Yesterday I spent much of the day inside, relaxing and trying to convince a recalcitrant summer cold/sore throat that it was an unwelcome guest. I also figured that scaring it away might be another possibility. Since I borrowed both Christine and Halloween from friends, I had two more Carpenter films to work with.

I started the day off with Christine at 9:00 in the morning, leaving Steffi to sleep peacefully upstairs. At best, Christine is a mediocre effort in the director’s hefty catalog. The characters, I thought, were one dimensional and predictable, and - let’s face it - there really isn’t anything particularly scary about a possessed Thunderbird. In fact, I kept dozing off during the film’s flat, final scene in which the injured football star and the prettiest girl in the school have a final showdown with Danny’s emotionally supercharged terror car. (I’m still trying to determine whether it was the film or the Benadryl knock-offs I took that made me so drowsy.) After watching Carpenter’s film adaptation of Steven King’s work, I’m convinced that Steffi spent that same 112 minutes much more wisely than I.

Two memorable moments in the film:

Because I had seen snippets of the movie on TV here and there long ago, my anticipation of one particular scene pulled me through much of the tedium. If there’s any reason to see the film it’s for the chance to watch a car regenerate itself. After hoodlums put the smackdown on Christine and she’s left looking like the Office Space printer/copier/fax combo, the car shows her stuff, literally pulling it all together, performing personal plastic (metal and glass, too) surgery while Danny looks on and offers his support as an anguished, revenge-seeking lover. This scene is, by far, the best the movie has to offer, and it's a fascinating orchestration of special effects: Glass unshatters. Bent metal exhales into its original fullness. Fire engine red paint bleeds back to a shiny gloss.

I also liked the film’s campy final parting shot in which a Caucasian coverall-ed man walks past the survivors carrying a boombox over his right shoulder, pressing his ear directly to the speaker. As the radio belts out a tune from the 50s, one of the teenagers exclaims “I hate rock ‘n roll.” It wasn’t this statement, however, that made me laugh – I found myself snickering at the guy with the “ghetto blaster.” Old technology dates a film so easily: Lug around a 20 pound stereo these days, and all the hip iPod-carrying youngsters will rudely point (with BOTH hands) and sardonically laugh you back to the 80s!

One last good thing about the film: I now have no desire whatsoever to read the book...

OK. I’m not going to write much about Halloween, the film that made the psycho killer Michael Myers a (haunted) household name. It’s worth watching simply for its reputation as a cult classic, and there are a couple of good, creepy scenes. Having seen so many horror flicks since this one was made, however, made it easy for me to predict who was going to get the knife and who would live. I don’t know whether this was one of the films that started or simply perpetuated the formula, but any teen having premarital sex may as well be wearing a glowing white T-Shirt emblazoned with the words STAB ME HERE under a center-printed red X. My main criticism of the film is that all of the ostensible teens look much too old to be high school students. For the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the movie I was convinced that Laurie was either a mother or a college student. My biggest shock wasn’t from the activities of the silent killer but the realization that Laurie and her other (also older-looking) friends were teenagers!

I didn’t know this, but Halloween represents Jamie Lee Curtis’s film debut, and she does a decent job as the main character Laurie Strode, establishing herself apparently as a “Scream Queen.”

***

Carpenter Count: 8

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Halloween (1978)
The Fog (1980)
Escape from New York (1981)
The Thing (1982)
Christine (1983)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
They Live! (1988)