Christine is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But I enjoyed it anyway. The movies have a love affair with cars, and at some dumb elemental level we enjoy seeing chases and crashes. In fact, under the right circumstances there is nothing quite so exhilarating as seeing a car crushed, and one of the best scenes in Christine is the one where the car forces itself into an alley that's too narrow for it.

This 1983 feature was Carpenter's best film since Halloween but still couldn't recapture the perfect balance of visceral shock and narrative integrity that defined his first success.

Christine does indeed suffer from the preposterous, low-octane nature of the devil-car pretext. But this satanic nonsense is saved from strictly facetious appeal by a few sensational pictorial effects, notably the sights of Christine speeding after a victim while engulfed in flames or miraculously repairing her own battered body, and by the no-nonsense performances of an excellent cast, especially Keith Gordon as the obsessed and transformed Arnie Cunningham.

It's to the credit of John Carpenter, who directs Christine, that he sees the comic side of King's metaphor. With the very talented 22-year-old Keith Gordon as Arnie, giving some fresh and funny turns on alienated youth, and a strong supporting cast including newcomers John Stockwell and Alexandra Paul and veterans Robert Prosky and Harry Dean Stanton, Christine has just enough comic energy to carry this fable to its crash-bam conclusion. [19 Dec 1983, p.66]

The story may be slim, but Carpenter deserves some credit. He makes more of the car-as-villain than one might expect, largely by filming the Plymouth in high style. [10 Dec 1983, p.B5]