Hi, it's Scott. And Drew. And we're here to bring you a special subscriber-only bonus episode. Drew, why don't you explain to our listeners what this is? I'm so glad that you found this. Well right now the Toronto Film Festival is in full swing and a couple of years ago we were there when they premiered the ward by John Carpenter, and we went back to the hotel where I was staying.

Just opened up the laptop and we just started talking about John's career. That conversation was one of the first times we started talking about doing a podcast, doing something where we talked about older films and films we had done adored, and a lot of ways, the very direct precursor to 80s all over. So because of Toronto, because I found this thing as we were moving some files around,

we thought it would be a great one to release to you.

And because we love John Carson. direct precursor to 80s all over. So because of Toronto, because I found this thing as we were

moving some files around, we thought it would be a great one to release to you.

And because we love John Carpenter, always and forever.

Always. So here you go, it's a couple of years old, but I think you will hear the same exuberance

and late-night enthusiasm that marks so many of the episodes. Hey everybody, we were just we just left a film and we started talking about how excited we were to see a new John Carpenter film. First one in, I mean, what was CoSIMAR's what year? CoSIMAR's was 2000. Right. Several, several years. So I just said, instead of just having our normal nerdy conversation, why don't we try to refine it a bit and do it for one of our sites and you said I like it

So we took some quick notes and we hit record in 2001 by the way there we go

So almost 10 years last time I mean

Crazy that a guy is as talented and you know again

We should preface this by saying we're we are horror fanboys, but we are not approaching this in that in that perspective

Right, we're looking at these films both nostalgicly, critically, you know, culturally, and, you know, obviously when you hear what we have to say, we're going to cover a whole career from STEM to Stern, and we far from love everyone is films, and I think it's safe to say that neither does it. Oh, I think that's very safe to say. It's intriguing, this whole week I've been hearing people talk about John a lot more than I've heard people talk about John a lot and I think that's great. I think it's very exciting that Carpenter is working on a big screen again. I've had the opportunity to work with him a couple of times and I... To those listeners who might not be aware Mr. McGee wrote a very cool episode of Master's A Horror with Scott Swan for John Carpenter and also an episode of Fear itself, which is also quite good, also co-written by Scott Swan. And these bastards have been fortunate enough to work with this master, whereas my perspective on John Carpenter is that he's probably the most influential filmmaker of my life, maybe up there with John Landis since the Evans Builder. And I would say definitely John would count as one of the most influential filmmakers in my life as well, even well before I work with him. Let's go all the way back to where John started, which was as a student film that eventually became a feature film. And that's the movie Dark Star. 1974. Now the way, by the way, before we begin, we're going to each be writing these different ways. Yeah. Start wanted to do these as out of five stars. I like to rate when I do rate on a five star scale, because you can easily extrapolate that to an ABCDE. You could also extrapolate it it to a one through 10. And not a big fan of quantifying films this way, but for the sake of brevity and fun, I will rate these on a five star scale, whereas Drew will be ranking the films in his order from least to most favorite, although we will be chronically in the films chronologically. Yeah, we'll be going through and I'll just tell you what number was on my list and

There are 17 feature films and we'll be discussing today I'm true. We'll be taking a few side bars where to cover the TV films We're not gonna count those but yeah, we'll talk about the TV movies a little bit But but 17 feature films and I'll be ranking them from one to 17 I'm a list freak Scott likes to do the stars So we're just gonna approach them in a slightly different way.

Okay. So dark start, the first film of his career is uneven uneven the best way to describe it is you know what it is it is a student film yes I'm in the fall and kind of got built on to and it's you know it is a it is a really promising ramshackle film but it's very creative and clever. It is and it's got a really dark pessimistic sensibility right from the beginning

And that's one of the things that is distinct about Carpenter and

Distinct about a lot of the 70s horror filmmakers is they truly it wasn't that they thought it was a cool ending

What if the bad guys win they genuinely thought the bad guys had already won?

Yeah, what I like about Dark Star,

and it's certainly not among my favorites to his,

and again, it shows a lot of promise, but it's not the kind of carpenter film that you want to pop in three times a year because it's really slick and fun and polished, but any carpenter fans should have to check it out at least once. And what I like about it is that it's a dark comedy sci-fi. And that's right, and a Malcolm that's just straight.

Yeah, that's, and it's solo budget, and it's so creative

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