I first was introduced to the work of Alex Karpovsky back in 2006 when The Hole Story was screened at the Minneapolis/St Paul International Film Festival. The Hole Story was an incredibly unique film that seamlessly melded fiction and non-fiction into a wonderfully funny and melancholy story about one man’s dream to try and make a pilot for his television show.

With Woodpecker Karpovsky once again uses his unique style of mixing fact and fiction, this time focusing on the fervor surrounding the sightings of the previously presumed extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the bayous of eastern Arkansas. Following one ardent bird watcher (Jon Hyrns) as he attempts to become the first person to definitively prove the elusive birds existence, Karpovsky also interviews many of the locals who are both thankful and frustrated by the birds sudden reappearance.

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The young people of today may not realize just how scary the word Satanist used to be here in the United States. You see, being a Puritanical society most people had a fear of God. But if there was one thing that could scare them even more then God it was Satan. And thanks to Hollywood hits like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby those fears were suddenly rationalized in celluloid.

Yes those kindly old neighbors are trying to stealthily allow Satan to rape you in your sleep. And yes, the reason your daughter has started cursing and crab walking everywhere is because she is possessed by a demon. And yes, that scary blind man constantly sitting in that chair in the attic is guarding the gateway to Hell.
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I always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. As a kid, he was the first director whose name meant something to me. Seeing his name flash across the screen for the commercials for The Fog when I was a child left an impression that I’m still trying to shake off today. More than any other director, Carpenter appeared to be making movies just for me. Halloween and The Fog were there when I was first discovering horror movies. Escape from New York, The Thing and Starman arrived when I was exploring other genres. When I discovered Stephen King, Christine arrived at the video store. When I stumbled on martial arts movies, he gave me Big Trouble in Little China. When I became interested in science, Carpenter churned out the underrated Prince of Darkness (a pessimistic and claustrophobic End of Days story offset by the optimism of quantum physics). And when I started to question authority, along came They Live (a movie remembered more for its excess than its restraint). Looking at Carpenter’s work from The Fog (1980) to They Live (1988), not only is it an impressive resume, but it is a body of work that perfectly reflects the paranoia, glut and cynicism that was the Eighties.

Sadly, the Nineties would not be a good time for Carpenter, and this, like many of us, is when I started to lose interest in his work. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while inventive at times, is painful and never quite understands what kind of movie it wants to be; all of this is made worse by the fact that many scenes practically scream studio intervention.

So when I saw the trailer for 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, I tried not to get my hopes too high. The good news was the movie ended up being pretty good, and the bad news was that it would be Carpenter’s last good movie. (more…)