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.