Word: halloween
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Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween develop out of the simple, steady building up and then the furious release of pressure implicit in their plots. Carpenter wrote and directed both films, and composed his own music. He is especially skillful in constructing and sustaining situations that can cause an audience to yell, and, watching these films, there is the peculiar pleasure of being in a crowd that can't keep its mouth shut for excitement...
...Halloween, while still cheaply made, is a much slicker, more flagrantly commercial movie than Assault, and it has been grossing big money. Carpenter employs a gliding subjective camera throughout, alternating between the killer's and the victims' points of view, producing a continual, stomach-tightening sense of menace. There is surprisingly little blood in the movie, scarcely any nudity, and, considering the story it comes out of, and the opportunities available for flat-out ghoulishness, Carpenter has produced a tame and tactful film. However, most of Assault's quirky humor and antic allusiveness have been rubbed away, and Halloween...
...Such ingenuity and control displays itself in ways that are embarrassing to name: the breathtaking efficiency, for instance, with which one character in Assault snaps a man's arm at the elbow; or the startling, gimmicky appearance, time and again, from out of nowhere, of the masked killer in Halloween, whose presence is signalled by an amplified breathing sound and a supernatural thrum. Carpenter's action sequences are especially resourcefully engineered. There is one virtuoso scene in Assault on Precinct 13, in which the station office room receives an intensive barrage from outside: the street gang is equipped with silencers...
...particular locales. In Assault, the desolate quality of a faded section of Los Angeles is captured perfectly in the disconsolate look of a parking lot, a few haggard palm trees, and a grim, sloping street, and there is a similarly good, throwaway treatment of leafy suburban lawns in Halloween...
...obvious debt to and affection for earlier movie-makers have tempted a number of critics to consider him a clever contemporary heir to several 40s and 50s directors whose exciting grade-B films have been sauvely generalized under the label film noir. Just now, with the success of Halloween, more careful critics are insisting that Carpenter is not as good as all that...