David Vining's Blog, page 149

In the Mouth of Madness

This movie is steadily growing on me. I’ve seen it twice now, and I more fully appreciate the descent into total insanity that it represents. Inspired heavily by H.P. Lovecraft with some nods to Stephen King, In the Mouth of Madness is John Carpenter creating a dream in a similar vein as Argento’s Suspiria or Dreyer’s Vampyr. These kinds of movies are about creating an alternate reality so complete and believable while being so removed from our actual experience that the unreality becomes ul...

Body Bags

Originally meant as the first three episodes of a Tales from the Crypt ripoff on Showtime, Body Bags was made into an anthology feature film ala The Twilight Zone: The Movie when Showtime passed on the show. It’s really not that hard to see why. None of this is the best work of either John Carpenter or Tobe Hooper, the directors of the three shorts, going from okay to kind of bad. If this was an effort to create a show, the material presented as the beginning really should be strong than thi...

Memoirs of an Invisible Man

This Chevy Chase vehicle was originally going to be directed by Ivan Reitman based on the novel of the same name by H.F. Saint. After weeks of clashing with Chase in pre-production Reitman gave an ultimatum to the producers that either Reitman left or Chase would leave. The producers chose Chase who had been working to get the movie made with him as the star and as a vehicle to dramatic roles. The central problem of the film, though, is Chase himself. He’s wrong for what the role demands, an...

They Live

My tastes in movies are pretty mundane, I think. Almost everything a movie fan is “expected” to like, I like, and most things I’m not “supposed” to like I don’t. It’s definitely not some effort to fit in with a particular set of movie fans (most of my movie conversations cheerfully take place with people who have vastly different tastes than I do), it’s just how my tastes align. That being said, I’ve never been able to see the real appeal of They Live. I’ve seen this twice now, and I surpris...

Kentucky Pride

I’m not sure where the idea of telling this story from the perspective of the horse came from, but I’m not entirely sure it was in the plan from the inception. Kentucky Pride tells the story of the life of a female racehorse from her birth through to the success of her daughter on the racetrack, but the intertitles that mostly speak from her point of view feel almost like an afterthought to me. It may have been planned, but it ends up so oddly executed that I’m open to the idea that it was a...

Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter was going to a dark place. It’s not really the subject matter, though. While Prince of Darkness is a bit more apocalyptic than some of his other offerings, it’s obvious that it was the commercial failure of Big Trouble in Little China that did something to Carpenter’s view of the world. This and his next film, They Live, are dark, angry films that take some of his earlier ideas and motifs about the nature of evil and turn them up to eleven. He had done good, making successful ...

Lightnin’

A mixture of comedy and drama, John Ford’s 1924 Lightnin’ is based on a play by Winchell Smith about a perennial louse of an older man and the efforts he has to go through to save his wife and home from a pair of conmen. It’s a largely entertaining time that doesn’t really end on the notes that I feel like it needs to fully realize the story’s potential while also leaving a story thread or two unresolved. I enjoyed it, but I just don’t think it quite comes together in the end.

William “Li...

The Colossus of Rhodes

I think it’s obvious why Sergio Leone’s first credited feature directing credit gets ignored by most people. It contains none of his stylistic flourishes that he became known for, is removed from the Italianized version of America he liked to set his films in, and feels wildly generic. It feels like a film that any talent working in the Italian studio system in the early 60s could have tackled with identical results. It’s also boring and kind of just outright bad.

Set on the island city-s...

Starman

In order to further prove himself to Hollywood, Carpenter took on this project, a script that had been in consideration for production by Columbia at the same time that Spielberg made E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, as an effort to prove that he could work outside of horror. The end result is a rather wonderful little road picture that feels apart from Carpenter’s filmography in the same way that The Straight Story felt apart from Lynch’s. It’s apart stylistically but feels part of the whole the...

Christine

The Thing bombed horribly both financially and with the critics, and John Carpenter retreated to safety. Some of the harder edges of his voice got sanded off, and he made a mostly routine monster movie based on an unpublished Stephen King novel. His voice seems muffled, in favor of the kind of weird story about a man falling in love with his possessed car.

I’ve read that the opening of the film set on the assembly line that created the titular car, Christine, was a reshoot to better estab...