Watched: 10/24/2025
Format: Simon's 4K
Viewing: First
Director: John Carpenter
As I said to Simon 3/4ths of the way through this movie, "I would have loved this in high school".
That isn't to say I didn't like it *now* on my first viewing. I did. I just never got around to it, which is kind of a bad call with John Carpenter.
Once again Carpenter tells a story about a group of people stuck in a single location as things go sideways (Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, etc...) but this time he's getting metaphysical.
Donald Pleasance plays a Catholic priest who learns a secret Catholic sect has been keeping the world's biggest secret. Apparently they have a cosmic horror buried under a church in LA, but they need SCIENCE.
To this end, they recruit a world famous physicist and his PhD students to come in and take a look at what they've got (a cylinder spinning and full of green liquid), and scientists from a few other disciplines. They all set up shop in an old church, and begin to try to sort out what's happening.
Team, what's happening isn't good.
What follows is a bit of cosmic horror that plays out over about two days inside the church. And I am not here to spoil it.
Now, the movie has some issues. I think they could have cut off the first ten minutes and we'd lose very little. We could have had more of the great characterization we got in other Carpenter films with large casts like The Thing and Escape From New York. Someone could explain who was keeping all 700 candles going in the basement of the church. And I kept wanting to know why the movie wasn't about a school like Georgetown that is both high end and is also a Jesuit school. We could have had a nice connection there, but it also might have undercut the idea Carpenter had about faith in both religion and science failing in the face of horror.
And that's the bit that I would have dug in high school. Gimme that "your much beloved rules aren't going to help you now" jazz, and back then, especially peering into the unknown.
I do wish Carpenter had found more ways to tie in the quantum physics conversation into what was going on with our cosmic problem. It's okay that it kind of doesn't, but so much time is spent worrying about Schroedinger's cat and the nature of reality once we're talking particle physics, I can make some loose connections narratively, but it would have been cool to see those things tie directly together, even with some hand waving.
Anyway, I'm super bummed I took so long to get to this one, but it sure feels like a great movie to team up with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness.
Fun fact! That's a young Dirk Blocker in this movie, who would go on to play Hitchcock on Brooklyn 99.
No comments:
Post a Comment