While still a student at USC, John Carpenter (b.1948) would take home a 1970 Academy Award for best live-action short with his early effort, The Resurrection of Broncho Billy. On the success of this he was able to raise to finances to extend his first feature; 1974's Dark Star from its original 16mm to 35mm. A cult favorite, the film cunningly dismantled and debunked the machinery and pretensions of Stanley Kubrick's earlier 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Two thrillers that were made by Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) stand to be the director's most impressive hours. Assault on Precinct 13 is arguably the director's best film, in its brilliant redeploying the styles and conventions of Westerns such as 1959's Rio Bravo (dir.Howard Hawks) and the subsequent John Wayne directed Alamo (1960) in a remorselessly modern setting, as a convocation of assorted characters holed up inside of an abandoned Los Angeles police station battle for their very lives against urban terrorists. Even more successful commercially was Halloween which would make a star of its lead Jamie Lee Curtis, concerned an apparently indestructible psychopath with a particularly twisted sense of humor wreaking havoc in suburbia. This regrettably spawned an innumerable series of far less adroit films in which youngsters (chiefly female) were terrorized and slain by male deviants.
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| You're not even safe in police stations these days, I tell ya. Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) |
Carpenter's work has since stayed closer to his B-status movie roots - the monster in The Fog (1980) and The Thing (1982) being reassuringly supernatural rather than disturbingly human. Consequently though films like these and Escape to New York (1981) - set in a gangland in the future and more recently 2010's The Ward each host an entertainment factor though they lack the overarching crucial punch and wit of the director's mid Seventies successes.