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Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: An Evening With John Carpenter (Prince of Darkness/The Thing)

I'm a fan of Joe Bob Briggs, the premier drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, going back to the '80s when I first caught a glimpse of him on The Movie Channel. By the '90s, when yours truly had more or less stopped caring what was on TV, you could find me in front of the set at crazy hours on Saturday nights watching whatever crapola they had given him to host. A brief correspondence with him during my technical writing years cemented my affection for the man, who has been genuine and supportive to everyone I've come across who ever interacted with him.

But it wasn't until I hauled my butt out to the Drive-In Jamboree that I considered myself a mutant, which is a name that comes from a one-man show JBB did in the '80s, where he had people take the Drive-In Oath. This begins, "We are Drive-In Mutants." How the groups I consider myself a member of (the moron horde, the jackals of 372 pages, and the drive-in mutants) reflect on my self-image I will leave to the armchair psychologists.

What was a gag forty years ago has taken on depth, especially in the past six years since a fan (now Darcy The Mail Girl) exhorted him to revive the show, and a marathon turned into a six-, soon to be seven-year run.

Reciting he original oath from 1985's "Joe Bob: Dead In Concert" which is available on Youtube and Amazon.

Your humble correspondent immensely enjoyed the second and third jamborees (the first sold out before I could get tickets), and was shocked to discover there almost wasn't a fourth one. They were turning into big, expensive, elaborate events—I actually have no doubt they could have become something akin to Comic-Con—when what JB had wanted was for them to be a place where he and Darcy got together with the mutants to watch movies and talk about them.

So, he quit.

Darcy, on the other hand, refused to quit and started doing the con on her own. (She's the one who gets letters from the mutants telling her how important the meet-ups are to us, some of which are heartbreaking.) She was going to throw it with her own time and money, and drag JB there to host, whether he liked it or not. JB ultimately caved, but with the caveat: They would put up tickets—no guests, no bands, no program whatsoever—and see if people were interested in coming. Were they there for the program, or were they there for the mutants and movies?

Tickets sold like hotcakes: We were there for the movies and each other.

As much as I loved the previous years, the vibe this year was perfect. Being about the movies and the mingling made everything feel more relaxed. The music was fan music, and surprisingly delightful. The show started at a reasonable time—I didn't notice if it was late or not. I don't think too late because the sun was barely down. It also ran late, but nobody who is a Drive-In fan expected any less. We like to talk about stuff. A lot.

Svengoolie was at the show, and he was amazing!

They had no sponsors this year and didn't offer much in the way of incentives for featured guests (and some turned them down), but they ended up with a stunning line-up. Svengoolie showed up (free of charge) and co-hosted Saturday night's offerings of six classic universal horrors: Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Creature From The Black Lagoon. JBB is a wealth of movie trivia, of course, but Svengoolie was absolutely stunning in the "Horror Host Havoc" competition where each offered factoids about the movies and the audience decided who the loser was by pelting him with rubber chickens.

The previous night had ended with the three most iconic scream queens of the '80s: Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer, who were inducted into the Scream Queen Hall of Fame, which is totally a thing or will be one day. To me, this was perhaps the best line-up possible, after the previous year's Roger Corman tribute. Bauer stayed to the end (around 6AM!) and showed up the next day for signings. Your humble correspondent was bowled over by her charm and graciousness.

John Carpenter, Master of Horror

Friday night began, however, with John Carpenter. Which was as improbable as it was perfect.

Some of us were somewhat apprehensive about Carpenter. He's famously curmudgeonly and reluctant to do these kinds of things, and we didn't know how he'd feel about us. But he'd come down for free, agreeing to open the first movie and left after the intro to the second. He seemed somewhat surprised that JB had chosen to air Prince of Darkness at all, much less first, but JB pointed out that JC has gotten a ton of questions about The Thing, and Prince of Darkness is a much more mysterious movie.

And on seeing him in person, reacting to a variety of JB and the audience's questions, I'd describe him less as curmudgeonly and more as uninterested in bullshit. And that includes his own. There were numerous places he could've launched into some pretentious arty nonsense and—well, he just didn't. JB asked how he ("no offense but I'm not [Republican]") could work with Kurt Russell ("to the right of Genghis Khan") and he just said, "We just don't talk about it."

This used to be common wisdom.

Anyway, I think we won him over, and he certainly won us over, treating the audience questions respectfully and signing a Michael Meyers figure for a teen fan who had come up on stage to shake his hand.

John Carpenter receives the Hubbie

Prince of Darkness

Sometimes I think Prince of Darkness is the most heretical film possible, even though it's not excessively violent, hardly sexual at all, and fairly restrained in terms of language. But it's also strangely conservative and anti-gnostic, with the idea being that God (like the tribal O.T. Jehovah) walked the earth, but rather than being loving and benevolent was, in Carpenter's words "pissed off". Somehow he gets cast out to the "dark side"—the mirror universe—but leaves behind his son, Satan, which is evil in material form.

We get into college bull-session territory from there as Jesus turns out to have been a space alien warning humans about Satan's material nature and trapping Old Scratch in a container, with the idea that man will eventually evolve scientifically enough to find a way to secure and handle this evil in the future. The Church ends up being the guardian of the container and the promulgator of the lie about a good universe.

The soundtrack, also written by Carpenter (because he had no money to hire anyone) features a better poster than most movies these days.

When the story begins, the last caretaker of the container dies and it begins to leak. And the quantum physics professor talking about how our concept of reality breaks down at the subatomic level is the guy who knows how to handle the substance, which can reverse entropy and possess people and emanate controlling force at a distance, while the heroes receive warning messages sent via tachyon particles into dreams from the far distant year of 1999, where things have gone to hell. If Satan gets loose, he'll be bringing in papa from the darkside, and he's perfectly happy to distract our heroes by possessing them and having them be menaced by street people (led by Alice Cooper).

Basically, we have an almost "Evil Dead" style situation of monsters being outside the church and anyone on the inside also potentially being a monster, with a bunch of novel horror effects both visual and intellectual, to keep things interesting. Some of these implications don't work out, or they suggest a movie that's superversive more than subversive.

That is, as the priest (Donald Pleasance) explains the Church's role and beats it up for its dishonesty, the priests and especially the nuns have a "holy warrior" vibe. They are, after all, holding off the Devil and his demiurge father single-handedly, making a civilization where evil can be defeated technologically.

Another possibility is that the protagonists are in the mirror-universe—but again, it implies an inherent goodness in Man that is so powerful, it can operate in a universe which is made of evil.

A movie about Satan which is still less Satanic than the last Olympics

I don't think it quite achieves what it's striving for. For one thing, the main romance (between "Simon & Simon"'s Jameson Parker and the late Lisa Blount), while being a very typical Carpenterian romance (boy meets girl, they have sex) doesn't have the chemistry of, say, Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall, Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis, or Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau.

If we contrast with The Thing, one of the things that works so well there is the struggle to survive personally balanced with the concern that's one own survival could mean the death of humanity. The individual need to survive needs to be strong to be relatable, and I'm not sure we feel that in Prince of Darkness.

Prince of Darkness is the second of Carpenter's "apocalypse trilogy", which ends with In The Mouth of Madness). The first film in the trilogy is The Thing.

The Thing

The Thing was the thing (heh) that, in my opinion, derailed Carpenter's career. The attacks on this film were truly outrageous, labeling it literal pornography, and WB naturally panicked and botched an almost guaranteed sleeper hit. An excellent adventure-horror or what we'd now call "survival horror", I remember being slightly disappointed when I first saw it because of the ending. I now think the ending is perfect, and the re-emergence of this scene in the current election season explains why:

Election 2024!

When you get past the action, the suspense, the tension, and the amazing special effects—Carpenter basically credited Rob Bottin with The Thing's artistic success—something still remains, and is still relevant. To with, we have a closely knit society where trust is necessary for survival.

Trust is quickly undermined, and the last scene underscores that beautifully, as two humans quietly freeze to death (maybe) because they can't trust each other. (They have to both be humans, because there's no reason for the alien to leave just one human alive.)

Even this is an over-simplification. There are other possibilities, like they're both infected (but not yet consumed) and the thing is just lurking, waiting for its chance to spring itself on the rest of the world.

The Drive-In Academy Lifetime Achievement Award: The Hubbie

But Carpenter doesn't really make message movies. Even They Live, which he wanted to tie into an anti-Reagan campaign (according to Roddy Piper, who refused), today comes across as a documentary, and an apolitical one at that, at least to those of us who are wearing our special sunglasses.

Listening to him talk reminds me a little bit of listening to Bukowski or Frazetta, in the sense that he's very down-to-earth while at the same time tapping into a sublime artistic spirit that exists on its own plane. And if I can claim any personal experience with it from writing, I notice that what I think I'm writing about always ends up taking a back seat to (or being completely controverted by) the story that's actually there.

"Our logic...collapses into ghosts and shadows," as Victor Fong lectures in The Prince of Darkness.

I think Carpenter was genuinely touched by our enthusiasm, and got a little sense of who we are (not really having an idea before, which, how can you blame him?), and received the Hubbie gracefully and gratefully. (Traditionally, the award is a Cadillac hubcap, but in this case it was from a '57 Plymouth Fury, after Christine.)

Somehow, it was perfect that he would be here for this reformation of the Jamboree: No fanfare, no big bucks, just a bunch of weirdos who like movies getting together to watch them and talk about them.