Watchcast Poll for October 2022: Your Fifth Carpenter Film!

Happy Friday, everyone! October is fast approaching, and along with it our Halloween-themed slate of films. For our first spooky month since launching the Watchcast, we're gonna be watching a selection of films by one of my all-time favorite directors, The Horror Master himself John Carpenter! Four of those films have already been selected by me (Alex), and they include the original Halloween, The Thing, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness. I've seen all of these, but The Thing is the only one all of us have seen, plus neither Brad nor Vinny has seen Halloween or In the Mouth of Madness, and I can't wait to hear their reactions to those. However, there are FIVE Mondays this October, which means five terrifying Watchcasts, and we decided it should be up to our voting patrons to decide what that fifth film will be. Here are your choices for the month:

The Fog (1980)

Y'all like ghost stories? Then you may like The Fog, a spooky, atmospheric tale set in a remote coastal Northern California town where the vengeful spirits of a sunken clipper ship wreak havoc on the population, including ruggedly handsome middle-aged everyman Tom Adkins, a hitchhiker played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the local radio DJ played by Adrienne Barbeau, and Hal Holbrook Hal Holbrooking it up as the town priest. I like this movie a good bit despite not being one of Carpenter's strongest works, partially because much of it was filmed close to where I grew up. The Point Reyes lighthouse is just a short drive from my hometown! 

Christine (1983)

Carpenter's only Stephen King adaptation, but he makes the most of the material in telling the story of Arnie (Keith Gordon), a teenage boy who acquires a 1958 Plymouth Fury that seems to have a mind all its own, and a strong desire to keep its owner all to itself. I wouldn't call this the greatest of all King movie adaptations, but there's a lot to like in this movie, especially visually. Some good supporting performances from the likes of John Stockwell, Robert Prosky and Harry Dean Stanton as well. 

Prince of Darkness (1987)

The third entry in Carpenter's loose Apocalypse Trilogy (The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness being the others), this one posits a question we've all had to consider at one time or another in our lives: what if you found a big jarful of Satan lying around? To say much more about what is going on here would be too much of a spoiler, but suffice it to say this movie goes some places, and despite taking its sweet time getting there, it's a movie I would certify as "a hoot". If I had to pick one of these four that I most wanted to see as part of this, this would be the one. But it's not up to me! It's up to you, and we will abide by whatever you choose.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

For the sake of making the poll fun, I felt like we had to have the opportunity to foist one of Carpenter's, uh, less-than-great films on us, and after reminding myself that his Village of the Damned remake is mostly just boring and that I have no desire to watch James Woods fight vampires, I settled on Ghosts of Mars, a movie I will charitably describe as "a real piece of work". When miners on Mars accidentally unleash an alien force that begins to possess the population of the planetary colony, it's up to an extremely pissed off space cop (Natasha Henstridge) and a bad-ass convict (Ice Cube, playing a character with an all-time name: Desolation Williams) to fight back and retake the planet. Also featuring an early-ish Jason Statham performance, and Pam Grier as an even more pissed off space cop. It's a bad movie, but it's kind of fun-bad, so I wouldn't hate watching it again.

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And those are your options! Vote away, dear patrons. Make your voices heard. You've got one week to do so. Until then, we'll see you at the movies!