Now I'll depart from my various lists for one
last movie this October, our Horrorfest 2016 finale, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME!
This made-for-TV movie was directed by none other than master-of-horror John
Carpenter. He shot it right before he shot HALLOWEEN in the late 70s, and it's
hard to find on home video formats, so I was lucky the Hollywood Theatre was
showing it the other day. Looks like Movie Madness does have it though, if you
want to check it out.
Lauren Hutton stars as an independent career
woman who has recently moved into a high rise apartment in Los Angeles. She
quickly finds work as a live television director and successfully fends off the
Donald Trump-esque advances of co-worker Steve (Grainger Hines). She has a nervous
habit of joking around about everything, even to herself when no one's around,
and while most of the jokes aren't funny, strictly feeling, it makes the
character memorable in a way that many "women in peril" are not, and
makes her seem like a real, three dimensional individual.
Hutton starts getting creepy phone calls and
weird gifts and notes delivered to her apartment, and we in the audience get
glimpses of someone recording his phone calls with her and watching her via a
telescope from a building across from hers. There's even an early scene with a
legit scare shot where an intruder in her apartment dashes behind her back when
she's looking the other way. Yikes!
Since this a made-for-TV movie, it's not as
stylish as the stuff Carpenter later became known for, but you can see he's a
born director even with these limitations, especially in a suspenseful sequence
where Hutton searches her building for the intruder, following him down into
the laundry room and eventually hiding in a weird crawlspace under the floor.
The movie is impressively forward-thinking
when it comes to gender and sexual politics. Many movies like this take great
pains to show how independent their career-woman leads are, but this one goes
way out its way to really portray this as a positive character trait for the
lead character. Not only does Hutton rebuff the afore-mentioned Steve, she also
rebuffs another guy trying to pick her up at a bar, only to immediately turn
around at the same bar and choose the guy SHE wants to pick up (David Birney),
and run a pick up line on HIM. She's then in charge of that relationship,
choosing the man she wants to talk to, pursuing him because he seems nice, etc.
It's actually kind of sad how rarely you see this in movies, not just form the
70s, but even today.
On top of that, Adrienne Barbeau plays a
co-worker friend of Hutton's who unabashedly introduces herself as gay on their
first meeting, and later is impressed that Hutton doesn't seem fazed by it.
Hutton just says something like, "Look, I'm around men all the time and
that doesn't bother me, so why should you." I mean, this isn't ground
breaking civil rights stuff but it is a unique and interesting point of view
for a movie that could have been the usual misogynistic crap.
Anyway, SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME! is not a ground
breaking masterpiece, but it's better than it has any right to be and is an
interesting flick to check out if you follow the career of Carpenter at all.
Hell, it's better than IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, so that makes it the best John
Carpenter movie I've seen this month.
Thus ends Horrorfest 2016, another successful
foray into the fearful annals of horror films. Happy Halloween!
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