John Carpenter | the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: Tremors

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Darren

Man, I love Tremors. I’m a professed B-movie geek who grew up on the particularly cheesy Wes Craven and John Carpenter films of the seventies and eighties, who has always harboured a soft spot for playful monster movies, so I reckon I’m the film’s target audience. Tremors is one of those affectionate throwbacks, those movies that don’t just aim to evoke a particular genre and time period (as The Expendables was a generis eighties action movie produced twenty-five years too later) so much as offer an up-to-date and self-aware reinvention of them (as Spielberg produced a thirties adventure serial with modern sensibilities in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Rodriguez offered a brutally hilarious modern-day Mex-ploitation film in Machete). Tremors is basically a fifties B-movie produced with late eighties A-list talent and self-awareness.

The town's gone to ground...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Bacon, Brent Maddock, Earth Sciences, Fossil, fred ward, John Carpenter, kevin bacon, non-review review, Paleontology, Peter Lindbergh, raiders of the lost ark, review, Ron Underwood, Russians, Tremors, Vertebrates, wes craven, wilson | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Thing (1982)

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Darren

John Carpenter’s The Thing is almost the perfect late-night Halloween viewing experience. It’s one of those movies that is gloriously trashy entertainment, with any number of visceral thrills, but also more deeply unnerving. Updating the 1951 The Thing From Another World, and arguably remaining truer to the original story, Who Goes There?, John Carpenter’s adaptation perfectly captures the unnerving paranoia of a world where there’s no promise that anybody is exactly what they claim to be. In space, nobody can hear you scream, but your odds aren’t too much better in the white Antarctic tundra.

What sort of Thing could do that?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Alien (film), Carpenter, film, John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, Movie, non-review review, review, ridley scott, the thing, The Thing (1982), Thing, Thing From Another World, William F. Nolan | 5 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Ringu

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Darren

There are a handful of movies I will forever associate with a particular viewing experience – and some with the first time I had seen a given movie. I remember, for instance, seeing Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for the first time with my father in the local cinema during its nineties re-release. When I think of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I recall the time I had to sit in the hall while the grown-ups watched it. Anytime I see The Shining, I think back to watching it in the wee hours of the morning with gran and granddad. The Japanese cult horror Ringu is something of a similar experience.