Stephen King is overrated. Damn, a little more – and it will become my watch phrase. But seriously, King does not take quality at all, but quantity. A kind of Daria Dontsova from the horror world: of his almost sixty full-size books, except for a dozen of the most famous, there is nothing else to read. And in short stories in general, a nightmare is happening. Plus, Stephen himself admitted that he does not remember writing some of his stories, since he was under cocaine at the time of his creation – what’s there to be surprised about. As a bonus, if you read enough of Stephen’s writing, you involuntarily begin to notice that Comrade King clearly has some problems with our brother. At any opportunity, rock’n’roll fans turn out to be bad guys who are not fed bread, but let them torment the usually modest protagonist. In the story, Sometimes They Come Back the briolinists are so frostbitten that, having killed the protagonist’s brother during his lifetime, they later return from the other world to kill the hero of the story himself. Just like that, for no reason. On the other hand, I’m starting to notice that this is a trend of those, and indeed of all time. It just so happens that guys in leather and jeans are usually bypassed… Well, to hell with it, maybe it’s for the best.
Do you know who is not overrated? John fucking Carpenter! That’s really cool – so it’s him. As soon as he takes up the camera, a real masterpiece is guaranteed to come out. Yes, some films, a la In the Jaws of Madness, are slightly sagging, but they are still at a level that is simply unattainable for many. Yes, even for the same King, because his Maximum Acceleration can only be viewed as a comedy. And so, in 1982, a master of body horror, a lover of rock music and synthesizers, Carpenter had just finished shooting his own Something, which, unfortunately, people did not really appreciate at that time. And the cards are so stacked that John now needs to transfer to the screens the work of Stephen King, which had not yet been released at that moment, called Christine. Comrade Carpenter found the story not particularly frightening, but a career is a career, and the director set to work. And as a result, one of the most rocking car horror films came out, along with The Car‘s Duel of Spielberg and the film The 77th year. By the way, I was just thinking: The Car was just released five years before King’s story…
Ah, never mind. So, the 1983 film Christine is his. In general, Christine is an evil Plymouth Fury 58th year of release, which for the most part can not stand the people around him. That’s the plot of this movie. Of course, the first thing that catches The Car’s eye when watching a movie is that Christine lacks a golden radiator grille and other features exclusive to the Fury model. All this is so because already at that time the Plymouth Fury of the 58th was a rather rare and expensive model, so 28 second-hand Plymouth models Belvedere and Savoy in various stages of neglect were bought up for the film, of which 17 cars were later assembled for filming. The problem was that the Fury from the factory was produced only in Buckskin Beige color, but in the book they sort of explain to us that this is a custom-made car… To be honest, this is my main complaint about the film: they could have just taken not Fury, but something… more vicious.
Maybe this would also help to avoid some problems with The Car’s rarity. Or technical problems. For example, on the bonus DVD, Keith Gordon – the performer of the role of Arnie – talks about the fact that he constantly had problems with the TorqueFlite transmission. The fact is that in those years Chrysler, in another revolutionary impulse to turn the entire automotive industry upside down, began to equip all their cars with a new gearshift system: through the buttons next to the steering wheel. And whether the technology turned out to be not that very reliable – in the style of Chrysler – or just so lucky, but in the process of filming with these buttons there were eternal problems: gears were switched not from the first, and often not even from the second time, and technicians were constantly repairing this magnificent system.
On the other hand, Stephen King kind of specifically chose The Car Plymouth Fury, because it was a forgotten car, and not one of the legendary models for all ages. It is worth saying that after the film the situation changed dramatically. Yes, in the process of filming, according to various sources, either 13 or 16 The Cars were destroyed (and it is not clear whether they were considered out of the 28 originally purchased or 17 filming ones), but now only one shop called Mopar Mel’s can boast of having restored as many as 58 Belvedere models and Fury, turning them into Christine’s clones. And the original evil car from the movie in 2004 was sold for $ 167,000. So why did the movie become such a cult classic?
Well, because, apart from the engine jambs, Carpenter made a first-class movie. Compare at least the book and the script. It seems to me that the plot of the film wins over the book in everything. The line that the spirit of The Car’s former owner inhabits Arnie has always seemed absolutely stupid to me – it’s much more interesting to see the hero’s transition from a modest square nerd to a self-confident rebel for no reason under the influence of The Car and The Car alone. Hints have also been removed that the same evil spirit of the previous owner has settled in The Car itself – Christine is initially an evil creature on the screen, which is born to the song Bad To The Bone and immediately begins in every possible way to harm the meat bags with bones surrounding her. In the book, Christine was The Car’s four-door, and the ’58 Fury was never a four-door-I bet King just liked the name of the car. Yes, some good story lines were also cut off, but mostly secondary ones – this is understandable, because you can’t fit the whole book on the screen, especially even in those time frames when the films lasted an hour less. Well, to hell with them, to be honest, it just looks easier without them. In general, almost the only thing in which the plot of the book wins over the film is that Detective Junkins survives on the screen.
The characters in this movie generally turned out to be first-class. Of course, there is no way to take away the palm from the book: if you have a rich imagination, then the letters on paper, whatever one may say, will draw a more pleasant picture specifically for you. But the creators of Christine did their best. From casting to acting and costume design, everything was done exceptionally correctly. Keith Gordon said that while playing the role, he imagined that the car was a woman, and every time he touched Christine, he tried to imagine exactly what part of the female body it could be. And it works. There is chemistry, as they say. Plus, the main character’s friends, who are trying to save him until the last moment, are working on the feelings of the viewer – Christine may not be a very scary story, and far from the most psychologically subtle, but still very multifaceted and believably touching. In general, not so much is needed for a good film: the absence of cliches, sane acting and plausible, logical actions of the actors. Modern horror movies for the most part don’t have such things in principle, so I’d rather review Christine or Something worn to holes than Astral 42.
Remember, I said that King loves to take fans of rock music on the role of bad guys in his books? Christine is no exception, and in the film they decided not to deviate from Stephen’s idea. And not only do the bullies who get Arnie at school look like the most stereotypical rock fans, right down to switchblades, hairstyles and Rolling Stones tracks in their Camaro, but the main character himself, under the influence of the car, begins to transform from a bespectacled nerd into a 50s bryliner with a sleek hairstyle and leather clothes. And at some point, Arnie wears a red jacket, like James Dean. Actually, no one has ever hidden that it was the Rebel movie that was copied for those frames for No Reason.
This is how Arnie, the protagonist of the film, looks at the beginning of the film.
There’s a lot of rock and roll in this movie. Not least because Christine communicates with people by turning on the right songs at the right time. And, I must say, this Fury even has some sense of humor.
When Dennis sneaks into the garage and tries to get into Christine, she won’t let him in and starts the famous Little Richard track: “Keep a-knockin’, but you can’t come in! Keep a-knockin’, but you can’t come in!” or, before flattening one of his victims, Plymouth starts playing Bony Moronie. And the words there are: “I got a girl named Bony Moronie. She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni…” And how do you like the priceless moment of the final fight, when Christine, unwilling to give up, starts playing Danny & The Juniors? “We don’t care what people say, rock’n’roll is here to stay!”
And, of course, countless romantic songs with which red Fury confesses his love to his owner. So the soundtrack is just a bomb, from beginning to end, except for the ABBA track that came from somewhere there. He’s in the credits, but I don’t remember him in the movie. So I threw out their song – it’s too painful it’s not in the subject. I think no one will judge me.
In addition to rock and roll songs, there is also a lot of synthesizer music of good quality in the film by Carpenter himself. John loves electronic music of the 80s, he even – if you suddenly didn’t know – had a band The Coupe De Villes, which played in this genre. Together with the general picture, synthesizers and rock’n’roll refer us to the modern trends of retro-futurism and syntwave – one of the few fashionable things I like nowadays. Carpenter, apparently, realized this himself, and therefore in 2017 he shot a clip on the title theme from the film, and all this together involuntarily refers us to such films as Drive and Upgrade.
What else can be noted? Nuances, lots of nuances. In addition to Fury in the film, you can also admire Dennis’s blue Dodge Charger for quite a long time and Buddy’s Chevy Camaro, the leader of a gang of guys bullying Arnie, for a short time. By the way, Nicolas Cage could get into the role of Buddy, but it didn’t work out. The jambs in the montage are objectively forgiven, because all this was filmed without graphics and for the sake of many scenes the real Plymouth’s were destroyed. Which, on the one hand, is extremely sad, but on the other, well, it won’t be possible to draw so well, no matter how you look at it. Yes, John Stockwell had to learn how to drive a bulldozer. Yes, I had to flatten Fury. Yes, sometimes gluing does not combine one frame with another very well. But damn, it looks extremely good and extremely natural, and, frankly, I wouldn’t want another car to be flattened just for the sake of a more successful take. I wouldn’t like to, because I love cars, and I wouldn’t like studios, because Plymouth’s don’t grow on trees. The scenes where Christine’s headlights have been replaced by airplane landing lights look really cool. Plus there are some deleted scenes on the collector’s DVD. Some of them contradict the timeline of the film, and some are remnants of cut plot branches from the book. So most of them were removed absolutely rightly. As far as I understand, they have never been translated into Russian, so I tried to translate them myself. Those interested can see the result below.
You can also download these scenes in the original quality with the translated and original track from the link (1.10 GB):
Perhaps the most controversial deleted scene is the one where Dennis and Lee kiss. In King’s book, it so happened that Arnie’s friends kind of betrayed him. In the movie, they decided to remove this branch, and, frankly, I’m not sure how it would be better. Well, judge for yourself: if Dennis throws Arnie, then this, after all, creates a completely understandable motive for murder. And then Christine no longer turns out to be the very true evil that kills just like that. It turns out that in the film Plymouth kills only those who either harm her directly or somehow stand between her and her master, and it just so happens that most of all these guys are rare bastards who are not particularly sorry. Well, not counting the worker who got hit on the arm by the hood at the very beginning, and even then it’s not clear what he was picking at Christine there. Therefore, if we take the scene of Lee kissing Dennis, then Arnie and his car no longer come out as particularly evil guys. Yes, they remain cruel and somewhat crazy, but they have an absolutely transparent motivation for every murder and they can be understood. And I do not know which is better: with motivation, or with the premise that Christine is just an angry bitch who needs blood for no reason. Anyway, I’m ready to say the following: despite the fact that this was not the film that Carpenter really wanted to make, John nevertheless approached the matter with the greatest possible enthusiasm and, together with his team, squeezed everything out of Christine that could be squeezed. If you haven’t watched this movie yet, then it’s time to join.
I really didn’t hear Abba anywhere in the movie, although their Name Of The Game is in the credits. And the Rolling Stones in the car of hooligans is The Beast Of Burden, which is actually a very unexpected ballad here.
It’s sometimes quite difficult to catch tracks there. For example, Harlem Nocturnal plays with a short 20-second interval between two synthesizer themes. So who the hell knows where they put a piece of ABBA in there.