Word: scared
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...harsh, sly, single-minded persistence with which Carpenter strums and strains his audience's nerves. Assault on Precinct 13 is a kind of hipped-up, relocated Western: an undermanned Los Angeles police precinct station is besieged by a silent army of murderous street gangsters; Halloween is a scare picture about an escaped lunatic who, having returned to his home town Halloween night, stalks some high school girls babysitting in adjoining houses. The combined budgets of these two films total a great deal less than half the production costs of the more solemnly ingratiating Academy Award nominees you are likely...
...paper or in the hands of a less talented director? It is largely Carpenter's gleeful knowingness, in constructing a situation and co-ordinating an action, with regard to what his audience expects or surmises from any given scene. He tugs at the nerves most sharply through sly scare-tactics: close calls, delays, false alarms, the expectation and possibility of violence as often as the brutal thing itself. He can make sudden action at once surprising and coherent, and, despite the relative poverty of his productions, the direction in each film is practically seamless. Nearly every scene appears...
...DEFICIENCIES of Carpenter's films are easy to identify: too many of his scare effects start in the stomach rather than in the brain; his characters and the actors who play them have their purpose chiefly as puppets to be twitched along as the stories demand; he exhibits little knowledge of how people really talk and think, and the whole premise and intent behind each of his movies is as simple-minded and morally undernourished as the genres require. You would hope for a great deal more from his best movies--the best, even, of this limited, specialized kind--than...
...against the utility company that runs the plant, and against the television station manager who wants to avoid controversy at any cost. The film is The China Syndrome, but unlike All the President's Men, nobody knows the ending, so it is a fine, riveting thriller that manages to scare and entertain at the same time...
...turn, the family will produce witnesses who will contend that Silkwood had been too horrified by the contamination to have possibly caused it herself. The family concedes that it cannot prove who planted the poison, but suggests that someone was out to scare Silkwood-and had certainly succeeded. The Silkwood lawyers will also try to turn Kerr-McGee's argument against itself. If Silkwood could have slipped lethal quantities of plutonium out of the plant, they will ask the jury, does not that mean that any employee could do so? And would not that prove that the "highest...