At Anorak: The Five Most Underrated John Carpenter Movies

My latest article, now posted at Anorak, tallies up the five most under-appreciated John Carpenter movies.

As all readers here know, I have long been an admirer of Carpenter's output, and consider him a truly great genre director.  I believe his films are superbly-crafted, and thus stand the test of time.

Here's a snippet of the article:

JOHN Carpenter’s film career has had its critical ups and downs, but time – the final arbiter of success, perhaps – has been almost universally kind to the vast majority of his cinematic work.

Reviled upon release in the summer of Spielberg’s E.T., John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) is now revered as a horror classic and a work of art superior to the Howard Hawks film of 1951.

Similarly, Carpenter’s anti-yuppie battle cry, They Live (1988) has been re-evaluated as an ahead-of-its time masterpiece about the imminent death of the middle class in America, and “vulture capitalists” picking at its bones.

Even In the Mouth of Madness (1994), dismissed on original release as lesser-Carpenter, is widely considered now to be the finest interpretation of the Lovecraft aesthetic yet committed to film.

Why do Carpenter’s films age so well, and thus almost universally merit serious re-examination?

In part this pattern repeats because his neo-classical visualizations — his understanding of where to place the camera for maximum visceral and artistic impact — compares so favorably to the modern green-screen “fix-it-in-post” approach to modern movie-making.

And in part this occurs because Carpenter’s work is admirably consistent. His canon features what might be readily termed an umbrella of unity.  In particular, the director almost universally contextualizes his films as Westerns…only as westerns set in unusual settings such as Mars, or at the (supernatural) town of Hobb’s End.

The following five films — including Carpenter’s two most recent works — as yet await the full light of critical study and appreciation, but nonetheless deserve to be spotlighted.  They are, as of right now, Carpenter’s most underrated works of art.