Netflix'd :: Clearing Out the Instant Que :: Taking a Ride Down Showtime's Rebel Highway (1994)

Back in 1994, American International Pictures kinda had a mini-revival on premium cable via Showtime's anthology series, Rebel Highway. Under the guiding hand of producers Lou Arkoff (son of AIP's co-founder, Samuel Z. Arkoff,) and Debra Hill (Halloween, Escape from New York), all ten episodes were based on a sordid and motley bunch of vintage AIP juvenile delinquent and high-octane exploitation releases from the 1950s; period pieces still, but with more *ahem* lax standards and practices. Or, as the younger Arkoff put it: "If you made Rebel Without a Cause today, it would be more lurid, sexier, and much more dangerous -- and you definitely would've had Natalie Wood's top off." (From the Rebel Highway Wikipedia page.) 

With the only caveat being they had to be set in the '50s and fit into a programming slot, lengthwise, to make this happen, Arkoff and Hill sent out feelers to several top-notch directors, offering them a decent 12 day shooting budget, with full creative control over the script, cast and crew choices on whatever title they personally chose to pluck from AIP's back catalog to remake. Well, not outright remakes, mind you, but films 'inspired by' the original title. Or, more than likely, these new adaptation were based on the old posters for these films just like American International had done so successfully for years and years, where the promotional art rendered by Al Kallis or Reynold Brown came first, and, if they drew booking interest, only then did a movie get made. Several big name directors answered the call, along with a few young turks, with casts littered by the established brat-packers of the day -- but it was some fairly new faces, who now look very familiar, that really left their mark on the series. Throw in some Brylcreem, tailfins, nicotine, rocket-bras, leather, chrome, switchblades, and a lot of scorched asphalt, with a killer soundtrack as a cherry on top of it all (Fats Domino, Link Wray, and a metric ton of obscure rockabilly from the likes of Jody Reynolds and The Scarlets), some episodes prove better than others, yes, but thus far I've found nary an outright dud in the whole bunch.

Serving as the opening salvo, Robert Rodriguez's RoadRacers is one hellacious opening act with Dude Delaney (David Arquette) as our hot-rodding rebel rouser, who has just about had it with the Squaresville he calls home. Hounded by a psychotic police sergeant (William Sadler) and his even more psychopathic son (Jason Wiles), both looking to settle old scores, this sets up several staggering vignettes of ratcheting tension, territorial pissings, and fateful decisions until it all finally explodes with a final, fatal rumble. Along for the inevitable ride on this road to ruin are Selma Hayek as Dude's girlfriend, Donna, but the movie is absolutely stolen out from under everybody by a barely recognizable John Hawkes as our hero's toadie and street corner prophet, Nixer, who is currently obsessed with the new movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose themes of coerced conformity and homogenization Rodriguez uses brilliantly as a framing device to help finally prod our hero down the wrong, self-destructive path. 

All of the director's hyper-active quirks are present and accounted for, and if the episode has one flaw, and it's nearly fatal, is all the 'time-outs' Rodriguez takes to focus solely on the fetishistic ritual of Dude striking a pose, greasing up the ducktail, popping a Winchester, and lighting an over-modulated match that stopped being "kewl" and started being downright buffoonish about the fourth or fifth time thru (and I stopped counting at 12), which kinda derails the mood and it just wasn't necessary. A major minor quibble, because the rest delivers a sizable entertaining payload.

Next, director John Milius liberally mixed in a massive dose of Hot Rods to Hell (1967) into his version of Motorcycle Gang, where once more a family in transit is menaced by pack of degenerate two-wheeling hooligans when the club leader (Jake Busey) takes a shine to their daughter (Carla Gugino). But even before the rubber hits the road we're already made privy to several family skeletons. Seems the Morris' marriage is already on the brink due to the overly-stoic father (Gerald MCraney), who hasn't been the same since coming home from the war, always distancing himself from everyone due to some lingering PTSD; this detachment causes the emotionally unstable mother (Elan Oberon) to find comfort in the arms of another man, which only makes the wedge driven between her and her daughter, who knows about the affair, even worse; and frankly, it was bad enough already due to mom's vanity and the lingering jealousy over the misconception of being constantly upstaged by her rapidly blossoming offspring. Hoping a fresh move to California will help solve all their problems, somewhere in the desert, they run afoul of this predatory pack of heroin smugglers, who have a history of kidnapping, raping, and murdering unwary waitresses from many a roadside diner. And soon enough, these thugs engineer another smash and grab before heading off to Mexico. And when the authorities on both sides of the border prove worthless, it's up to dear old dad to tap into some old training and unleash hell to save his daughter, his family, and, ultimately, his marriage. 

I know Milius grew up immersed in the surfing culture of southern California, which kinda shows, here, through his palpable disdain for the bikers and beatniks our nuclear family unit encounters during this trial by fire. In fact, he kind of thumbs his nose at the whole genre, epitomized in the scene where the daughter, innocent, bored, and just maybe looking for a ride on the wild side, almost falls for the roguish greaser's line of bullshit only to be rewarded with a sexual assault followed by the threat of a gang bang. (The fact that she is saved by her Fabian pin, a stand up guy, sure, but definitely the establishment's answer to Elvis Presley, only adds insult to injury.) Oh yeah, here, Milius is squarely on the side of law and order, especially when you have to take it into your own hands to defend what is yours. Whether you agree or disagree, Motorcycle Gang does provide an interesting counterpoint to all the other glorification tales of rebels, delinquents, and rock 'n' rollers. Personally, I think the set-up of simmering hostility and smoldering lust plays out better than the vengeful payoff. And the whole thing is saved thanks to the efforts of McRaney, Gugino, Busey and Oberon in front of the camera, making up for Milius' too heavy a hand behind it.

Meanwhile, Mary Lambert's Dragstrip Girl is a wildly disjointed love letter to the forbidden teen romance that fueled a lot of these exploitation pieces. Here, on the wrong side of the tracks we find Johnny Ramirez (Mark Dacascos), a Chicano car hop, who also ramrods a low yield but extremely effective car theft ring with several of his cohorts (including a young Raymond Cruz). Johnny lives with his wheel-chair bound brother (Augusto Sandino) under the supervision of their 'aunt' Blanche (Traci Lords, doing a passable impersonation of Mamie Van Doren doing a passable impersonation of Marilyn Monroe), who runs a brothel out of her bedroom that her 'boys' constantly spy on through several holes in the plaster. (And how she or her clientele cannot hear their constant derisive giggling is beyond me.) Anyhoo, longing for something above his station, Johnny soon becomes infatuated with Laura Bickford (Natasha Gregson Wagner, daughter of Natalie Wood), a girl from the suburbs, much to the chagrin of her letter-jacket wearing beau. Seeing her as the key to getting everything he wants, meaning wealth and standing, turns out this girl who has everything is tired of the same old thing and looking for something 'money can't buy.' And after a fairly creepy stalking sequence, Johnny mistakes this confession for wanting something more dangerous (and he would've known different if he'd only read the diary he stole earlier), and so, he uses one of the stolen cars to impress his new girl at the drag races, which brings on a ton of heat from the cops -- not only on him but his soon to be former friends. 

Alas, this tale was destined to end tragically, as Johnny chucks everything, not for the girl, or t'woo wuv, but for what the girl can give him, which, when you consider how he treats his old girlfriend, betrays his friends, gets his brother killed, and whether Laura loves him or not is completely irrelevant, because, I don't care how diehard a romantic you are, you cannot change the fact that Johnny is a self-serving asshole of astronomical proportions. Known mostly for directing Madonna's breakout music videos, Lambert's effort here was trying for the same stylized aesthetic but wound up with something a little off-kilter that's hampered by a strange candy-coating that leaves the weird parts not weird enough, the romantic bits too awkward, and the sleazy parts not sleazy enough, leaving you with a sense that Dragstrip Girl had a lot of promise left unfulfilled. No. Check that. Not unfulfilled. Misfired. An entertaining enough misfire, but a misfire just the same.

Speaking of misfires, Jonathan Kaplan's Reform School Girl probably comes off a little too sweet for its own good. Strange, considering this is the same guy who gave us the ultimate movie about disaffected youth with the highly nihilistic Over the Edge (1979). It starts with an introduction to Donna Patterson (Aimee Graham), a good girl, who works as a waitress, desperately trying to save enough money to get her and her little sister out of their lecherous uncle's house. (Their real parents died in a car crash.) Unfortunately for her, she's set up on a disastrous blind date with a young turk named Vince (Matt LeBlanc); and I say disastrous because it ends with a fatal hit and run, with Vince ditching the stolen car and Donna at the scene of the crime. Unable to provide the last name of the driver, Donna is convicted on manslaughter charges, but, thanks to a clean record otherwise, she is sentenced to a girl's reformatory for rehabilitation instead of the state pen. 

What follows never really strays from the usual women in prison tropes, this time with a juvenile twist. You've got the usual learning curve, treacherous snitches, food fights, time spent in the hole, and a predatory warden (Carolyn Seymour) looking for athletes to populate the institution's track team. Wait. Track team? Yes, a track team, which explains why the behind the bars antics are dumped for a bizarre slobs versus snobs third act that is stolen wholesale from two other prison flicks: Michael Mann's The Jericho Mile (1979) and Sidney Poitier's Stir Crazy (1980). There is some intrigue in-between as Donna makes friends and loses friends on the inside, gets into trouble with the grab-fanny staff psychiatrist, and refuses to join up until coerced. (Luckily, she is still able to clandestinely gets her sister out of Dodge and away from both Vince and Mr. Bad Touch.) Along the way, Kaplan also manages the seemingly impossible by having an exploratory lesbian make-out scene in a prison flick without one single iota of salaciousness generated and, dare I say, comes off as kinda sweet. Which is nice, yes, but probably isn't quite what you're looking for in something called Reform School Girl. But! I still dug it and the 'up yours' ending nonetheless.

I don't think anybody can strip the veneer off the 1950s better than Joe Dante. And he does it again here, taking the decade behind the woodshed and beating it senseless with a big, biting farcical club of comedy called Runaway Daughters, which begins with a delightful montage credit sequence culled (I assume) from Dante's The Movie Orgy to give everyone a snapshot of life in the Eisenhower era, which, in spite of what your parents and grandparents tell you, proves just as dysfunctional as any other era. And after another nifty sequence at the local drive-in to introduce our players, our story proper kicks in when a horny teenager (Chris Young) uses the imminent threat of the recently launched Sputnik to finally get into the pants of his girl, Mary (Holly Fields). And when Mary misses her next period, she confronts Bob with the news of his imminent fatherhood, who promptly skips town to join the Navy. When Mary's two best friends, Angie and Laura (Julie Bown, Jenny Lewis), get wind of this treachery, they concoct a bizarre faux kidnapping plot so the three of them can steal a car and skip town to San Diego to head the deadbeat father off at the recruiting station, drag him back home, and make him do the right thing before the whole town knows what happened. But things get a little crazy on the road where out trio encounter a couple of lecherous patrol cops, crazed anti-commie survivalists, and two mad-dog killers. Meanwhile, back home, the parents realize the local cops are idiots and hire a private detective (Dick Miller), who doesn't buy the kidnap plot, to find their errant children. And with the help of one of their boyfriends (Paul Rudd), he's soon hot on their trail; but will he catch them before they catch Bob? Or will they even make it to San Diego at all? 

The answer to all of the above is yes. Yes they do. And it ends disastrously for one of them but I will leave it to you to find out who. Runaway Daughters would make a great double feature with Matinee (1993), Dante's cinematic ode to the next decade gone awry. Mostly harmless and quite silly, the whole film comes off as a goof; and taken as goof, it truly is wonderful. Hysterical even. All of Dante's trademark destructive humor is there, along with a ton of welcomed cameos (Roger and Julie Corman, Fabian, and even Sam Arkoff shows up), the usual stock players (Miller, Christopher and Dee Wallace Stone, Belinda Belasky, and Robert Picardo), and the usual film references and inside jokes. (The family names are (Jim) Nicholson, (Lou) Rusoff, (Eddie L.) Cahn, and (Alex) Gordon, all familar to American International junkies like myself, and keep your eyes out for the AIP food market and gas station.) The third act is kinda leaking water, and there's a twist that resolves itself a little too cheaply, but, eh, I'll just roll with it. And besides, I was too busy laughing to really even notice.

Before I wrap this up, I would also like to commend Arkoff and Hill for the dedication that finished every film, paying tribute to the late, great James H. Nicholson, who was the creative force behind American International, and Lou Rusoff, who penned the majority of those scripts that first put AIP on the map.

Adapting their feature films to TV was nothing new for American International Pictures. Larry Buchanan did a bunch of remakes back in the 1960s that netted us Zontar the Thing from Venus and Attack of the the Eye Creatures. And Cinemax would follow in Showtime's footsteps in 2001 by re-imagining some of AIP's sci-fi output (Teenage Caveman, Earth vs. the Spider), though I found those results pretty odious. But I'm really digging this revisit to the Rebel Highway, so much so that this retrospective will definitely be continued somewhere further up the road as I polish off the rest of the series. Until then, stay cool, Boils and Ghouls.  

Rebel Highway (1994) Drive-In Classics :: Showtime Networks / P: Lou Arkoff, Debra Hill, Willie Kutner, Llewellyn Wells / AP: Llewellyn Wells / D: Allan Arkush, Ralph Bakshi, Joe Dante, Uli Edel, William Friedkin, Jonathan Kaplan, Mary Lambert, John McNaughton, John Milius, Robert Rodriguez

Trailer Park :: It Really Was the Boogey Man :: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)

Fifteen years after he brutally murdered his older sister on Halloween night, Michael Myers engineers an escape from the mental institution he'd been confined in since he was six years old. Convinced his patient is evil personified, and doubly-convinced he will return home to kill again, his psychiatrist doggedly pursues him back to Haddonfield, where his worst fears are soon realized as the ghostly fugitive starts stalking a trio of teenaged girls who have no idea what's about to hit them...

 

Video Courtesy of classichorrorfilm.

When Irwin Yablans caught a screening of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, the producer really liked what he saw for the money that was spent and immediately sent out feelers to the novice auteur to see if he'd be interested in doing a movie for him based on the old urban legend of an escaped mental patient stalking and terrorizing an isolated babysitter. 

Wanting something as scary and groundbreaking as The Exorcist and The Omen -- only without the pea soup vomit or visceral impaling and decapitations, with a dictum of a scare every ten minutes without ever showing anything and letting the audience be frightened by what they think they saw, Yablans found a kindred spirit with Carpenter, who always championed old school film shocks, and he agreed to the challenge of writing, directing and scoring the feature under three conditions: total creative control, final cut, and his name over the title. Yablans happily agreed to these demands, and feeling the film could made for about $300,000, after shopping their project around, and after a lot of closing studio doors hit them on the ass on the way out, the duo finally found a simpatico backer with Moustapha Akkad. 

With the money firmly in place, Carpenter turned to his muse (and girlfriend at the time), Debra Hill, and together, they hammered out a script for The Babysitter Murders with Hill concentrating on the teenage protagonists while Carpenter focused on the psycho and the kooky doctor trying to rein him back in. Here, Yablans stepped in again and suggested they set the tale around Halloween; and even co-opted the holiday for the title. And with that in mind, the script galvanized itself with several more elements about evil's durability (Carpenter based 'the shape' on Yul Brynner's unstoppable robot in Michael Crichton's Westworld, who kept on coming and coming...), terrible family (and community) secrets best forgotten reasserting themselves and coming home to roost with a vengeance, and some old fashioned carnival spook-show thrills, where there's always something lurking in the shadows around the next turn, waiting to jump out and say "boo." 

Casting would prove slightly more difficult. Originally, the part of Laurie Strode was offered to Anne Lockhart, who was starring in Battlestar Galactica at the time; but this first choice turned them down flat. Hill then suggested Jamie Lee Curtis, a fresh face, whose name could be exploited being the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, who, of course, starred in Psycho, whose shocks and black humor Carpenter was trying to mimic. The role of Lynda was specifically written for P.J. Soles (and cribbed just a snudge from her similar character in Carrie); and Nancy Loomis, the girlfriend of production designer Tommy Lee Wallace, was given the role of the good girl foil, Annie. A hold over from Precinct 13, Loomis, as were several other actors, including Charlie Cyphers, were fast becoming familiar faces in Carpenter's burgeoning stable of stock players, mimicking some of his cinematic role models like John Ford and Howard Hawks. 

For the silent killer, Carpenter cast his friend, Nick Castle, for the majority of the picture, with Tony Maron subbing in for the brief unmasking. But Castle is the one who deserves most of the credit for Michael Myers' menacing and unrelenting presence. As for Dr. Loomis, again, Donald Pleasance was not the first choice; and the only reason he agreed to be in Halloween is because his daughter was a fan of Assault on Precinct 13's soundtrack. And as much as I love Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, I'm kinda glad they both turned down the role first because Pleasance brings such a maniacal bugnutsitude to the character, making one wonder if, indeed, the lunatics were running the asylum. And just like with most of these spooky tales, despite all that ranting and raving, the nutjob is absolutely right on the money. 

The script and cast set, with a crew made up of friends, and friends of friends, hungry for experience, filming commenced from every possible angle that didn't show any palm trees in South Pasadena. And with some help from cinematographer Dean Cundey, armed with the recently innovated Panaglide steadicam, the film quickly established a distinctive and fluid look and an overall aesthetic that definitely elevates it several notches above its like-minded brethren. (I love the constant misdirection and sleight of hand with 'the shape' appearing and disappearing at will, and how scene after scene is set up to draw your attention one way when we you should be looking somewhere else.) Add in a modified William Shatner mask and a soundtrack inspired by the pulsating beats of Goblin and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (performed by the one-man Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra), Carpenter and Hill and company produced themselves one helluva taut, tense and creepifying film. 

Once filming was completed, however, Yablans still couldn't find anyone willing to distribute it ( -- a decision that was about to haunt many a studio exec.) Undaunted, Yablans decided to distribute the film on his own through his Compass International Pictures. Turning to his business partner, Joseph Wolf, who cashed in a favor at MGM that netted them 400 prints of Halloween, Yablans started rolling them out regionally with little or no publicity; and after an initially tepid response, that had the disappointed filmmakers heading back the drawing board, Halloween quickly caught fire and started raking it at the box-office as it moved from mouth to mouth and city to city  ( -- it was held over for five weeks in my hometown). The spread was so slow and steady rumor has it both Carpenter and Hill never even realized they had a hit on their hands until several months had passed.

Often imitated but never bettered, Halloween is one of those rare films that not only lives up to its reputation but exceeds it. I wasn't old enough to see it in a theater back in 1978, but heard all about it from my eldest siblings, who played right into my hands when they thought they were rubbing that fact in when they gave me the rundown. The first time I actually saw it was the extended cut shown on NBC. Then came the VHS version, and then the DVD, where I finally got to see the whole thing in its proper aspect ratio, and finally, the BluRay. Each stage was a new revelation, with the latest platform really showing what an influence Mario Bava had on the color schemes and the obvious mini-Argento / Suspiria homage during the rainy nuthouse escape, and each step only cemented my love for the film even further. And if you haven't seen it yet, I truly envy you. You're in for a real treat. No trick. Honest.

 Other Points of Interest:

Poster campaign for Halloween at the Archive.

Newspaper ads for Halloween at the Morgue.

Halloween (1978) Compass International Pictures :: Falcon International Productions / EP: Moustapha Akkad, Irwin Yablans / P: Debra Hill / AP: Kool Marder / D: John Carpenter / W: John Carpenter, Debra Hill / C: Dean Cundey / E: Charles Bornstein, Tommy Lee Wallace / M: John Carpenter / S: Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Donald Pleasence, Charles Cyphers, Tony Moran, Nick Castle 

Movie Poster Spotlight :: The Trick to Staying Alive is No Treat When He Came Home :: John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)

"Hi, everybody. We're back. Miss me? Also, BOO!"

Well, it's October. Fall is here, and Hallowe'en is fast approaching -- and what better way to celebrate than with an International conglomeration of French, Spanish, German and Australian lobby cards for John Carpenter's seminal seasonal classic Halloween.

Stay tuned, Boils and Ghouls. We're just getting warmed up.

Halloween (1978) Falcon International Productions :: Compass International Pictures / EP: Moustapha Akkad, Irwin Yablans / P: John Carpenter, Debra Hill / AP: Kool Marder / D: John Carpenter / W: John Carpenter, Debra Hill / C: Dean Cundey / E: Charles Bornstein, Tommy Lee Wallace / M: John Carpenter / S: Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Donald Pleasence, Charles Cyphers, Tony Moran, Nick Castle

Trailer Park :: What You Can't See Might Kill You : John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

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"I don't know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us ... But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don't wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea  who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

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I was about four or five when I saw The Ten Commandments for the very first time on TV; and one of the things that always stuck with me from this first viewing was the last plague Moses sics on the Pharaoh, when the Almighty sent his Angel of Death to kill all the first born sons of Egypt. (Well, that and that whole parting of the Red Sea thing...) This was realized in the film with an unearthly fog, creeping and seeping through the streets, and to even touch this vapor meant instantaneous death -- and, to me, it seemed regardless of your birth order. 

Several years later, while driving home on a lonely country road I crested a hill and, in one of those bizarre barometric twists of nature, spied a small fog bank on the other side, barely three-feet high, that devoured the road ahead of me. As I dipped down into the small valley below the fog engulfed the headlights and broke around the car's hood, but then immediately stitched back together just past the trunk. Intrigued by this encompassing soup, I pulled over, kicked the hazards on, and got out. The moon was full and bright and lit the mist up like white liquid under a black UV-light. Wading into this cloud, the vapor whipped up in my wake as I ran my hands over the top of it, like I was wading in a pool of water; and then, on a whim, got down on my hands and knees where, to my surprise in the headlamp glow, I saw about a six-inch gap between the gloom and the ground. Above, as I continued to move around, all that was visible were some fence-posts, a nearby windmill, and the top of the car. This was all as cool as it sounds (I hope), and my words don't do it justice, but then, just like when you’ve been in the water for a while and that stupid shark music starts playing in your head and gives you the willies as you contemplate your place on the food chain, a small, dour pit or irrationality developed in my stomach and settled there as I smiled sardonically at myself, wondering if there was anything lurking nearby, no matter how nonsensical its existence, just beyond my sense to detect it properly. 

No. This wasn't any kind of old school biblical dread that I felt that night, but ghosts. Ghosts of the unsettled dead, who linger, fed by a need for vengeance, and walk the earth until their untimely and unjust deaths are avenged ... That's right, in the middle of nowhere, and several time zones removed from any major body of water, I was worried that Captain Blake and his men were out there, somewhere, waiting for me to turn my back to his best advantage. So, yeah, you could say John Carpenter's The Fog made a helluva impression on me, too...

Video courtesy of horrornymphs.

The Fog opens on a quiet beach near Antonio Bay, where an old salt enthralls a group of kids gathered around a campfire with ghostly tales of the sea. As the fat full moon rises and the brackish tide slowly ebbs, our storyteller listens to a forlorn wind as he checks his watch, that shows five minutes to midnight. 

Time for one more story:

When the clock strikes twelve, he direly intones, it will be the 21st of April -- a date that will live in infamy, we’ll soon find out. For on that date, exactly 100 years ago, the Elizabeth Dane got lost in a dense, meteorological defying fog in these very waters. And when the crew spotted what they thought was a signal fire to lead them safely in, it was only someone’s campfire. Terminally off course, then, the ship cracked up on the rocks off Spivey Point, just over yonder, and sank, with all hands lost to the cold and dark and unforgiving sea. And as the Elizabeth Dane settled to the bottom, seemingly having served its aberrant purpose, the preternatural fog disappeared ... Now, I know this story sounds more tragic than scary, but this tale ends with ominous portent, when the old man prophesizes that when that unnatural fog returns, those doomed and drowned men will rise up out of the water and seek revenge on whoever lit that misleading fire just as a distant church bell strikes midnight -- in more ways than one -- on the sleepy little hamlet of Antonio Bay, whose sinister secrets are about to surface and be cleaved wide open!

Okay, then, now, that beginning sequence with John Houseman's preamble on the beach sneakily lulls the viewer into lowering your defenses and really sucks you in (...and let's face it: Houseman just reading the phone-book in these surroundings would be spooky enough). And this eeriness continues right through the opening credits as the town is overrun with bizarre and vandalous poltergeist-like phenomenon. Most shots have a clock in them somewhere, showing the Witching Hour as it slowly tics by. If there is no clock, resident disc jockey Stevie Wayne (Barbeau) gives the time over the air. It's a very subtle -- yet very satisfying, sequence. But, the film just cannot sustain the mood past this point. There are a few flashes of brilliance later, but the film loses its focus somewhere in the middle, switching back and forth between characters and plot-threads so fast you'll get whiplash. And after the scatter-shot middle, we're left with an all too familiar ending where Carpenter resorts back to his Howard Hawks roots and gets his Rio Bravo on with another hole-up and siege scenario, similar to Assault on Precinct 13, only this time with water-logged zombie sailors.

It’s been documented that Carpenter has a framed copy of Variety in his possession that proclaims The Fog was the biggest moneymaker for a certain period in 1980. He says he keeps it as a reminder for how close he came to a complete, cinematic disaster. Co-writing the script with his long time collaborator Debra Hill (Halloween, Escape from New York), the film was meant to be a ghostly/ghastly homage to Lovecraftian themes of terrible family secrets, curses, and evil-squishy things hell bent on vengeance. And unlike his other films, The Fog truly is a straight-up ghost story designed to titillate, creep-up, and give you a bad case of the drizzles. We hear a lot of death in this movie, but we rarely see it. Once principal photography was completed -- aided, abetted and greatly enhanced by the efforts of cinematographer Dean Cundey, another Carpenter regular, the director turned the film over to his trusty editors, Charles Bornstein and Tommy Wallace, and began hammering out the film's soundtrack. But after splicing all of it together, the end results were rather dire. Finding it too plodding and too slow, Carpenter initially thought about biting the bullet and letting the film ride, but then, with the studio's encouragement, who felt the film lacked sufficient shocks, the director decided to try and salvage it. He took a month, rewrote and re-shot several scenes, and even redid the film’s score, then spliced it back together with the old footage into something that he and AVCO/Embassy could live with. When the film was finally released, The Fog didn’t receive as much acclaim as Halloween but it did do very well at the box office.

There are a few interesting subplots that are brought up, like when Solley (Curtis) and Castle (Atkins) find and search the inexplicably swamped and salt-encrusted Sea Grass, which inevitably leads to a reanimated corpse in the morgue. Cool, yes, but this also reinforces one of my biggest beefs I have with the movie -- another interesting plot development that's spooky enough as an isolated incident but only adds confusion when looking at the whole. And making matters worse, more often than not these tangents are left to die on the vine. Are the other missing sailors, Dan the Weatherman, and Mrs. Kobritz now among the dead assaulting the town? Close scrutiny of some of the publicity materials show that they very well could be. And, more importantly, were all the victims direct descendants of the six original conspirators like Father Malone (Holbrook), whose church was built with the blood-stained gold? 

Despite these complaints, I do like this film -- really, and quite a bit, actually. Most of the problems I have can probably be blamed on its patchwork origins and over-tinkering after the fact; and I've been told that a lot of the questions and holes the plot doesn't answer or fill in are expanded upon in Dennis Etchison's novelization, and even confirms some of my theories and suspicions.

Perhaps lost in the, forgive me, fog of Carpenter's more famous films, The Fog probably deserves to be brought out into the sun more often, which can burn away any and all misgivings. Besides, it is really, really creepy. A slow and slithering creep, sure, but sometimes, those are the best kind.

This post is part of the John Carpenter Blogathon, originating over at J.D.'s Radiator Heaven. Thanks for throwing out such a wide net and allowing me to participate. Now click on over there and check out the other entries. Good reading, to you all! 

The Fog (1980) E.D.I. :: Debra Hill Productions :: AVCO Embassy Pictures / EP: Charles B. Bloch / P: Debra Hill / AP: Barry Bernardi, Pegi Brotman / D: John Carpenter / W: John Carpenter. Debra Hill / C: Dean Cundey / E: Charles Bornstein,Tommy Lee Wallace / M: John Carpenter / S: Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook, Nancy Loomis, John Houseman