ACCUSATION: Craptacular demise.
DEFENSE: He’ll be back.
Here’s the deal. I finally sat down to watch, for the first time ever, the last major theatrical release from director John Carpenter, Ghosts of Mars, with every intention that I can find something defendable in it. After all, it couldn’t possibly be worse than his remake of Village of the Damned. I made it approximately 23 minutes into the film before turning it off, and about 5 minutes into the film before I started searching for every online review I could find that might find any possibly good about it. There’s not much.
John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is an astonishingly incoherent mess of a movie, unsatisfying as a horror/thriller, a science fiction tale and an action vehicle. It’s a film in search of a genre to cling to with a cast in search of a paycheck and a once brilliant director in search of a 116-pack of Alka Seltzer from Costco. Why the guy even left his name on the film, and above the title no less, is a complete mystery.
While most film fans are quick to label his filmography after the 80s to be on a streak of suck, I always like to point out that he has turned out some really interesting work, including episodes of Masters of Horrors and my very favorite of his after Halloween – 1993’s In the Mouth of Madness. Memoirs of an Invisible Man is like-ably ambitious, but flawed. Village of the Damned starts out fine, and descends into movie hell. Vampires doesn’t completely suck. He hasn’t really done much in the past 20 years, with the exception of the mysterious possible come back feature The Ward, which premiered at the Toronto Film Fest this past September.
I’d rather believe that Carpenter is still an amazingly talented filmmaker, and one that we can expect more great feature films from. Yet, if he were to retire tomorrow completely, don’t forget that in addition to Halloween or The Thing, most of his movies are underrated masterpieces. Many a film school essay has been written on They Live, which is also one of the most daringly subversive things to emerge from Hollywood in the 80s. Christine actually still holds up as one of the best Stephen King book to movie attempts. The Fog is a fascinating study in mood and tone that hadn’t been done since Val Lewton got under our skins. Big Trouble in Little China collects new cult fandom with every screening. Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13 continue to serve as the models for countless action entries each summer.
While Ghosts of Mars was certainly bad enough to abandon, it ain’t enough to divorce his filmography from my memory. Cherish the past, hope for the future.
