HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 37
Six decades: 2nd of 2 films from the 70's

It's so predictable to watch this plucky little John Carpenter indie film from 1978 in October.... OR IS IT!?!? [gasp]

I suppose given that "movie of the week" is no longer a thing... Hang on, maybe it is. Network television still exists, doesn't it? Sorry, I forgot that for a minute there.

Anyway, my point was going to be that I suppose everyone who has watched this movie in the last ten years or so is a John Carpenter completist. Enter... me!

I thought this was just a director-for-hire job for JC (for which he did as professional a job as you would expect from the man) but he actually wrote this too, so I guess he was pitching to TV studios as much as movie ones. Makes sense - although we now see Assault on Precinct 13 as a classic, at this point he still hadn't made Halloween, and so he really hadn't broken at all.

This is fine. It's really a fairly standard stalker flick, with more than a few explicit nods to Hitchcock and, less relevantly for the film but true to Carpenter form, a Lovecraft nod as well (just the name of the apartment building in which it takes place: Arkham Towers). Lauren Hutton makes for a reasonably charismatic lead and David Birney is an entirely 70's kind of vanilla suave but I found him strangely watchable. The real cast highlight is a fresh faced Adrienne Barbeau as a Hutton's character's lesbian friend (a nice bit of attempted social inclusivity from John - go Adrienne!).

I dunno what to say - this isn't going to knock anyone's socks off, but it's diverting enough and it certainly has a velour-like comfiness to someone like me who is old enough to remember a time when TV movies were a staple of household entertainment.

Box ticked.