6. Ghosts of Mars/John Carpenter
From the mid-1970s through to the late 1980s, John Carpenter was a force to be reckoned with, beginning with making the cult classic
Dark Star for a mere $60,000, and graduating onto larger successes with
Assault on Precinct 13, the seminal
Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China and
They Live. The 90s proved a trying time for the resourceful filmmaker, however, with
Memoirs of an Invisible Man, In the Mouth of Madness, Village of the Damned, Escape from L.A., and
Vampires all receiving a lukewarm-to-negative reception. The worst, however, was yet to come.
Ghosts of Mars, released in 2001, was largely panned by critics for virtually every aspect of its production, ranging from the sets, to the script, performances, and Carpenter's direction, which was described as him "at rock bottom". Commercially, it also only recouped roughly half of its $28m production budget, a shocker for a man who in his formative years turned huge profits against minuscule production costs. The failure of Ghosts of Mars is largely believed to explain why Carpenter went into semi-retirement, and only returned to filmmaking 9 years later with
The Ward which regrettably also turned out to be pretty terrible too. It's a shame as his 2005 direction of a stellar
Masters of Horror episode suggests that there's still some life in the old dog yet, yet he seems quite content just to cash-in on the various remakes and reboots of his earlier films.