John Carpenter’s truly bizarre ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ gets a cult
In 2012, Wesley Freitas wrote the music, sang lead vocals, and directed the video for “Batman Maybe,” a Dark-Knight-themed parody of Carly Rae Jepsen’s song “Call Me Maybe” that was perfectly timed with the release of the last installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. It was a viral monster, racking up almost two million views, thanks to the facts that it 1) combined the two biggest hits of the 2012 summer into a movie-music mash-up; 2) featured actors that looked uncannily like the stars in The Dark Knight Rises (Freitas was close enough to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but Russ Russo was almost indistinguishable from Christian Bale); and 3) was brilliant.
How did Freitas spend that cultural capital? On his true love, John Carpenter’s 1986 film Big Trouble in Little China—or what Freitas called “the greatest movie of all time.” His follow-up, a parody of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” called “Lo Pan Style,” was a tribute to the film’s villain, recreating the plot and the most famous quirks of Big Trouble in Little China in the song’s lyrics and video (and featuring a cameo by James Hong, the actor who played Lo Pan in the original). Whether it was a success or not is a matter of opinion—on the one hand, it only got half the hits “Batman Maybe” did, but on the other, that’s still a million freaking hits—but one thing is certain: it heralded the subsequent cult comeback for Big Trouble in Little China, which will be screened at the Santa Cruz Film Festival on Saturday (Nov. 15).
Keep in mind, this film was a flop in every way when it came out in 1986. Director John Carpenter briefly gave up on studio filmmaking after his disastrous experience making it (his excellent next two films, Prince of Darkness and They Live, were independently produced). Interestingly, Carpenter’s remake of The Thing from 1982 was also a box office and critical disappointment when it came out, but is now considered one of the best horror/sci-fi films of the ’80s, and one of the best remakes ever.
A similar movement seems to have been building for Big Trouble, though it couldn’t be more different than The Thing in style and execution. Where The Thing was bleak and complex, Big Trouble is goofy and fun, and as oversized as a semi-truck plowing through the narrow streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Carpenter threw together a hodge-podge of genres: fantasy, action-adventure, kung fu, sci-fi, horror and romance (sort of). In setups like the early scenes at the airport, he showed off the chops he’d developed creating claustrophobic suspense in films such as Assault on Precinct 13 and, of course, Halloween. It is an absolutely confounding film, with crappy effects and almost no character development. On the other hand: Kurt Russell talking like John Wayne while driving a semi with one hand and eating a submarine sandwich with the other!
That is the very essence of Russell’s Jack Burton, for whom the lack of character development is in fact the point. Burton fails upward, Lebowski-like, through the whole film, and his role as the traditional hero is almost entirely in his own mind. Watching the ever-underrated Russell work in this movie gets more entertaining with each viewing, and his iconic character is undoubtedly the reason that Big Trouble in Little China is finding a growing cult following.
‘Big Trouble in Little China’ plays at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 15, as part of the Santa Cruz Film Festival, at Verve’s coffee-roasting facility, 104 Bronson St., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $11 general/$10 students and seniors; all-festival passes are $60 general/$50 students and seniors.
