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.