Carpenter Carpet Capsules: HALLOWEEN III, YOU'RE NEXT, MACHETE KILLS, THE OCTAGON

"For me it's simply an exercise in improvisation, since I can't read or write music - I just make it up as I go along. I think of the orchestral stuff as 'carpet' music - I lay a "carpet" under the scenes - it doesn't get in the way," -- John Carpenter (on scoring his own movies)

Horror has never been about moving forward, or being in the present, it's about the past reaching back up from the unclaimed freight basement to pull us back down, and so it's always the simple, insistent, slightly-off scores that wow us. A simple piano riff can send chills down a nation's spine, or a harmonica and single sustained twang of an electric guitar can blow our minds during a climactic western showdown. Ala, filmmakers hire 'real musicians' for their scores, which means complicated strings helicoptering over our shoulders, feeling every emotion on our behalf. As Carpenter's quote above makes clear, knowing too much about writing music and composing complex melodics can be a drawback with good horror and action movies. One crazy squiggling synth line or sustained Morricone guitar note is worth a dozen full-bodied orchestras. When Ennio gets too orchestral he just sounds schmaltzy, but when he simplifies - a girl moaning in turned-on fear, a Jew's harp, and a single chime, or whatever, it's the best thing in the world. You probably heard it in bands, too. The Beatles and the Stones are wondrously simple songwriters, every element stands out to create a unique and effective whole, but it is never about showing off all the stuff you learned in Juliard, the feeling that the more complex and emotional your piece is, the 'better' is a common error in the film scoring world, which is why all the best composers are self-taught, or DJs rather than classical violinists. I digress! Let's look at these four films I've seen the last few days, united by badass music scores if nothing else.

Great as a score can make an otherwise average film, a few terribly ill-advised passages can take just as many stars away, which is why the beloved Jaws theme of John Williams is undone by the jaunty pirate shanty played when the boys sail off on the Orca. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) winds up right where it started, because while the score is one of those great John Carpenter-Alan Howarth percolators, rich with the same kind of 303 cyclic rumblings and unease-producing synth drones that are so mind-blowing and ingeniously simple in Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York, there are some shrill notes here that are less fun and less carpet-like and more like nails on a blackboard, liable to aggravate your tooth fillings, including the diegetic TV commercial jingle for the Silver Shamrock mask collection (a "London Bridge is Falling Down" if remade by Raymond Scott in his "Music for Baby" phase) that plays nonstop until you want to smash your TV or the face of writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace (Carpenter's Christian Nyby). This shrill unscary bouncy headache music plays over some otherwise superlatively unsettling trick-or-treating shots as the sun goes down in an array of Los Angeles suburbs (onscreen text declares they are other cities but they're clearly all the same neighborhood); elsewhere it sounds like a five year-old trying to duet with a car alarm on a triangle.

Supposedly Nigel Kneale, the genius behind Quartermass and the Pit, started writing the script for this but wound up taking his name off. It's clear whomever came up with the concept didn't understand Halloween or how we in the USA consider a shamrock anachronistic in any month but March. Maybe Silver Shamrock could have sold Guy Fawkes masks and have this be set in Britain? That might make more sense (Britain doesn't have Halloween). The jingle could have been "always remember / the fifth of November / because you'll be dead / just five days earlier" --I just made that up and it's still way better! A lot of this film's detractors glide over all that to focus on the lack of Michael Myers. I have no problem with it, but I do have a problem with being expected to believe anyone would want a giant shamrock button affixed on the back of their Halloween mask like they were just down at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and neither would they want to be one of only three mask options. "Don't you have any Halloween spirit?" a bar patron asks when the proprietor changes the channel from the awful commercial. What the hell does "London Bridges" with a bouncing shamrock have to do with goddamned Halloween spirit?


I hadn't deigned to see this since first hating on it back in the 80s when it premiered on TV, and even then, as a kid, the illogic of the plot made it hard to follow, but I've been reading good things on the internet --ooh you should give it a second chance blah blah ---well, I'm glad I did, for the most part BUT there's a lot of dumb decision-making involved with the central gimmick: the idea of using a shamrock to sell designer Halloween masks is just the iceberg tip: the villain's plans hinge on every kid in America sitting around the house at nine PM, wearing a stifling latex mask while watching TV to wait for the 'big giveaway' --there's no clear reason why or how the masks would help one get a prize for watching, and no kid is going to sweat it out in a hot latex mask watching TV for more than a minute at a time; and it gets worse, Silver Shamrock makes only three mask types for Halloween--skull, pumpkin, and a witch (for the girls)--and no kid is going to see a selection of three lame masks and think, gee- I'd love to look exactly like a third of my class in some atypical uninteresting mask. One of the frustrated buyers at the motel complains that her four year-old was playing with the mask and the shamrock design logo chip fell off -- who the freak cares? Will people not get scared if the label falls off your ghostly bed sheet?

Ho ho Ho! Merry Xmas!

I never squawk about dream logic or inconsistency in general, but here they pile up so fast that they strain incredulity. And I squawk here because I wish there were more great early John Carpenter films; I wish this was one of them and parts are, such as the typically refreshing and Carptenter-ish no-nonsense hotel hook-up between mystified Dr. Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin, the daughter of an early victim of killer automaton-like agents of Silver Shamrock, and there's some good use of tick-tock momentum -the sense of the hotel room as a base of operations where the pair hook up and plan their attack but another demerit for the tiresome cliche of his ex-wife Linda, who we most often hear badgering him on the phone about missing junior's recital or whatever the hell- it's shrill and unneeded, generating the kind of rote bad vibes lesser directors feel they need, but Hawks and usually Carpenter avoid such nonsense; also the cheap shock of the penultimate robot attack that rolls against most all logic and whatever affection may have come over us for this cute, easygoing and Hawksian chick. And our respect for the way Atkins handles himself on the tour is lost when he thinks he should go use the Santa Mira hotel phone to call the cops, after learning from the bum he met that the Shamrock controls everything via cameras and bugged phones!  He seems surprised when the call doesn't go through. Come on, dude! You're throwing my good faith right out the window.


But if you can forget all the ridiculous nonsense, whole chunks of the film have the groovy Carpenter vibe, especially when it's just Atkins and Nelkin driving and hanging out in their room, bluffing their way into tours of the factory with the aplomb of a pair of Hitchcockian lovers-on-the-run. Even freaked out and scared as they might be, they're cool, rational, adult, and no drama. Atkins' shaggy Nick Nolte-ish charm in full effect, "It's getting late, I could go for a drink," how often do you hear a shaggy dog hero of a horror movie say that and have it not be a sign he's an alcoholic? I like that even after they shag he's going out late to score a bottle of booze, just like I would have done, and remembering the ice bucket on his way back too, too, --that's the kind of shit Carpenter probably added --and the cute hook-up where even the nudity and showering is emotionally grounding and nice rather than just merely exploitative and I love the cool dead isolation the Northern California town in the setting sun and utter stillness at night--a lowdown town recalling the wastelands of Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and Prince of Darkness, and near no interesting park or lake; I've driven through--as that awesome music plays, that shit's all primo gold. As the evil genius mastermind Cochran, Dan O'Herlihy exudes great Celtic charm that can oscillate to reptilian evil without showiness -- his whole countenance seems to shape-shift and the cheery paternal charm in his voice drops away to reveal a base line of unperturbed malevolence -- he does after all plan to kill almost all the children in the USA. "It's a joke, you see, on the children!" He even gets in a great creepy monologue about the 'real' Halloween and the last time such a large sacrifice occurred, and "the streets ran red with the blood of animals and children... In the end, we don't decide these things, you know, the planets do. They're in alignment. And it's time again."


I suppose it's wishful thinking to hope for a 'producer's cut' that replaces the anachronistic elements and makes the penultimate anticlimax less dispiriting (by which I hope you understand I do NOT mean less apocalyptic and 'horrifying,' just nicer to the spirit of the Hawks-Carpenterian feminine and less a kind of last minute El Dorado-style abandoning of originality to just homage in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and hope for the best). Alas - fans of the first Halloween--and even the second-- still hated it, even so.  I've got no problem that Michael Myers exists only on TV here, and I'm a fan of nightmare logic--I love Argento and Fulci in my fashion--but the technology in Halloween III is fundamentally flawed even within a fairytale/nightmare context. The problems run deep, a guy with a mask on chasing a kid, unmasked, with a knife, is scary but a TV show killing a mass amount of kids wearing masks is not --it's too abstract --we have to see their faces and come to like them like we do Billy and Lindsey in the first film. The kids here are all pretty one-dimensional cliches, and once the masks are on, they more or less cease to matter.

Luckily, there's that carpet.
Getting back to the idea of the right, simple but strong carpet being so integral to horror, You're Next has one of the best in recent memory-- a vaguely retro synth 303 burbling, eerie drones that are unnerving but never annoying-- it's enough to give one hope for horror's future-past, not that You're Next is exactly horror as opposed to a 'thriller'--there's no repressed to return--but it's certainly creepy, not least for the way we don't know whom to trust or root for and everyone is characterized in a way that's both sympathetic and the reverse, like real people, a family who can devolve into shouting matches at the drop of a pin and be calm a minute later- like my family! The cast is great and I can't really tell you anything else without spoiling it. AJ Bowen, whom I did not care for in Ti West's otherwise nearly sublime House of the Devil, is pitch perfect here, and Ti West himself shows up as one of the heirs. Also appearing is Calvin Reeder who made the genuinely nightmarish and surreal near-sublime The Oregonian (review here), and Larry Fessenden, whom I did not care for as the smug hipster hotelier, chickenshit ghost-hunter, and lame wooer in West's The Innkeepers. But I hear good things about his horror film, Habit. As long as he combs and occasionally washes his hair in future outings, we should be fine.

My brother Fred had that same brass rubbing (far right)

I haven't seen any of Missouri filmmaker Adam Wingard's other films either, but they look like a grim lot. You're Next was completed in 2011 but wasn't released here 'til last year, which is a goddamned shame as this is a future classic. Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption and I love that none of the characters are entirely sympathetic or unsympathetic; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. What else can I tell you that wouldn't spoil what may be the best thriller-chiller since The Descent? Or at least, Cabin in the Woods? What a treat having 80s cult horror favorite Barbabara Campton as the mom - you may remember her as the badass dominatrix from From Beyond! She still looks damn good.

Barbrara Crampton - top - You're Next (2011), bottom: From Beyond (1986) MACHETE KILLS!! 2013 - ***1/2