John Carpenter has a black belt in Action Movies!

John Carpenter is known as the maestro of the horror film as the director of two of the genre’s greatest movies in Halloween and The Thing as well as the yet to be acknowledged In The Mouth Of Madness. But this graduate of the USC Film School has also morphed across multiple genres in his filmmaking career such as science fiction, westerns, comedies, social satires and the genre near to all our hearts – Action Cinema!

Early Action Attempts

His first foray into action was a modern retelling of the western Rio Bravo in the 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13. Made for under $100K with a cast of unknowns, it told the story of cops and criminals trapped in a decommissioned police station that need to put their differences aside when they come under siege from the street gang in retaliation for the murder of their leader. What follows is a cat and mouse game as the survivors repel attack after attack before they make their final stand. Suspenseful stuff done on a shoe string budget. An early scene shows a small girl get shot for no reason while eating an ice cream cone.

The MPPA told Carpenter the movie would be rated X if that scene remained. Carpenter told them he would take the scene out and got his R rating…and was such a rebel he left the scene in. This scene was the perfect metaphor for the senseless violence and utter brutality of the neighborhood the movie takes place in. This movie is considered one of the great exploitation movies of the 70’s and made Premiere Magazine’s list of Lost But Profound Movies.

Enter Kurt Russell

After tearing up the horror genre and single handily creating the slasher genre, Carpenter returned to action and his view of America in decline with 1981’s Escape From New York. He teamed up with Kurt Russell, who was eager to shed his clean cut image from his Disney movies…and shed it he did in creating one of the most memorable characters in all of pop culture- Snake Plissken! Set in the then future of 1997, Manhattan has become a walled in maximum security prison where the inmates are allowed to rule themselves. Into this hellhole crashes the President of the United States who was traveling to a peace summit with some MacGuffin that will bring about world peace.

The only man that can bring him out? One war hero who has turned his back on society named Snake Plissken, who is being sentenced there anyhow for trying to rob the federal reserve. What follows is the greatest B movie in history, as one eyed, world weary Snake shoots, cage fights and snarls his way trough this society like he owns the place. The climax has Snake rocketing across the boobytrapped Brooklyn Bridge, with the president in tow and The Duke played by Isaac Hayes standing in his way. The movie has one of the most nihilistic endings in history before The Thing came along.

Mr. Carpenter Goes to Chinatown

And what director wouldn’t want to make a martial art move? More specifically, a Wuxia movie, which is a Chinese hero movie characterized by magic, demons and exaggerated martial arts using wires and trampolines. I believe Carpenter has claim to being the first Western director to do one and set it in modern times. This was years before America embraced the genre with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a decade later. Carpenter adapted a script from the guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai, set it in modern day Chinatown, re-teamed with his buddy Kurt Russell and called it Big Trouble in Little China. Unfortunately 1986 America simply wasn’t ready for a film of this caliber.

Russell plays Jack Burton, a truck driver that comes to Chinatown to collect on a debt and finds himself embroiled in a Chinese demon’s quest to marry a green eyed American women. Russell’s performance is pure gold and one of the greatest subtleties of the script is that the blowhard American so full of himself fails to realize, he’s actually the sidekick in his own movie. The real hero is Chinese American Wang Chi played by Dennis Dun, who constantly steps up to save the day. You will grow to love this movie upon repeated viewings. Carpenter was so crushed by the failure of this and The Thing at the box office and the pressures the studios put him under, he left Hollywood and went back to making independent films.

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