Big Trouble in Little China: The Action Film Where the Hero Is the Sidekick

Sun, 11 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) died on release. It cost around twenty-five million dollars, made back a fraction of that, helped sour Carpenter on the studio system for good, and then it did the thing that the best flops do: it refused to stay dead. Rented, taped, traded and re-watched for four decades, it has become one of the most beloved cult films of its era, and the reason is a single structural gag so clean that most first-time viewers do not notice it is happening to them. The film gives you a swaggering, wisecracking action hero in Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton, and then it quietly arranges the plot so that Jack is useless, the comic sidekick who has wandered into the lead role and never worked it out.

Escape From New York: Carpenter, Snake, and the Dystopia on a Budget

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

John Carpenter wrote Escape From New York in the mid-1970s, in the sour aftermath of Watergate, and could not get it made. Studios found it too bleak, too cynical, too convinced that the American future was a prison. It took the success of Halloween to give him the leverage, and even then he made it for around six million dollars — pocket change for a film that had to convincingly turn all of Manhattan into a maximum-security penal colony. That gap, between the scale of the vision and the poverty of the means, is the whole story of why Escape From New York (1981) works, and why every ambitious low-budget genre film since has quietly studied it.

Kurt Russell - vo.rs

Big Trouble in Little China: The Action Film Where the Hero Is the Sidekick

Escape From New York: Carpenter, Snake, and the Dystopia on a Budget