"Hey, what's wrong, baby?"

Bill Frist announces his candidacy for Earth Overlord.


John Carpenter, a seminal master of schlock cinema, capable of spinning the most tired genre premises into compelling, atmospheric, ass-kickingly entertaining films. "Halloween" essentially invented the slasher genre. "The Thing" contains an aura of suffocating paranoia and some of the best special effects of the 1980s. And what can be said about "Big Trouble in Little China" that hasn't already been said by a room full of stoned hipsters? However, somewhere around the late 80s, Carpenter lost his commercial appeal, his budgets and distribution dried up, and he's now scampering from one underfunded retread idea to another. If he directs another movie before he dies, I'd be surprised.

There has been a recent trend in Hollywood, one on par with the Tuskegee Experiment and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, to remake John Carpenter movies with big budgets, blank young actors, and helmed by hack video directors. Instead of giving that money to a proven craftsman like Carpenter to make a movie that will undoubtably be more interesting than anything these uninspired, glorified salesmen could ever dream up, they throw the cash at a pack of chimps and set them to work fucking with Carpenter's movies. It's a monumentally dumb idea, because the reason that these films are memorable isn't their thin, gimmicky plots, it's the eye that Carpenter brought to them. So, by remaking his films with suck-ass hacks at the helm, they're left with nothing more than the thin, gimmicky plots.

The two examples released so far speak for themselves: "Assault on Precinct 13" and "the Fog" bite dog wang for weeks.

However, in violation of everything I just wrote, there is one John Carpenter film that I really hope the Hollywood jizz-sacks get around to re-making, because it has a thin, gimmicky plot that happens to be AWESOME!

"Rowdy" Roddy Piper, wrestling super-star, plays a drifter in Los Angeles who discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the Truth: which is that there are hideous, bug-eyed aliens living amongst us in disguise. They compose the top 1%, the movers, the shakers, politicians, lawyers, media figures. All advertising is, under it's colorful exterior, a simple order: OBEY, CONSUME, REPRODUCE. This reality is obfuscated by a microwave that makes the aliens look like people, and the stark, black-and-white orders look like media content. The sunglasses, manufactured by an underground cell of human rebels, block that wave. Roddy eventually joins these fighters and takes out the main microwave dish, revealing to the horrified human population the reality they've long ignored. You don't have to be Umberto Eco to get the symbolism here.

However, the movie featured crappy special effects (the alien's walkie talkies were clearly left-over PKE meters from "Ghostbusters"), less exposition of the alien control mechanism than I would have liked, and it starred Rowdy Roddy Piper. So let's remake this fucker: throw in some WB rent-a-hunks, decent CGI, and finally make a disposable Hollywood action time filler with an actual idea in its celluloid head.