I come into this one biased. This is John Carpenter. If he never makes another good movie, ‘The Thing’ is enough for me. I can’t quite describe how much I love that movie. It is one of the few films I can watch over and over and not get bored of it. I could go on and this could turn into some cinematic nerd pseudo-homo-erotic rant about Carpenter, but it might just land me in hot water like it did earlier in the week, wherein I now have to spend a month in Norway writing a Thing related script for a friend of mine.

So I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.

‘Cigarette Burns’ was Carpenters first ‘Masters of Horror’ feature and oh your weird tentacled god, did it rock. Udo Kier, just everything, if I think about it, I start talking in tongues.

‘Pro-Life’ is about a girl from a fundamentalist Christian family trapped in an abortion clinic. She’s expecting…something. As this is a feature directed by John Carpenter featuring Ron Perlman, I already liked it so much I almost didn’t need to see it.

It has nods and whispers to many of Carpenter’s previous films, not least ‘The Thing’ and runs at a smooth, masterful pace. If John Carpenter had lost his form, this just ices off his return to it. Me? I think he was just being lazy for a few years. Think about it? The surfboard scene in ‘Escape from LA’? What the fuck were you thinking?

Although I didn’t like the ending, finding it somewhere between an episode of ‘Monsters’ or ‘Tales from the Dark Side’, I loved the rest of this feature. Now that I think of it though, I have one other beef with this, CGI, the headshot; there should have been proper splatter. Goddamnit John, that was just fucking lazy.

Three Stars out of five– yes, that’s right, I’m docking you for the CGI.