They Live

You know how sci-fi movies from the 1950s served as an allegory for the Red Scare and the Cold War? That lurking fear of "the enemy" being on your very doorstep, leaving you helpless to stop them? Turns out that allegory didn't completely disappear when McCarthy did.

Made during Reagan's second term as President, John Carpenter's They Live serves as a Carpenter's frustrations towards the former's policies. Granted, the 1980s were already a stressful and angry time but Carpenter was especially frustrated. (He still is all these years later.)

It wasn't just Reagnomics that Carpenter was pissed off at. As shown throughout They Live, he got annoyed at the mass (and crass) commercialism of the era. In anyone else's hands, the conveying of that frustration would've been clumsy and heavy-handed; Carpenter makes his irritation very clear.

Worrying still is that nearly forty years later, They Live is just as relevant as ever. With the internet and social media becoming present in everyday life, it makes the movie's message of hidden conspiracies all the more unsettling. (Fiction becoming fact...)

They Live shows that sometimes history is regularly doomed to repeat itself. The original offenders may be long gone but their actions still linger. But as also shown here, all it takes is someone seeing the awful truth to spark both a change and a revolution.

My Rating: ****1/2

The Thing

By now, everyone knows that remakes don't always work. There are those very rare exceptions, but the number is still small.

Most people know by now that John Carpenter is a devotee to Howard Hawks. (After all, Assault on Precinct 13 is a sci-fi take on Rio Bravo.) Carpenter's The Thing, although based on a different source, clearly had Hawks' The Thing from Another World as an influence. (Yes, I know Hawks wasn't the official director, but just go with it.)

I'm not big on gore, but Carpenter is fortunate enough to not overdo it. Okay, he does overdo it sometimes, but it has meaning to it. Saying I got nightmares from it is an understatement; I got nightmares for all eternity. As if Halloween didn't spook me out enough. Now Carpenter's my go-to source for something scary.

The Thing gets a good feel of paranoia. Think of it as Invasion of the Body Snatchers set in Antarctica. You don't know who's been taken over, so you're constantly on edge. You know how Brian De Palma kept making homages to Hitchcock? Carpenter did that with immense ease with both Halloween and The Thing.

My Rating: *****

Halloween

A role her father did was as one of the most infamous serial killers that ever lived. Her mother's most famous role was as the victim of Hollywood's most prolific murder scene. So wouldn't it be appropriate that their daughter's film debut was as the prey of a deranged killer?

Fifteen years after murdering his older sister, Michael Myers escapes from the mental institution, much to the dismay and horror of his psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence). Michael returns to his hometown of Haddonfield and starts stalking Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she makes plans for Halloween. But Loomis isn't going to have Michael claim another victim.

Over thirty years old and it's still scary. The fact that this could actually happen makes it really unnerving. There are actually a few references to Psycho in Halloween, particularly the name of Sam Loomis (in Halloween, he is Michael's psychiatrist; in Psycho, he is Marion's lover). Pretty ballsy stuff for a horror movie with a shoestring budget. One of the best horror movies ever made.

My Rating: *****