6. John Carpenter
The Five Awful Movies: Village Of The Damned, Escape From L.A., Vampires, Ghosts of Mars, The Ward When you look back at John Carpenter's run of movies in the '70s and '80s, you can see a true master at work. He created memorable movie after memorable movie - genre classics in every sense, and some of the finest American pictures to have emerged in that time frame. And now Carpenter, though a legend in his own right, has been relegated to the realms of nostalgia only. Which is okay, I guess, because he hasn't lost his credentials and he still stands as one of my all-time favourite directors. But the last twenty years have been painful, John. The reason for his sudden reputation as box office death is because his movies are either purposely "retro" or genuinely retro - they're dealing with ancient curses and B-movie aesethics and people don't want to see that kind of thing anymore. Still, that's no excuse, I suppose, because Sam Rami just made
Drag Me To Hell and proved that approach can work. So whereas die-hard fans might find merit in his later works, the best of which is probably the accidently hilarious
Escape From L.A., it does seem like Carpenter is simply a man out of time.