Hey! Will you look at THAT??? I’m finally getting back to the Spook Show reviews! I’m still hoping to get 31 movies reviewed before October 31st of this year, even though it’s suddenly JUNE, and I’m only on my second review of the year. I’m going to have to pick it up a bit. Regardless, let’s get this show on the ROAD…
[This is a photograph that I took of the actual DVD that I watched. The image is included for review purposes only!]
Christine is a 1983 teen drama / horror film directed by John Carpenter and based on the novel, Christine, by Stephen King. Though the movie was released in 1983, it begins in 1956, as we see a car being built in an old-fashioned (non-robotic) factory and getting its first taste of blood. We don’t know WHY this particular car likes to kill people---it appears to just be BORN BAD. (This is a theme that Carpenter had explored just five years before in his classic slasher film, Halloween.) After we get the gist, Car = Bad, we flash forward to 1979…for some reason. (I don’t know why the movie isn’t set in the year it was filmed. Four years is hardly enough time to become nostalgic for the past, but whatever. It’s set 1979---doesn't really matter.)
For most of the first half of the film, what we get is a crude, foul-mouthed exploration of high-school life, with a nerdy kid (played by Keith Gordon) who is inexplicably good friends with a popular, football player (played by John Stockwell.) (In a little "making of" feature on the disk, the script writer says they intentionally wrote the characters to cuss a lot so the movie would get an "R" rating. The dialog hardly seems realistic, and often comes across as unnecessarily rude for no reason...although now we KNOW the reason. They wanted an specific rating. Doesn't really work with the characters, but HEY, ain't MY movie...) In addition, we are never told how these two unlikely best friends (super-nerd and popular-jock) came to be buddies; we’re just supposed to believe that they are… At school, the nerdy kid gets picked on by a group of thugs, and the football player comes to his rescue. (The “kids” in this film ALL look like they are somewhere in their late 20s or 30s…) There is also a girl in the film, (a young Alexandra Paul), but she isn't given much to do but be loudly lusted after by all the popular kids, although she ignores all of their advances and ends up going out with the nerd guy… A very likely occurrence.
After the thug “kids” (one of them who looks a LOT like John Travolta in the ‘70s, but isn’t) torture the nerd for a while…these people all have names, but the names don’t really matter...the nerd decides to buy a hunk of junk car from a psychotic hillbilly, and the nerd becomes obsessed with the car, fixes it up, and (of course) it turns out to be the evil car from the first act of the film. The rest of the story involves the nerdy guy obsessing over the car, and the car attempts to murder anybody who comes near it---sometimes in some very weird ways.
For example, at one point, the nerdy kid is at the drive-in, in the pouring rain, with the popular girl, and he gets out of the car to fix a windshield wiper that has stopped moving. Once he’s out of the car, his girlfriend takes a bite of a hamburger and starts to choke. An oldies song comes on the radio, a bright light shines up from the dashboard, and the door to the car locks by itself… (Don’t worry, she lives through this attack…) It’s weird, though, with the character herself even mentioning the bright light and saying that the car tried to kill her, even though SHE took the bite of the hamburger and choked on it. All the car did was lock the door, play some oldies music, and turn on a light... It’s very odd (and unlikely) TO MY MIND that someone would blame the CAR for causing them to choke, but, for some reason, this girl thinks HER choking points to the fact that this is a haunted car!!!! Spoooky!!! (The police detective, played by Harry Dean Stanton, also seems to think the car is haunted for some reason...although we are never told WHY he assumes this to be true.... It's all just weird...)
The movie does have a solid score composed by Carpenter himself, one of his synth-laden, moody, pulsing scores, which I quite enjoy, and there are a few scenes that are extremely well shot. The visual effect of a flaming car with black windows chasing a bully who is running down a highway at night is very effective. And there are three character actors in the film, Roberts Blossom, Robert Prosky, and Harry Dean Stanton, who play memorable parts. (Blossom, in particular, is creepy as hell.)
I watched this film a few weeks ago, and I watched it again this morning, and the same thought went through my head both times: “This is ‘okay,’ but not great.” Although there are a few good scenes in the movie, I don’t think this is Carpenter’s best work. It’s not as moody or sinister as Halloween, or as ghostly as The Fog, or as funny as Big Trouble in Little China, or as over-the-top as Escape from New York or as terrifying and bat-shit crazy as The Thing... Christine is just...alright. As I said, it does have a few good scenes in it, a couple of memorable visuals, but the friendship between the jock and nerd isn’t believable, the romance between the nerd and the popular girl isn’t believable, the transformation of the nerdy kid from harmless misfit to raging psycho (as he’s possessed by whatever evil spirit is in the car) isn’t particularly believable, and the idea that ANY of these actors are in high school isn’t even REMOTELY believable… About the only thing that IS believable is that a spooky car could drive around killing folks. (And it’s also pretty believable that Roberts Blossom’s character is a closet serial killer. There’s really no doubt about that!)
It’s kind of a fun film, if you just go with it, and like I said, some of the visuals, particularly of the car in action, are fantastic, and the score is good, but it’s not a scary movie or strange movie or a tense movie, like many of Carpenter’s other films are, and it CERTAINLY doesn’t have the thrill factor of a truly horrifying film, like The Exorcist or Carrie or The Thing (the latter of which is undoubtedly Carpenter’s BEST, freakiest, most paranoid and intense film. A true horror masterpiece… I should review THAT one of these days!) All in all, I’m going to give this a “MEH…” rating, and suggest, if you want to watch a good killer car film, that you try The Hearse (1980) or The Car (1977) (boy…that’s a GREAT bad movie) or even The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) if you’re feeling like a real weird trip! Christine isn’t a BAD film, it’s just not a particularly interesting movie, either. Not bad enough to be a GOOD bad movie, but not scary or funny or compelling enough to be a classic on its own merits.
But that’s okay. They can’t ALL be our favorites!
If you want to read my other SPOOK SHOW reviews, check out my REVIEWS page!!! There’s a LOT of stuff covered there!!!
LATER!!!
---Richard F. Yates (Primitive Thoughtician and Holy Fool)
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