The Reverend’s Review
FT’s resident man of the cloth reverend Peter Laws dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot! (www.theflicksthatchurchforgot.com; @revpeterlaws)
Ghosts of Mars
Dir John Carpenter, US 2001 Powerhouse Films, £14.99 (Dual format)
VAMPIRES
Dir John Carpenter, US 1998 Powerhouse Films, £14.99 (Dual format) I’d better ’fess up straight away: I’m a John Carpenter fanboy. I love his stuff to the point of creepy obsession. Last October, I even got to see him play live in London at the Troxy. I was 10 feet away as he pounded out the themes to Christine and The Fog. I listened to my iPhone video clips of it and I can hear myself whooping out “hell yeahs” like a quivering Price is Right contestant. It was embarrassing, but impossible to control. You need to know this fact for balance, as it means I can be overly generous to some of his less celebrated works. Like Ghosts of Mars, for example.
Most critics think it’s a turd, a bona fide piece of crud. The New York Times described it as “a zombie picture directed by one of the undead”, and Mr Showbiz opined that it was “so wretched that it practically defies description”. I, however, think it’s a bit of a hoot. Yes, it’s pretty brainless, and makes you feel as if you’re looking into the mind of a seven-year-old boy playing with action figures in a
sand pit and doing whatever the heck he thinks would look cool; but this means you get Ice Cube, Jason Statham and Natasha Henstridge spitting out ridiculously macho lines on a matriarchal Mars that is infested with ancient Martian spirits who possess humans and make them rip Pam Grier’s head clean off and shove it on a spike. And Carpenter swaps his usual synth soundtrack for head-pounding Anthrax guitars. Is it one of Carpenter’s best? Ha ha! No. But it is an amphetamine-fuelled mash-up of Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing and Prince of Darkness relocated to the Red Planet. What’s not to like? Watch out for the very final moment too. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen Carpenter break the fourth wall. The grown-up in me thought this was cheesy, and that it affected the internal logic and integrity of the movie… but the seven-year-old boy inside of me thought it was amazeballs.
Also released on Blu-ray is Vampires, which I like a little less, even though it’s the more accomplished of the two films. Here, James Woods treks across the desert, wiping out nests of leather-clad vampires, including Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, whose bite on the thigh makes her gurn at the camera a lot. There’s a nice thread about the vampire hunters working alongside the clergy to track down the undead menace, and it’s filled with dusty, sunset shots that often look a lot like Mars. Considering these two films followed each other, they definitely count as Carpenter’s ‘red period’. Some might prefer to call it his dead period, suggesting that he’d lost his directorial mojo by this point. It’s true, I much prefer his earlier works, but there’s still something wild and delicious about the films Carpenter makes – even the so-called turkeys.
Fortean Times Verdict
two Less-celebrated works from carpenter’s red period 7