1980 horror, dir. John Carpenter, Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis:
IMDb /
allmovie. The vengeful ghosts
are out to get you.
And it's good to see Jamie Lee Curtis again; she wasn't going to
be in this, but Carpenter worked her in at the last moment because he
felt she hadn't been offered enough good parts since Halloween. I
suspect that an earlier draft might have had Nick romancing Stevie; as
it is it sometimes feels that there isn't really enough for Elizabeth
[Curtis] to do in her own right.
Curtis' mother, Janet Leigh, is here too, as Kathy who seems to be in
charge of the town, though the pair don't have any scenes together. So's
Nancy Loomis, Annie from Halloween. Carpenter seems to end up with
actors who want to work with him again.
The thing is, as an overall plot there's a lot that breaks. The people
who would go on to found the town deliberately wrecked the ship that
was bringing the founders of a leper colony to be their neighbours;
gold stolen from the wreck was used to start the town on the way to
prosperity, but a hundred years later the ghosts want revenge. OK, I
can work with that. But towards the end it's suggested that the ghosts
only want six deaths, indeed six specific deaths of the descendants
of the original conspirators… so… how about all those people who
escaped being murdered because they didn't answer the door until five
seconds after one o'clock? The ones who were being assaulted through
the church windows? Stevie, with the monsters following her up onto
the lighthouse roof? Are we supposed to believe that they were never
in danger at all?
No, what this film is about is a lovely long build-up of tension, then
a series of individual scenes of horror and action that don't
necessarily make much sense in a larger contest. The cast is isolated
too; most of them don't meet each other except for very occasional
moments of contact.
But the shot that sums up the film for me and makes it more than an
effects reel is Nick and Elizabeth, having escaped from the first
attacks, sitting at a bar with other townspeople… and they're just
visibly tired. It's a lovely human moment that generates sympathy
for both of them, and more films should do this kind of thing.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.