Review: Christine (1983)

Christine (1983)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

It's odd that killer car movies, or even movies like The Love Bug about cars with minds of their own, haven't made a comeback with all the hype surrounding self-driving cars. It seems like they also have to be transforming robots to get anybody to pay attention to them. Well, I think that part of the issue may be the legacy of Stephen King's novel Christine, and John Carpenter's subsequent film adaptation of it. The titular Plymouth Fury may be possessed by an evil supernatural force rather than commanded by a mad AI, but it's basically the definition of a self-driving car, albeit with some features that Elon Musk probably only has installed on the special Tesla Roadster he keeps in his volcano lair. (Or the one he sent up on that rocket- oh, that's why he launched a car into space!) It's a rather high bar to reach, the film being pure '80s Carpenter at his best, taking a setup that should sound silly at first glance and making a chilling supernatural horror story out of it. It has just enough self-awareness to recognize that you can't take a movie about a killer car 100% seriously, instead putting the focus squarely on the car's owner and his attachment to it, helping to elevate it beyond a creature feature into a terrifying exploration of a deranged young man. 

The plot is that, in September 1957 at a Plymouth assembly plant in Detroit, one '58 Fury sedan just came out bad. Before it even left the factory, its hood slammed shut on the hand of one worker, while another was found dead in the driver's seat after he hopped inside during a smoke break. Years later, the car is purchased by Arnie Cunningham, a nerd who picks out the battered '50s classic in the hopes of restoring it and looking cool enough that he won't get picked on by the bullies who harass him daily at school. As he grows increasingly attached to "Christine", as the car was called by the man who sold it to him, he starts dressing and speaking like a '50s greaser and growing increasingly unhinged, all while the people who wronged him are run down by the classic death-mobile. As Arnie's jock friend Dennis and new girlfriend Leigh learn the truth about Christine and get scared of Arnie's attachment to "her", they realize that they too aren't safe from it.

Being an '80s teen horror movie, the values of many of the characters, especially the loutish bullies who harass Arnie, are very much of their time, with all the casual misogyny and homophobia you'd expect. I'm bringing this up not to knock the film, far from it. In fact, watching the film through a modern lens, in the midst of debates over toxic forms of masculinity, gives a whole new layer of subtext to Arnie's descent into villainy, one that I feel that John Carpenter and Stephen King (neither of whom have been shy about their politics) probably recognized back in 1983. Upon purchasing the '58 Fury, the dweebish Arnie, who's always felt pushed around and disrespected by his parents and classmates, morphs into an old-school "bad boy" in the vein of Andrew "Dice" Clay, except while the Diceman was a comic persona, Arnie's transformation isn't. He embraces the bad attitude that comes with that in more ways than one, most notably in how, while the car immediately gets him a gorgeous girlfriend in Leigh, his awful behavior drives her away just as quickly. As it becomes clear to him that the car hasn't made him popular, and that people still hate him for whole new reasons, he doubles down on his love of Christine, the one thing in his life that won't challenge him or call him out on his bullshit. It may be Christine that's running down the bullies, but Arnie's riding along every step of the way, such that the fact that the car is driving itself is presented as a genuine twist. Today, stories of nerdy young men getting sucked into misanthropic, nihilistic movements that feed and justify their worst impulses, driven by disaffection at a world they feel has beaten them down, are a dime a dozen, as are stories of people who let their fandom obsessions consume them. And Arnie's journey in this film mirrors them almost perfectly. Christine may not be a group of flesh-and-blood humans like the incel movement, the alt-right, or a street gang, and she may be a physical object rather than a movie, game, or comic book story, but she still turns Arnie into a monster just as menacing as she is. Keith Gordon delivers an outstanding performance as Arnie, going from geek to chic to evil and making me increasingly scared of what he's turned into, almost like a male version of Sissy Spacek in Carrie except without the realization at the end that he's the bad guy.

Arnie's journey from victim to villain, fueled by two tons of Detroit steel, is the source of this film's main horror, but with this being a Carpenter film, it's hardly the only one. Given that Christine is much bigger and louder than, say, Michael Myers from Halloween, this isn't a film where the killer can spend long in the shadows silently sneaking around. The kills are all about burning rubber and grinding metal as Christine runs down those who wronged Arnie, cramming itself into tight spaces, T-boning other cars, blowing up a gas station, and (of course) running people over. And since the car is alive and can repair any damage inflicted to it, we're also treated to scenes showcasing outstanding special effects in which the car's metal bends itself back into shape after the damage it sustained on its latest rampage. This film is something of a meeting of "horror Carpenter" and "action Carpenter", the director putting his skills from both genres to great use in rendering how Christine kills its victims and eventually how Dennis and Leigh confront it. Speaking of such, Dennis makes for a great foil to Arnie as the jock to his nerd, the sort of character you'd expect to be a douchebag who gets righteously killed in a movie like this but grows into the sort of hero a villain like Arnie needs, while Leigh makes for a great audience surrogate as the character who's exposed firsthand to both Arnie's downward spiral and Christine's supernatural evil before joining forces with Dennis to defeat it; both John Stockwell and Alexandra Paul (of future Baywatch fame) did good work in their roles. And while Harry Dean Stanton felt underused as the detective investigating Arnie for the deaths that Christine is causing, it was still a treat seeing him in this movie.

The Bottom Line

This was a damn good one, and one where I debated with myself whether to give it a 5 out of 5. One of both Carpenter's best and one of the best adaptations of as Stephen King book, Christine is an outstanding movie with great special effects, a pair of memorable villains, and a story whose subtext is, if anything, even more relevant in this day and age. Check it out.