Rio Taco
Someone's Watching Me! (1978)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
John Carpenter's paranoiac dislike of Los Angeles - which meets its disgruntled apotheosis in They Live more than Escape from LA - began in the anonymous concrete alleyways of TV land. Considering how remarkably life-like the Haddonfield, Illinois, of Halloween is, Lauren Hutton's apartment is closer to the Bluths' model home in Arrested Development than anything anyone could live in. Young John, no doubt proud of this sturdy TV gig, writes Hutton as a no-nonsense pragmatist forced to contend with the oversexed cads at her new job. She does it with Hawksian confidence ("I think it's only fair to warn you that I studied with Bruce Lee before he died") and just a little late-70s SoCal racism ("How about a Chicano who only reviews westerns?"). Adrienne Barbeau is the sensible modern-day lesbian at her side ("Don't worry, you're not my type"), and the two share their all-American distrust of police competency with a sensitive philosophy professor from USC. I've never heard slippery spaghetti referred to as "the Romans' revenge" before, and Carpenter's man enough to let Hutton sort out her own problems, but a stalker with a telescope just isn't as scary as something supernatural. Like Steven Spielberg on Night Gallery before him, made-for-TV can't compare to the movies.
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
John Carpenter's paranoiac dislike of Los Angeles - which meets its disgruntled apotheosis in They Live more than Escape from LA - began in the anonymous concrete alleyways of TV land. Considering how remarkably life-like the Haddonfield, Illinois, of Halloween is, Lauren Hutton's apartment is closer to the Bluths' model home in Arrested Development than anything anyone could live in. Young John, no doubt proud of this sturdy TV gig, writes Hutton as a no-nonsense pragmatist forced to contend with the oversexed cads at her new job. She does it with Hawksian confidence ("I think it's only fair to warn you that I studied with Bruce Lee before he died") and just a little late-70s SoCal racism ("How about a Chicano who only reviews westerns?"). Adrienne Barbeau is the sensible modern-day lesbian at her side ("Don't worry, you're not my type"), and the two share their all-American distrust of police competency with a sensitive philosophy professor from USC. I've never heard slippery spaghetti referred to as "the Romans' revenge" before, and Carpenter's man enough to let Hutton sort out her own problems, but a stalker with a telescope just isn't as scary as something supernatural. Like Steven Spielberg on Night Gallery before him, made-for-TV can't compare to the movies.
posted by NPK at 7:54 AM
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