Clark’s lasting legacy are two films that could hardly be farther apart, except for their sense of 50s nostalgia: A Christmas Story & Porky’s. I was surprised to see how many films he’d done (though almost nothing he’d directed since 1983 seems to qualify as “good”).
Still, I hope his death was quick and painless and given that his son died also, it’s a tremendously bad day for the Clark family.
RIP.
As a young man once said while decoding a secret message from Little Orphan Annie…SON OF A BITCH! I showed my grandparents A Christmas Story for the first time last year and they both enjoyed it. I enjoyed seeing it again, too. So long…and we’ll forgive you for Baby Geniuses.
And let’s not forget “Moonrunners,” which would later be tweaked and reworked into the TV series “Dukes of Hazzard.”
Killed by a drunk, unlicensed driver. Well, enjoy your prison sodomy, fuckface.
He should also be credited for Black Christmas (1974), the first and best (except for Halloween) of the slasher genre.
Also, the first movie on the Jack the Ripper theory used in From Hell - the Sherlock Holmesian Murder By Decree starring Christopher Plummer & James Mason as Holmes & Watson.
Bob Clark should have been punished for many of his movies (Baby Geniuses 1 and 2!?), but death is not appropriate.
He was one of the few directors to have movies listed in IMDB’s Top 250 AND Bottom 100.
Has anyone else achieved that?
Sons of bitches! Bumpuses!
I just read about this and it is a sad day. Granted, he’s done some bombs, but A Christmas Story is a seminal holiday favourite, Black Christmas is credited (incorrectly) as starting the whole slasher genre (it did directly influence many slasher flicks to come after it though), and let’s face it, the first two Porky’s movies (which he produced) are classic in their own rights.
Rest in peace, Old Man.
Burn in hell, drunk drivers.
According to IMDB, he was working on a remake of his 1972 horror film, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. I was not aware that he directed that–one of my favorite low-budget 70’s horror flicks!
I actually really enjoyed the Porky’s films. Yeah, I know–sophomoric, crude, all that stuff. But I was always impressed with how he made those elements coexist with the films’ underlying anti-racism themes. He also managed to get that message across without being preachy.
A sad day for the film industry.
How come the asshole drunk driver never dies?
I don’t recall where I heard it, but the phrase “babies and drunks bounce” applies here. As I understand it, drunks, whose reaction times are greatly slowed, tend not to tense up immediately prior to a collision, resulting in the driver (and any drunk passengers) simply bouncing around rather limply. Perversely, this ends up saving their lives. Those who tense up and brace themselves for impact usually end up with more broken and shattered bones resulting from the blunt force of the impact hitting them more or less perpendicularly. Think jumping out a second or third storey window; he who keeps his legs stiff will likely break them, while one who just lets his legs buckle will probably just bruise and possibly sprain.
The drunken driver who killed him was also an illegal immigrant:
http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=ff97593b-5561-44cc-be5f-e4cea19f98f1