August 15th
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 16th
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 17th
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 18th
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 19th
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 20th
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 21st
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.