Big Trouble in Little China

There are many reasons for a hero to embark upon a quasi-mystical quest, where he will be challenged and tested, where the arcane and the preternatural will confound his sense of reality, where danger lurks around every corner and his nemesis may take on unexpected forms.

Some heroes will embark upon such a quest for the love of a woman, or the lure of riches, or dreams of power, or because – in some strange way – it is their inescapable destiny.

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) just wants his truck back.

How Jack came to mislay said truck is like this: he’s made a delivery to San Francisco’s Chinatown, he’s won a fuckton of money off his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) in a card game and … Okay, I’ve got to pause for a moment. Wang really shouldn’t be playing cards with Jack because he’s due to meet his fiancée Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) at the airport prior to the happy couple tying the knot; and Jack should really have let him off the debt, given the dude’s about complete the nuptials. Just sayin’.

Anyway, Jack insists on accompanying Wang to the airport to meet his inamorata, after which Jack damn well expects him to settle the debt. Then a bunch of toughs who look like they’ve just stepped out of a Duran Duran video turn up, kidnap Miao, and Jack and Wang take off in hot pursuit. Said pursuit leads them into an alleyway wherein two rival gangs cut loose with knifes, guns and chop-socky movies. And then things get bat-shit crazy when three warrior brothers who can fly and utilize the elements turn up, followed swiftly by Lo Pan (James Hong), “a ten foot tall road block” as Jack puts it, who can beam fire from his eyes and remains impervious to having a fucking big Freightliner truck driven over him. Jack and Wang flee the scene, setting up the man-rescues-heavy-goods-vehicle dynamic of the narrative (with, oh yeah, the fate of Wang’s girlfriend also in the balance).

Jack and Wang are joined in their quest by crusading attorney Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) and wise old man Egg Shen (Victor Wong), who has his own score to settle with Lo Pan. Between the goofily engaging double-act that Russell and Dun provide, and the joie de vivre that Cattrall and Wong bring to their performances, the film’s entertainment factor is ramped up no end. Wong plays the wise, mystical seer like a live-action Yoda and delivers hilariously hokey lines as if he’s explaining the deepest secrets of the universe. Cattrall – about a million years before she was in ‘Sex in the City’ and looking damned hawt – imbues Gracie with the breathless comedic dynamism of, say, Rosalind Russell in ‘His Girl Friday’.

The script – credited to Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, adaptation by W.D. Richter – maintains an unflagging pace and keeps the pithy dialogue coming. John J. Lloyd’s production design is atmospheric and eye-catching. The action scenes are energetic and Carpenter has the good sense to play most of what happens for laughs. Including the monsters, which to be honest look a bit cheap and cheerful and belie the film’s $25million budget.

It’s tempting to wrap up this review by describing the whole shebang as walking a tightrope between utterly stupid and incredibly cool, but it doesn’t so much walk that particular tightrope as perform back-flips along it while blindfolded and juggling throwing stars. It’s the most bonkers piece of work on John Carpenter’s CV, the least easily classifiable piece work by a director whose output generally falls into the categories ‘horror film’ or ‘siege movie’, and sometimes both. To be honest with you, I don’t know what the hell I’d classify ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ as … and that’s probably why I have so much fun with it.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #7: Prince of Darkness

The key to John Carpenter’s underrated ‘Prince of Darkness’ is the pseudonym under which he took credit for the screenplay: Martin Quatermass. Carpenter cheekily alleged in the press notes that this personage was no less than the brother of renowned scientist Bernard Quatermass.

This latter Quatermass, of course, was the brainchild of Nigel Kneale whose fiendishly inventive and cleverly constructed ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ was an acknowledged influence on Carpenter. ‘Prince of Darkness’ can easily be read as a variation on ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, with a sprinkling of other Kneale homages – most specifically ‘The Stone Tape’ and ‘The Road’ – thrown in to intriguing effect.

On another level, ‘Prince of Darkness’ is also pure Carpenter, from Gary B. Kibbe’s geometrical cinematography which evokes Dean Cundey’s previous work for the director, to the incessant rhythms of the Carpenter/Howarth score; from the presence of Donald Pleasance (‘Halloween’, ‘Escape from New York’) to the narrative conflation of supernatural (‘The Fog’ etc) and siege (‘Assault on Precinct 13’) elements.

In an opening credit sequence that runs a couple of seconds shy of ten minutes, an elderly priest dies and the key to a dilapidated church passes into the hands of his colleague (Donald Pleasance); Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a lecturer at Kneale University, engages his students in sub-atomic theory; two unlikely-to-hook-up members of the student body – mustachioed He-man type Brian (Jameson Parker) and earnest intellectual Catherine (Lisa Blount) – find themselves on course towards hooking up; and the priest contacts Birack with a view to a scientific investigation of the McGuffin his predecessor – a member of the so-called Brotherhood of Sleep – was hiding in the church basement.

Intrigued, Birack corrals a group of his colleagues and his students into helping out. They haul their apparatus into the old church and set up shop there. Meanwhile, news broadcasts are full of the new discovery of a supernova, insects are multiplying and swarming everywhere and a group of homeless people suddenly turn all zombie-like and lay siege to the church. The McGuffin in the cellar turns out to be a huge glass vial full of swirling green fluid that looks like some weird version of a slushy maker that’s been filled with crème de menthe instead of orange juice. It’s secured by a seemingly impenetrable locking mechanism that, as one of the students discovers, can only be opened from the inside.

It contains something very ancient, very dangerous and very ready to embark on its comeback tour.

For its first hour, ‘Prince of Darkness’ moves and grooves quite nicely, getting its science vs superstition funk on in fine stylee. Carpenter keeps the tension on the backburner, gradually bringing the atmosphere inside the church to boiling point. The homeless (and now, presumably, soulless) amass outside to sinister effect and an early sequence that veers into outright horror boasts the genuinely unsettling image of a crucified bird followed by the almost-funny-but-not-quite image of a secondary character buying the farm in a bizarre death-by-unicycle set-piece.

Aye, for virtually two-thirds of the running time, Carpenter pulls off a virtuoso high-wire act between white-knuckle genre thrills and thinking man’s extrapolation of the age-old good vs evil conflict filtered through the logical perameters of scientific enquiry.

At which point Carpenter remembers he’s supposed to be making a horror film and it’s balls to the wall Satanic zombies from hereon in. Heads lopped off, see you at end. This, coupled with the functionality of the characters (for the most part they exist as expositional/theoretical mouthpieces rather than as fully rounded people whom we might actually give a shit about), pretty much boots ‘Prince of Darkness’ out of the first tier of John Carpenter’s filmography. And there are those who would kick it down even lower.

Still, for all that the acting performances range from bland (Parker) to phoned-in (Pleasance) to doing what she can with the material (Blount), ‘Prince of Darkness’ retains enough of the intelligence and intrigue of its first hour – particularly with regard to the authentically creepy dream sequences – to compensate for the slightly ropy pay-off. It’s given short shrift in the Carpenter canon, but it deserves better.