Director: John Carpenter
Rating: 10 out of 10
I know, I'm getting behind on this thing. I can assure all of our thousands of readers that I'll be getting caught up very soon.
My last couple reviews were The Mist, a film I knocked for being just a creature feature and little else, and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, which I knocked for being awful. I was festering in a sea of mediocrity or worse, just hoping to see a film that was scary and intelligent. Rest assured folks, John Carpenter came to my rescue. This is a damn horror movie! Your standard films of the genre seem to usually be in warm climate locales, like places where it's perfectly feasible to go skinny-dipping or take your clothes off at a moment's notice so the killer can murder you in a state of undress. Well, this film couldn't be farther from that: it's set at an American outpost in beyong-frigid Antarctica. It almost chills your bones just to watch these poor guys trying to survive in that harsh climate. It's the perfect secluded setting, especially for this kind of paranoid horror.
Basically, these men working at the outpost take in a stray dog that they rescue from annihilation at the hands of a crazy team of Norwegians at the very beginning of the film. Before long, they, and we the audience, become very aware that there is something seriously wrong with their new friend. I'm not going further than that, but you are not expecting what becomes of this scenario. Let me just say this: the creatures, mutations, and just plain freaky things they came up with for this film are the stuff of nightmares. You know why they're so great? Because they're all practical effects. No CGI, no man in a rubber suit. I'm talking animatronics, pupppets, and stop-motion work. These guys took the time to actually MAKE something, instead of pointing a mouse and typing on a keyboard, and their result is something freaky, disgusting, and just plain amazing.
The brilliance of the film, for me, is in the paranoia of the team members and their sudden distrust of each other, especially considering the seclusion they've been subjected to for quite some time and the strength of the bond they must have formed during that time. All it takes is one little crises with an alien life-form (ALF, hehe) to break that bond and get everyone doubting one another. The reason it works so well is because even we, the audience members, are as unsure as the characters are. Carpenter never once tips the hat or shows us anything that the actors on screen don't know. In this way it's very anti-Hitchcockian. We're along for the same ride as all the principle actors and feel the same sense of danger and terror. Kurt Russel plays "Mac", the loner helicopter pilot who drinks too much and doesn't really seem to care too much for being where he is. That is, until their survival comes into play. I know he isn't winning any awards for his performances, but give me one person that doesn't like Kurt Russell and I'll show you a person without a soul. He's just so damn charismatic and likeable, and he's no different here. But, this is a pretty straightforward horror flick, not the horror-comedies we've been subjected to for quite some time. There are no jokes, no cynical asides, no comic relief side-kicks, and no women either, which is another deviation from the normal horror plan. There's no helpless female heroine screaming her brains out, no sex appeal, no one that all the men are trying to protect. Kudos to John Carpenter for straying from that cliche, especially since he practically invented the scream-queen with Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Now we know Carpenter isn't a one-trick pony.
All in all, brilliant stuff. It's frightening and intelligent at the same time, which is all I want from a horror movie. So rarely do I get my wish. Thank you, John Carpenter.
Next: Evil Dead I think
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