Movies: Repeat Assault, with Vigor

• Share

(2 of 2)

Carpenter, from the first generation of film-school babies, was fusing two favorite old movies: Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, with Sheriff John Wayne and his ragtag deputies holding off a jail raid, and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, in which the zombies attack a house in a cemetery and just keep on coming. He also laced his movie with references to Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Sergio Leone movies. As he did in his next film, the horror hit Halloween, Carpenter broke a few rules, as when he put a cute 10-year-old in and out of peril and then--bang!--killed her off, but his style is classic: lots of three-actor medium shots and hardly a raised voice or drop of sweat in all the bombarding. The cop (Austin Stoker), the killer (Darwin Joston), the woman (Laurie Zimmer)--all are professionals, focused on outliving a hard night's job.

The other difference is the films' choice of enemy. Who's out there in the night? In the new film, it's a specific group (we won't say which) with a motive familiar to readers of cynical crime fiction. In the original, it's an L.A. street gang, but one that metastasizes into a more generalized and troubling plague: the whole roiling sweep of urban pestilence that seized the U.S. in the '70s. It's the rampaging unknown, voiceless and ruthless--a nightmare that will end only if you can stay awake, and alive, till dawn.