Lean, mean suspense machine

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2004)

But then again not really, because you know who's going to get it right? P.J. Soles never comes out of these movies in one piece. Well anyway, this is one of the best of the "unlucky saps get hunted down by random psycho" movies of seventies like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Bob Clark's(of Porky's fame) Black Christmas. The sequels gave Michael Myers a motivation, something to do with a Druid cult or whatever, but in the original he was just some guy taking a stand against Women's Lib (okay bad joke, but y'know what I mean...). See, most of the bad guys in Carpenter movies are facless, amorphous, impersonal "Alien" things...y'know, like "The Thing." Or "The Fog". He once said that in the Sixties what really scared him wasn't The Bomb, but the idea that there was this invisible thing carried on the wind called radiation, and you couldn't hide from it. In other words he was as scared of faceless impersonal amorphous things as Wes Craven was scared of older threatening males named Freddy. Stephen King wrote in "Danse Macabre" that this movie was kind of like "The Tale of The Hook Handed Killer Prowling Lover's Lane" but stretched out to feature length. That's about right.
10 out of 10 for its respective genre Trivia: *This movie previewed horribly for awhile, until Carpenter decided to add the score and "save it with the music". Subsequent test scores shot up dramatically. Pretty nifty for five or six twelve year olds out there who've never heard it (imagine Tubular Bells but creepier and at a faster tempo).
*This movie was also written off as a turkey when it premiered until an article in the Village Voice praised it and started to change critics's minds. They really stepped into it didn't they? This was one of the few slice'em up movies that Ebert praised before he and Siskel started a campaign against them in the eighties in response to what he saw as a "morally depraved" trend and that should "outrage" us. Now he'll give three star reviews to anything. I mean he liked "The Hunted".