Random Thoughts

ACW1987: Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter. Prince of Darkness. 1987.

After the unpleasant experience with releasing Big Trouble in Little China (the studio wanted Indiana Jones, which that film definitely wasn’t, so they made him recut the film a couple of times before spiking the release), Carpenter swore off studios. (Or perhaps it was the other way around, because Big Trouble flopped seriously.)

So we’re back to indie film-making on a pretty small budget. (A tenth of the previous film.) Carpenter re-uses some of the actors from Big Trouble, though, and Donald Pleasance from his earlier low-budget films.

It’s pretty scary; perhaps Carpenter’s spookiest horror film so far. But it could have done with a bit of editing. Not a lot, but some of the scenes are just a smidge too long.

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

ACW1986: Big Trouble in Little China

John Carpenter. Big Trouble in Little China. 1986.

I really thought I had seen this before, but absolutely nothing looks familiar.

I do remember this film getting really bad reviews at the time, and I can see why. It’s a zany comedy/action film; a very popular genre in the 80s. But Carpenter seems to have too much fun with the concept, so I guess it was just too much for people? If the action isn’t taken seriously enough, people (and I mean 14 year old boys) might feel condescended to?

It’s very silly, and I like that, but it’s also very loud, which I don’t particularly enjoy this evening. Everybody’s shouting all the time.

But after taking an acetaminophen things got a lot funnier. Kurt Russell is perfect as the buffoonish action hero.

Is this the first Carpenter film to use greenscreen extensively?

This post is part of the A Carpenter Winter series.

Quiz Time

Guess what this is!

If your guess was “smoked eel marzipan”, then you were correct.

Mmm… marzipan… Those wacky Germans…

A bit disappointing that it’s neither smoky nor fishy, though.

Tangled Lettering

I was reading Pride of the Decent Man by T. J. Kirsch, published by NBM. It’s OK, but I found myself sort of vaguely annoyed by the diary/letter parts. They look like this:

And then I started really staring at the diary (and letter) snippets.

And then it hit me: There’s really no other way to get bold handwritten text other than to have two pens: One thin pen and one thick pen.

Which then suddenly changes the image of the person writing these diary pages from the grizzled old man seen above to a 14-year-old boy, lying on his bed with a pop song on the stereo, writing his diary with different pens and dotting the i’s with hearts and glitter.

Fam.

I mean, in my mind.

So, hot tip for people working with computer lettering and “hand-written” fonts (which this is): Don’t use bold. Use underlining if you want to get that insane grizzled random insistent vibe going on.

This has been a public service announcement.

4AD Bootleg Tapes

During the 90s, I was involved with a lot of tape swapping related to the British record company 4AD. These tapes have since languished in a box in the basement, but this autumn I went on a I Must Tidy Things! jag and carried the box up to the apt. and digitised all the tapes.

Most of the tapes were rarities (tracks from limited edition 7″ records and stuff like that), and all that stuff is available already for anybody interested. But there was also a small stack of live bootleg recordings that nobody seems to have bothered to upload to Youtube yet, so I did it.

Enjoy. Most of these are pretty horribly-sounding recordings from the middle of the audience, so you get a lot of “whoo hoo” and not so much music, but I think some of these are pretty exciting anyway. Especially the Throwing Muses live at Anaconda tape, which is just so raw-sounding and intense. Wish I were there.

Kristin Hersh live mid-90s (bootleg audience recording)