Christine (1983) [w/Commentary]

In 1957, in Detroit, a red Plymouth Fury is built and is the cause of two accidents, one of them fatal, still in the assembly line. Twenty-one years later, the outcast and bullied nerd Arnold "Arnie" Cunningham is getting a ride with his best and only friend Dennis Guilder and he sees the wrecked car for sale in a garden. Arnie immediately falls in love with the car. The car was given the name Christine by its first owner. He brings the car to a repair shop of the despicable Will Darnell and works hard to restore the classic car. While he works in the restoration, he changes his personality to a cocky teenager and he dates the most beautiful girl in the high-school, Leigh Cabot. Soon Arnie becomes selfish and jealous of the supernatural Christine that kills everyone that is a threat to them.



Audio Commentary featuring John Carpenter and Keith Gordon is hugely enjoyable, nicely balancing technical data (Carpenter used Fuji film in the prologue rather than the Kodak stock utilized for the bulk of the film, since Fuji had a browner, softer ambience that harkened back to the 1950s) and anecdotal (Gordon laments never really having gotten friendly with Stockwell, perhaps because both were young, competitive males). There's some nice information about some of Christine's two most famous sequences, one where Christine "restores" herself after having been vandalized and the incendiary climax at the gas station.