Christine is not great, but it is tremendously fun.

It sort of can’t help being B-tier Carpenter, because I have this theory that John Carpenter is, at heart, a thriller director who is at his best with stories that tensely unfurl over a limited time-frame; Christine has to sprawl a bit for the story to work, and so the pacing here is unavoidably off. King’s novel has better pacing but also can’t quite solve the story’s POV problem, so there’s no “perfect” version here. But I love the novel and like this movie a hell of a lot anyway. It’s a grab bag of narrative and sensory pleasures: deft moments of characterization, memorable visuals, great effects, well-constructed scares, and a killer soundtrack and score. And one of cinema’s best cars. Come on, look at this beauty:

It would be an honor to be killed by such a fine automobile.

And if anyone doesn’t already know the story, you’re now wondering about that sentence, so let’s have a brief overview.

John Stockwell plays Dennis, the goodhearted boy-next-door high school student who is our way into the film, but the focus is on his best friend, perennial loser Arnie (Keith Gordon). Arnie is too bespectacled, quiet, and geeky for his rough-and-tumble auto shop classmates–most of whom, in typical movie bully fashion, look to be in their mid-thirties–and too much of a grease monkey for his genteelly domineering parents. Then he meets Christine, a red-and-white 1958 Plymouth Fury rusting to death in someone’s yard, and it’s love at first sight. Dennis begs him to be reasonable: there are better cars he could have for less. But Arnie is already past reason, and he will only get worse.

Arnie bends all his skills and all his free time to tending to Christine, not so much repairing her as nursing her back to health. It’s not an entirely one-sided relationship. Christine, as the film’s opening shows us, has been vicious from inception, with a taste for blood and vicious vengeance, but she likes Arnie, God help him. She likes him enough, we gradually understand, to make him into another version of her beloved (and now deceased) original owner, LeBay. (This is partly Vertigo with Jimmy Stewart played by a car.) Quietly, without much comment, Arnie sheds his glasses and his insecurities. He gains confidence. He can even start dating, landing the school’s new and most sought-after girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul). But Gordon never lets us feel good about these changes, even before the truly worrying signs set in. He plays this new-and-improved Arnie as a kind of vampiric Fonzie, superficially cool but already dead, with no light behind his eyes; soon the transformation is so total that it’s fairer to say he’s now LeBay haunted by the old Arnie, buried alive–by choice, hauntingly enough–and only occasionally able to reach up out of the grave.

The movie’s main fault, besides its weak ending and uneven pacing–Arnie’s transformation is excellent but too quick–is that it can’t quite bear the weight of its tragic central arc. Gordon does fine work with it, and Stockwell and Paul do their best to sell the sadness as well as the horror, but the movie’s own enlivening fun works against it here. It’s having too good a time to break your heart.

But still: what fun. It’s impossible to list all the entertaining scenes here, from Christine’s exuberant stalking of her prey (with her proving more willing to endanger herself than any human would be) to half-reverence, half-striptease vibe to Arnie seeing her powers in action for the first time. I’m also not above being entertained by Christine’s passive-aggression, which shows up in key musical choices on her self-controlled radio and in how she stages Arnie’s discovery of her post bully-battering. Even some of the flaws are fun: Harry Dean Stanton’s character is wildly unnecessary, but then you get to hang out with Harry Dean Stanton! None of this is high art, but it’s artful entertainment, and it makes for a great popcorn movie.

Christine is streaming on Tubi, Peacock, and the Criterion Channel.