Assault on Precinct 13

The term "Busted Flush" could almost have been invented for John Carpenter. His career is entirely backwards - we'd had the best of him before we'd even heard of him.

His film school debut was a "hippies in space" movie called "Dark Star". It was an extremely low budget affair, with dodgey scenes - such as a battle between a beach ball and a mop - that were carried off more through charisma than cinematography, but it had an intelligent charm that still endures to this day.

His retro noir follow up was "Assault on Precinct 13", an explosive reworking of an old Howard Hawks western called "Rio Bravo". It was dramatically and thematically as tight as a nun's arse and featured an innovative self composed soundtrack that set it apart from the crowd.

Then there was his first big success, "Halloween", the movie that launched a thousand misogynist "slasher" derivatives: Teenagers + Sex = Death, the girl with the least clothes on must die first, etc - this was the film that made up all those silly rules. However it was distinguished by another iconoclastic self-penned synthy soundtrack.

His last good movie was the "The Thing" in 1982, which saw him return to Howard Hawks' back catalogue to give the marauding walking carrot alien of the original a scarier spin.

There is a theory that right wing politics and creativity do not walk hand in hand. Perhaps it was his partnership with über right wing former child star Kurt Russell, whom he had worked with since his unlikely directorship of an Elvis biopic in 1979, that made him give up his happy hippy liberal values - who knows? Suffice to say that everything he has made since 1983 has been shit - and he's still working...

Why is he here? Why am I posting one of his compositions? Because, like it or not, John Carpenter IS a musical innovator. He may have snorted his life's work into a ball of fascist bunkham, but he's up there with Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone as one of the finest film composers of the 20th century.

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