Escape From New York

John Carpenter's trash-art action yarn Escape From New York (1981) has two things going for it: Kurt Russell's bad-ass performance as Snake Plissken, and a gritty, pulpy atmosphere that transcends its paper-thin storyline. The film is set in the near future, where Manhattan Island has been transformed into the country's lone maximum security prison. (Presumably there was low interest in preserving the Big Apple's iconic cultural monuments and history.) When the President's plane goes down inside the premises, the government makes a deal with a war criminal, Snake Plissken, to rescue the President in exchange for his freedom.

This was Carpenter's fifth feature film, coming off the phenomenal success of Halloween (1978) and the moderate success of The Fog (1980), but more closely related to his cult thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Both Escape and Assault have a certain neo-Western apathy for cinematic niceties, an attitude Carpenter seems to apply to all his movies. He's in love with those 1950s Westerns by Howard Hawks and he seems to have embedded into his movies a sort of synthetic sense of Los Angeles cool, even when the setting isn't L.A.

The problem with Escape From New York is that it never builds enough momentum to sustain its intriguing but problematic story. The idea feels like something contrived by a 12-year-old kid. It has wonderful cinematic possibilities, but Carpenter seems to have written this in a hurry, or perhaps when he decided to make this movie (he had written the screenplay years earlier) he didn't revise it. There are kinks in the plot, most embarrassingly the incredulous prospect of getting all the law-abiding Manhattanites to give up their jobs and their homes and their lives and leave the city to the underworld of criminals that inherit it in this movie.

The film itself looks like a comic book, and it's this dark, guttery, gloomy, nightmare-metropolis  production design that really makes Escape From New York a fun diversion, despite its shortcomings. You can tell the film's money pool wasn't too deep, and in a way, the shoestring budget works for it. It's a throwback to the  B movies that probably made Carpenter want to make movies when he was a kid.

The film was shot by Dean Cundey, who did the cinematography for several Carpenter films, and produced by long-time Carpenter collaborator Debra Hill. It moves along without much sense, but you find ways to enjoy yourself anyway.

The cast of stock characters, poorly fleshed out (such a shame, considering the collection of talent assembled), includes Adrienne Barbeau (whose wonderful comic abilities are barely used), Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Atkins, and Charles Cyphers. ★★★

The Fog

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) may be ludicrous as a thriller, but as an exercise in creepiness, it's wonderful fun. Carpenter and co-conspirator Debra Hill had just come off the phenomenal success of their low-budget thriller Halloween (1978), so by comparison The Fog seemed tame to audiences who were by now growing accustomed to more shocks and splatter, and less patient with an atmospheric, deliberately paced ghost story.

The plot involves a cadre of vengeful spirits bent on doling out vengeance (and murky weather) to a small California town on its 100th anniversary. The founding fathers of the community apparently betrayed a group of lepers, leading them to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. Now the lepers have come back to celebrate.

Carpenter relies too much on plodding slasher-film death sequences as the film progresses, but overall it's still one of his best mood-pieces. You find yourself enjoying all the little stories being weaved together throughout the film.

Carpenter imitates two masters in The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The movie feels like a noirish, supernatural re-imagining of The Birds (the setting reminds you of that film's coastal locale, Bodega Bay, and the fog serves as a stand-in for the birds, creating a similar feeling of apocalyptic doom). Simultaneously, Carpenter invests his scenes with a Hawks-esque film noir feel. That feel is best developed in the scenes of the main character, a local deejay named Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau). Stevie sits solitarily perched in a lighthouse, from which she runs a radio station that plays old jazz standards. From the lighthouse, she has a bird's-eye-view of the whole town. As she observes the fog and begins linking it to a series of deaths, Stevie becomes a voice of warning to the community. Barbeau is perfectly cast as the heroine: she's gutsy and smart, and carries the film well, especially since she's hardly on screen with any other actors.

The Fog deflates a little at the end. The whole movie is a big buildup, layering the scary atmosphere with relish, but there's not a whole lot beneath the atmosphere. Evidently, there were attempts to punch things up by adding a little more violence to the movie after the first cut was finished, but the movie's problem isn't lack of violence but lack of a genuinely scary threat. Fog almost always adds to a horror film, but when the things in the fog are only moderately scary, fog ceases to be effective.

Most of the cast members compensate for the movie's lack of follow-through. Janet Leigh makes a good impression as a local busybody who's spearheading the town's centennial anniversary gala. Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter in real life) returns to Carpenter-land, this time not quite as helpless as Laurie Strode was in Halloween. However, she's not memorable in this movie. Her part feels unnecessary to the story, and because there are stronger female characters around her, she fails to stand out. She's even overshadowed by fellow Halloween co-star Nancy Loomis, who plays Leigh's droll assistant in this. The two have an endearingly irritated-with-each-other relationship. With Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook as an alcoholic priest, Charles Cyphers, and John Houseman, in a creepy bit at the beginning, giving us the town's dark secret in perfect ghost-story fashion.

It might be thinking too deeply to call The Fog an indictment of colonialism, but it certainly points out the irony of celebrating people who murdered and stole to get what they wanted.

Night of the Creeps

Movie Imposters. Did you know that January is the month when studios dump the crummy movies onto an unsuspecting public gorged on holiday food and a glut of "important" Oscar-bait? Perusing the roster at my local multiplex confirmed this with such dazzling prospects as Season of the Witch, The Dilemma, Country Strong, No Strings Attached, and The Green Hornet (which looks like it might be the best time among this selection). After that, it's leftovers from 2010, and isn't 2010 old news already?

Shall we go back, then, to 1986? Where in Night of the Creeps, a pair of less-than-smooth college buddies accidentally unleashes an alien parasite that turns people into incubators so that it can reproduce itself by the hundreds. The slimy alien-thing looks like a slug (if you saw Slither, that movie most assuredly borrowed from this one), and it slithers across the ground at a remarkable pace. The movie, directed and written by Fred Dekker, is essentially grabbing as many B horror movie plot elements, throwing them against the ceiling, and seeing what sticks. There's the tormented detective (played by Tom Atkins) whose high school sweetheart was chopped into pieces by an axe murderer in 1959. He's apparently still bothered by the 27-year-old case that happened when he was barely two weeks with a badge, and now he thinks that the axe murderer may have been "regenerated" by those slug things, which have the affect of turning their human subjects into zombies (until they leave their host for another). There's the fraternity-sorority drama that has been the basis for a number of horror movies in the 1970s and 1980s (and has informed plenty of non-horror plots as well). Jumping back to the detective's story, there's the homicidal maniac on the loose plot.

Dekker's script, frankly, tries too hard to be an homage, and tries even harder to be self-aware so as to outsmart its audience. Fortunately there are moments when Dekker forgets himself and allows us to simply have a good time at his movie. After all, it's the kind of flick you would watch late at night for a good laugh, so it shouldn't require too much from a filmmaker in terms of plot development. Dekker smothers his dialogue with corny lines and obvious statements such as, "this is like a bad B movie." Atkins has most of the crummiest lines. For some reason Dekker or perhaps Atkins thought it would be funny to have the detective call everyone he meets by some cartoonish character name. He also makes liberal use of the catch phrase, "thrill me," which isn't bad as dumb catch phrases go, but it gets overused.

Night of the Creeps is keenly aware of all the important and not-so-important movies of its genre of choice, and of course the pleasure--or the hoped-for pleasure--is in seeing what the cast and crew will do with that. How will they manipulate our knowledge of Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and every other piece of horror schtick which the movie has set out to alternately canonize and lampoon? The problem is, it gets so repetitive that audiences may grow bored. You're waiting for something truly uncanny to happen, but (perhaps because of budgetary constraints), the movie relies chiefly on its perceived cheekiness (and its only marginally appealing cast) to stretch out the plot until the big finale where the frat brothers are turned into the walking dead and head to the Beta house to "pick up their dates."

What is ultimately going on in Night of the Creeps is that, rather than being a commentary on society, it's a commentary on moviemaking and movie love. The hosts (i.e. the humans whose brains become incubators for the slugs) are the various plots of horror movies that have been made and made money over the years. The little slithering alien slugs are inside them, incubating, reproducing, until they tear through the flesh and the bone and escape so that they can create imitations of the original. After all, this is Dekker's love letter to his favorite horror movies, and he's not very subtle in giving characters names like Cronenberg, Romero, and Carpenter (even the college is called Corman University). Dekker wants to pay tribute, and while it's not a total washout, Night of the Creeps is firsthand documentation of the tension between trying to be original and trying to imitate for the sake of imitation. It tries to do something a little out of the ordinary, but then doubles back in fear that it might go against the current "masters" of the horror movie. With Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Steve Marshall, Allan Kayser, Dick Morris, and Suzanne Snyder.