That time of year is upon us again. The time of year for me to watch movies of questionable “quality” and fill in some holes in my backlog of movies I’ve missed. This year I started off with “Christine” from John Carpenter. A movie less about “horror” and more an episode of my strange addiction.
For Arnie Cunningham life is a grind. He’s an awkward nerdy type kid in his high school. He’s picked on, ridiculed, and generally made a fool of on a regular basis. He only has one friend, Dennis. Dennis is a star football player for their HS team and one of, if not the ONLY guy that will stand up for Arnie. The unlikely friends see each other every day since Dennis has a car and picks up Arnie for school. They chat and enjoy each other’s company as much as they can on the ride to school and off and on over the course of a school day.
One day on the way home from school in the middle of a conversation Arnie insists that Dennis stop his car. Arnie has seen a car for sale that he feels compelled to check out. Talking to the strange current owner of the car, Arnie decides, rather rashly, to buy the car on the spot. Dennis insists that the car is just a bucket of bolts held together exclusively by rust and miracles, but Arnie buys it anyway. He says he doesn’t know why, but the car seems to speak to him in some way. Arnie’s parents are none too happy with this impulse purchase and tell Arnie that he has to keep the car off their property as it is a giant eye-sore.
Undeterred by his friends and family, Arnie takes his “new” car to Darnell’s garage for safekeeping. It’s here that Arnie will work on his car, and get it back up to running condition. Arnie works on the car lovingly for weeks. Pulling parts from the junkyard and paying for it by doing odd-jobs for Darnell. Oddly the work is easy for Arnie and seems to go a lot faster than anyone could have imagined. Over time he works on the car, Arnie develops a disturbing attachment to the car, and becomes obsessed with it. It isn’t until one night when his girlfriend gets upset and takes it out on the car that Arnie (and everyone else) start to realize that the car might actually be obsessed with Arnie.
I always thought that Christine was going to be a horror movie. I think I remember my older sister watching the movie when we were kids and thinking that it seemed scary. Watching it now, it’s more creepy or disturbing than anything. Arnie loves his car… a little too much. I seriously thought at some point he would quite literally attempt to have sex with some part of Christine. I was kinda let down that there were so few unusual things in the film. I liked that the car would almost destroy itself to get at the victims only to repair itself afterward. Arnie, though corrupted and mislead by Christine, never really played more of a role that quite literally the driver.
Other than the one long shot of Christine engulfed in flames trying to run down a victim, there wasn’t a lot of moments in the movie to cheer for. The end of the film came kinda swift and predictably. Though I’ve never read it, I am guessing that this is one of those movies where the book was much better. I am kinda surprised that given the end sets up a sequel that one was never made. That and that no one has attempted to reboot the movie. Even though I didn’t really think much of the film it combines John Carpenter and Stephen King, and that isn’t bad. Also, it’s a hell of a lot better “Horror” movie than Maximum Overdrive.
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