ASSAULT ON JOHN CARPENTER’S ESCAPE FROM PRECINCT MARS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

How is this challenge of mine going? I’m tackling a movie a day, to clear those bookshelves of movies that just shouldn’t be there. Books should be there. Fear not, for they are. I don’t seem to be clearing the movie stacks as fast as I’d like. The endless pile of submarine flicks sank below the depths, true…
   John Carpenter’s proving to be a problem. It’s Escape from New York. Damned thing has three commentaries on there. This means I’m watching a movie four times. Throw in a few other features, and add up the running-time. Four days of this. It’s quicker to escape from New York for real, and I’ve done that on several occasions.
   Escape from New York counts as many films instead of one, and takes days to wade through – for I have other things to be getting on with. Eating. Sleeping. Trivial matters, I know. There is no game of knocking back shots for John Carpenter movies. The game would kill you and anyone sitting next to you.
   Take a shot every time Carpenter makes a film that is really a western.
   Add a drink if he works on the score.
   Knock one back if there’s no budget to speak of.
   Slug one down for a bleak ending.
   Raise a glass if Kurt Russell is in the movie.
   And raise another if Keith David is in the film.
   Charles Cyphers appears in the movie? Down a swig in his honour.
   This one will likely kill you twice over. Knock one back if a character’s name references someone else. Sam Loomis in Hallowe’en comes from Psycho, though coincidentally acts as a reference to the actress Nancy Loomis – who also appears in Hallowe’en.
   In The Fog, Charles Cyphers plays Dan O’Bannon – Carpenter’s collaborator on Dark Star. Joanna Cassidy is A. Whitlock in Ghosts of Mars – a sideways reference to Albert Whitlock, “credited with art duties” on The Thing.
   Some of those are a bit of a stretch. Maybe avoid delving too deeply into character references from other films…
   But do swig one down if John Carpenter appears in the movie. The usual giveaway will be helicopter stuff. Look for Rip Haight. Carpenter has a helicopter-based cameo in this film, and also appears as a musician in Ernest Borgnine’s opening scene.
   Drink a shot if the movie features space or an entity from space.
   Is George Buck Flower in the movie? Now there’s a man with a hell of a filmography. A drunken filmography, at that. He was your go-to guy if you wanted a drunk, a bum, or a drunken bum in your scenes.
   Okay, okay. A shot for Donald Pleasence, and a shot for Jamie Lee Curtis.
   It might be easier to knock back a drink if Dean Cundey ISN’T the cinematographer on a John Carpenter movie. But…damn it…drink one for Dean Cundey if he worked on the production.
  Where would that put Escape from New York, so far?
   Cinematography? Dean Cundey. It’s a western. All John Carpenter movies are westerns. Carpenter did the score, there’s his delivery guy helicopter cameo, and he played in the band. I hear he also directed. Snake Plissken takes his name from a real guy. There are references to other directors: Cronenberg, Romero, to name but two. Donald Pleasence is in there as President John Harker…
   This may be a reference to Jonathan Harker in Dracula. Too much of a leap? Carpenter eventually did his own western take on a vampire movie. JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES features a psychic link from vampire to victim, much like the telepathy between Dracula and Mina Harker in Stoker’s novel. This stuff swirled around in Carpenter’s brain for years.
   Speaking of things on his cinematic mind, Carpenter shows The Thing from Another World and Forbidden Planet on television in Hallowe’en. He’d return to those sc-fi inspirations with his own version of The Thing. Vague elements of Forbidden Planet linger over Ghosts of Mars.
   Back to our escape. Jamie Lee Curtis narrates Escape from New York. Kurt Russell? Yes. Buck Flower has a small yet important drunken role. Charles Cyphers? Check. Is there a budget to speak of? They couldn’t afford to film the whole movie in New York, so they sneaked the Statue of Liberty in there…
   Movie budgets are cheap bullshit adverts when released into the wild by movie companies for reasons of publicity. So add a mine full of salt to any talk of budgets. Going by cinematic releases in 1981, we see the big budgetary hitters are Indiana Jones, Superman, and James Bond. If we believe the studio-backed accountants, that year’s Jim Henson flick, The Great Muppet Caper, had over twice the budget of Escape from New York.
   We’ll say Carpenter’s budget was low for its scope and ambition, at $5-7 million. For the sequence involving that dash to the wall, they bought a disused bridge for $1, filmed their scenes, and then sold it back when production closed. Cheap and cheerful.
   I’ve not listed all the in-joke name references, people on the movie production side can be a bit obscure, so you are on your own when it comes to downing shots. Isaac Hayes plays a character named for John Wayne – The Duke. Mind how you go with that alcohol. You may think the ending is bleak, and that’s worth a shot.
   Yes, I’d skip this boozy game if I were you.
   Carpenter is at his best when he has no money to spend. He’s forced to be far more creative, to compose his own music for reasons of cheapness, to use vehicles owned by his production crew, and to fly helicopters himself when required.
   Oh, some of his films were made with money. Memoirs of an Invisible Man had the cash for early computer effects. What did Carpenter bring to that movie? His love of Hitchcock thrillers. He saw an opporchancity to do North by Northwest, but our hero on the run can’t even be seen. Except by the audience, when required.
   If I could recommend one John Carpenter movie to you, I’d recommend at least three. Is there a film that sums up his style? Sadly, yes. He made one film that now serves as a greatest hits compilation…
   Ghosts of Mars counts as many films.
   I like this one much more than I should, and I want to like it even more…yet I can’t.
   Movie opens with a vehicle moving relentlessly in the direction of the audience. And we also have a character introducing the story in flashback at some sort of legal meeting.
   Why, that’s Big Trouble in Little China with the serial numbers filed off.
   Our tale is set in a town way out in the dusty desert, and is approachable by train. Hell, that’s a western. With a jail-break. All John Carpenter movies are westerns. A hint of John Ford, a touch of Howard Hawks, and you are ready to ride.
   All are westerns? Even The Thing, right? Yes. Kurt Russell is having a drink in the saloon, playing a game with a lady. He throws booze in her face and calls her a cheatin’ bitch. Then a stranger comes to town and stirs up trouble, setting the cowboys at each other’s throats. The stranger’s trying to stake a claim.
   Mars. There’s a theme of possession. We get that in The Thing and again in Prince of Darkness. Slashers and stabbers, in masks? Okay, that’s Hallowe’en. Not that Carpenter ever cared for the term slasher as a descriptor of, er, slasher movies. What else? An eerie mist that rolls in, bringing terror.
   Yes, we’ve seen The Fog.
   Roaming bands of crazies. You get those a-plenty in Escape from New York. A base under siege…there are a few Martian corridor-fixated camera shots reminiscent of The Thing. Here, the exterior of the outpost is Martian Red instead of Antarctica White…
   And that redness is sprayed on, to make everything look Martian.
   Anyway, you get the idea of a town with one main street. Western. Carpenter is playful. Outpost 31 is Precinct 13 with the numbers reversed…two places under siege…one from within and the other from without.
   In Ghosts of Mars he gives us an assault on a police facility, all over again. He throws in the alien possession idea mixed with the crazies from New York. There’s an attempt to replicate the banter between men and women from the movies of Howard Hawks.
   I say attempt, as, damn it, nothing quite works to full capacity in this film. It’s a greatest hits compilation. And you’d be better off watching the other stories unfold in earlier movies. See his other films first.
   Carpenter flat-out tells us Howard Hawks directed The Thing from Another World. It’s still debated whether that’s strictly true or not. What do we have going on in this movie, set on Mars? That’s not Hawks. It’s imitation. We got to watch the movie before it had time to finish.
   Finish what?
   Finish imitating Howard Hawks.
   Carpenter was too busy imitating Carpenter. The ghosts in this movie attacked elsewhere and moved on to attack the main area – we know that from a “survivor” who came from the first place. That’s straight-up imitation of the basic structure of The Thing. A survivor from the Norwegian camp reaches the American camp and tells everyone what’s going on. If only you spoke Norwegian Hovitos.
   And so it goes.
   The banter isn’t quite up to the usual standard. We’ve seen and heard it all before in previous Carpenter films. Ghosts of Mars is linked rather dubiously to Escape from New York. If you want to see a movie called Escape from Mars, featuring Snake Plissken, well, just watch this movie featuring Desolation Williams.
   We see what you did there. Once we put on those special sunglasses. We were promised one thing and given a cheaper version of it. Consume films. Be happy.
   Carpenter walked away from making movies for around a decade after that ghostly Martian excursion, and returned for one final film as I type…The Ward, which I have not seen.
   I stopped to watch the trailer for The Ward. Now I feel I’ve seen the whole movie. The art of the movie trailer is truly dead. Stopped again to watch the trailer for Ghosts of Mars. I rest my case.
   Anyway, gulp a slug of booze if the movie title is JOHN CARPENTER’S…
   That gives a new meaning to JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING if the title describes what he is and not the film that belongs to him.
   Leaving directing behind, his most recent credits have, unsurprisingly, been for movie scores. Ghosts of Mars falls down on the score, too. It feels as though the movie is leaning a bit more heavily on the music for assistance than it should be doing.
   We brought Anthrax in. Suddenly, that’s a selling-point. The score is right for another movie. Just, for this one, it feels like the music was asked to do a lot more than its fair share of the work in selling visuals.
   The main villain, super-mutant, chief zombie guy, who spends the movie screaming blah-de-blah-de-blah in Martian, is very transparently meant to be Alice Cooper – who wasn’t available. Cooper’s involvement would’ve shifted the musical tone, I’m sure. No Anthrax. Carpenter had to go cheaper with Cooper aboard. He’d have written his own score in full. Alice, I guess, might have penned a Martian track for an album.
   Cooper released Brutal Planet just before Ghosts of Mars went into production. As the brutal planet is never quite named in the song, it pretty much works as the opening track for this movie. Missed opporchancity? Yes.
   Back to the formula of JOHN CARPENTER’S GREATEST HITS…
   Hell, Prince of Darkness does the building under siege idea mixed with possessed bodies a hell of a lot better than Ghosts of Mars does, and Prince of Darkness features just as many John Carpenter movies thrown into a blender…
   It helps if you’ve seen some Quatermass films for Prince of Darkness. Yes, it is written by “Martin Quatermass” and that’s worth a shot. There’s a character named Wyndham, and Carpenter would go on to direct John Wyndam’s work…so there’s another shot.
   Kneale University could only be a reference to the creator of Quatermass, grumpy Nigel Kneale. Down a slug of booze to get over that sly bit of movie commentary. On the topic of grumpy Nigel Kneale, you don’t delve terribly deeply into Kneale’s work before finding out how much of a grumpy bastard he was. Really grumpy. Not yelling at clouds, but yelling at the sky behind the clouds. That grumpy.
   The chief complaint of Nigel Kneale is that everything isn’t written by Nigel Kneale – and that everything NOT written by Nigel Kneale is a waste of time. Oh, except for the third Hallowe’en movie, but he had his name removed from that production.
   Ghosts of Mars might’ve worked on the effects side of things if they’d cut the effects to the bone. Keep it minimalist. The town’s main street was okay. Building interiors did the job. Things fell apart if you were looking at a city in the distance or encampments below.
   Train fakery is acceptable. If Carpenter’d directed a straightforward action movie on our world, aboard a train, there’d be a load of train fakery anyway. We give that one a modest pass.
   There’s an Evil Dead feel to the alien possession which worked for reasons of cheapness. By fuck, my annual coffee budget is larger than the amount of cash they threw at The Evil Dead. Threw at, and missed. Say that in the voice of Sam Raimi, laughing.
   Where does the ghostly Carpenter movie fall apart? Our heroes are waiting for the train. Not quite the 3:10 to Yuma. Let’s say 3:10 to Yu-Mars and be done with it. There are other ways to handle this. But Carpenter goes with a Martian stand-off.
   You know the red mist possesses humans and turns them into self-destructive cultists. And you know if you kill a possessed human that the alien flees that corpse and seeks a new living host. The survivor tells us so. In her own way.
   The last fucking thing you are going to do is…kill any possessed people.
   No. You just can’t kill them. Instead, movie-makers, you write scenes about finding ways to block the possession. Annoyingly, there is a way to reverse the possession and expel the alien right there in this film. That part of the story should’ve been the main focus. Get everyone high as fuck and stroll out to the train.
   But no. There is a slow-mo trip to safety. This goes nowhere. The 3:10 is late. Snake Plissken…Desolation Clones…comes back into the fray, both guns blazing, along with everyone else, and they start killing aliens. I mean…they start releasing monsters who can fly right into your head.
   Your small valiant party attacks the zombies. And you kill more of them than they kill of you. Enough of them are now free to possess…ALL OF YOU. It is beyond tedious. The movie should end right on that fight. For reasons of padding out the plot, the film is obliged to continue.
   Flashbacks abound. The whole story is a flashback. But we stop off for a flashback inside that flashback. And we might even delve deeper into Inception levels of stories within stories, but frankly I haven’t the time. I stopped counting flashbacks within flashbacks. With a movie execution like this, it is hard to care.
   Yes, the movie was executed.
   Annoyingly, just to pad the story out even more, there are scenes of splitting the party and duplicating dialogue to show a flashback to what happened when the groups parted company. Let’s go over to another character and see what occurred there in his side of the flashback. A little overlap in the flashbacking and you pad the movie out just a touch more.
   You can admire Sam Peckinpah’s work. But any western attempt at slowing the motion of characters here…is not tribute. No. It’s just a way of padding the movie out a little more more. I could go on. Truth be told, I’ve gone on too long.
   There’s only one thing worse than a bad movie. And that’s a movie that comes so close to avoiding being bad. You can drive the Pork Chop Express through the holes in many a John Carpenter film on a dark and stormy night, and no one cares. We embrace the strange nonsensical rhythm of it all.
   Just not here, on Mars. I like the absurdity of the balloon sequence. Comes out of nowhere. No real budget for it, alas. The movie aches on many levels, though. You can set your watch by the second, showing Pam Grier’s departure from the story after those dollars went her way. She gets the shortest stick in this flick, as far as the main actors are concerned.
   The dialogue isn’t quite right. And the effects aren’t all there. The music tries too hard. This is a twice-cooked meal. The only reason Donald Pleasence isn’t in the film? He’d died over half a decade before. Inconvenient. (Doesn’t stop his resurfacing in a much later Hallowe’en movie, though.)
   I don’t actually have a problem with the cast. The actors do what they can. Second-shortest end of the stick goes to Clea DuVall, playing a character who is shocked by it all. We’re all shocked by it. Is the cast game enough for this? Not quite, but I don’t hold that against them.
   The padding. Inconsistent effects. Massive plot point over not killing the possessed – you could rack up a load of tension there as the heroes try their damnedest NOT to kill a maniac. Repeat the fight from They Live.
   We’d judge you…but only a little.
   Strap that possessed maniac to a bed and add a little more tension as the character tries to escape. Make the movie about NOT killing the enemy, coming up with other ways to raise the tension. Here’s a problem. Solve a problem. Obstacles in the way. At least throw a bone to the three-headed dog of plot holes.
   Anyway, it’s a bit shitty to take a Carpenter interview with The Guardian and split it across two Blu-ray releases. See. Even the special features let you down. I’m told you can view the whole thing online. Guess your level of irritation at half-interviews depends on which Carpenter movies you feel like buying. VAMPIRES has the first part of that interview. It’s a gritty western.
   Movies you feel like buying? That is, while the physical medium of the movie-on-disc is still a thing, for those who don’t want films beamed into the base of the spine by corporate chips. Consume streams. Be happy. Send us your viewing data.
   Yes, Ghosts of Mars has achieved its cult-like status. Carpenter’s not a fan of the word cult. Good job he hasn’t made any cult films. Or slasher movies. His Martian effort? It is watchable. Bearable. Endurable. To a point. Should have been so much more. How to fix it?
   We can’t. Reduce the budget. Cut scenes you can’t film. Of course, Carpenter already did that anyway. He’s a carpenter by nature, as well as name, and knows what to cut and when – more so in his earlier films.
   I won’t say much about ESCAPE FROM L.A. It was rumoured to have been a bridge between the New York escape and some sort of escape from the planet Mars. This sounds nearly true, and almost plays that way in viewing Ghosts of Mars. But then, the Martian film is a compilation of other Carpenter outings.
   Spoiler alert. Knock back a shot if you think ESCAPE FROM L.A. has a bleak ending. All electrical machines are wiped out. So how the hell does anyone convict Snake Plissken of a crime so harsh that he’s sent to Mars as punishment for a sequel? How do they fix up a rocket to send him on his way? Wouldn’t they be better off repairing hospital machinery first?
   ANYWAY.
   In the Los Angeles outing, I think the same thing goes – kill the money spent badly. In the Martian movie and ESCAPE FROM L.A. it’s an idea to cut the budget and eliminate the plastic computer effects. Work around scenes you then cannot put on film. Improve the tone of the product.
   As for escaping from Mars…
   Did Christian Nyby direct The Thing from Another World or didn’t he? Is Ghosts of Mars a retooling of an idea for a third Snake Plissken film or not? Hell, it’s enough of a retooling of Assault on Precinct 13 as it is.
   Certainly wouldn’t work as a vehicle for Snake Plissken. Does the man do nothing but spend his hours escaping? Ah, I guess that’s what we do, too, when we spend time watching escapist fare.
   Back to it. These shelves don’t clear themselves of movies. Unless you avoid putting movies on bookshelves alongside books in the first place. There’s a harsh lesson to be learned in there, somewhere.