FEW DIRECTORS HAVE BEEN AS prominent as John Carpenter when it comes to taking above-the-title possessive credits for their films. The Thing's full title is John Carpenter's The Thing. Escape from New York is officially known as John Carpenter's Esca
pe from New York and so on. Given Hollywood's current penchant for doing rubbish remakes of his movies – Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog and Halloween for example – this bout of egomania actually seems rather prescient on Carpenter's part; a way to distinguish his work – good and bad (John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars anyone?) – from all the leeches out there.
Examples of both can be found in the seven film set, The John Carpenter Collection. All of the aforementioned films, except Ghosts of Mars, are on it, as well as his rubbish satanic horror effort from 1987, Prince of Darkness, and 1988's not-quite-as-good-as-you-remember-it body-snatching alien invasion film, They Live (whose mullet-haired embodiment of machismo, WWF star Roddy Piper, is no match for Carpenter regular Kurt Russell).
What's good about this collection, though, is that while Halloween has undeniably left the biggest mark on cinema history (it changed the face of horror and helped usher in the era of independent filmmaking that began to take off in the 1980s), it really reinforces Carpenter's legacy as one of the last great B-movie auteurs.
His films, most of which have been made on the fringes of the Hollywood system, have the same subversive edge as George Romero's: they're designed to wake us up to horrors of the modern world as Carpenter sees them, whether it's the evil lurking within (The Thing), the dangers of turning a blind eye to an aggressively capitalist society (his Reaganomics satire, They Live) or the savagery inherent in an oppressive state (Escape from New York). Unlike Romero's films, at their best, they're also wildly entertaining. Sure, The Fog doesn't really hold up, but few films from the 1980s can match Escape from New York – with its eye-patch-wearing anti-hero Snake Plissken (Russell) – for brilliantly inventive genre thrills.
Of course, fans will likely already have most of these films (the only notable addition is a career-spanning interview with Carpenter), but for anyone new to Carpenter, this represents a director mostly in his prime, unafraid of putting his own stamp on his work.
Also just out are a couple of early 1970s sci-fi classics: Logan's Run and Westworld. Ripped off recently by Michael Bay with The Island, the former has aged the most, courtesy of its quaint effects and sterile vision of the future, but its central concept revolving around a utopian society that culls its population at the age of 30 remains intriguing. Westworld, meanwhile, plays like a purer and bleaker version of writer-director Michael Crichton's later creation, Jurassic Park. Instead of dinosaurs, life-like robots are the attractions that go haywire, turning against the pleasure-seeking guests of a hi-tech amusement park where consequence-free sex and violence are the chief selling points. Both films prove that while nothing dates like the future in visual terms, strong ideas can give sci-fi films a timeless quality.
