Movie Scum

The Shape is back! And he’s slashed all concepts of canon and connectivity to shreds! Depending on who you ask, it’s either been eleven years since the last “good” Halloween film or much longer. However, the new David Gordon Green -directed Halloween sequel-reboot-thing may just be the film die-hard fans have been waiting an indeterminate amount of years for.

With the recent news of Jamie Lee Curtis returning to the new Halloween film in 2018, another exciting franchise vet is coming back: creator John Carpenter .

Information has been slowly trickling out about David Gordon Green ’s untitled Halloween continuation coming in 2018. Now, we know who Michael will be facing ... again.

Originally published January 7, 2010 Surprisingly, I had been missing out on John Carpenter’s The Thing until a few years ago when a friend of mine turned me on to it. I thought it was a very effective movie and the DVD was great, featuring commentary by Carpenter and Kurt Russell as well as an in depth documentary on the making of the film. Sadly, my original DVD was not anamorphic so I had no desire to watch the film in recent years until I upgraded my disc to the re-release from a few years back. For some reason, I didn’t remember much from the film so it was almost like watching it for the first time all over again. A loose remake of the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, Carpenter’s version puts us in the middle of an Antartic research team who uncover a monstrous alien who has already devastated another research camp. As the being infiltrates the tight group of men, it takes their appearance and mannerisms leading them to doubt as to who is human and who is not. It is...

John Carpenter may not be churning out classics like Halloween any longer, but his arguably most famous film seems to have been the perfect storm of dedication, foolishness, ambition and talent that elude most films. Made on a tiny $300k budget (or about $1 million today), Halloween would go on to become one of the most financially successful independent pictures ever, not to mention the impact it made on filmmakers and movie-goers even thirty years later.

In the past two decades, once prolific horror director John Carpenter has made only six features, one of which has not seen a proper release here in America. If Carpenter was still making movies as creepy and effective as Halloween or The Thing, this would be bothersome. Village of the Damned typifies Carpenter’s later entries in the genre, notably bland stories, decent-to-awful acting, and very little redeeming qualities. It was a disappointment especially coming off his far superior film the year prior, In the Mouth of Madness. The film takes place in the small California town of Midwich, population 2000 (or so the quaint sign says at the beginning). It is not long however that the population tally starts fluctuating as the entire town is struck by an unexplainable mass black-out for six hours. Shortly after the blackout occurs, all of the women of childbearing age become pregnant, some even without the corresponding act of coitus. This is not only worrisome to the residents but ...

Written by: Digger H.P. Lovecraft is called the father of modern horror and is credited with creating the Cthulhu Mythos and the ‘weird fiction’ sub-genre. Although there have been several adaptations of his various stories (most of them directed by Stuart Gordon) the highest any of those films have ever climbed in the mainstream consciousness is the movie Re-Animator, and that’s not a very well-known film. In 1995, the fans of John Carpenter (one of the more iconic horror directors working today) were treated to the giant H. P. Lovecraft tribute film In the Mouth of Madness. The movie opens with Sam Neill as a raving lunatic in a straight-jacket being dragged into a padded cell. Doctor Wrenn (David Warner) is called in to find out what made Sam’s character, named John Trent, go insane. John, who has covered himself and the walls of is cell with the images of crosses, sits down to tell Wrenn about his most recent case. John was a private investigator that specialized in cases of in...

Written by: Digger Environmentalists will tell you that cars are evil. Now, almost all motor vehicles are inanimate objects, incapable of making any kind of moral or ethical decisions of their own, but when they do, cars usually are evil. Christine comes to us from the mind of Stephen King , which makes sense as the story is basically the same one as Carrie , but with a little Maximum Overdrive flare. The film is directed by John Carpenter , and stars a lovely 1958 Plymouth Fury as the titular character.* It is never made clear in the movie why the car is magically alive and has such a bad temper, but Christine's murderous rampage apparently began as soon as she rolled of the production line, smashing one man's hand with her hood, then killing another factory worker in her front seat. After this opening scene, the film jumps to 1978 in some random, all-american neighborhood where Arnie ( Keith Gordon ) and Dennis ( John Stockwell ) are on their way to school. The two...