I can’t say I’m a life long John Carpenter fan, because that implies, I was born with knowledge and appreciation of Carpenter’s work. Which in 1978 when I was hatched I did not. And what a blooding weird thing to claim. So, I will say I’m a massive John Carpenter fan. Some say ‘uncurable fanboy’, but those fuckers have no taste.

Where was I? oh, yeah. John Carpenter. I love his man’s output. A true artist of modern times. His movies have a timeless quality too them even looking past some 70s wardrobe choices and his film scores are simple, atmospheric and perfect. Some of my all-time favourites are Carpenter films, like Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, They Live and In The Mouth of Madness. But my all-time fav JC flick, the one I know all the dialogue by heart and featuring my favourite actor, Kurt Russell, just so happens to be the first of his films I ever saw. That film is the big budget, genre mashup, cult classic, Big Trouble in Little China.

To my ten-year-old mind, it was the best thing ever in the wide world of everything, and that hasn’t changed in the extra thirty plus years I’ve been alive since watching it. BTILC is this amazing mash up of martial arts film, John Wayne western, Chinese style fantasy epic, with big doses of action and comedy. And to top it all off, our main character in truck driver Jack Burton, doesn’t realise he is actually the traditional sidekick character. Monsters, magic, and martial arts in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I mean what’s not to love here. I was mesmerised from the first scene in the lawyer’s office, but when that Carpenter score starts with the titles and the movie proper starts, I became a John Carpenter fan in that moment.

Now the first time I saw the film, it was taped off television, so it was not only a censored cut of the film, it was also cut for time to fit into a certain timeslot. I didn’t see the complete film until years later when someone, I never found out who, recorded over the masterpiece and I rented it from the video store to get my fix. But watching this film was the first time I can remember that I started to look for a director’s name on the video store shelves instead of the actors. And look I did. And watch I did. And oh, the dreams I had.

I also looked for his name in TV guides, magazines, journals, newspapers, and movie trailers looking for movies I had missed, movies that were coming out and anything on the man himself. Hell, I even bought movie novelisation of anything I could find of his work. I still have a copy of the novelisation of Starman. And being a kid in Australia in the late 80s and through the 90s, there wasn’t that much to find. But then a wonderful thing happened. Something that would allow me to find everything I ever wanted to know and John Carpenter and film in general. That marvellous certation was the internet. DUM DUM DAH!

It wasn’t until iMDB that I found a list of all of his work and realised I could actually finish my Carpenter viewing experience. What I found, apart from all the films I owned and watched religiously at least every year without fail, was the TV movies, films he wrote, produced (or both), but didn’t direct and all of his appearances in genre film documentaries and documentaries about him. This was a little extra film geek homework before I could hand in my ‘fanboy’ assignment. Films like the thriller Someone’s Watching Me starring Laureen Hutton and Adrienne Barbeau (which is still an amazing way to spend 90 minutes even for a TV movie), and the three-hour TV biopic Elvis starring Kurt Russell, where both amazing pieces of entertainment, even taking into account that they were made in the 1970s for network television.

I even hunted down others over time as they became available to the film geek half a world away where licencing and rights issues sometimes stopped a film from being rereleased. Like the films based on original scripts that Carpenter wrote on spec as a way of trying to get a foot in the door on the film industry. And one such film is the 1986 action film Black Moon Rising.

Upon watching the film recently, I realised I had actually seen it before back in the 1990s, again on VHS. Ah, the old days. It was in my final year of high school when I was studying for the HSC exams. I was stressed, confused and completely unsure of myself. And to make things worse, there where a number of suicide attempts at my school because of the environment surrounding the final exams. I needed a break, so I rode my bike down to the local home entertainment emporium and rented some distractions, and grabbed microwave popcorn and a massive bottle of Coke for good measure. And this was the first film in a solo movie marathon. It did the trick. It is always amazing to me how a film can take me back in time.

Anyway, Black Moon Rising is a action film that blends the tropes of film noir, an adventure heist caper, and throws in a sci-fi McGuffin of a futuristic car that runs on hydrogen taken from water that can reach speeds of 300 miles an hour.

Our hero is Quint (played by Tommy Lee Jones) a thief hired to steel tax records of a shady organisation by the government. His exit from the organisation’s building goes a bit sideways and he makes his getaway under fire from hired goons lead by old rival Ringer (Lee Ving), who gives chase. Quint ends up hiding the disks with the tax records in the back of an experimental car being transported cross country by the car’s creator Earl Windom, formerly of NASA (Richard Jaeckel), driver Billy Lyons (Dan Shor) and mechanic Tyke (William Sanderson) to make a deal with a car manufacturing company in LA. And since Quint knows where they are headed, makes his own way there, avoiding Ringer and his goons.

Later at the restaurant where the meeting takes place, Quint tries unsuccessfully to get the disks back, and goes into the upscale eatery to watch the car’s creators and his friends and keep an eye on the car parked outside on a trailer in the parking lot. But then Nina (Linda Hamilton) enters the story. She is a car thief working for business man and leader of a ring of car thieves Ryland (Hollywood veteran Robert Vaughan). And surprise, surprise, she and her crew steal all the cars from the parking lot including the super car Black Moon.

Quint follows the best he can to a seemingly dead end in the park garage of a high-rise building, which just so happens to be the secret hideout of the bad guys. Quint then teams up with the car creators to steal the car back, and get his disk back while trying to appease the fed in charge of his hiring Johnson (Bubba Smith, Police Academy’s Hightower himself), and avoiding Ringer and his men as well as Ryland’s henchman Luis (Nick Cassavetes). Quint and Nina develop a relationship and ends up helping the boys get the car, mostly for her own reasons. And they are helped on the way by Quint’s old friend and mentor Iron John (the great Keenan Wynn, in one of his last performances).

Okay, that synopsis is all well and good, but is the movie worth watching? Well, yeah. I know shock horror, right. If you are a fan of action thrillers, it’s a competent enough film. But if you love 1980s flicks of the cult variety, then there is a lot to love here. It might not win any awards but it is a fun ride. With a cool car and everythying.

While this finished film can’t really be called a John Carpenter film, even with an executive producer credit. He basically had nothing to do with the film apart from writing the original script. That script rewritten before production started, like many spec scripts in Hollywood usually are. But I think there is enough of JC in the finished project to warrant me talking about it. And there are some good filmmakers attached to this.

Directed by Harley Cokeliss, a Chicago raised and English film school educated filmmaker has done a bit of everything. He worked for the BBC making children’s programs and films, was the second unit director on Empire Strikes Back (my eyebrow went up on that one too). And he was the director behind an awesome B post-apocalyptic flick Warlords of the 21^st Century (aka Battle Truck), the Burt Reynolds actioner Marlone from 1987 and the 1988 horror flick Dream Demon. He has even worked in television with episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, and The New Adventures of Robin Hood. Cokeliss knows how to construct a good story and even on a smaller budget, and with props that don’t work, like a futuristic car that could only travel at 50 mile per hour, he can deliver a tale with action, suspense and a decent amount of comedy and drama. Misha Saslov’s cinematography just added to the look of the film with good use of street scenes in the car chases giving a sense of speed and danger that wasn’t really there on set as well as masterfully shooting the more intimate scenes. Yes, that includes the sex scenes, you pervs.

And you know who did the music on this movie. Lalo Schifrin. Lalo ‘mutherfuckin’ Schifrin. The veteran composer that has given the world the Mission: Impossible theme, worked on The Man From UNCLE, composed the scores for Cool Hand Luke, Enter the Dragon and the Dirty Harry movies. He proves an effective score can turn a mediocre story into a great one. And he even steps out of his comfort zone and blends traditional film score with a minimalist synthesiser-based score, very much like one of John Carpenter’s own film scores.    

I was talking to a friend of mine about this film online, because you know, COVID sucks. And she mentioned that she wasn’t surprised I like Tommy Lee Jones in the film, stating that he is ‘Always good’. And for some reason has always looked way older than he is in every film. True, he always seems to flow in every role he does. From dialogue to action, everything seems so effortless and naturalistic regardless of the material. But this wasn’t always the case. While Jones had had a pretty good career before he starred in Black Moon Rising, he wasn’t the mega star he is today. He had done some amazing films like Rolling Thunder, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Savage Islands, Eye of Laura Mars (another Carpenter spec script) and Stormy Monday. It wasn’t until he starred in the western mini-series Lonesome Dove in 1989 that his star began to rise. But it was the one two punch of Under Siege in 1992 and The Fugitive in 1993 that the ‘mega star’ became his. So, looking back to 1986, it may have seemed like a gamble to many to have Jones headline your film. Even if these was the case, having Linda Hamilton fresh of Children of the Corn and The Terminator soften any real concerns. And who doesn’t want to save the day with Sarah Connor. And a cast of character actors, both old and new, backing you up couldn’t hurt your chances.

This movie it definitely is worth a look. Even if it’s just for curiosity’s sake. Hell, after I watched it again, I ordered the Arrow lease of the film on Blu-Ray, and that is an awesome transfer and with a decent collection of special features, even if the audio commentary is a little dry. I don’t think this film is streaming anywhere I know of, but DVDs of the film a pretty easy to find, but if you want a better viewing experience, order the Blu-Ray online. And to think, all those years ago I rented this movie because the car on the box reminded me of a Tron light cycle had a baby with the A-Team van.