I'm with Charles B, JC should get back with Debra Hill (who was such a cutie back in the Halloween/Fog days. Man, Debra Hill, a cool horror lovin chick and Andrienne Barbeau....my admiration for JC goes beyond his being one of my favorite directors.) I think it was a good working partnership between the two.
I'm also with Floyd...I've still got faith in the man. While his later work may not compare to the "classic" status of his earlier works, I don't find it as bad as some. For a long while I would say his only really bad film was Escape From LA. But I recently tracked it down on dvd and rewatched it...it ain't great, still one of his lessor efforts, but it ain't that bad. (I also find some stuff to like about Memoirs of an Invisible Man...even though it doesn't have the John Carpenter's at the beginning, as he doesn't consider it one of 'his' films, it isn't bad.)
I don't know if I'd use the words "enjoyable trash" as wetbones did for Ghosts of Mars and Vampires, but I know what he means exactly and I guess it's a matter of semantics. And it's a good enough term. I enjoyed them, but don't know how far I could go to defend them as "great" movies. But I really liked In the Mouth of Madness and Village of the Damned, which, while adding nothing new to the great original, I thought was very solidly well done and a very good, solid horror flick. Of his later films I actually think it's one of my favorites of his. The steady tone of it...with no real action scenes or rises in the tension--sure there's a death scene here and there, but there are hardly any 'action' scenes--the movie is just a steady prgression of atmosphere and mood (though some may say it's flat.) But his music is great in it. And there's a lot of little touches in it that seem very much Carpenter. The slow parade of cars to the 'birthing barn' and then the slow dolly across all the mothers giving birth and when they do all their smiles, etc, but during the whole scene there's his music playing giving this 'happy' moment this sense of dread. And the same shot of the cars as the children are dropped off, etc. It may not be an original idea and may barely deviate from the original film, but some stuff in there as well as Vampires and even Ghosts of Mars let me know that John Carpenter the director I love is still in there.
I think he just needs something to light his fire again. Maybe get a project he really loves, or make that low budget "halloween-like" horror film he's mentioned vaguely time and again (not a specific script, but the idea of going back and doing a film like that.) Personally, I'd love for him to do a remake of Quatermass And the Pit, which is a huge fave of mine and I know his. He's mentioned it over the years, and he's a huge Quatermass fan. I think something like that would really get his juices going.
But yeah, I'd really really like to have some new JC movies.
