Each installment in the horror trilogy from novelist Stephen King that began with the letter "C" was made into a motion picture. Carrie was about an evil girl who gets even, Cujo was about an evil dog who gets even, and Christine was about an evil car that gets even. Just when I was starting to suspect he was trying to kick the repetition habit, I found out this year he is releasing a novel called From a Buick 8, about -- you guessed it -- an evil car that gets even. Note to Stephen -- it didn't work that well the first time around!
Christine might have worked better for me if I had ever been stalked by a car, or feared being stalked by someone behind the wheel of one. As it stands, the film and the premise never really lends itself to believability. When Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho came out, people were scared to go into the shower. Like Hitchcock, one of King's strengths is to tap into those similar, potential fears which people might have in their daily lives. To me, this certainly explains why the idea of an angry, possessed car never works. After watching the movie, I wasn't scared an evil car would come after me. Conversely, a few years back, the hobbled body of Paul Sheldon certainly stayed with me after I read Misery. Such is the hit and miss nature of Mr. King.
Come to think of it, such is the nature of John Carpenter as well. Carpenter is behind the camera for this 1983 college try. He barely manages to maintain any suspense throughout most of the film, and leaves a sour-tasting possibility for a sequel at its conclusion. The lemon stars John Stockwell as Dennis and Keith Gordon as Arnie. They are supposed to be high school students. Dennis is a football player who is just trying to find the right lady, and Arnie is the hopeless outcast who thinks he may have found her in the form of Christine, a run down 1958 Plymouth Fury which he decides to revamp. Baywatch viewers (i.e. men) may recognize Alexandra Paul as the girl who "suspects something is wrong", Robert Prosky as the scrapyard owner who "suspects something is wrong", and Harry Dean Stanton as the investigator who "suspects something is wrong". None of the performances are very good, and thanks to the meandering structure of the plot, we soon realize we could care less what happens to them anyway.
To call Christine a horror movie is an astonishingly far stretch. It has little terror, no blood or gore, and only a marginal amount of suspense. If it weren't for Dennis and Arnie's graphic conversations about women, the movie would have been lucky to chalk up even a PG rating. Just when it starts to get going and shows potential, it breaks down time and time again. Over the near twenty years it's been around, it's pretty clear this is one jalopy that can't be salvaged from the junk heap.
