Once upon a time, John Carpenter could do no wrong as far as the Cap'n was concerned. The reason? His track record speaks for itself: Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York, They Live, In the Mouth of Madness, Elvis, Assault on Precinct 13, Dark Star, Christine, Prince of Darkness and of course Big Trouble in Little China. Hell, while I don't really like Starman, Village of the Damned, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, or particularly The Fog, I will admit that they have their relative merits and supporters. Is Escape from LA a good movie? Well, no, but it is fun in a stupid way.
So when I found out Carpenter was adapting John Steakley's Vampire$ with screenwriter Don Jakoby, starring James Woods as a vampire hunter, I was on board. In fact, in order to see it with the usual gang, I took a train ride from Greensboro to Cary just to make the 9:30 showing. It was October of 1998, Carpenter was making a horror western, and we were pumped. The film did not disappoint.
Well, it didn't disappoint us; if I understand correctly, Vampires is generally reviled by Carpenter fans and has been the point of contention about when exactly the director "went south" quality-wise (the other side argues that In the Mouth of Madness isn't actually any good and that the drop-off started with Memoirs of an Invisible Man). The film's misogyny is widely cited and derided, and it's crude, casual vulgarity offends almost everybody. I can't debate the presence of any of this in the film, because it's there in spades. I guess the reason that it didn't bother us was that those elements were exactly what we expected to see in Vampires.
During the build up to Vampires, an atypical "October" horror film to be sure, the trailers and TV spots made it clear that this was not the kind of horror-western hybrid (all Carpenter films are essentially western/something hybrids) designed to appeal to all audiences - even John Carpenter audiences. I often joked that Vampires would have a long life on TNT's "Movies for Guys Who Like Movies," a weekly feature the network ran designed for "guy flicks" like Predator and Lethal Weapon. Vampires dripped with machismo, was laced with tough guy banter, and wasn't designed in any way to appeal to people interested in political correctness.
And it doesn't - there's nothing in Vampires that really caters to anyone but guys who like movies about tough guys that solve their problems with fists (and in this case stakes). I get why people are offended by the way that Woods and Daniel Baldwin's characters treat Sheryl Lee's prostitute turned vampire-to-be, but what about the advertising of this film led you to expect anything else. It's like going after From Dusk Till Dawn for reducing 99% of its female characters to sex objects and / or monsters. These films weren't designed for all audiences, but apparently Vampires also offended John Carpenter fans, so if I speak fondly of the film, I almost always have to do so under the auspices of a "guilty pleasure," lest I enter an extended argument / lecture about what a horrible person I am for admitting I've seen it more than once.
Thankfully, I never have those arguments about Ghosts of Mars, the last movie John Carpenter made for nearly ten years, because I've never met anyone who defended that waste of 100 minutes. If you ask me, that's where Carpenter went south, followed by an exile from film-making and two terrible episodes of Showtime's "Masters of Horror." I didn't go into Ghosts of Mars with any idea how awful, how sloppily paced, acted, and written the film would be; in fact, we went to see the film in the summer of 2001 fondly recalling the testosterone-laden Vampires. I was excited to see Ice Cube (Anaconda) alongside Natasha Henstridge (Species), Clea DuVall (The Faculty), Pam Grier (Jackie Brown), and that guy from Snatch. What was his name? Oh right: Jason Statham. Sure, he wasn't the Jason Statham he is now, but I'd seen his Guy Ritchie collaborations, and the rest of the cast had been in films I'd enjoyed recently to 2001. Carpenter was at the helm, the film was about an outpost on Mars possessed by murderous killers? What wasn't to like?
It turns out, almost everything: the cast is totally wasted, the film looks like crap, and the "flashbacks within flashbacks" gimmick gets old quickly. The ghosts that possess the colonists look like second-rate Marilyn Manson fans, the story of how their spirits get loose is executed laughably, and Carpenter's science fiction variation on the "Indians attack the Outpost" western trope is a bore almost immediately. Oh, and there's the train.
Normally, something as crappy looking as the model train in Ghosts of Mars would drift from my memory, but Professor Murder took particular umbrage to the lousy effects photography that made a central plot mechanism look like what it was: a miniature locomotive on a badly lit miniature Martian landscape set. As the film when on, I'd hear laughter mixed with sighs, punctuated by the phrase "that fucking train..." as he trailed off in disappointment. It became symbolic for everything wrong with the film, from the pointless flashbacks to explain where every character was to the truly unfortunate character name for Ice Cube: Desolation Williams. I mean, really?
I've tried to watch Ghosts of Mars again once or twice over the last decade, and I can't even make it as far as the halfway mark. To put it in perspective, I've at least FINISHED re-watching House of 1000 Corpses once, and I hate that movie. I understand why we didn't walk out of Ghosts of Mars, but I can't say I'll ever watch the whole thing a second time. That's asking a lot. The film that shattered my confidence in John Carpenter and turned dread into relief when he eventually retreated from making movies afterward. I hear The Ward is at least pretty good, but even the high of Carpenter's better films (including Vampires, for me), has been tempered by how much of a mess Ghosts of Mars is.
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