YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS BROADCAST AS A DREAM: JOHN CARPENTER’S APOCALYPSE TRILOGY
Every species can smell its own extinction. The last ones left won't have a pretty time with it. In ten years, maybe less, the human race will just be a bedtime story for their children. A myth, nothing more.
Films in this Program
John Carpenter
109 minutes
Snuggle up! Kurt Russell battles against the cold (and a horrifying alien life-form) in John Carpenter's sublime exercise in creature terror and paranoiac dread, THE THING.
A team of scientists working in the frozen landscape of the Antarctic encounter a killer shape-shifting alien being after a very bad dog enters the camp. Isolated in a part of the world nearly as remote as space, Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady leads the charge for survival as, one by one, his colleagues are turned into pulsating mountains of ooze. Unfairly overshadowed upon its original release by E.T. - a film in which no one is set on fire with flamethrower (!?) - THE THING remains the high-water mark of both practical effects-driven horror and great hair in cinema. Just be sure to tuck your pants into your socks.
A team of scientists working in the frozen landscape of the Antarctic encounter a killer shape-shifting alien being after a very bad dog enters the camp. Isolated in a part of the world nearly as remote as space, Kurt Russell’s R.J. MacReady leads the charge for survival as, one by one, his colleagues are turned into pulsating mountains of ooze. Unfairly overshadowed upon its original release by E.T. - a film in which no one is set on fire with flamethrower (!?) - THE THING remains the high-water mark of both practical effects-driven horror and great hair in cinema. Just be sure to tuck your pants into your socks.
John Carpenter
101 minutes
This is how to age gracefully. Like Jack Kirby's Fourth World comic books, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is John Carpenter's pet-project masterwork - a sprawling, Lovecraftian folk epic about demons, science, and unseen evil.
A group of college students and professors camp out in a decrepit church to research the unexplainable charms of Satan. Once there, they're flung into a netherworld that's populated by zombies who hijack souls, Donald Pleasance with an axe, and Alice Cooper as a homicidal hobo. Released ten years after HALLOWEEN, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is John Carpenter stopping to smell the roses. It's heavy on development, but even heavier on violence, dread, and payoff - like Fulci's THE BEYOND if that movie was rooted in the existential angst of late '80s America. As a professor says in the movie's opening minutes, "Say goodbye to classical reality."
A group of college students and professors camp out in a decrepit church to research the unexplainable charms of Satan. Once there, they're flung into a netherworld that's populated by zombies who hijack souls, Donald Pleasance with an axe, and Alice Cooper as a homicidal hobo. Released ten years after HALLOWEEN, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is John Carpenter stopping to smell the roses. It's heavy on development, but even heavier on violence, dread, and payoff - like Fulci's THE BEYOND if that movie was rooted in the existential angst of late '80s America. As a professor says in the movie's opening minutes, "Say goodbye to classical reality."
John Carpenter
95 minutes
Sutter Cane is the best-selling author whose latest novel is literally driving readers insane. When he inexplicably vanishes, his publisher (Charlton Heston) sends special investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) to track him down. Drawn to a town that exists only in Cane's books, Trent crosses the barrier between fact and fiction and enters a terrifying world from which there is no escape.
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS proves once again that John Carpenter will always be the greatest dad. A dreamlike ode to the work of H.P. Lovecraft that's steeped in shredding guitars and charming nihilism, this is a gloriously ‘90s dose of cosmic horror from Carpenter – a genre master who was still at the top of his game.
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS proves once again that John Carpenter will always be the greatest dad. A dreamlike ode to the work of H.P. Lovecraft that's steeped in shredding guitars and charming nihilism, this is a gloriously ‘90s dose of cosmic horror from Carpenter – a genre master who was still at the top of his game.
