, which I think is a lot of the reason that
films based on novels are often radically different than the book they
ape. The director (and the writer, if they're not the same person) is taking
a piece of work and interpreting it in his or her own vision. That's why
no two productions or films of Hamlet that you see are ever completely
the same, and that's why films based on novels are often completely different
from the book that they are based on. That's why it's better, I think,
when looking at a film based on a novel, not to have read the book
before seeing the movie. That lets you look at the film objectively, and
judge it on it's own merits. Afterwards you can go to the source material
and see what was done differently.
Arnie Cunningham is played with fiendish glee by Keith Gordon, and John
Stockwell and Alexandra Paul are convincing as Arnie's friends, too. But
the real star of this film, of course, is the '57 Plymouth Fury known as
Christine. That, and the dazzling camera work of Mr. Carpenter. I can't
stress enough how stylish this man's work is. Even John Carpenter's
Vampires, which suffered from a terrible script and a boring plot,
throbbed with life thanks to Carpenter, and we all know that Stephen King
is not in the habit of putting out boring plots. So King's genius combined
with Carpenters makes a chilling film.
There's very little gore in JC's Christine. There's some blood in
the climax, and of course there's the burning corpse left in the middle
of the highway. Other than that, nada. That's another reason Carpenter
is so brilliant; he manages to evoke fear with atmosphere, not gore, as
most horror directors do. Of course, in JC's Vampires, there's gore
everywhere. Someone should remind him why JC's Christine was so
brilliant, and why JC's Vampires is always on the shelf at Blockbuster.
They should also ask him when he became like all the other lame-ass horror
directors.