John Carpenter: The Man and His Movies (2004)

Directed by Gary S. Grant

I went into this expecting a more in-depth documentary on the life and works of John Carpenter, but it was only upon sitting down and watching it that I realized it was a TV documentary, and it turned out to be more of a fluff piece than anything. Either way, it was still entertaining, but any fan of Carpenter's work, especially those that have watched the special features on his DVD's won't be learning anything new.

The film starts off talking about Carpenter and his early life, how he went from aspiring musician to film student when his family moved from New York to Kentucky and he ended up at the movie theaters more often, and how he fell in love with science fiction, fantasy, and horror in the 1950's. This segues into his first films, from his student short "Legend of Broncho Billy" to his first feature The Dark Star. It was interesting learning about The Dark Star, as I've never seen any supplemental material about the movie, and it was cool to hear him talk about the extremely low budget, and how they fudged the sci-fi sets. It was also interesting to see why he made the movie, he felt like no one had done an outer space comedy, so he decided to. I still like Dark Star to this day, although I agree with Carpenter, it's definitely not his best work.

Then it covers the time he spent making Assault on Precinct 13, what drove him to make that movie and how they struggled with the extremely low budget. As I mentioned, if you're a big Carpenter fan and you've heard the commentary on this film, or seen the special features on the DVD, most of this is not really new material.

From there, it covers Halloween, and having seen the 4 hours of material on the 25 Years of Terror DVD, this was basically all rehashed information for me. I suppose a casual fan of Carpenter would be interested in seeing stuff like this, but for those that have seen any of the multiple supplimental materials from any of the Halloween special edition DVD's, or the 25 Years of Terror DVD, you aren't learning anything new.

The film also quickly glosses over The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, They Live, Escape from LA, and Vampires. None of this was really news to me, as I've followed Carpenter extensively, and watched many of the documentaries that exist as special features on the DVD's for these movies. I actually think there was some new material on The Thing though, Carpenter talks about the issues he had with both critics and audiences upon release of the The Thing, because of the crazy gore and how later on the movie found and audience amongst the annals of gore fandom, but before that it was mostly ignored.

In the end, this is an interesting film on John Carpenter, I just feel it suffers greatly from its brevity, as each of the films touched on here could easily have a feature length documentary made about their ideas, production, initial release, and social impact, so containing it to an hour and leaving a lot of good, important films out was ultimately a let down. I still would recommend the movie to any Carpenter fan, but I feel it would best serve a beginning fan trying to get familiar with his work.

5.5/10