A Month of Stephen King (fourth week)

As before, I'll be editing in updates to this post as I go.

August 22^nd

The Dark Half (George A. Romero, 1993)

Here's a movie that raises another difficult question when it comes to Stephen King on Film. How broadly do you play the horror elements? I don't just mean camp.

When author Thad Beaumont tries to ditch his more violent pen-name alter ego, George Stark materializes and begins a killing spree.

King's doppleganger story, or his Jeckyll/Hyde tale sprang from his own biography. On a superficial note, King used to write under the pseudonym Richard Bachman until someone caught on. King went public, announcing in press releases that Bachman was “dead”. More substantially, when he wrote as Bachman he tapped into something more violent and hardened in his own psyche. His 'Bachman books are often less pleasant to read, more cynical, angrier. Whether King noticed or not, his wife Tabitha did and told him so. Tabitha, I take it from barely recalled testimony by King, was not a fan of this side of her guy. All of this is in the novel that sprang from that episode.

(An aside: when King describes his characters' physical attributes I tend to take them as suggestions rather than absolutes. Thus, I couldn't help casting King himself as Thad Beaumont when I read the book, and that being the case his badass mofo doppleganger George Stark could only have been played by Glen Danzig.)

While I don't have much to say about the story, I can attest that I adore both the book and the movie. The hardback was a birthday gift to me when it was in first release. I tried to read it slowly, to linger and make it last, but it was too good to put down. Storywise it hits the Jeckyll/Hyde basics...Beaumont's wife advises him to out himself so to speak, which is the right choice, but he misunderstands and instead of owning the more untamed side of his nature he tries to abnegate it entirely, Trying to suppress his own nature, it comes back to bite him in the ass. The harder he tries to kill this essential part of himself, the more of a problem it becomes. None of this is groundbreaking. What I love about the story is the magic realism King spins around it, a mythology at once deeply personal to himself, and oneiric with allusions to psychopomps and the land of the dead. It's a smooth read.

It's also a smooth movie, among the first tier of King adaptations. Sadly, not many share that estimation. It has three strengths, IMO and two weaknesses. First on the plus side is Timothy Hutton giving not one but two distinct performances. As Thad Beaumont he's a pretty standard protagonist, exasperated but stalwart. As Stark, he's a cold bastard who walked right out of a pulp crime novel, all mid-Western drawl and mean self-assurance.

The second and most sublime is Amy Madigan as Thad's wife Liz, maybe the movie's secret weapon. Liz is atypical for a supporting female lead in a horror film, where we'd expect her to be wholly reactionary to the drama and a potential damsel-in-distress to boot. On the contrary, Liz is the anchor that keeps the drama from drifting away on the tide current of phantasmic occurrences. She loves her husband and is steadfast in her support of him despite her misgivings about his darker side. In this too she is a rock, not backing down from his “dark half” (even when literally confronted by it in the corporealized form of Stark) but openly talking to Thad about it. This shows a self-respect on her part and a vital trust in Thad and in their bond. At the story's opening it is Liz who sees clearly enough to give Thad the good advice to own his whole nature – to be an integral whole – and cheat the blackmailer of his prize.

Finally there's the direction of George A. Romero, who gives treads a fine line between between straight drama and dream logic, eschewing most of the accepted cinema language of exaggerated lighting and dutch angles, which I think would have undercut the weight of the story (there is however one hallway scene with strong red and blue gels ala Argento or Bava). Instead the horror comes from a spate of brutal murders committed by George Stark. Time and the genre itself have blunted the violence considerably, these scenes were bloodless at the time and we've seen worse since, but I once found them hard to watch. Romero sets 'em up tense and delivers in swift slashes.

Here's where my initial question comes in, because I think Romero's refusal to play up horror cliches results in a stronger movie and yet even with Romero at the helm it usually doesn't get more than “it's passable” from horror fans. I'm trying to wade my way through this, and don't have anything yet but comparisons to other films. For example, Romero's contribution to the anthology film Two Evil Eyes: based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe, Romero's is universally regarded as the weaker section of the movie for looking like any episode of a low-budget television series. It is utterly devoid of flavor or flair, which makes it unlike The Dark half, but it could be argued to have been born of the same aesthetic choice. Both refuse to punch up the horror with standard cliches, one is IMO effective and the other not, neither is well regarded. Or there's Pet Sematary in which the horror scenes are delivered under a barrage of trite horror riffs and comic relief, IMO undermining the truer horror at the heart of the story and yet enjoying the popularity that has eluded Romero's film (Romero had been slated to direct PS but had to bow out to scheduling conflicts – we can only wonder what his version would have been like). The Dark Half is a somber though not depressing or otherwise overbearing story lacking in comic relief. It deserves a reverent telling and that's what Romero gave it. Was he wrong?  I don't believe there's any clear answer but to honor the needs of the film first, and the source material second.

Possibly detrimental to the movie is the nearly inexplicable failure of the police to arrest Thad Beaumont for crimes which bore his fingerprints (literally – Stark and Beaumont are the same person, after all). King pulls it off in the novel as the chief investigating officer is no less than the Sheriff of Castle Rock, a friend of the Beaumont family who jeopardizes his job to forestall Thad's arrest. Preferential treatment and less-than-proper handling of a case is true to life, yet in fiction we demand more “credible” plotting. In this the script could have used the same care that King gave it, but the crucial dialog that would have let this play are missing. We're also left to wonder exactly how George Stark was conjured from nothing, a mystery to which we are given an anecdote about Thad having ben conceived as a twin and the sibling been not entirely absorbed in thew womb. If you've seen enough horror to accept mystical poesy it isn't a problem, but those who need strict logic may find it a roadblock.

August 23^rd

Secret Window (David Koepp, 2004)

From the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden published in the collection Four Past Midnight. Author Mort Rainey is being hounded by a man named John Shooter claiming that Rainey plagiarized Shooter's own story. Shooter is a scary obsessive who pursues Rainey with his own warped understanding of justice.

A top-shelf production all around, the sole problem with Secret Window is that it comes some two or three decades too late. No spoilers (well, okay, mild spoiler) but you're going to guess where it's going because you've already been there countless times before, and chances are you may be disappointed that such a clever, well-mounted and suspenseful puzzle doesn't lead to something more surprising. I suppose, as they say, it's the journey and not the destination...

I resisted this movie the first couple of times I saw it, and it's not one I take down from the shelf easily. That would be because I'm not overly fond of the story. Still, the more I see it the more I like it. That's not because the story itself is growing on me. Rather, the telling of it is.

Secret Window is written and directed by David Koepp, not one of my favorite screenwriters. He's been involved in a number of box office hits but his work is spotty. At his best he writes charming crowdpleasers without depth (You may want to exclude his one standout, Carlito's Way, not original to Koepp but an adaptation). At worst his scripts are so idiotic as to be borderline offensive (The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2). As a director, Koepp still has less than dozen titles to his filmography, and as yet I've only seen this one. I'll have to get at Stir of Echoes at some point, because on the strength of this one movie he might be a better director than a screenwriter. He maintains a calculated pace that increases in menace incrementally, building our suspicions about what it all means through a judicially placed clues. When Shooter pays his visits, they're staged with a flair for paranoid shudders and frights, and when it's Rainey on his own we're offered character building with dialog that's engaging and well-drawn performances from capable actors. Lovely cinematography, too, everything and everyone is beautiful. Early on I thought it was lead actor Johnny Depp who owned this movie, but eventually realized that even Depp was under Koepp's reins the whole time.

Depp balances his performance well, when you consider it. Mort Rainey spend the entire movie in a pissy mod and is kind of a dick, which Depp stays true to, yet at the same time he manages to be amusing and at least sympathetic enough to hold center stage without turning us away. It's nice to see Depp give a sincere performance as a real human being for once. Sadly he's given his career over to highly mannered caricatures – fun to watch but it gets tiring when you know he's capable of more.

Instead it's John Turturro who almost delivers a caricature. Almost, but not not quite. As John Shooter Turturro looks, thinks, and speaks like a hayseed but shining through is an urgent sense of pathos and wounded pride, of outraged dignity. The guy is scary but in an obvious, hulking way. John Shooter is entirely incapable of reason, an infuriating tunnel vision Turturro puts across with ease.

I don't have anything else to say of the material or the film, and I'm usually doubtful about discussing the way audiences take to a movie...but I have to say that looking at the preponderance of comments on SW's IMDb page is disheartening. The majority of users there have a mindlessly misogynistic outlook on Rainey's soon-to-be ex for having had an affair. It is made clear that she was driven away by Rainey, and that he himself is to blame for the state he is in. More, the movie's portrayal of Amy Rainey (Maria Bello) is entirely sympathetic, a woman who still cares deeply for her estranged husband and wants to keep him as a friend. Yet in spite of all this, most of the movie's audience sees her as a “bitch” who has a comeuppance in store. Sometimes it's not the movie that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.


 

August 24th

Needful Things (Fraser Clarke Heston, 1993)

The devil's in the details.

Leland Gaunt has opened a new curio shop in Castle Rock. Whatever your fondest desire, he can get it for you. The price is a cruel prank you’ll play on someone, anonymously. Everybody is buying.

Needful Things was marketed as the swan song for Castle Rock. King was taking it off the map. That meant another panoramic tale of a community necessitating one of his longer novels, taking care to breathe life into many different characters. That's a hard challenge for a movie adaptation with a two-hour length. When I first saw Needful Things I had mixed feelings about it for all that was left out. Then again, I'm one of those King fans that loves his books to be long as long as his paths aren't constantly winding back on themselves. I love to immerse. You can't do that in a kiddie pool, there's no deep end to dive into. Maybe that's why I was never big on short stories. Having read the novel already, the movie seemed glossy but empty. I don't think it got much acceptance, since it's never spoken of and director Fraser C. Heston's career effectively ended with his first big film. That's a shame because looking at it now after all this time, I've done a complete one-eighty. I've seen seen some great movies this month, some that were more endearing, and some scary but of them all Needful Things has been the most pure fun.

So how 'bout them details? I have to staart with the incomparable, always original Amanda Plummer. Her Netty Cobb is not the central character, but she's really the essence of the story – an eccentric like the town, and a heart of pure gold. It really takes the Devil to push her way, way off the edge. It happens to every citizen of Castle Rock but Plummer lends Netty an innate sweetness that really isn't there in the book and I think looking back on it it's her downfall that's the most undeserved. She's got a natural enemy in a local pig farmer...but that's not who's been breaking her china.

You cannot feel at all bad for the comeuppance of the two priests in town (Don S. Davis, William Morgan Sheppard), of rival faiths, when they're such perfect representations of the chasm between man's faults and the church's aspirations to perfection. Their lack of innocence lends itself to comedy, and this movie is having a ball.

Obliquely then, on to the horse-racing addict comes to mind, the uptight little bureaucrat no one loves – Danforth “Buster” Keaton. J.T. Walsh begins by playing a blowhard at reasonable volume, the kind of sphincter we've all sadly met, and ramps up in increments until he's the biggest and most dangerous laugh in the movie. You see, the man's in debt and thinks a magical, vintage toy can save him.

All the work of one Leland Gaunt, deliciously underplayed by Max Von Sydow. Gaunt has had shops of similar name as far back as history has been written, in every country. His shop carries, miraculously, just the very thing your heart desires most. You can afford it if you make a deal. He doesn't ask for your soul, just a prank. Your soul is what you lose a little at a time when you agree to hurt someone who's done you no harm. You, see, it never ends. Once guilty, you're never off the hook.  It's original sin, the greatest crime ever perpetrated on humankind.  We're not meant to stand up for ourselves and shrug off our imposed sentence of guilt.

One man begins to catch on, and that's Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris), late of The Dark Half, charged with investigating the sudden rash of ill will and with keeping the peace amongst ever angrier recipients of these “pranks”. Fingers are pointing everywhere but at everyone's favorite new proprietor, Mr. Gaunt. And why shouldn't Pangborn like him too when he's offering a miracle cure for the crippling arthritis that mark the days of Pangborn's love (Bonnie Bedelia)?

As I said, there's a rich tapestry of town life, and while the movie trims much of the book there's plenty left for a movie. We move in and out of a social web that never stops moving, one strand making turbulence for countless others until the whole thing is collapsing in on itself. As King does in the novel, director Heston and screenwriter W.D. Richter skewer all manner of social life – the niceties, the mores, networks, they do it with amusement and wit, and they spare no one. It's a patchwork that always feels integral. It's expertly acted – you can feel each citizen as a recognizable human being with his or her own internal life – well choreographed, beautifully shot, and edited to a pace that is just leisurely enough to allow the scenes to breathe.

What's sobering about the movie is that Gaunt is hardly needed. This is who we are. What, exactly, is stopping us from acting on our worst instincts? We do, of course, time and again. Imagine if we all did, at once.

There's a very delicate balance to pull off here, making this material genuinely funny without forcing the audience to betray their empathy. That Heston does just this deserves more credit than the film has garnered. I'm not always taken with black comedy, some are too mean-spirited for my taste, but Needful Things had me laughing.

A Month of Stephen King (third week)

August 15^th

Christine (John Carpenter, 1983)

Boy meets car, car meets girl, car gets jealous and tries to kill girl.

Some people don't get the killer car concept. To them it's no less goofy than a killer laundry press. Hey, King, why not a haunted toaster? Or a killer Mr. Coffee? I wanted to make a trailer parody of an evil bicycle: “Body by Schwinn. Sold by Satan.”

Ah, but I'm not one of those people, having been well primed for it in childhood by Killdozer, Duel, and an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker in which a headless biker returns from the dead. True, an updated headless horseman isn't a killer car, but the growl of that bike was damn terrifying, signaling the proximity of death. He and the cycle were one big integral creature, inseparable. In Duel, Spielberg was canny enough to never let us see the driver of the rig, nurturing the subliminal impression that the semi itself was alive.

See, a machine is supposed to work only when operated. If it functions without being made to do so, that's a basic human anxiety: loss of control. When the machine starts to function with a will of its own, that's a deeper fear – the killer that can't be reasoned with, that doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear and absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. Yes, I'm quoting The Terminator. Same thing. Ditto Westworld. Before it. The living machine is so removed from life as we know it that it does not even emote. That's the scariest thing about it.

Killer cars, I think, are something special beyond that. Especially in America. The automobile is the very heart of American pop culture. Everyone can own one, or a dozen. They mean freedom and independence. They're a fashion statement that come in every size, color and style imaginable, and if one doesn't exist that says “you” you can have one custom made. You can own a Barris Batmobile! The automobile symbolizes youth and a rebellious spirit that longs to roam. A car means sex – look at those curves, that baby was made to go parking in. A car means rock&roll, 'cuz you can't take your girl to an A&W or the drive-in without rock&roll.

The killer car is American pop culture with teeth. The Car and Duel tapped into that in a crude, unstated, intuitive way but Stephen King understood it on a conscious level and explored/exploited every aspect of it...ran it to ground. For subject matter alone Christine could be his Great American Novel. The story it tells is right out of Norman Rockwell, if Rockwell suffered a mental breakdown. A nerdy, picked-on high school kid gets a neato set of wheels and suddenly becomes cool – gets the girl and bests the bullies. Rock and Roll is here to stay.

Christine would make a great triple feature with American Graffiti and Cronenberg's Crash.

Meanwhile the nerd in question gains the confidence to take his life back from his unpleasant, overbearing parents. If Apt Pupil was meant to explore evil by nurture, Arnie Cunningham is closer to what King had in mind than Todd Bowden. Arnie starts off as a nice kid but he's a walking bag of repressed aggression and resentment primed to seethe forth. When he gets his cool on, it's an affectation he wears like a warning. Let me take a moment to praise Keith Gordon for his mesmerizing transformation from Charlie Brown to angry teen to foaming madman. One of the more nightmarish sequences I've seen in film is a midnight drive he takes with his best friend Dennis practically hostage in Christine – that's the title car, a '57 Plymouth Fury that was born bad. Gordon is all nervous ticks and sore eyes. There's a hint of something recognizable left that might have been friendship, but the slightest wrong step will set him off. It's an amazing performance.

The book is a long one, full of King's embroidery. Usually I'm happy to explore all of that but this time he has added details to the hauntings that seemed off to me...the ghosts of Christine's victims have a tendency to become permanent passengers, among other things. The perfection of a killer automaton is that no one is behind the wheel. But it's a minor complaint. It's King, so ya gotta go with it. A film is not a novel, and Carpenter isn't King. When I first saw the movie I had mixed feelings more so than with the novel. So much was left on the side of the road. Well, I no longer miss any of it. Carpenter is in top form, throwing out the fuzzy dice and bumper stickers, tuning up the V8 engine and polishing the chrome and cherry red paint job. I don't want to do a rundown of what works, because AFAIC pretty much all of it does, in a big way.

I'll mention Harry Dean Stanton, because it's always worth mentioning Harry Dean Stanton. I should mention Harry dean Stanton in ever review whether it's one of his movies or not. His character is a little dodgy, though. Detective Rudy Junkins has a grand total of three brief scenes that amount to nothing more than putting the pressure on Arnie and, I suppose, trying to ground the movie just a little in the real world – people are dying, you want to think the police are paying attenuation. Junkins must be awfully damn good at paying attention, cause he either has the whole story worked out or is the most credulous cop ever – when it's all done with he buys the killer car story with no reservations. He even calls the survivors heroes, when at the very least they have taken the law into their own hands and gotten someone killed for it. If I ever kill someone and try to blame it on Bigfoot, I want Detective Junkins on the case.

August 16^th

Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert, 1989)

Louis Creed learns of a magic burial ground that brings the dead back to life. Trying it on the family's pet cat proves disastrous as the dead come back as warped, murderous things...something evil. Yet when his son dies he can't help trying again.

I got into horror at the age of three. There was a TV show I watched back in Vallejo, mom never thought a thing about it as it was a family show and sci-fi/adventure at that. She never realized just how dark and terrifying that show could be to a child, a show in which children were targeted for horrifying death on a semi-regular basis – and not in cartoonish way. This show was pretty serious in it's first half-season. Most young children will hide behind the furniture. I hid behind the TV. Still, in the back of my mind was an awareness that it was all make-believe. So, it was a “safe scare”. Thrilling, but in a fun way. It was my favorite show.

I bought Pet Sematary the moment it hit paperback. I'd already read all of King's previously published books in a Summer-long marathon and loved every minute of it. Pet Sematary was different. It pushed buttons the others hadn't, dealing with profound loss at home. It wasn't a safe scare. King dives right in on grief and dread of loss,beginning with a child losing a pet and then a thorough examination of familial ties. It's honest and unflinching, highly uncomfortable, not fun stuff at all. King hardly needs his usual foreshadowing, because there's only one way the story can end.

The movie comes soooo close. I've warmed up to it but it still delivers a watered down version of the novel. Maybe that's necessary given how unrelentingly sad the book is ( I'll be getting to Misery soon enough where I think a straight adaptation would have been too grim for audiences). Pet Sematary the movie has its share of harsh emotional terrain but is held up back from its full potential, and I'm not sure if it's the scipt by King himself, Mary Lambert's direction (which is actually pretty good though not top shelf) or the production by Richard P. Rubinstein: he had just come off a long stint producing the TV series Tales of the Darkside, and PS has much the same quality about it. He, King, and Lambert punch up the conventional horror treatment such as scary hallucinations and ghostly visitations. One such is the character of Pascow, who died in the ER but keeps coming back to warn grieving father Louis Creed away from an unhallowed burial ground. All of the phantasmagoria are Kings' from his novel, King loves to embroider whether the premise supports it or not. It works in his novels, as we're dealing with capital E Evil, but what works on paper doesn't always play on film. In this case I think the horror beats detract considerably from the much deeper horror inherent in the material. Play it without the phantasmic touches and it could have been even more gutwrenching. Too, Pascow's scenes are badly handled with an offputting irreverence that took me out of the movie, imposing a comic relief that undermines the tension when it most wants amping up. Another vision takes the haunting character of a sister who died of Spinal meningitis too far and robs her of the impact she'd had as a figure of guilt. Zelda was played by a man in prosthetics to appear wasted away, it works, just barely, until “she” begins to speak. And then she talks up a storm. King never did learn subtlety, one of his pitfalls has always been overplaying a good thing.

The word 'wendigo' s never mentioned in the movie. It is the novel's boogeyman and one I;d like to see explored further (Mario Bava had a great short in Black Sabbath, and Larry Fessenden has been so taken with the concept that he's done at least three stories now with vastly different treatments). What exactly a wendigo's traits are has never been pinned down, so I couldn't say with any authority that one could not extend it's evil over vast distances – say, cause a tire to blow out, and I doubt whether it could cause visions either. Every fictional world needs its own internal logic to function by, and those rules should be reasonable to that realm. King's script pushes to breaking point, and IMO just a little beyond.

On the other hand, you've got the great Fred Gwynne as neighbor Jud Crandall. What a magnetic persona! Gwynne melts right into the role, exuding country charm and homespun wisdom. Jud is under the sway of the wendigo enough to lend Louis some breathtakingly toxic misguidance, yet still has the charm to make it seem reasonable to a man who doesn't want to break his child's heart.

PS also looks great. Evocative locations and lovely photography set us right in rural Maine, a lovely little place that underscores the evil that transpires there. The pet cemetery and the Micmac burial ground (“the ground is sour!”) are perfect works of cinematic art, as inviting as they are haunting.

 

August 17^th

Silver Bullet (Daniel Attias, 1985)

(spoilers)

Now, I'm fond of the novella “Cycle of the Werewolf”. That's what it's being called in the movie's credits, a novella. It's really more of an art experiment between King and illustrator Bernie Wrightson. Twelve chapters, one for each calendar page, with a scene or two each depicting a werewolf attack on a small town and the wheelchair-bound boy who discovers the identity of the lycanthrope. It has been expanded for the screen by King himself.

Never was too fond of the movie, though. It's a genial, inoffensive thing but I wasn't impressed then and haven't seen it since until last night. Whenever the subject of werewolf films comes up this one always gets some love. So I bought a copy to get my King stash up to thirty-one movies. Apologies to those who love it, but I'm still underwhelmed.

What is the audience for this supposed to be? The tone shifts drunkenly between a G rating and an R, with no stopping in the middle for PG. We've got adolescents who act impossibly innocent for their age and hijinx like dangling snakes at girls because – ooh, ick, cooties! The girl in question, meanwhile sees the snake when she walks into it, but failed to spot the boy holding it despite his having been right in her path in a tree with no foliage to hide him. This scene is not integral to the plot, but it's the one that introduces us the tone of the film, and to the lead characters If the first scene is this bad, what's to follow? The scene tells us that the director is on autopolit. It's just a job to him. I'd say the same for the screenwriter, but...it's King?

This is followed by a scene of family discord in which we learn the parents mistreat the daughter badly to favor her younger brother, the boy in the wheelchair. Later a hard-drinking (so we're told) and supposedly irresponsible uncle enters the picture. The boy (Corey Haim as Marty Coslaw) loves him, but there's tension between the Uncle Red (Gary Busey) and Marty's mom (Red's sister Nan, played by Robin Groves. These scenes promise a maturity or even an honesty about family realationships, but no such substance ever materializes. For every scene that is well conceived, there is another that is plodding or pedestrian. If the movie were not interspersed with gore I'd have mistaken for an Afterschool Special.

Some of those fx and makeup are decent, some are not. Carlo Rambaldi is credited with the werewolf itself, and I know he can do amazing things. It doesn't look so amazing, but there wasn't much budget for him to work with. Give him the benefit of the doubt, IMDb does not list his as having supervised or worked on the actual transofmation fx and we can assume he had no part in how his creation was lit and photographed. This is one of the worst wolfmen I've ever seen. It's obvious they wanted to emulate the work of Rick Baker and Rob Bottin but fell too far short.

So does the score by Jay Chattaway, an ill-fitting work straight out of a cheap 80's Tv production. When a lynch mob sets out to hunt down the town's murderer, Chattaway goes whole-hog overbearing. Themes accompanying Marty are post-disco and brimming with Disney innocence.

The one thing that is special in the film is Gary Busey, not because he's got anything good to work with but because he's Gary Busey and eminently watchable by default. Uncle Red is a pretty lovable guy, maybe kinda reckless and rash but the film never develops him as a reason for tension. On the contrary we see that the sister thinks of Red as a potential threat because of her doting overprotection of Marty...again potentially interesting but it goes nowhere. There's a theme that wants to emerge, and it's totally on King that it doesn't. Busey lights up the screen when he's on, and he's practically the only one who does besides Megan Follows as Marty's sister Jane. She gives her role a sincerity the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to honor.

Here's the spoiler, so I'll warn you again. Completely miscast is Everett McGill as the town preacher, who is also the werewolf. You're not supposed to know that until the midpoint or later, and that's why McGill was wrong for the role. With those glowering eyes, how could he have been anything else? Wrightson's preacher looked kinder. King also tips his hat with a nightmare sequence. We should think that when Reverend Lowe dreams of his congregation turning into werewolves, it's the fears of a good man – but at that point there had been no inkling of werewolves amongst the townfolk. How would he know?

Everything else is painted in broad strokes, which does reflect the simplicity of the novella but fails the movie. The townspeople are caricatures.

I'm left wondering, did King really give this his best effort? 

August 18^th

The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)

No spoilers, but that ending...you just don't do that to your audience after putting them through a wringer. It's a drag. It's wrenching, and it turns what was supposed to be a fun throwback to Fifties b-movies into a drag. Plenty of people feel this way, and they blame Darabont...but, y'know, King got there first. His novella is open-ended but hopeless after letting us down with the depressing death of someone we cared about. What Darabont did was ramp an already bad ending up to unthinkable.

Oh, well, it never was King's mission to offer us comfort. The worst Darabont can be accused of is remaining faithful to King's sensibilities and tone. There's irony for you.

I watched the version that could be described as a Director's Cut, which is the same movie as the theatrical release but in black and white like those old b-movies it sprang from.

A tourist town is cut off from society by outages and a mist that descends upon them. Lovecraftian monsters lurk in the mist. Townies and vacationers wait it out trapped in a supermarket, and things deteriorate inside the store even faster than they do outside.

Darabont had already proved himself with Shawshank, and he does no less with this material. It's the sort of thing I should like, and sitting through it found it riveting an suspenseful...it's just, well, as I said: that damned ending.

King does go somewhere interesting with it, too (the screenplay is by Darabont). As the people in the market grapple with their fear and their lack of solutions, each clings to their convictions with a desperation that grows more fierce. Soon they are dividing themselves into factions. The question of religious faith arises with one fervently devout woman seizing the opportunity to proselytize at the top of her lungs. This would be Marcia Gay Harden as Mrs. Carmody, far scarier than Piper Laurie as a similar character in Carrie. I used to read posts from critics who didn't find her credible, but by now we've all seen her like on the evening news, or even met some like her. She has a seething contempt for her fellow humans, so her love for God is the love an Old Testament God that with a bloodlust. What I seldom hear mentioned is that King balances her with a Richard Dawkins-styled rationalist who utterly rejects anything that isn't pre-packaged scientific fact. This man is Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), whose mind snaps shut against eyewitness testimony, physical evidence he refuses to examine, and even the death of those around him. Of the two Carmody is clearly the far greater danger, and the script never tries to imply that religious zealotry and rationalism are equivalents, but both get people liked in The Mist. Rationalists can be insufferable and some sow anger, but they don't have religious judgmentalism to peddle. Hand that to a frightened people and they look for someone to wield it against.

On a technical point The Mist is noteworthy for utilizing CG for its monsters. CG can be dodgy, and practical fx have a solidity to them that is more satisfying, but I have to admit I'm not a big critic of computer-generated imagery in films. Every generation of movie fx has suffered its share of unconvincing work, including the great stop-motion animators of the kind of monsters that inspired this movie. That said, the CGI in The Mist looks much better in b&w than it does in the color release.

August 19^th

It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990)

Thirty years ago a group of seven close childhood friends saved Derry, Maine from a devouring psychic entity. Now It is awake again and they are reuniting to finish the job.

I don't think I have anything to say about the two-part TV movie adaptation, critically. Honestly, I love the thing too much to see it objectively. That's the book and movie both. It's not King's most challenging work but it's his most rewarding for me personally...and that's how it feels, personal. Ha! Yes, right, personal to just me and thousands of other Constant Readers!

The first thing that hooked me was the premise, the closest thing in book form I've read that plays like my favorite horror movie Phantasm (if I were forced at gunpoint to choose just one). It's science fiction, it's horror, it is fueled by the warmth of its characters bonds...it runs on dreamlike occurrences. It, an alien entity that fell to Earth thousands of years ago, awakes every thirty years stranded here and hungry, feeding off the fear of the animals it kills above ground. That includes the humans whose minds it invades with hallucinations, getting them to kill each other and taking a few on its own in corporeal form. Children are its favorite prey, as their imaginations are the most expansive.

Second was the scope of the book. I'm a sucker for epics in which to lose myself, and the paperback of It was over a thousand pages. What bliss! Slow reader that I am, it zipped by at a hundred pages a day. I couldn't put it down.

Third was King's winning card – his ability to evoke memories of childhood, his endless capacity to set a scene and create a world. The world in It is Derry, seen through the ages. Those inhabitants we spend time with are schoolkids. Their lives are not unique to them, to me, or to anyone reading...they're just like anyone. They had the same friends, the same playing grounds tucked away from the adult world, the same inner lives they kept private from all but each other, the same anxieties their parents didn't get. They shared the same pop culture landscape, those movies and songs and brand names that king is constantly namechecking. The kids in Derry are a continent away from me, in an era a decade ahead of my time, and still reading the book felt like home. King is that good. I identified with shy, awkward Ben Hanscom loving his Beverly but never able to tell her while she dated someone else. My Bev was a girl named Kris. Reading It, I cast us both in the book. My Barrens was a little place along Johnson Creek and the RR tracks where I went with a friend or two who wanted to catch crawdads, Just a little corner not meant for kids but tucked away from notice.

The book and movie are both told by dividing the two eras: the past, and the present. Most people find the first segment to be the more compelling. That makes sense, as even though the rich texture of King's world cannot survive the transition to the screen his characters and their bonds do. How the Loser's Club comes together is heartful stuff played by a cast (a young Seth Green among them) so likable and up against such odds that you can't help rooting for these underdogs.

Some of the audience are lost by the adult's stories and reunions, but I found only the final ten minutes of the movie to be flat. In fact, I kept misting up seeing them deal with where their lives have gone (mostly success, but not without some of their troubles still playing havoc) and rediscovering their memories. Literally, that – a pet peeve of mine where it concerns King, but I'll get to that. The adult friends are played by one of those great ensembles you only get in made-for-TV movies, the star-driven vehicles albeit that said stars are all (or mostly) from the realm of television. Richard Thomas, Harry Anderson, Annette O'Toole, Dennis Christopher, Tim Reid, John Ritter, and Richard Masur play the Loser's Club, each cast to their strengths. Meanwhile, Its most enduring corporeal projection of itself is a clown calling itself Pennywise, for which the mercurial Tim Curry has been chosen. Curry disappears into the role. When I think of the movie in hindsight, he comes to mind as the kind of hammy schtick that Freddy became in the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels – Freddy the icon, not Fred Krueger the sincere characterization of evil featured in the first two films of that series. Pennywise is all tics and mannerisms, all voice and teeth. And yet while I'm actually watching, damn if it isn't effective. He's a real presence you can't take your eyes off. It wasn't what I imagined when reading the novel...and is strong enough to have supplanted whatever that was, as I can no longer remember it.

It was directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, and acolyte of John Carpenter's. Wallace also directed the underrated (and half-baked, scriptwise) Halloween III. He does a good job of it... the tone of the film is straightfaced but TV-breezy, not a bit of realism to it. Given the material I don't think a realist approach would have convinced many people. It;s not heavy stuff, either, its pure entertainment. No central theme emerges...you've got the value of teamwork and friendship, the fear of citizens to get involved or intervene when they see others in crisis, and the power of spiritual faith – any kind of spiritual faith, King keeps it wide open. That was a stroke of luck for me, as an atheist, I didn't have to feel excluded. The Stand was a troubling experience but that's another discussion. All of this is touched upon but none of it is especially stressed but for the “we can do it together” message and how invaluable it is to have friends who've got your back. The faith held by the Loser's Club – that It exists, that the imagination it feeds off can also be it's Kryptonite - relies on intuition and poetic logic...isn't that true of all faith?

Oh – the pet peeve. This is in the way of an aside and not the note I want to end this review on, but a great many of King's supernatural stories involve his characters developing amnesia at the ends of their travails. To King this must seem like some kind of truth, understandably so (see my writeup of Stand by Me). It happened to him, not the result of anything paranormal but certainly of trauma. Even so, I hate it. It drives me nuts when he does that! What a lousy thing to do to your characters, that you should rob them of the answers they fought so hard for, the resolutions, the understandings. And if you've got your readers to invest in the characters, then what a terrible thing to do to them as well! I'm as much into mysteries as anyone. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of being left in the dark.

I mentioned the finale. No spoilers, but King's finale was so phantasmic as to be unfilmable. It involved a near-2001-esque trip through dimensions involving a couple of ancient, incorporeal beings locked in the subterranean chambers of Derry, and the Loser's Club wielding the strength of their subconscious minds as much as their intuitively chosen weapons. Any attempt at putting this on screen was going to be dubious. Doing it on a TV movie budget was a losing move before the contracts were even signed. What appears on screen feels like a minor scene or even an afterthought, not a resolution worthy of the three hours that built up to it. But, ya know, I don't care. It doesn't diminish the story that I've taken to heart.

August 20^th

Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)

(spoilers for the novel)

When it comes to Misery I'm dead wrong. Rob Reiner is right.

Popular genre novelist Paul Sheldon is snowbound and body-broken in the care of a fan. Annie Wilkes is an even bigger fan of his character Misery Chastain. Annie is more than a little unstable, and she's about to go off the deep end.

Now here's a case that should be argued more when it comes to the touchy subject of adaptations. People endlessly debate what makes for a “good” adaptation of a King story, with The Shining the most contentious and oft-argued example. Kubricks' film is said to have “changed” the story altogether, but that's largely untrue – what it really changes is the way in which we perceive the film: intimately with the novel, objectively from Kubrick. It alters our response to the story rather than altering the story itself. Extraneous details are omitted, the ending is altered...the story is there.

I bring that up because Rob Reiner did much the same thing with Misery and yet no one speaks of it. Kubrick gets derided but Reiner, doing the same thing, does not. Like Kubrick, Reiner retains the story intact and so is faithful to the material in that regard, but he drastically alters the framing of the story and the tone of it, and in so doing he alters the way we take it in. Why is one director chastised but the other not? Kubrick's film was never a please-everybody kind of movie whereas Misery is pure fun.

Part of what makes the novel Misery so riveting is the way in which the story is framed. We are stuck Paul Sheldon – in his sickbed, then his room, then the confines of the Wilke's home once he is able to sneak out of his room. His POV is ours, always. When Annie is away, w live in the terrifying uncertainty of her return. We don't know if anyone is still searching for Paul. The only escape is through escapism – one of the book's central themes, the power and importance of indulging in fantasy. Paul is forced by Annie to write a new novel featuring Misery Chastain, and passages from his work are the only ones in which we are not locked in Annie's grip. That's no arbitrary choice of King's , the master of terror knows what he's putting us through.

This makes the novel's finale the scariest part of the book. It's a brilliant piece though it relies on the “killer isn't really dead” cliché that's riddled horror cinema since the end of the Seventies. Paul has been discovered by the authorities who are in the process of rescuing him from the Wilkes house. We – and Paul – should feel a profound sense of relief...but the body of presumably dead Annie is nowhere to be found. As Paul, still physically helpless, is carried out of the building, it is the first time in the novel that we ourselves have been outside it. We are open and exposed, no longer any shelter. It's the most frantic, panic-stricken moment in a novel filled with them. It only works because King never left Paul's POV.

That was a great read. I used to fancy the idea of being a director and would film books in my head as I read them. When I read Misery, I also though 'whoever makes a movie of this is going to fuck it up. They're going to open the narrative.' Sure enough, Reiner opened the narrative. He constantly cuts between Paul, Annie on her own, and the ongoing effort to locate the missing author.

So why is no one complaining? Not even me. I was disappointed that the movie was expanded the first time I saw it but still had to admit it was thrilling. More than thrilling, it was tremendous fun..and the greater part of that was the chemistry of the wonderful Richard Farnsworth and Frances Sternhagen as a local Sheriff and his wife, a homey but sharp couple blooming with wry wit. These two should have had their own movie all to themselves. They share a warmth and umanity that is genuine and boundless in stark contrast to the film's other couple-from-Hell. James Caan anchors the movie as Paul. It's not an easy performance as Paul has to keep his thinking and his terror hidden behind a facade of gratefulness to his faux guardian angel. Annie, on the other hand, is hardly if ever aware of her own inner demons. Her soul is a whirlwind of toxins. Kathy Bates rightly won an award for her performance – outwardly sweet and cloyingly innocent, she's gone beyond passive-aggression to sudden binges of lunatic anger and bouts of severe depression. Walking a minefield is bad enough, imagine trying to navigate one in which the bombs are also on timers and will go off sooner or later whether you step on one or not. Even playing nice, Paul's time is running out.

This is harrowing stuff, punctuated in the novel only by scenes of torture and Paul's writing. It's unrelenting. I think I can say without much ego that the film I had in mind would have been more frightening and more brutal than what Reiner made, and now that I've seen Reiner's I'm certain that his instincts were a hell of a lot better. I would have left audiences miserable. Audiences would have turned away and rightly so. Reiner gives us the breathing room to let us accept this unacceptable, terrifying situation and not turn away. This story needs Farnsworth, Sternhagen, and screenwriter William Goldman's wit. It isn't Reiner alone that earns credit fort making the right choices. Goldman has a long history of brilliant scripts flowing with delightful dialog. Most of what passes between Annie and Paul is King's, the Sheriff-snd-wife's repartee is pure Goldman.

August 21^st

The Tommyknockers (John Power, 1993)

(spoilers for book and movie)

If The Tommyknockers had been an original work it might be slightly better regarded today as an average TV movie, a creepy and sometimes daft bit of schlock. I'm tempted to say that the source novel isn't one of King's best, but maybe that's just my own taste. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. Nothing much about this adaptation works, the horror and premise having been defanged and. The movie's producers aimed for mediocrity and got just that.

Having a personal crisis, poet and alcoholic Jim “Gard” Gardner seeks out out his love and longtime friend Bobbi Anderson in her home town Haven in Maine. Bobbi has a secret: she has discovered and is excavating an ancient structure in the woods behind her property. The more she digs, the more the citizens of Haven begin to change in strange and alarming ways...

The ancient structure, it turns out, is a flying saucer that crashed thousands of years ago (and how 'bout that, right next to Derry, Maine!). King's novel is a mixed bag of themes beginning with a fear of nuclear power plants and irradiation. I'm with King on that, no one has ever built a truly safe nuclear power plant – we lie to ourselves that we have and try to build more. The technology is getting beyond our ability to control, another theme of the book. That latter is represented by the townfolk undergoing a sudden rash of technical genius that enables them to build extraordinary devises from household goods, which they put to no good purpose – technological advance without the scruples or sense to use it wisely. These scenes permeate the story along with psychotic fits and hallucinations. Many of he devices come across as whimsical whatever use they are put to. One of the movie's problems is that nothing about it says 'whimsy”, so the inventions themselves seem to come right out of some other movie entirely – something frothier. Plopped into this grim atmosphere they reek of the idiotic. As these episodes are meant to be no small proportion of the movie's scares, it hurts that they are handled so ineptly. One woman goes to a lot of trouble and ingenuity only to have her TV set electrocute her philandering husband, and we have to ask whether it wouldn't have been easier to just throw a radio into the bathtub with him.

It doesn't help that the characters are poorly drawn and the dialog cringeworthy. Maybe if we were the slightest bit interested in them or could invest emotionally...? But, no. Some good actors are involved but can do nothing with the material

This wave of know-how is but one symptom of a radical makeover affecting nearly every citizen of Haven. At first they resemble victims of radiation sickness, drawn and haggard, their teeth falling out. That's as far as the film goes with them, stupidly excising the biggest horror beat of the novel. I'll get to that. Their condition is shared by Bobbi and it does triple duty as yet another parallel, to being strung out as an addict. Gard is doing his best to recover while Bobbi is so high off the saucer that she cannot see that her very body is deteriorating. She has it the worst, being the first and closest to the craft, but the rest follow. The disappearance of a young boy leads to a search of the woods, whereby Bobbi's secret is out. We are left to work out for ourselves that this was likely a machination of the buried entity, the goal of which was to get itself a larger workforce digging it up.

I suppose you could say there is something here too about alienation, because in the novel the transformations of the townspeople completes itself with the humans literally becoming aliens, a replacement crew for the ones that died eons ago. Imagine that, the ship itself as invader raiding worlds for personnel to maintain itself. Now, that was a hurdle for any filmmaker – the fx of the day were not sufficient to pull off the nauseating mutations per King's description, especially not on a TV movie budget. A hurdle, but not an insurmountable one. The filmmaker's solution was not to even bother, instead reviving the long-dead aliens and rendering the town's illness moot. Bad, bad call, that was the novel's most potent sting. Anyway, I'm wanting to find some commentary in this about the way communities find their own personalities, that we ascribe to the spirit of the locale (a theme that King has explored often), but I can't find it in this empty script. Maybe if I reread the book it will be there. “The land casts a spell. It kinda gets to ya.”

While I can't recommend the movie, I still like it on some base level. It's the kind of movie I grew up on, a mix of cheap TV fare and throwback to Fifties B-movies dealing in alien invasions and nuclear mutations scares. It's enlivened by the two leads, Jimmy Smits and Marg Helgenberger as Gard and Bobbi, both likable and charismatic actors and the only two involved who make their roles engaging.

On a side note, Haven was also the setting of King's novel The Colorado Kid, which I have not yet read. That gave rise to the TV series Haven, which I have not yet seen. I'm suddenly curious to find out how that works, since he killed off the town first time out.

A Month of Stephen King (second week)

August 8^th

The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983)

John Smith (a cypher's name if ever there was one) is looking forward to marrying the love of his life when a traffic accident puts him in a coma for five years. When he awakens (no one thought he would) he finds his love has married someone else and time has moved on without him. He has also gained an unwanted ability with ESP, which complicates his life in unexpected and tragic ways.

By the time I read The Dead Zone I was already a fan of King. The movie made me a fan of Cronenberg who is now a favorite director. The Dead Zone is one of his best novels and I think this is one of the very finest King movies. That said, I don't watch it much.

There's nothing I want to say of the substance of the movie (questions of fate and free will, dealing with loss). I'd rather talk about Cronenberg's knack for surrounding himself with talent from longtime collaborator Carol Spier (production design) to his cinematographers (in this case, Mark Irwin), composers (usually Howard Shore, here Michael Kamen), screenwriters, actors, etc...

Jeffrey Boam wrote the script chosen by Cronenberg, the first time the directoed worked from a script not his own. Between them, I think they put the lie to the idea held by many fans of King that the barometer for a good adaptation is in it's to-the-letter fidelity to the source material. (Also see Firestarter, the next movie – together, Firestarter and The Dead Zone pretty much kill that misconception). The Dead Zone does not follow King's details without alteration, yet this is among the closest you'll get to recreating the flavor of the author and his sensibilities. The only thing missing is King's sense of tackiness, and I don't recall that I the book either.

Importantly to his career, Cronenberg  proved himself here as an actor's director. I say it's this one and not Videodrome because you already expect a great performance from James Woods and might overlook the director's contribution there but here you have one of Christopher Walken's finest performances, understated but powerful and compelling, playing against type and bolstered by a great cast all giving their best: Herbert Lom, Brooke Adams, Martin Sheen, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Tom Skerritt. This is an actor's movie, the major characters are fully dimensional while the lesser roles in their brief appearances manage to be fascinating and vibrant in their own right. In his next two films Cronenberg would go on to elicit star turns from Jeff Goldblum and Jeremy Irons, both career highlights for those actors.

Walken...man, he's amazing in this. I love seeing him play a sympathetic character for once. All Johnny wants is – well, not, that's not right, what he wants is his life back. He has watched his love spend her life without his having been able to share any of it with her, and though she loves him still he's not welcome there. So what he wants now is to crawl into a hole and be forgotten by everyone else. Walken makes that pain palpable.

The romance...aw, fuck. When I read the book in 1980 the romance was just...er, romantic. Derp. Oh, you know what I mean. Good melodrama, very moving. These days it has a personal resonance, it hits too close to home. I do not have the emotional space left in my life to wallow in downers, and this time through I really didn't care to engage with this movie the way I usually do. There are so many fucking downers in my favorite genre. I'd rather watch movies for fun.

Come to think of it, almost every one of my favorite director's movies is a downer. Well, that sucks.

Cronenberg often has opening credit sequences that are apropos to the movie. I love these,establishing the setting with still shots of bucolic Maine countrysides that are whittled away bit by bit, lost to void until they form the title.

August 9^th

Firestarter (Mark L. Lester, 1984)

Everyone has music that speaks to them gets into their soul, fills them with emotions that are impossible to explain. Songs, even whole albums. Tangerine Dream's score for Firestarter is that for me Go on, find it on YouTube and give it a listen. Listen to it on headphones at ocean's edge at night. That shit's nearly spiritual, that is. I took it with me to the beach for solace once when – well, never mind. It's powerful.

It might be worth noting how that score came to be. The members of Tangerine Dream were willing to take the gig but only in their terms - they didn't give a damn about the movie and refused to watch it, but would gladly take the money and compose some fresh themes. This they did, and handed the music over to the producers saying, essentially, “You tailor it to the film. Use it how ya want. Were done.” IMO it turned out to be maybe their best work, but that's no way to score a film. I'm amazed how well it works for the movie, but it works even better without the movie.

Why am I going on about tangerine Dream instead of the movie? Because the movie is not more than the sum of its parts. It's not a bad movie, it's reasonably good, but the parts by themselves are better.

First, you've got a solid Stephen King tale. Young Charlene McGee has a strong pyrokinetic ability that a shady and powerful Federal agency wants to cultivate as a weapon, and they'll do anything to have her. Charlie and her father Andy are on the run. Having been enticed to finally read King by the movies Carrie, Salem's Lot, and The Shining, and having been handed a paperback copy of The Stand, this was the first King novel I ever read and loved every page of it. (A personal aside, I was entranced by the cover art, as seen at the top of this post, as much ore than by the blurb on the back cover: those amazing liquid eyes, I thought, that's the kind of work I want to do!)

I've mentioned the score, so how about the cast? Adorable child actor Drew Barrymore is at the center, surrounded by David Keith (a good actor, though not how I pictured Andy so a little jarring), the great George C. Scott as an understated menace, Martin Sheen more lucid than he was in The Dead Zone, Art Carney and Louise Fletcher as decent folk who try to help. Freddie Jones is the scientist who regrets having started the ball rolling.

What else? Mmmmm...no, that's pretty much it. Those are the highlights. Oh, the smoke – the opening titles appear over a whiff of smoke that dances serenely. I liked that a lot too.

When the movie hit theaters, I saw it with a friend. He thought it was alright but I was so happy to see it given life that we sat through two consecutive showings. Ultimately he was right: it's okay. The story moves well enough, though the dynamic changes midway through from a road adventure to captivity. That slows the pace a tad, but not a lot as the first half was shot through with explanatory flashbacks. This follows the flow of the novel perfectly. Maybe a little too perfectly, I got the feeling that the energy inspiriting the tale comes strictly from the book, and that the screenwriter gave it none of his own – no passion for the material, no getting into the heart of the situation or characters. This is the other half of the argument I'd give (see The Dead Zone above) that King fans who prize strict adherence to the source novels above all else. Same with the direction: sturdy enough but artless. Firestarter does that and feels at times uninspired for it. We the audience seldom feel more than mere observers even if we like the story. The movie could have used a stronger identification between the characters and the the audience. Don't just tell us a story, put us there with them!

I like the movie well enough. I just don't watch it much. That Tangerine Dream album, though...


 

August 10^th

Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

(Spoilers)

In the midst of a marital crisis, Donna Trenton and her son Tad become trapped in the Pinto when it's laid siege to by a rabid dog.

The dog isn't the story. You can think of it as fate, or the hand of God (as Donna does in the novel) or just a random life event, the St. Bernard Cujo is just a device.

Like Carrie, Cujo is another King story in which the women act while the men react. The story is about two women with sons making choices about what matters to them. One is very clear – Mr's Camber intends to get the fuck away from her abusive lout of a husband and save their boy a dismal future growing to be like his old man. The other, Donna, is still in a fog. She's got a wonderful son, a devoted husband who's a great father...a loving family all around. And she's jeopardizing all of that by having an affair with her husband's not-so-best friend. That's where the device comes in, she's about to have her priories brought into sharp focus via an expensive lesson. More expensive in the novel, wherein the child dies.

I'm not too big on the God angle and prefer to see it as life blindly stepping in. Fate I could be okay with but it's a harsh, Old Testament move if the Deus really is in the machina. It smacks of slut-shaming, a mindset and practice that pisses me off. Granted, the real offense isn't being sexually active (am I assuming too much of either King or readers/audiences to give them the benefit of the doubt on that call?) but that she has betrayed the faith of her husband and child. Even so, if this is punishment it outweighs the offense by a long shot (especially in the novel!) Abusing (killing!) the boy to teach the mother is a dick move. King as the god of his literary world goes for that OT grand gesture, and it leaves an open question of the survival of Donna's marrriage. The movie's ending can't help but be more upbeat after putting the characters and the audience through the wringer. No, the angry God rap isn't for me, but king has always been fascinated by it.

Director Lewis Teague does an evenhanded job of the family drama, never sentimental or overbearing. He and cinematographer Jan de Bont do some lovely, understated work (look at those scenic shots!) with a few nice flourishes (Tad racing to reach his bed in the dark before the monsters can grab him). For the most part it's a lightweight cast but Dee Wallace is a knockout as Donna, and Danny Pintauro gives a surprisingly credible turn as young Tad.

In a way, Cujo makes the third star. He's a magnetic presence – powerful, brooding, and progressively gooier. Great makeup fx, you can almost smell hot diseased dog wafting off him in the heat. The second half of the movie is a director's challenge, what they used to call an elevator drama (an entire story in which your characters never leave the confined setting). TV shows used to do elevator stories to save money, while masters like Hitchcock did them (Lifeboat) because they relished the challenge. Teague is well up to it, but again it's Dee that really sells it.

Important to King fans the story is set in Castle Rock and features Sheriff Bannerman, both of which first appeared in the serial killings segment of The Dead Zone. I don;t recall wither of them being mentioned by name in Cujo, however.

August 11^th

Creepshow (George A. Romero, 19882)

An anthology consisting of five stories of varying length and a wraparound. Creepshow was written for the screen by Stephen King and directed by genre icon George A. Romero in homage to the horror comic books published by EC Comics (Entertaining Comics). EC titles like Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror...well, to be honest I didn;t grow up on them and shouldn't be the one to describe them. King himself, in his book Danse Macabre, reminisces favorably about them as lurid tales of poetic justice, usually consisting of unlikable characters abut to get what's coming to them, and written under a child's logic. If we didn't have EC as kids, most of us encountered some equivalent. Like King we often have fond memories.

Romero does a first-rate job bringing the comic-book sensibilities to the screen with faux paneling, a lurid basic color palette for the horror stings, and King's script emulating the EC ethos of simplistic characters, horrible deaths, and crude comeuppances. It makes for a movie that stands out visually from the crowd. Better – if you're into this kind of thing – King and Romero really do evoke memories of the horror fare we had as kids. There's not a thing wrong with it. (You just said uh-oh). Yeah, sorry. Good movie but I never liked EC much, so I don't get much from Creepshow. My favorite segment would be 'They Creep up on You” with E.G. Marshall as a misanthropic millionaire and germophobe shut up Howard Hughes style and dealing with a cockroach advance. Marshall plays an entertainingly vile piece of work gleefully insulting the widow of a man he's just driven to suicide King must have had fun with the dialog here, it's fun to listen to and the bugs are well icky inside the antiseptic white of the apartment.

The best story, though, is also the most developed: The Crate, in which a ferocious creature lies dormant in the basement of a university. On being rediscovered, it starts eating the faculty. Doormat Hal Holbrook sees a way to be free of the abrasive harridan he's married to (Adrienne Barbeau, you never imagined she could be so intolerable). An explanation of the beast – where it came from , what it is, how it remained alive for over a century in a crate – is never offered and beside the point. It exists because without it there's no story.

I can get into the hang of this movie around Halloween, which IMO is the perfect time for a viewing of Creepshow.

August 12th

The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)

(spoilers)

Is the prison drama an American thing? I know other countries have them but it seems to me that America in particular loves them. Something about our rebel history and nature draws us to outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, or the Corleones. Both real and fictional, they're a apart of our cultural mythology. IRL we have a justice system in dire need of rethinking, born of a crime-&-punishment mentality, a disproportionate percentage of our citizens in jail – we just keep building them. We've a fascination foe the death penalty. We also love prison break thrillers and tales of the long con. I've no information to base this on but I think Shawshank Redemption is an especially American story.

Andy Dufresne is a Maine lawyer wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife and the man she was having an affair with. Is that a spoiler? It's been too long, but I have the impression from the novella that we knew right away that Andy is innocent. The movie keeps that from us until late in the film, pulling us in by keeping the man a mystery and then dropping the info when it would have the most emotional impact.

The movie is an adaptation of the King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, one of four King novellas published in the Different Seasons collection. Between this and The Body (filmed as Stand by Me), King had a winning one-two punch against critics who turned up their noses at the horror genre, as three of the novellas are non-horror and these two in particular are among his best works. Both are highly American in flavor, one about adult disillusionment and the other about children having their first realizations of an adult world. Already a popular cross-media success, King now had critical recognition not just as a genre star but as one of the great American authors.

The movie adaptation of Shawshank was something of a revelation. I remember well when the public at large started to turn on King, after a number of films had been successful and a string of bestselling novels, we also started to get a lot of adaptations that were mediocre or just plain bad. It was unfair to King as it was none eof his doing, but then he shot himself in the foot by declaring that if anyone was going to make a bad Stephen King movie it might as well be him – and he proceeded to do just that with Maximum Overdrive*. By now going to see a Stephen King movie was considered a gamble if not a losing bet. Frank Darabont's Shawshank was not only a damn fine movie, it was that rare beast that followed the source material nearly intact right down to King's dialog with few if any noticeable changes. I hate to criticize King but his attempts at more colorful dialog usually sound awful on the page and when spoken aloud by actors it just doesn't play. Darabont makes it all work, which is a remarkable feat. To a lot of King fans, if Darabont could do it then there was no excuse for other directors to take liberties.

Thing is, I think Darabont and King are two of a kind. They're both consummate storytellers brought up on the classical mold – King emulates the authors he loved and Darabont the old Hollywood greats. They both live for the little details, among other things. Their characters are storybook perfect. Both artists want their audiences to share in the emotional lives of their protagonists and sometimes their villains, and they find relevance in side ventures. Neither finds aesthetic pleasure in streamlining their tales – where are the unexpected pleasures in refusing to explore your fictional universe? All due respect to Mick Garris, Darabont is the director King was waiting for.

The Shawshank Redmption has a ton of little joys throughout but there are three standouts: the two leads, and the prison itself. The exterior of Shawshank was filmed at Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, a magnificent and cold behemoth that could crush any man's soul. One we've had an introductory flyover of it, we never question the authenticity of the interior sets. Darabont and his crew make Shawshank a “real” place. In that setting its easy to to forget Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are anything but Andy Dufresne and fellow con Ellis “Red” Redding. Andy is a quiet guy, aloof, and we see him through Red's eyes. To facilitate this we get a constant voiceover from Red. That also goes a long way to bringing the movie closer to its literary counterpart, King's own prose read aloud (and by none other than Morgan Freeman, how much classier can it get?). Very sly like the con itself, the focus of the story is on Andy but it's really about Red. We root for Andy but never really get into his head, always viewing him as outsiders. It's misdirection. Red's is the life that is changed most profoundly. We cheer when Andy is triumphant, but the strongest emotional fulfillment comes in the final sequence of the film, and we share it with first Red by himself and then Andy and Red together. Shawshank Redemption is neither sloppy nor maudlin, the emotions it evokes are hard earned.

*Maximum Overdrive is one of the movies I won't be watching this month, and hopefully not ever again. It gets a lot of love for being a superlatively bad movie but I was never able to see the charm in it. I saw it with a friend who was excited for it, and well before it was over he was begging m to leave the cinema. He stopped being a King fan almost overnight.

August 13^th

Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

Someone posted on IMDb that kids today cannot relate to Stand by Me. Yeah, I remember back in my day when we'd tromp off across the countryside to see dead bodies because we didn't have wi-fi. Sometimes we'd do it two or three times a year. These kids today don't have cliques, or troubled home lives, misunderstanding parents, dishonest teachers, ambitions that feel too big for them, older bullies terrorizing them, or inane discussions over pop culture and junk food...and ya know what, the little bastards had best stay the hell off my lawn. Harrumph, that's what.

Come on, man, if the dog in Cujo isn't the story, then the plot in Stand by Me isn't what matters either. It's about the bonds, and that magic time in adolescence when one finds ones clique to share it with. I had mine in middle school and high school (with a slight change of cast). The first girl I ever loved had hers in 5^th grade, Mr. Sherrill's homeroom. The Separator had hers in Mrs. Collin' 8^th grade homeroom, and she and I clicked in another community in high school: the drama crowd. I don't know what her memories of her friends are, but I treasure that time with my friends. They're what made going to school worth it.

Nostalgia, that's one of the keys to King's success. He's a master of evoking it. Stand by Me is based on the novella The Body, from the Different Seasons collection of four novellas. Four friends learn where the body of a missing school peer can be found, in the woods off a railroad track, and make a cross-country trek to see for themselves before anyone else can find the boy. The Body was a proving point for King, as Different Seasons included three stories that strayed from the horror filed King had made his name by. Critics could no longer dismiss him based on genre snobbery. With The Body, King delivered something still further, a fiction steeped in his own deeply personal biography. As a boy he once came wandering home from roaming the Maine countryside with a case of amnesia, only to discover that the best friend he'd been roaming with had been struck and killed by a train – presumably right before his eyes. King wrote the Body in first-person singular as Gordie Lachance, the talented storyteller who doesn't believe in himself. Nostalgia being the key to the story, it is set up specifically as a reminiscence of the grown and published Lachance. King could do more than just write, he could open himself up in astonishing ways.

Stand by Me was the movie that proved Rob Reiner's merit as a filmmaker. A likable cast of young actors that would keep getting roles deftly, deftly handled in their camaraderie and bonding, sweet photography, a solid screenplay the only flaw of which is to arbitrarily relocate the story from Maine to Oregon (where it was filmed, a boon for me as an Oregonian but it screws with King's Maine mythology),. Reiner might well have been drawing on his own memories, because he sets just the right tone throughout. There's a subtle shot at the end of the movie where the body has been found, the kids have realized that rather than a lark this adventure has been a solemn discovery about the fragility of their lives, and as they head home again...they cross a field in which the late afternoon sun backlights the air filled with dancing seedpods. I'm pretty sure there's no similar shot earlier in the movie...it points to the film's substance. This isn't an ephemeral fancy, nor is it an ending. Their future has been seeded by their shared experience.

There's another moment that struck me as signifying a coming of age, and it points directly to another of King's maturation tales. Having crossed a small lagoon the kids find themselves covered in leeches. Gordie looks into his underwear and finds one on his genitals, removes....then stares in shock at the blood on his hand before passing out. It directly echoes Carrie in the shower, deliberately I believe, as Gordie's own pivotal awakening.

 

August 14^th

Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998)

(spoilers)

From the Different Seasons collection: High-schooler Todd Bowden discovers a Nazi war criminal living incognito in town, and instead of exposing him Todd takes over the man's life.

Apt Pupil is another example of an adaptation best viewed at a far remove from the source material. The longer it's been since you've read the novella, the more satisfying the movie. It's an excellent film in its own right, but has been considerably toned down in grottiness with violent acts removed and an altered ending.

Studying the holocaust in school sets off a flame in Todd's imagination and he becomes feverish to know more...to really sink into it entire. Not the politics, not questions of how it an entire civilization could have descended so low...just the cruelty, and the power to be cruel. We're clued in via montage that the victims are not who Todd identifies with, his face juxtaposed with those of Nazi officers, including one he will recognize riding a bus. Todd stalks the guy, identifies him via fingerprints as Kurt Dussander, then confronts him in his home. In exchange for Todd's silence, the boy demands that Dussander tell him all the most horrible details and sensations of what it's like to be a mass murderer...a slaughterer. Todd soaks it up, feeding his fantasies while his friendships and schoolwork deteriorate...nothing else is as important to him, he is addicted.

There are two lines I can pursue here, one being the nature of sociopathy. I think the novella is meant to make us ask whether Todd is seduced by evil or if he already had it in him. To me, the answer to that is clear: an innocent does not start a relationship by blackmailing a total stranger, nor could he be so unmoved by the atrocity he wishes to learn about. Todd is an evil seed before the opening credits roll, he only needs nourishing in order to blossom. We never learn Dussander's arc, how he became a Nazi, so his recollections mean nothing to us as they to to Todd. Bryan Singer started what that same assessment. For this sociopath it's nature, not nurture. The Bowdens (sans their son) are good people.

So, what about that need for murder and cruelty? The movie does an uneasy dance around the subject, never fully going there as King does in he book but playing up other aspects of it that are every bit as queasy and rather more questionable. There is an overt sexual tension between Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander, made clear by the dialog and the staging of certain sequences. Should we infer that the bond is one of gay attraction? Well...it's hard for me to argue otherwise when Singer himself testifies that this is what he intended – not as a fact but as a suggestion. And that's a little troubling, given that Singer is gay himself and yet is flirting with the steretypes that homosexuality os inextricably linked with madness and criminality. I'd seriously like to question the guy on this, because I have no idea what he's thinking.

On the other hand, pay attention to just who responds to what. Dussander is not drawn to the boy, he finds Todd an unwelcome danger that has to be handled with craft and deceit. Todd, meanwhile, is not attracted to physical sex of either gender, it's power that he fetishizes. Watch the scene in which he dresses Dussander up in costume and forces him to march – it's not the old man that has him rapt, it's the uniform. Todd lies awake in bed fantasizing about the gas chambers and of medical experiments and other tortures. Singer has him photographed nearly naked in moonlight, a voyeur's layout. Perhaps to avoid a stronger rating, Todd isn't getting off...except that we know he really is. Like I said, it's an odd dance we're being led, one that skirts the issue in some ways but not others, in seemingly arbitrary manner. The book's Bowden cannot help himself but to sate his desires through the killings of transients. The movie doesn't go there. Horror beats missed. Dussander also begins to kill again, though not for sexual gratification but to restore his confidence and quiet his nightmares.

Which gets us to the finale, and the spoilers. King ends his novella with Todd sussed out by his school counselor. In a chilling foretelling of real-life school massacres to come, high-schooler Todd takes arms and ammo to an overpass to begin a shooting spree, knowing it is a suicide move. Death by cop, and he'll take as many innocents with him as he can. No such thing occurs in the movie, where Todd is confronted by the counselor and todd gets the upper hand by threatening to claim the counselor sexually abused him. The final shot of the film is of Todd smiling in triumph. “You have no idea what I can do” is the movie's last line.

So, which is the more powerful? Which the more chilling? I think it's a tossup. The book's is more visceral, certainly, and probably the more credible...but the movie leaves us to wonder how far can someone like this go? It plays on one of the same fears that fueled The Children of the Corn, that the next generation will form a world that does not hold the same values that we do. Some would say we've had people like this in office already. Are we looking at a future leader of the United States?

Already stated, Kin ties the story of Todd Bowden to real-life mass killings, especially those committed by kids. By implication it asks what drives someone to commit an atrocity like this. King may or may not have the right ending. I'm under the impression that most killings of this sort are committed by the mentally ill, and some who have felt bullied and victimized past the point of reason, not clinical sociopaths but people who are alienated. This is not Todd. Todd has spent the entire movie learning how to hide his twisted soul and survive.

So what we have then is a polished, professional piece of provocation that's also frightening for its subject matter, and a smart script that raises more questions than it answers. Singer's direction is quietly stylish and confident. It is broguth to life by pone very good performance (Brad Renfro as Todd) and one great one (Ian McKellen as Dussander). In all a superior film in the upper tier of King adaptations, getting the core of the material if not its full horrific impact of the plot.