"One for the Completists"
That John Carpenter film his fans don't tend to mention gets a new UK Blu-ray and DVD release courtesy of Fabulous Films.
After meeting Alice Monroe (Daryl Hannah) at a bar one evening, stockbroker Nick Halloway (Chevy Chase) goes on a bender and ends up so hungover the next morning he falls asleep in a room in the research facility where he's supposed to be attending a symposium.
A freak accident caused by a spilled cup of coffee turns half the building invisible and Nick along with it. Pursued by David Jenkins (Sam Neill) and his gang of CIA agents who want to recruit Nick as an assassin, will our hero find love and escape the bad guys?
A critical and commercial failure on its release, I'd like to be able to say that time has been kind to MEMOIRS, but I can't. There's something about this film that's just tonally off. Chevy Chase makes a reasonable leading man in pretty much a non-comic role, Daryl Hannah does what she had been doing best in the 1980s (blonde likeable but nothing special heroine) and Sam Neill plays Damien Thorn yet again.
But it just doesn't work. It's neither funny enough nor suspenseful enough, and while setting a movie in the world of stockbrokers and their rich friends (with us expected to feel sympathy for them) might have appeared glamorous in the early 1990s, certainly now that approach feels all wrong.
But it just doesn't work. It's neither funny enough nor suspenseful enough, and while setting a movie in the world of stockbrokers and their rich friends (with us expected to feel sympathy for them) might have appeared glamorous in the early 1990s, certainly now that approach feels all wrong.
It's an odd film for John Carpenter to have made, and perhaps that's the key. The characters in Carpenter's best films are resolutely working class (THE THING, THEY LIVE) academics (PRINCE OF DARKNESS) or middle classers who are just about getting by (HALLOWEEN, THE FOG). What MEMOIRS really needed was someone who could perhaps have had more fun with the upper class world the film is set in, like Joe Dante, or someone who could have gone a far more serious route - imagine if David Cronenberg had treated the subject the way he did THE FLY.
As it is we're left with a film the main appeal of which is for completists of the works of Carpenter, Chase et al rather than for the film itself. And if you fancy seeing Father Ted's Bishop Brennan (Jim Norton) as a physicist.
For those who are interested, Fabulous' transfer does indeed look fabulous. As extras you get deleted scenes and a featurette on the special effects.
John Carpenter's MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN is out on DVD & Blu-ray from Fabulous Films on Monday 1st October 2018
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