Christine (John Carpenter, 1983)

It's a little surprising that Christine works as well as it does. John Carpenter had been enthusiastically prepping a big-budget adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter when the dismal financial and critical response to his most recent film, The Thing (it's incomprehensible to me that almost everyone hated one of the greatest films of the 1980s on its initial release, and its belated success is still a little bittersweet), gave studio execs the vapors. They yanked Firestarter away from Carpenter and eventually gave it to Class of 1984 director Mark L. Lester, where it would open in 1984 to a middling response. Carpenter's next project, The Ninja (an adaptation of an Eric Van Lustbader novel), also fizzled out, with Carpenter quitting after script conflicts with the studio. Reeling from all this professional turmoil, Carpenter took on another Stephen King novel, Christine, as a career-saving director-for-hire job. Carpenter thought the premise was silly, but he knew he had to take producer Richard Kobritz's job offer if he wanted to keep making films. (Carpenter's career slump was good news for Kobritz, who had placed the director at the top of his wish list.) 

It's also not surprising that Christine works as well as it does. Duh, it's John Carpenter at the height of his talent. Even when the guy has to work with material he's not crazy about, he does not phone it in. Despite it being his first for-hire job and not a personal project, Carpenter put his all into it, pushing back against the studio to get the people he wanted behind and in front of the camera and filling the frame with visual invention, turning what he thought was a goofy idea that wouldn't scare anybody into a disturbing and tragic movie that's also weirdly a lot of fun. Yeah, it's mid-tier Carpenter, but mid-tier Carpenter is pretty damn good.

Pushing back against studio pressure to cast Scott Baio and Brooke Shields in the leads, Carpenter instead chose Keith Gordon (Jaws 2, Home Movies, All That Jazz, Dressed to Kill) and then-unknown Alexandra Paul (later a regular on Baywatch). (Kevin Bacon was also a strong contender for the lead, but he turned it down to do Footloose.) He filled the rest of the teenage cast with charismatic young actors with just a few credits under their belts (Kelly Preston would go on to become the most famous) and the adult roles with some of the best character actors in the game, including Roberts Blossom, Robert Prosky, and my all-time favorite Harry Dean Stanton. Blossom, Prosky, and Stanton get only a few scenes each, but they're substantial, important scenes with a lot of flavor. Carpenter also successfully pushed for Bill Phillips to get the screenplay job despite the young screenwriter having only one TV movie to his credit because Phillips had also been working on the Firestarter screenplay with him, and for Roy Arbogast, a member of the special effects crew on The Thing, to head the FX team. Phillips gets a cameo as a guy carrying a boombox. Carpenter even got to do one of his trademark synth scores, composed with frequent collaborator Alan Howarth, and it's subtly and effectively employed and somehow doesn't clash with the soundtrack's use of '50s rock and roll and doo wop and its handful of then-contemporary rock and pop songs.

Christine, for anyone who hasn't read the King novel or seen the movie, is about teenage nerd Arnie (Gordon) and his jock-with-a-heart-of-gold best friend Dennis (John Stockwell, no relation to Dean, though he is the uncle of Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine) navigating the new school year. Arnie is a nerd, but he's also a car nut with serious mechanical and restoration skills, though his ultra-controlling parents, who want him to focus on more sophisticated matters, are not happy he's taking shop class, taught by Mr. Casey (David Spielberg, no relation to Steven). On the first day of shop class, Arnie runs afoul of a gang of bullies led by the fabulously coiffed and side-burned Buddy (William Ostrander, 24 at the time but looking 35). Buddy knifes poor Arnie's yogurt before turning the knife on Arnie, which gets Buddy booted out of school and Buddy's buddies suspended. Buddy-boy makes it a point to get revenge. Meanwhile, every guy in school is trying to date the new babe Leigh (Paul) and treating poor Roseanne (Preston) like she's yesterday's news even though I think she's just as cute, if not cuter, than Leigh, but I digress.

Arnie buys a seriously run-down 1958 red Plymouth Fury named Christine from the deeply eccentric LeBay (Blossom), pissing off his parents, who refuse to let him park his car at his own house. He rents a space for Christine at a DIY garage run by the hilariously curmudgeonly Darnell (Prosky), who tears into his character like a lion biting into a wildebeest. Arnie restores the car to mint condition at Darnell's place, but the car starts changing him, turning him from Poindexter to charismatic bad boy (he starts dating Leigh, loses his glasses, gets confident, and dresses sharper). The changes don't stop, though, and soon Arnie is getting scarier, weirder, and way more intense until, finally, he and Christine become murderously, telepathically, and, in a way, even sexually linked.

When one of Buddy's crew gets crunched after some group vandalism on Christine, a detective named Junkins (Stanton) starts asking Arnie some tough questions. Gradually, Junkins, Dennis, and Leigh realize the car may be a supernatural entity, and Dennis and Leigh, dismayed at their friend's descent into car madness, become determined to destroy Christine and save Arnie.

Carpenter does a great job of making the car ominous and seductive, framing it almost fetishistically, and cinematographer Donald M. Morgan photographs it in lush colors. Despite how silly the evil automobile premise can be, Carpenter makes it feel believable, and the control Christine exerts over Arnie is scary, sad, and even relatable. It's easy for a dorky, talented, goodhearted kid with low self-esteem and a desire to be cool to get lured into a dangerously obsessive situation, with tragic results, and the movie works as a metaphor for addiction, online radicalism, adrenaline junkiedom, criminal behavior, materialism, any hobby turned unhealthy obsession, etc., without making too much of a forced leap. It's corny and obvious to spell it out like this, but it just works, visually.

I was initially a bit turned off on this rewatch by the early scenes' casual sexism and the depiction of Arnie's mother as a whip-cracking ballbuster, but teenage boys in the late '70s would most likely be this casually sexist in a blustery, performative way (and Carpenter does a good job showing that it is bluster and performance), and, as the movie progresses, Arnie's mother is depicted as more complex and caring than first impressions revealed.

While I wouldn't put Christine up there with Carpenter's all-time greats, and it doesn't feel quite as personal as most of his movies, it's an admirable piece of work and damn fine entertainment to boot. The drive-in scene alone is more expressive and visually thrilling than the last two decades of blockbuster swill combined. If Hollywood movies still looked like this, the world might be less of a toilet. Don't get me wrong, it would still be a toilet. Just less of a toilet. It's also technically a period piece, since it's set in '78 and '79 despite being filmed and released in '83, which puts it in the pantheon of period pieces set in the extremely recent past (cf. The Big Lebowski, released in '98 and set in the early '90s). Anyway, if you haven't seen Christine, go check it out, you chowderhead.

    

The Comeback (Pete Walker, 1978)

The Comeback is a complex, smart, weird, and unusual British-American dark-side-of-show-biz slasher movie, and I greatly enjoyed it. It was my first encounter with the films of Pete Walker, the retired British horror and sexploitation director, and I was surprised to discover that hardcore Walker-heads consider The Comeback one of his lesser films. Considering how much I loved The Comeback, this opinion baffles me and makes me very excited to see his other work.

The film is about former teen idol Nick Cooper, a pop/lite jazz crooner in the Johnny Mathis/Paul Anka/Barry Manilow vein who has been absent from the business for six years. He's played by real-life pop/lite jazz crooner Jack Jones, a pop star in the '60s and frequent TV variety and game show guest in the '60s and '70s who is still a popular Vegas act today. He's probably most famous among my fellow children of the '70s and '80s as the singer of The Love Boat theme. Cooper is attempting to make a comeback after a difficult divorce by recording a new album outside of London (he's an American who is more popular in the UK) under the auspices of his controlling former manager Webster Jones (David Doyle, fellow Nebraska native who attended my alma mater of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was good friends with classmate Johnny Carson). Sparks quickly fly between Nick and Webster's secretary/assistant Linda, while unbeknownst to Nick, his ex-wife Gail (Holly Palance, daughter of Jack Palance) has returned to London and their old penthouse apartment, where she will encounter an uninvited guest.

Linda is played by Pamela Stephenson, an actor and sketch comedian who was a Saturday Night Live cast member on the 1984-85 season, the last one before Lorne Michaels returned. She quit showbiz in the '90s to become a psychologist and has also worked as a psychology professor in addition to founding a dance company, writing several books, doing charity work, and undertaking two year-long South Seas voyages. She's married to actor/comedian Billy Connolly. I don't understand where people like this get their energy. I'm mentally exhausted after loading the dishwasher.

Back to the somewhat complicated story. Nick finds the memories of his broken marriage too painful, so he's decided to sell the penthouse apartment (a swanky pad hidden away in an otherwise creepily abandoned building accessible by a creepy unmarked alley door and an even creepier manual elevator) and rent a room in an equally creepy country manor 40 miles outside London while he records the smooth, velvety tunes for his new album (sample lyric: "sing about a man who gave a picnic on the moon/he never stopped to thank you for the love he left so soon"). The manor owners are away on a year-long round-the-world sailing trip, so Nick is sharing the sprawling estate with the elderly caretaking couple who clean and garden the property, Mr. and Mrs. B (Bill Owen and Sheila Keith). The Bs are a trip, and they give off some serious weird vibes, but Nick rolls with it. Our other major character is Nick's longtime assistant/equipment technician Harry (Peter Turner, Gloria Grahame's much-younger boyfriend in the last three years of her life) (does every actor in this movie have an interesting life story?), a nasty piece of work whose overprotectiveness of Nick and misogynistic suspicion of any woman in Nick's life lead him to some pretty dark places. Nobody likes Harry, and Harry reciprocates that dislike, but the easygoing Nick overlooks the sour man's many flaws. Meanwhile, a murderer in an old woman's mask and clothing is secretly killing people in Nick's circle, and Nick is hearing screams and cries in the manor at night and hallucinating corpses even though he doesn't even know about the murders yet. And Mr. and Mrs. B just keep getting weirder. At most points in the film, every single character is a likely candidate for the killer.

My wife and I were talking about the movie this morning, and she made so many good points and observations that I asked her if she would write the post while I kicked back and drank coffee. She declined, but these next few paragraphs come from the twisted, beautiful mind of my wife Kristy.

She made a sharp observation that the character of Nick is put in a position and in several situations that are usually reserved for women characters, especially in genre films of this era made by male directors. Nick can't decide if what he's seeing and hearing are real or if he's losing his mind, and the other characters try to convince him that he's losing it. When he encounters something scary, he doesn't spring into action. He reacts with real fear, and he loses his composure, unable to handle what he's seeing. He's also a relatively passive character, who lets other people decide the direction of his life and career, and he abandoned his UK pop idol fame at the request of his ex-wife Gail. I don't think any of the preceding examples belong exclusively, or even more often, to one gender, and most of us would react the way Nick reacts when he sees what he sees, but these behaviors are often gendered in film, with women freezing in fear, being told they're going crazy, and having their actions and movements during a crisis dictated by a strong male character. Men pressuring their wives to leave their careers is a common occurrence, inside showbiz and out, and it's fascinating to get the reversal here.

The other characters in the film blame Gail for stalling his career, and viewers may have been more sympathetic to that opinion if the opening scene wasn't presented from her point of view. Instead of the manipulative, career-killing, success-hungry, unfaithful woman existing in the other characters' minds, we see that she loved her husband and his music and is sad about their failed marriage. She also had his back when the other characters just wanted their piece of his money and fame. He was aging out of the teen idol role anyway, and Gail thought a return to the United States and meatier, more contemporary songs were the way to go. It didn't work out, but it was hardly the evil plot of a gold-digger. This living, breathing (at least for a while) version of Gail we see from the film's beginning is at odds with the scheming version of her we see in Webster's flashback/memory later in the running time, a clever way for the filmmaker to ask the audience if he's presenting the unreliability of memory or the complex and contradictory behaviors that make up a single person without giving us a clear answer.

Walker captures all this complexity with a sharp eye, perfect locations, and clever editing, his killer is unsettling as hell, and he knows how to quickly shift sympathy and perspective so the audience identifies with multiple characters even as we're suspicious of most of them. I also like how his ending puts forward the idea that the surviving characters will have aftereffects of the trauma they experienced. Most movies act like the survivors are going to be just fine. Jack Jones is great in the lead, and he plays his pop star as a normal, down-to-earth guy who got famous because he could sing, not because he's some success-driven inhuman demigod or spoiled manchild with amazing talent, and he reacts to weird shit the way the average person would react to weird shit. Bryan Ferry was initially offered the role, but he turned it down. As much as I love Roxy Music, I think Jack Jones was the right choice. Ferry would have been too cool, too knowing, and it would have been harder for an audience to forget who he was outside of the character, though it probably would have made The Comeback a bigger cult film.

I really liked this movie, and there are dozens of curious details I haven't even mentioned yet (Webster's secret life, a mysterious book of Chinese mythology, a gas-masked dummy on an apartment stairwell, the artificially colored sky above the manor at night, etc.). It truly feels like the period between the mid-'60s and the early '90s contains an inexhaustible treasure chest of neglected (or belatedly appreciated) oddball gems. I'm in my mid-forties, and I keep discovering at least one a week. I salute every one of these filmmakers for consistently injecting my difficult life with 50cc of soul-saving freakitude. Pete Walker, I need to see more of your movies.