Prom Night (1980)/Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)/Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990)/Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil (1992)

Posted on October 20, 2017 at 5:41 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Without a doubt one of the strangest of the slasher film cycles is the Prom Night series, which kicks off with a decent, by-the-numbers genre entry, stalls out, unexpectedly resurrects itself, plunges into horror-comedy, and doubles back to slasher while almost completely abandoning the core “prom night” concept. Inevitably it would be rebooted (and quickly forgotten) as a 2008 nostalgia horror remake, but for our purposes we’ll pretend that never happened. The series is centered on Hamilton High School, a setting rife with teenage slayings and demonic invasions. In Prom Night (1980), shot in Toronto, we’re introduced to a group of young children playing an ominous game of hide-and-seek in a derelict convent. There are heavy overtones here of the evil-children subgenre as they chant “Kill! Kill!” and eventually corner poor Robin Hammond, who, retreating from their taunts, falls backward through a window to her death. The kids decide to say nothing of the accident. Six years later, the little bullies have grown into high school teenagers preparing for the big prom: Wendy (Eddie Benton, aka Anne-Marie Martin, future wife of Michael Crichton), Jude (Joy Thompson), Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens), and Nick (Casey Stevens). Also critical to the forthcoming prom night mayhem are the two surviving Hammond siblings, popular girl Kimberly (Jamie Lee Curtis) and withdrawn Alex (Michael Tough), still grieving for their lost sister all these years later along with their father (Leslie Nielsen). But a psychopath has escaped from an insane asylum, chased by a police lieutenant (George Touliatos) – who comes to believe that the lunatic is targeting the high school.

Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens) and Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) discover that they’re not alone in the locker room.

Despite the convoluted set-up – with some very jarring editing in the early going as director Paul Lynch (Humongous) cuts back and forth between the teenagers and the manhunt for the escaped inmate – Prom Night eventually reveals itself to be a very straightforward blend of Halloween (1978) and Carrie (1976). To the latter, you have Wendy and school dropout Lou – David Mucci, doing his best John Travolta – plotting to humiliate the prom queen, as well as the overall structure of using the crowning of prom king and queen as the trigger to a climax of bloodshed. But the Halloween influence is obvious in the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, still in her nascent career phase of scream queen: The Fog and Terror Train were released the same year. Curtis gets to show off her dancing moves here, as Hamilton High’s prom night has a disco theme – and she, too, gets to do her best John Travolta, as the generic made-to-order song “Prom Night” blasts on the soundtrack. What makes Prom Night stand out as a horror film is its embracing of the high school setting, with teens being chased down high school corridors and through classrooms, and the fact that the mysterious killer is not an invincible supernatural being, but someone who trips, stumbles, and misses – and eventually is revealed to be someone with a surprising amount of emotional vulnerability. Yes, you will figure out the killer’s identity pretty early on, despite the multiple red herring characters. The tagline is slasher-wonderful: “If you’re not back by midnight…you won’t be coming home!”

Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) in 1957: “Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II.”

The story goes that Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), directed by Bruce Pittman (Mark of Cain), wasn’t originally intended to be a sequel to Prom Night, which explains why it…isn’t, really. It’s another Canadian horror film with a school setting, and shares Prom Night‘s executive producer Peter R. Simpson, but having the same high school name in the script was a coincidence, as Phil Castor notes in his appreciation at Blumhouse. Pittman’s film was a supernaturally-themed slasher with no story threads connecting it to the original film. In 1957, promiscuous prom queen Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is accidentally burned alive right after receiving her tiara – a Carrie-like prank gone lethally awry. Thirty years later, her spirit is reborn when shy high school student Vicki (Wendy Lyon) discovers a chest containing Mary Lou’s prom dress and crown. Bent on vengeance for her mistreatment in 1957, Mary Lou begins taking possession of Vicki and attacking her friends. The only ones who understand what’s happening are two men complicit in the events of 1957: Buddy Cooper (Richard Monette), now a priest, and Bill Nordham (the always-welcome Michael Ironside), school principal. Meanwhile, Nordham’s son Craig (Justin Louis) tries to save Vicki’s soul from the grip of the demonic Mary Lou.

Jess (Beth Gondek) is threatened by a possessed paper cutter in “Prom Night II.”

Here’s a secret: Prom Night II, though not terribly original, is one of the most fun horror films of the 80’s. As with Fright Night (1985), the FX-driven horror and teenage humor are perfectly balanced. The characters are certainly high school stereotypes, but the self-aware script plays this up for genuine laughs rather than settling for the kind of smug, irony-based humor that would come into vogue post-Scream. Vicki’s transformation from wide-eyed wallflower to she-demon is played to the hilt by Lyon, culminating in an attempted lesbian seduction in the locker room that is sexy and outrageous before it becomes absurdly, stupidly, wonderfully grisly, a splatter of an exclamation point. But even the smaller interactions are scripted to perfection (with credit to writer Ron Oliver), as when Vicki’s friend Monica (Beverley Hendry) complains to her:

Monica: The prom’s like a week away, and I don’t have a date.

Boy: Excuse me, Monica, could I speak to you after school?

Monica: Get lost, asshole. (To Vicki) So why don’t guys ask me out?

Most of all, the film is lively. One victim is almost decapitated by a possessed paper cutter before she’s hanged and then, for good measure, thrown out the window. Another is electrocuted by his computer after he tries to doctor the prom voting results. At one point, Vicki seduces her father before her mother walks in. There’s a demon rocking horse. The climax takes place in Hell. Prom Night II gives you a lot to take in.

The undead Mary Lou gives high school student Alex (Tim Conlon) major relationship problems in “Prom Night III: The Last Kiss.”

I vividly remember the heavy marketing campaign for Prom Night II, with frequent TV commercials that cashed in not so much on the original film but this new movie’s Nightmare on Elm Street vibe, Mary Lou sold as the next Freddy Krueger. Though the film was heavily reshot and bears little resemblance to the Jamie Lee Curtis original, it’s slickly produced, Halloween-ready horror that burns bright with wit. By contrast, Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990) – which only received a brief and limited theatrical release – is a major step down and arguably the worst in the series. This shouldn’t have been the case. Both films share the same screenwriter, Ron Oliver – who now co-directs alongside series co-producer Peter R. Simpson – and the story is filled with promise. Mary Lou Maloney (now played by Courtney Taylor) rises up from Hell to make a mess of the life of high schooler Alex (Tim Conlon). She quickly seduces him and usurps his girlfriend (Cynthia Preston), but can’t stop murdering teenagers, with Alex left to hide the bodies at night by digging graves in the football field. It’s a clever premise, but Oliver’s script seems to drop a few IQ points, with the broad, groan-worthy jokes a bit closer to what you’d find in a Troma movie (I kept wondering if we’d find out that Hamilton High is in Tromaville). Most distracting are the considerably lower production values, including amateurish special effects and a very rushed-looking Hell-set climax that compares poorly with the previous film’s. It has the feel of a TV movie, despite a few gore setpieces, some of which are illogical to the point of distraction (the school principal cutting off his own finger during a ribbon-cutting ceremony; a teacher’s hands impaled by ice cream cones). The ending is ridiculously abrupt; try not to damage your TV set as you throw things at it.

In “Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil,” four teenagers skip prom for a cabin in the woods.

The straight-to-video Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992) tries to act as a course correction, while not even being anywhere near the road. A prologue returns us, promisingly, to the 1957 Hamilton High prom, but now follows a new character, Father Jonas (James Carver), who murders teenagers engaged in premarital sex. Jonas is confronted by his fellow priests, who become convinced that he’s been possessed, notwithstanding his spontaneous stigmata. With their exorcism rites failing, they choose to imprison him in the basement of a church for 30+ years, and I wasn’t raised Catholic, so I’ll just assume this is a normal thing to do. A new priest, Father Colin, is asked to watch over the cell-bound Jonas and given explicit instructions. (Father Colin is played by Canadian actor Brock Simpson, who grew up with the series, appearing in Prom Night and Prom Night II.) On the inevitable prom night, two high school couples (Nicole de Boer, J.H. Wyman, Joy Tanner, and Alle Ghadban) ditch the festivities for a limo, bound for a remote cabin in the snowy woods for drinking and sex. But Jonas has escaped his confinement and has followed them to the cabin, ready to punish them for their sins.

Meagan (Nicole de Boer) fights back against a deranged priest in “Prom Night IV.”

Prom Night IV is a typical slasher film, albeit with the oddball Exorcist slant that is never properly explained nor satisfyingly resolved. When the teens settle into the cabin, everything goes exactly as you’d expect. As direct-to-video, early-90’s horror it’s just fine, neither awful nor (at all) good; the only shot that I found particularly effective was the reveal of Jonas’s victims nailed to burning crosses, one of the burned-up bodies crumbling to the snow. The actresses pose in lingerie like a 1992 Cinemax movie, and one of them receives a nude body double scene that’s hilariously unconvincing. This is a stealth Christmas movie, but it’s no Black Christmas. It brings the series to an unexpected conclusion – with a high school prom movie that doesn’t bother with the high school and doesn’t show us the prom. So while I consider this a notch better than Prom Night III, the merits are purely technical (body double scene notwithstanding). If the slasher genre was about to turn to parody and self-commentary, it’s movies like Prom Night IV that provided the justification. But the series as a whole charts the course of horror from the early 80’s to the early 90’s, from drive-ins to video stores, from sincere teen-based shockers through colorful tongue-in-cheek gorefest to, finally, a dead end and a need for reinvention. That’s one cold, lonely cabin where the series goes to die; give me instead the authentic high school halls, the stress of finding the perfect date for prom, and the line which keeps popping up through the whole run: “It’s not who you go with. It’s who takes you home.”

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Stalker (1979)

Posted on October 6, 2017 at 1:13 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The Zone, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), is a region affected by a fallen meteorite in ways that are left deliberately undefined. It is an otherworld, a displaced and eerily altered stretch of swamp and forest and derelict buildings and sewers. Within, abandoned tanks seem to exist in a state of unnatural decay. A railroad extends from the nearby militarized city into the Zone’s reeds and weeds and overpowering silence. The only landmark of note is a place called the Room, which lies within an impassive structure that seems within easy reach. Except it’s not that easy, as the Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, At Home Among Strangers) informs the two men he’s led into the Zone. This empty landscape is filled with invisible traps. The only way to get to the Room is to weave back and forth, following a labyrinth whose paths are defined by wherever Stalker randomly throws a cloth weighted by a metal nut. Stalker claims that the Room has the ability to grant one’s deepest desires, a promise that’s highly dubious but with implications that begin to feel ominous to the travelers. What will their desires reveal about who they truly are? Do they really want to set foot inside the Room, if everything that Stalker says is true? He tells them that his father, who taught him the profession, entered the Room and soon became a wealthy man; he hanged himself anyway.

The Professor (Nikolai Grinko) and the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) discuss following Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) into the Zone.

Tarkovsky’s last Soviet film is a companion piece of sorts to Solaris (1972), his brilliant (and long) adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s classic science fiction novel. Stalker is a brilliant (and long) adaptation of a different SF novel, Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The source material has been more heavily reworked from the original in this case, a situation partially necessitated by production woes: Tarkovsky intended to shoot in the mountainous Tajikistan but was forced to relocate to Tallinn, Estonia, following an earthquake, filming around power plants and chemical factories. After completing most of the outdoor shots, the film was improperly developed in the lab, resulting in unusable footage. Tarkovsky fired his DP and started over from scratch. Meanwhile, the script became a loose adaptation of the novel, as the director, through his usual methodology, stripped plot and characters down to bare essentials, allowing space for the Tarkovskian extended, brooding, often wordless takes – and space for the viewer to truly enter a “zone.” The film is just over two hours and forty minutes, but it stretches time, creates its own altered temporal space through beautiful photography and almost magical movements inside the frame, and yes, this means that if you’re not in the right frame of mind it can be a slog. For a while, Stalker is a slog. But if you watch without distraction, and you are open to it, something happens, an effect which is par for the course with Tarkovsky. You reach a meditative state. You’re transfixed, invested in the sensuality of his images – even though the palette of Stalker is one of rusting industrial sites and environmental pollution. (It is widely believed that filming in these conditions led to the premature deaths of various crew members, including Tarkovsky himself.)

In the Zone.

Most fascinating about Tarkovsky’s long-take approach is that it allows an invisible presence to enter the film like a spiritualist’s summoning: the Zone, which may or may not be supernatural/extraterrestrial. The single overtly elevated aspect to the Zone is something only our eyes can see: the Zone is in color. Wizard of Oz-like, we leave a sepia-toned monochrome world. But everything important in Stalker is invisible to the characters; and the invisible is life-or-death important. In other words, Stalker is about faith. Late in the film we learn a very critical fact – that everything we think we know about the Zone comes from Stalker, and everything he learned comes from his father. It’s a cult-like, insular womb of belief which, by now, has completely encased the two outsiders, the Professor and the Writer (Nikolai Grinko and Anatoli Solonitsyn, both Tarkovsky regulars who also appeared in Solaris). Yet early on the Writer expresses extreme skepticism for the Zone – confounded by Stalker’s at-random approach to navigating this seemingly straightforward landscape, he attempts to walk straight to the building containing the Room. Such a simple act of rebellion almost destroys Stalker. It’s important to follow the rules, to respect the Zone. The Writer is brought up short by a disembodied voice telling him to stop. Shuddering, he turns and walks back. He asks the others why they told him to stop, though we can see he doesn’t truly believe the voice came from them. Stalker suggests that the Writer spoke the words himself. Nevertheless, the Writer begins to respect the Zone. He fears for his life late in the film after drawing the short lot and being compelled to walk through a tunnel, “the Meat Grinder,” which leads to the Room. But there is never any visual evidence that he’s in danger. Tarkovsky shoots this scene as one long walk and the suspense is claustrophobic; it might as well be a horror film. There’s nothing there. In a chamber beyond, a surreal room (not the Room) is filled with sand dunes. A bird flies through the room, and in a jump cut/retake flies through again. Did we see that, was it just a filmmaker’s flourish, or are we really in a place where the rules of reality don’t apply? Should Tarkovsky show you what’s in the Room, or should he hold it back so you can sketch in its geometry with your own faith (or lack of it)? He positions the camera inside the Room and points it back at the three characters struggling to decide whether they should really enter, wondering what that might mean for them to have their innermost selves exposed by the Room.

Monkey (Natasha Abramova), Stalker’s daughter.

The Professor is not what he seems to be, and even the Writer shows shades of character previously unrevealed by his womanizing and drinking. But it’s Stalker who remains the center of the film and its most fascinating, fully-realized human. In the aftermath of his journey into the Zone – which is really a pilgrimage – he is shaken to his core, questioning his faith, demanding that the Zone mean as much to others as it does to him. He’s in existential crisis that his life might have been a waste, built as it is on a yarn his father told him. His struggle mirrors Tarkovsky’s, who builds Stalker one laborious step at a time like the bell-making in his early masterpiece Andrei Rublev (1966), who reconstructs Stalker even after his first attempt at the film is destroyed in the photo lab. We can bring knowledge to a screening that Tarkovsky and his crew saw their health suffer from shooting in the chemical wastes of the real-life Zone, and this only adds to the uniquely Catholic (or Russian Orthodox) feeling of sacrifice and suffering. It invests the images of detritus and scorched or drowned ephemera over which Tarkovsky’s camera lovingly drifts; these scattered items in the industrial ruins seem to hold cryptic meanings, like sacred artifacts from lost races. And in the final moment of the film, while “Ode to Joy” plays in a far-off radio’s militaristic march, we see Stalker’s daughter, crippled from his repeated trips to the Zone, prove to us that sometimes the invisible can invade our reality in miraculous form.

Stalker was released earlier this year from the Criterion Collection in a 2K digital restoration which puts all former home video releases to shame – it’s highly recommended.

 

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Escape from New York (1981)

Posted on September 10, 2017 at 11:01 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Escape from New York (1981) is squeezed tightly into the middle of John Carpenter’s career hot streak, when he was releasing at least one film a year. Halloween (1978) was a runaway horror smash, but Escape from New York was the sleeper action movie that kicked him into the Hollywood big leagues for a strong run through the rest of the 80’s. (Strong, at least, creatively – it’s easy to forget that The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China disappointed at the box office, and that his top-grossing film of that decade was actually Starman, a movie that’s now neglected among Carpenter fans.) As Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell, who had come up in Disney movies and TV guest spots, completed an astonishing career reinvention that began with Carpenter’s Elvis (1979) and the hilarious R-rated Robert Zemeckis comedy Used Cars (1980). He was now a take-no-shit action hero, and no one would doubt him. Carpenter’s choice to build up the audience’s awe of Russell is to have everyone in the film talk about him: he’s incarcerated for robbing the Federal Reserve depository; before that, he pulled off some kind of dangerous covert mission; and everyone in the cast knows who he is (and, in the film’s best running joke, thought he was dead). The decision to not give Snake Plissken a conventional introduction was one made in the editing room. Carpenter had shot the bank robbery in a seven-and-a-half minute sequence where Plissken, carrying a billion dollars in stolen money, attempts an escape to San Francisco with his partner, who’s shot dead by police before Plissken is captured. It’s easy to see why it was cut: the film takes its time getting going, and this would prolong Snake’s infiltration of Manhattan Island even more. But it’s worth noting a few things: this is not a James Bond-style pre-credits scene; the intention is not to provide action spectacle or to show off Plissken’s skills, which is what other directors might have done to sell the new Kurt Russell. The somber lighting and feeling of impending doom in this deleted scene match the tone of the rest of the film, and it’s not Plissken’s combat ability that’s established, but his character. The fact that he gives himself up in the act of trying to save his partner would have deepened the impact of the film’s final scenes, especially his last exchange with the President (Donald Pleasence). Yet by removing any kind of introduction, we are left to Plissken’s legend and the rumors others tell about him. The deleted scene shows that he’s human. In the final cut of the film, it’s quite a while before we catch glimpses of his capacity for empathy. We only know the Snake that others have described while he stalks (and eventually limps) his way through a fallen Manhattan. Thus Carpenter wills Russell into becoming the new Clint Eastwood.

Police Commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), monitoring Snake’s progress from the outside.

Carpenter fans know that the director loves Westerns. The Western is often about the build-up – meeting colorful characters in an isolated town, an agonizing moral decision, the escalating tension before a quick and violent climax. We believe what everyone says about Plissken as soon as the eyepatch-wearing Russell sneers at a genuine Western badass, Sergio Leone veteran Lee Van Cleef. Despite its high concept in the near-future of 1997, Escape from New York is a Leone Western at heart, the audience placing its trust in an antihero, a futuristic Man with No Name, because the world he navigates is populated by the corrupt, the murderous, and the depraved. As with most Westerns, the action is actually pretty sparse, Carpenter favoring scene-setting and the suspense of a ticking clock, his plot given a High Noon-style deadline when our hero may die. The premise is irresistible: as the opening titles tell us, in 1988 the crime rate rose 400%, and in a desperate move, the entire island of Manhattan was transformed into a maximum security prison, surrounded by mined bridges, mined waterways, and towering walls. Within, the criminals may do as they please among the dilapidated skyscrapers and trash-strewn streets. Nine years later, Air Force One is hijacked by a militant group and crashes inside Manhattan Island. The President, whose heart rate is monitored through a watch, is believed to have survived in an escape pod, but when Van Cleef’s Commissioner Hauk and his heavily armored police officers helicopter inside the prison, a creepy punk (jokingly named Romero, and played by Frank Doubleday) claims that the “Duke” has the President and will kill him if they don’t leave immediately. Hauk sends for Plissken and offers him a deal: he’ll be pardoned and released if he can retrieve the President within 24 hours. He must also bring back a cassette the President is carrying, which contains a message key to the success of nuclear talks in a summit with China and the Soviet Union. The catch: if Plissken doesn’t return with the President and the cassette by the deadline, capsules injected into his arteries will completely dissolve, triggering a miniature explosion that will kill him instantly. Only Hauk, who will be waiting outside the prison walls, can neutralize the capsules. Plissken sets off in a glider in the middle of the night, landing on one of the towers of the World Trade Center and tracking the President’s pulse-monitoring watch.

The Duke (Isaac Hayes) uses the President for target practice.

Despite its reputation as an action film, there aren’t a lot of action scenes here, with the first major one – a fight between Plissken and a towering opponent in a gladiator arena in Grand Central Station – coming just before the film’s third act and well over an hour in. Most Westerns don’t have a lot of action, either, but the constant threat of violence is important. Carpenter even dips into the horror genre that made his name: the mean streets of early-80’s New York City are satirically heightened for 1997, Times Square disrepute transformed into Dawn of the Dead danger, Romero-punk and all. We learn there are various gangs (the Skulls, the Turks) that have claimed ownership of various streets and boroughs, but none more frightening than the Crazies, who live in the sewers and come up at night for food, pouring out of manhole covers, killing Plissken’s first contact (who’s just been introduced!) and chasing him through a derelict building. And whatever you do, don’t drive down Broadway. One of our guides through this nighttime world is Cabbie, played by Ernest Borgnine (another veteran of a classic antihero Western, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch). Cabbie knows everyone, and is smart enough to know where to go and where not to go: in one funny scene he peels off in his cab while Plissken and his companions are still pondering their next move. Carpenter keeps us unsettled with one of his trademark scores, a pulsing synth that beats behind every scene like the two tracked heartbeats we trace throughout the film, the President’s and Plissken’s. (The memorable main theme will be featured on the upcoming John Carpenter album Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998, which he’s touring to support. Here’s his promo video for Escape from New York.)

Adrienne Barbeau as Maggie.

Has there ever been a more perfectly cast genre film? Soul singer and Shaft composer Isaac Hayes plays the Duke as a kingpin confidently ruling the new Manhattan, the hood of his Cadillac decorated with chandeliers. He prizes the President as a negotiating tool, but isn’t above using him for target practice. Harry Dean Stanton (Alien) is The Brain, who has turned his lair into an oil refinery, providing gas for the Duke; Snake knows him from a former life as Harold Hellman. (“Don’t call me Harold,” Stanton mutters.) Carpenter’s then-wife Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing) plays the Brain’s partner Maggie, perhaps the film’s most sympathetic character despite her moral ambivalence. Van Cleef’s advisor Rehme is played by Tom Atkins, who would graduate to a lead role in the Carpenter-produced Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). And, of course, there is Dr. Loomis himself, Donald Pleasence, as the President (“President of what?” Snake asks). The film’s treatment of this character is interesting. We feel for Pleasence when he’s first discovered, still shaking in fear from the treatment by his captors, just as we sympathize when he’s being shot at and humiliated. We understand that he’s a fish out of water, a stuffy authority figure. But it’s when he seems completely unaffected by the sacrifice of those who died saving him that Plissken turns against him in the film’s final scene. The President fails Plissken’s test; on this level, he doesn’t meet the moral standard set by our antihero. In its belated sequel, Escape from L.A. (1996), Carpenter makes the implications of this choice even more explicit, as Plissken ultimately sends the world back to the Dark Ages. It’s the ultimate middle finger: maybe the world does deserve to burn, if we can burn the corruption away. (I have to note that on this viewing the message didn’t resonate with me at all. I’d probably vote for Pleasence’s character, depending on who else was on the ballot. So he’s a tool? So what? There are worse things, and these days I’d like to vote for the man who’s trying to avert nuclear war, as cool as I find the guy in the eye patch.) Still, in the context of the film, the 69th Street Bridge climax and the “Bandstand Boogie” denouement are crackerjack. Carpenter prefers abrupt endings, and sometimes they don’t work, but the model is Escape from New York, which ties up all its loose ends in a neat and clever fashion. By doing so, he crafted another perfect low-budget thriller. As with Halloween, imitations followed, like Enzo Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and Escape from the Bronx (1983). But Carpenter would use this film’s success as a springboard for a major opportunity at Universal, and it would produce what might be his best film: The Thing.

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