FEATURE: A Stephen King Halloween!...Christine

14. Christine

(John Carpenter, 1983)

Son, you're probably too young to look for wisdom in anyone's words but your own, but I'll tell you this: love is the enemy...yes.  The poets continually and sometimes willfully mistake love.  Love is the old slaughterer.

The Long and Short of It

Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) might be the nerdiest nerd that ever nerded his way through high school.  His nerdery makes him a target of both bullying and parental shame.  However, he does have something nobody else has: a possessed car that will do anything for him.  Her name is Christine.

Adaptation Decay:

Mostly Accurate.  The original novel is narrated from the perspective of Arnie's sometimes-friend Dennis (played here by John Stockwell), and the film tries to maintain Dennis's status as the hero, with Arnie as a kind of anti-hero.  Unfortunately, this isn't too successful, and why bother with a well-meaning lunkhead when Arnie's so much more interesting anyway?  He's the guy who's falling in love with a possessed car, for God's sakes.  On that note, the book makes explicit that Christine is haunted by its former owner, while the film opts for the cleaner idea that Christine, like Shirley Jackson's Hill House, was simply born bad.  An opening scene in the car plant is both new to the film and wholly welcome.

Forget All That - How's the Movie?

Undeniably fun.  John Carpenter was in the prime of his film career and a fine match for this kind of material, infused as it is with a can-you-believe-this-shit? cheeriness and a selection of rock-and-roll standards (this is the director who bio-pic'd Elvis with Kurt Russell).  The music offers great backing to Carpenter's familiar steady camera and careful eye, giving the suspenseful stalk-and-crash murders welcome black humor.  In case the possessed car wasn't enough of a hint.  Meanwhile Keith Gordon provides Arnie with a subdued, effective transformation from eighties geek to fifties greaser, his confidence built by Christine and fueled by countless schoolyard taunts.

Alright, But Is It a Good Halloween Flick?

Sure!  This fits in fine with a King-a-thon or a Carpenter-fest, and it has the right goofy-scary approach to match the holiday.  You'll laugh, you'll gasp, and you move on to the next film in an orderly fashion.

Kingwatch 2012

No references, no sightings.  Like Hearts in Atlantis, this film wants to exist on its own terms.

But You Know What Sucks?

14. Silver Bullet

(Daniel Attias, 1985)

Silver Bullet is a tedious werewolf movie with the occasional glimmer of campy goodness.  Like the funny bit when the one-eyed priest is trying to drive down a kid in a high-speed wheelchair.  Or when a bunch of townspeople form an angry mob and immediately get dragged underneath waist-high fog.  Or when the guy who clearly is the werewolf has a dream where everybody in a church lycanthropizes.  Sounds appealing, but most of the film is witless dialogue and feature-length paddery.  Stephen King wrote this film, based on his Cycle of the Werewolf, itself a foregone conclusion wrapped up in a thin story.  I remember reading that book as a teenager, and the only thing that interested me was how the full moon managed to fall on every single holiday of every month.  I can buy a werewolf fighting "the Busey," but I can't buy that.

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A Stephen King Halloween

01. ?
02. ?
03. ?
04. ?
05. Stand By Me / Dreamcatcher
06. The Dead Zone / The Mangler
07. Misery / Sometimes They Come Back
08. The Mist / Firestarter
09. "Battleground" / Creepshow 2
10. Creepshow / "The Road Virus Heads North"
11. Dolores Claiborne / The Tommyknockers (TV)
12. The Stand (TV) / Maximum Overdrive
13. 1408 / The Lawnmower Man
14. Christine / Silver Bullet
15. Cat's Eye / Thinner
HM. Hearts in Atlantis / The Shining (TV)