Genre filmmaking legend John Carpenter has recently taken to Letterboxd to write some frank reviews of his own movies and others.
Update: It’s since been confirmed that the profile attributed to John Carpenter is fake. We’ll keep this post live to avoid 404 errors. Sadly, the posts outlined below really are too good to be true, and weren’t written by the horror maestro himself.
Our original story follows…
Having made some of the greatest genre movies ever made, John Carpenter has quite deservedly shifted down a gear or two over the past decade or so. These days, he’s keeping himself busy with his music, playing videogames (he really loves Fallout 76), holding the occasional mercurial interview with the press – and, as it turns out, writing the odd review on Letterboxd.
Brilliantly, as spotted by Twitter’s Haunted Hippie (via our own John Moore), Carpenter has even cast his jaded eye over his own movies. Take Halloween II, for example, which he’s long admitted he wrote for the money. Here’s his Letterboxd review:
They paid me more money than I had ever seen to write a sequel to a film that did not need one. I took the check and spent it on beers to get me drunk enough to plow through this crap. I looked at the final script, which took a whopping 2 days to write, and said “wow, now that’s a piece of shit.” And it was. I had faith in [director] Rick Rosenthal and he did not deliver. I suppose I expected him to be a miracle worker and nobody could’ve made this work. I don’t regret hiring him.
Ouch.
He’s even more stinging about his last feature film, 2011’s The Ward. Of it, he simply writes, “I don’t count this as one of my movies, neither should you.”
Then there’s his 1995 John Wyndham remake, Village Of The Damned, which he awards a single star. “Yikes,” the horror maestro writes, before offering an insight into its production that I don’t believe has emerged before: “We filmed in my personal neighbourhood and my neighbours turned out to be complete assholes. They’d call the cops on us, we’d bribe them only for them to continue their antics… So I finished the film hating where I lived, and hating the movie I just made.”
Similarly, he writes that his 1998 action-horror western Vampires was originally greenlit with a $60m budget, but that was stripped down to $20m just before shooting. Carpenter rushed to rewrite the script, but “what we wrote just wasn’t that good,” he says. “Instead of scaling down action scenes, we just kept everything the same scene-by-scene until we had used up the budget.”
Read more: Ghosts Of Mars | The sci-fi western John Carpenter made 20 years too late
Of Memoirs Of An Invisible Man, the 1992 comedy vehicle in which Carpenter clashed with its star Chevy Chase, the director simply writes, “I fucking hate this pile of shit and want every copy burned.” He gives it half a star, which is probably a bit harsh.
He’s also way too hard on Dark Star, the 1974 feature he made when he was still a student – it’s a now seminal sci-fi cult film that paved the way for Alien, and was so good that it got a theatrical release. For Carpenter, though, it’s “Embarrising [sic]. I had not a single clue what I was doing.”
As hard as he is on those films, though, he still recognises when he’s made a classic. The Thing deservedly gets five stars; They Live gets four and a half, as do Halloween, Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York and Starman.
The really fascinating reviews, though, are for movies he didn’t make. In Carpenter’s write-up for the 1990 TV mini-series, It, he reveals, “This was another film I was approached to direct. I did not enjoy working with [Stephen] King on Christine. That guy is on fucking crack.”
There’s also 1985’s Santa Claus: The Movie. “I was attached to direct this one. It was called Old Saint Nick at the time. I thought it was cool. But the screenplay was worse than used toilet paper. I said no way in hell was I attaching my name to this script. So they dropped me.”
In his review for From Dusk Till Dawn, Carpenter reveals that he was Quentin Tarantino’s first choice to play the supporting character, Sex Machine – a part that ultimately when to makeup effects legend Tom Savini. To reciprocate, Tarantino was at one stage going to play a bloodsucker in 1998’s Vampires, but it never happened.
You’ve probably got the idea by now: John Carpenter’s posts on Letterboxd are a remarkable trove of insights, snippets of film history, and wonderfully embittered opinions. We’ll now conclude with a quote from Carpenter’s thoughts on Lockout, a 2012 sci-fi action flick that is essentially Escape From New York in space:
“Plagiarism is bad, folks,” he writes.
If you’re reading this, John Carpenter, please continue writing these reviews.
