Last Week Was a Movie: Sep 16 - 22, 2024
Film Vomit's weekly recap: What we watched, what we recommend, and what to avoid.
This week, David continued his journey through John Carpenter's filmography and watched Coralie Fargeat's latest body-horror satire, The Substance, as well as Azazel Jacobs' new moving drama, His Three Daughters. Here’s everything we at Film Vomit watched last week:
David: 8/10
With Halloween, John Carpenter concocted one of the most terrifying premises for suburbia: a murderous force invading an idyllic little community. In The Fog, Carpenter employs a similar approach—this time, the peaceful community is a small coastal town, and the murderous force is an ominous fog that carries the vengeful ghosts of pirates within its mist. But here, Carpenter also explores how these blissful little communities came to exist in the first place.
Both a supernatural revenge tale and a portrait of unearthed historical secrets, The Fog crafts the immaculate atmosphere expected of a Carpenter film while delving into the past we choose to bury to preserve our comfortable present. It’s not his most thematically deep film, as he’s more concerned with creating mood than exploring his themes, but it’s the small details Carpenter sprinkles throughout that make this fictional Northern California coastal town feel lived-in, and the unity of its citizens as they fight to survive the night feel meaningful.
It also doesn’t hurt that Dean Cundey is shooting the hell out of this thing, bathing it in shadows and blue light, making the intermittently incorporeal pirates besieging the town feel not only tactile but terrifying. The Fog is a true campfire story come to life—a small-town legend rising from the watery grave of speculation to not only confirm itself but condemn those who have forgotten it. And like all campfire stories, it’s only as good as the person telling it, and Carpenter is a master storyteller.
The Fog is yet another example of Carpenter's mastery of atmosphere and an easily recommendable '80s horror gem.
David: 8.25/10
John Carpenter’s Escape From New York deserves a spot on the Mount Rushmore of movie premises. In a dystopian future, a skyrocketing crime rate leads to the entire island of Manhattan being walled off and repurposed as the country’s one and only supermax prison. When terrorists hijack Air Force One and crash-land inside, one man has 24 hours to rescue the President and escape the city prison. That man is, of course, Snake Plissken, a special forces veteran with a name almost as badass as the actor playing him. Kurt Russell breaks from his Disney mold as the effortlessly cool Plissken, rocking an eye patch and a laughably cheap-looking torso-length serpent tattoo better than any other man in history could. But isn’t that the strength of all Carpenter films? Making the cheap look immaculate?
Despite having the biggest budget Carpenter had worked with at the time, Escape From New York’s ambition still far exceeds its fiscal grasp. Yet, through sheer ingenuity and the power of Dean Cundey’s camera, anything can look incredible. It’s remarkable how well the film’s analog special effects still hold up — glorious miniatures and matte paintings transport the audience to Carpenter’s hellish vision of 1997 New York.
Escape might be Carpenter in full action/sci-fi mode, but the most terrifying unifying principle of almost all his films is still present: how closely they skew to reality. Born out of post-Watergate presidential pessimism, Escape From New York feels as timely as ever. And the small victories of its war hero-turned-criminal-turned-one-man secret service remind us that, even if you’re living under the thumb of "The Man," you don’t have to like it.
99 minutes of shadows and synths, Escape From New York crafts a world of weirdness that rivals the dystopian wasteland of Mad Max. Its singularity is its greatest strength, and if you love unique action films (or Metal Gear Solid, which owes its existence to this movie), then you’ll love Escape From New York.
David: 9/10
You can read my full thoughts about The Substance here.
I strongly encourage everyone to check out The Substance, as it is not only an instant body-horror classic but one of the best movies of the year. But be warned, this one is not for the squeamish.
David: 10/10
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect paranoid masterpiece than John Carpenter’s The Thing. Both a remake of The Thing from Another World and a more faithful adaptation of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, Carpenter’s second masterwork leverages Cold War-era mistrust and Lovecraftian cosmic horror to craft one of the greatest horror films ever made. Reteaming with his Escape From New York star Kurt Russell, who is as cool playing the special ops soldier Snake Plissken as he is the gruff loner R.J. MacReady, Carpenter tracks the persecution complex to its natural endpoint: mutually assured destruction. Annihilation becomes preferable to defeat, and as the titular Thing works its way through the secluded Antarctic research station—taking the form of its victims and walking among its prey—it is ultimately a lack of communication that damns them all.
Thematically, The Thing hasn’t aged a day, and its second-to-none special effects ensure that’s true visually as well. This is Carpenter at the absolute height of his powers, and there’s a strong case to be made that cinematographer Dean Cundey is as well. The contrast between the ice-cold blues and fiery orange flames is breathtaking, and every tactile detail of the film’s game-changing creature effects is captured with such goopy verisimilitude that it makes your skin crawl.
As much as it pains me to see a film this totemic and influential mentioned in the same sentence as a glorified mobile game, I do hope that comparisons between The Thing and Among Us have inspired a new generation to discover this bona fide classic. John Carpenter’s nihilistic nightmare is about as good as movies get, and the fact that it was released on the same day as Blade Runner to equally dismissive reviews just shows how ahead of its time it was.
John Carpenter’s The Thing is mandatory viewing—not just one of the best horror or science fiction films ever made, but one of the best movies ever made, period.
David: 8/10
With an almost uncomfortable degree of fidelity, His Three Daughters beautifully captures the liminal period just before a loved one’s death. Anchored by three terrific performances from Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, Azazel Jacobs’ latest film follows a trio of sisters who believe that blood and circumstance are the only things they have in common as they reunite to care for their ailing father. Coon plays the cold, eldest sister, Katie, who struggles to parent a rebellious teenager and frequently butts heads with Lyonne’s Rachel, a burnout stoner obsessed with sports gambling, who was adopted into the family after their father remarried. Caught in the middle of their squabbles is the upbeat and obnoxiously positive Grateful Dead fan Christina (Olsen), a relatively new mother burying her negative feelings with meditation and yoga.
As these three women inhabit their father’s small New York apartment, waiting for his impending passing, decades’ worth of strife bubbles to the surface as they try to reconcile what their relationship will be once he’s gone. Jacobs’ lyrical dialogue occasionally reminds the viewer that they’re watching a movie, but so many small moments and gestures ring true as the actors disappear into their roles. The film is equally an uneasy examination of fraught family dynamics buckling under the weight of emotional stress and a cozy reminder of what it feels like to have people to lean on in the worst of times.
His Three Daughters features some of the year’s best performances and is easily one of the most emotionally moving films of 2024.
So, that’s everything we watched last week, but we want to know what you’ve been watching! Jump into the Discord and let us know if you’ve seen anything good lately.
David Lee
Published September 24, 2024