DOOMSDAY QUARTET Part Three

IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1995: Dir. John Carpenter)

The year was 1995 and writer-director John Carpenter's career was faltering, yet again. Having recently experienced his most dispiriting studio production, the Chevy Chase debacle Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and experimented with the entertaining but slight Body Bags (1993), a cable TV horror anthology for Showtime, designed in the style of Tales from the Crypt with the director himself in ghoulish make-up as a cadaverous host, Carpenter knew he needed to get back to what his fans and he himself knew were his strengths as a filmmaker, scaring people's socks off. He found his opportunity with a script written by young New Line Cinema studio executive Michael De Luca. If many of Carpenter's previous films had cleverly cherry-picked devices from the seminal fantastique literature of H. P. Lovecraft, he now took the opportunity to re-embrace with his horror roots by making an all-out Lovecraft pastiche. Lovecraft's mythology posited the existence of old gods returning from their trans-dimensional imprisonment to punish humankind for its misdeeds. De Luca's script takes that premise as the underpinning for a story about the disappearance of a Stephen King-like author whose writings not only drive readers insane but are in fact opening a portal to the dimension where Lovecraft's demonic deities await their resurrection. An insurance investigator played with smarmy charm by Sam Neill is the audience's cynical alter-ego, whose sanity slowly disintegrates as he witnesses reality itself being pulled apart. Tapping into the burgeoning millennial anxiety of Western culture at the time, Carpenter created his ultimate meta-film statement about the artistic responsibility of creative people and how their work is often shamelessly exploited despite the harm this does to the artist and public alike. These charismatic profiteers are amusingly parodied in the casting of a righteous Charlton Heston as the publisher who hires Neill, a benignly evil-enabling role which foreshadows Heston's own future as a messianic president of the NRA. Perhaps not unexpectedly In The Mouth of Madness was largely overlooked during its initial release but as with nearly all of Carpenter's work, its value was eventually recognized by critics and fans on DVD and Blu-Ray despite being accompanied by a most tedious technical commentary from Carpenter and his director of photography Gary Kibbe.  It was to be the pinnacle of his work during the Nineties and remains his last great feature film to date.  BLU-RAY REGION A

DOOMSDAY QUARTET Part Two

PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987: Dir. John Carpenter)

I vividly remember when John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness first opened. I was living in Halifax at the time and it was playing at one of the city's seediest cinemas, The Casino situated in the impoverished North End. The area was known to be unsafe and infrequently visited by my friends who insisted on taking a taxi directly to and from the cinema. I even recall hearing about a bar fight across the street where someone was attacked with an axe! Regardless of these warning signs I would not to be swayed from my support for the work of my favourite contemporary horror auteur. It had been four years since filmmaker John Carpenter had been attached to a film where he was not a director for hire. Both Christine (1983) and Starman (1984) had been penance for The Thing, and although they found an audience, the undeserved failure of his follow-up, Big Trouble In Little China, left a bad taste in his mouth for the corporate bureaucracy of Hollywood. To restore his faith in film-making he decided on a personal project that would be independently financed. Carpenter has always acknowledged his affection for British fantasy writer Nigel Kneale. Kneale was a unique talent in the U.K. having created legendary science fiction character Bernard Quatermass for a trilogy of 1950s TV serials later remade for the big screen by Hammer Films, as well as scripting the feature film versions of  playwright John Osborne's seminal kitchen sink dramas Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. Carpenter had even employed Kneale to dream up an esoteric ancient pagan boogeyman for Halloween III, a collaboration which fell apart after Kneale stubbornly refused to compromise his early draft ideas. Despite this personal rift, Carpenter retained his admiration for Kneale's eerie ouevre so in a concerted effort to return to the artistic freedom of his indie horror roots he chose to make an explicit hommage to Kneale's spine-tingling BBC haunted house tale The Stone Tape. With a minimal budget of 3 million dollars, and a pseudonymously written script by "Martin Quatermass", Carpenter grafted his trademark group under siege template (Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog) to a Lovecraftian doomsday story about a group of scientists investigating the properties of a vessel kept hidden for a millennium by the Catholic Church and said to contain the anti-God. It was to be the most intellectually audacious film of his entire career, incorporating Carpenter's then recent obsession with the science and philosophy of quantum mechanics into a challenging theological horror context. Made at such a low cost the film couldn't help but make money, however one is left with the nagging feeling that the film's quality could have been much improved with more accomplished supporting players. This is no reflection on the peerless casting of Carpenter favourite Donald Pleasence (Halloween), who brings an effortless authority and dignity to his role as a priest courageously confronting his own loss of faith as he seeks to defeat a supernatural being that defies the boundaries between science and religion. This epic battle over evil is atmospherically accompanied by Carpenter's own pulsating electronic musical score, menacingly summoning up an aural anxiety of the apocalypse. It all takes place in a lonely church located within a desolate district of Los Angeles, an area not unlike the poor Halifax neighbourhood that greeted me as I exited the cinema 28 years ago. Still shaken by Carpenter's intense and profound vision, I dared the dangerous journey back home to the "safe" part of town, but the thrill and paranoia of that viewing remains with me to this day. BLU-RAY REGION A