Stephen King Films
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1995 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
CARRIE (1976) **
For a horror movie, CARRIE sure isn't very scary. Hey, that rhymes! It seems more like a drama to me than a horror film. And that Sissy Space k is really weird looking. Are we really supposed to believe that a seventeen-year-old girl with fully developed breasts would just now be getting her first period? Hey, I was in sex education class. Stephen King can't fool me!
But King does have an incredible imagination, as we find out in the scene at the prom, when the movie turns exciting for about ten minutes. Once she gets that bucket of pig's blood dropped on her head, you can just say good-bye to John Travolta and his cute little girlfriend!
CAT'S EYE (1985) **1/2
One of the myriad Stephen King-based movies in the "C" category (CHRISTINE, CHILDREN OF THE CORN, CARRIE, CREEPSHOW 1 and 2, CUJO, etc.), CAT'S EYE consists of three unrelated vignettes linked together by a tabby cat out to save an innocent Drew Barrymore, who tells the cat at the beginning of the movie that she's in trouble. I'll say, she's a slut and a drug addict.
The cat sets off on its journey while we watch the first vignette, with James Woods as a troubled smoker who goes to "Quitter's Inc.," from a story in King's NIGHT SHIFT collection, which is presently gathering dust in my garage. Quitters Inc. is an organization for smokers who want to quit the habit, headed up by aging comedian Alan King. Their methods are unconventional, to say the least--a relapse calls for the electrocution of a close family member (the same reason I gave up Nutri-System). One of the movie's funniest moments comes when the cat is subjected to a mild voltage dose as a demonstration. So I'm a sick guy, okay? Rest assured no cats were electrocuted in the making of this movie.
Segment 2 features Robert "Airplane" Hays as a tennis pro involved with a mobster's wife. The mob guy captures him and offers him a wager he can't refuse--his life, $20,000 and the mobster's wife--if Hays walks around "The Ledge" of his penthouse. This one's also from the NIGHT SHIFT collection (still gathering dust in my garage).
The cat finally reaches Barrymore by the final segment, where she is being terrorized every night by a six-inch troll (no sick jokes, please). A fairly original piece (not found in the NIGHT SHIFT collection--Have I mentioned the dust in my garage?), but as always, the parents are the disbelieving stereotypes who blame the troll's damage on the cat.
If ever you see this movie listed in the TV guide, at least watch the first segment ("Quitter's Inc."), which is extremely amusing and doesn't contain the usual Stephen King weirdness. The rest of Cat's Eye is relatively weird less, but is also bland compared to "Quitter's Inc." This movie is in the middle, quality-wise of King's other vignette compilation movies, not as good as CREEPSHOW, but better than CREEPSHOW 2.
CHRISTINE (1983) *
You'd think between horror novel great Stephen "Carrie" King and horror movie great John "Halloween" Carpenter, that they could come u p with a good horror movie, but this sure isn't it. The only thing this movie's got that's even remotely interesting is the indestructible car, but we don't get very much car-killing action. Instead, we see thirty-year-old actors portraying teenagers with one thing on their minds--something they spend a lot of the movie talking about explicitly. I can't imagine much of this movie would remain in the censored TV version.
Christine's a car with a past. Several people in the past twenty years have died in or around the car. This doesn't stop Arnie, a hopeless nerd at the beginning of the movie, from buying it from the same old fart that would scare Macaulay Culkin half to death seven years later in HOME ALONE. After a little body work, Christine is as good as new. In fact, she's an immortal car. We never learn why Christine is alive ... and indestructible, but do you remember that TV show from the 60's, "My Mother the Car"?
Despite Christine's imminent compaction at the end of the movie, the door is left open for a sequel. Thank God they never made one!
CREEPSHOW (1982) ***
What the heck? An entertaining Stephen King movie?! Can it be? Why, yes it can. In CREEPSHOW, King takes a new approach to horror... demented comedy. Along with Director George Romero's (a household name, right?) weird comic book-style approach, CREEPSHOW could only have sprung out of the twisted mind of Stephen King.
CREEPSHOW contains five unrelated vignettes. The first, and weakest, is an incoherent piece about a dead guy who comes back on Father's Day and keeps asking everyone "Where's my cake?" See what I mean? The movie picks up from there, with King himself starring in the story of a redneck farmer who stumbles upon a meteor that contains concentrated MiracleGro, and soon everything he owns--including himself--sprouts foliage. The third chapter stars Leslie Nielson as the demented husband of Ted Danson's mistress, who buries his wife and Danson in the sand to be carried away with the tide. Part IV concerns a giant crate that contains ????. And the final vignette follows the saga of a millionaire who hates bugs. As you can guess, he soon finds him self fending off an onslaught of roaches.
So let me tell you, this movie's a good blend of comedy and horror. But let me also caution you that Stephen King's writing pleases millions, but his acting pleases few.
CREEPSHOW 2 (1987) **
Another Stephen King journey into the world of the macabre and mediocre. I thought the original CREEPSHOW was entertaining and original, but this one just ain't happenin'. "We've just received word, there are some bad horror movies going around the theaters. As always, we advise you to stay away from these movies, but it's your trip."
The first CREEPSHOW had five segments, three of which were unpredictable and fun to watch. This one has three segments, plus an ongoing animated sequence featuring Billy, the avid "Creepshow" comic book reader. The word "sucks" doesn't even begin to apply.
The only truly interesting piece is the first, "Old Chief Woodenhead," with George Kennedy of the "Naked Gun" series as a kind old store owner who is robbed and murdered by a young Native American gone astray. Chief Woodenhead, the wooden statue outside the store, takes on a life of his own to exact revenge on the backslidding redskin and his accomplices. Good, but too drawn out.
The second episode, "The Raft" (from the SKELETON CREW collection), has four young pot-smoking co-eds sailing the lake on an abandoned raft. Wherever they sail, they are followed by a giant oil slick that eats them one by one. I don't make this stuff up, I only summarize it.
Finally, "The Hitchhiker" episode shows us an adulterous woman who hit-and-run's a hitchhiker, who gosh darn it, just won't die. He keeps coming back to haunt her. Making this and the other two stories as half-hour TV episodes and leaving out all the cartoon junk with Billy would have been a whole lot better.
CUJO (1983) **1/2
Exactly how many Stephen King novels have they made into a movie?! I'm sure you could count them all on two hands--if they each had thirty fingers! This one, however, ranks in the top ten, being slightly better than CHRISTINE and GRAVEYARD SHIFT, due to its use of a huge, hulking St. Bernard that attacks a mother and child. But for the first forty-five minutes, we get the horror of the average family with their not-so-average problems.
The kid's afraid of monsters under the bed and in the closet, the mom's guilty about her affair with the "local stud," and the dad's in major trouble because his ad campaign for a popular cereal occurred at the same time the cereal sent hundreds of innocent people to the hospital. As all this is happening, Cujo the dog is growing more and more vicious. For some reason we never learn, the family's problems turn the dog into a raving, maniacal hound from Hell, but since it's a Stephen King movie, we just take it for granted that something supernatural or telepathic is going on.
Cujo had the potential to go beyond the somewhat insulting two-and-a-half star rating, but the entire last half of the movie is just the mom and kid trapped in a broken car miles from nowhere as Cujo lurks menacingly outside. While in real life, watching two people trapped in a car while being attacked by a huge dog would be entertaining, in a movie it's kind of boring.
GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1989) 1/2
I know Stephen King sued the makers of THE LAWNMOWER MAN because they took one of his short stories and turned it into a truly awful movie and, after watching GRAVEYARD SHIFT, I wonder why he didn't take the producer and director of this movie to court as well. It's a terrible movie about a small town textile factory overrun by rats . Several workers of the graveyard shift have already been murdered in freak "accidents" arranged by the head rat. The head rat is some sort of mutant that has grown from a few inches to seven feet tall. As a group of workers embark on a mission to clean out the factory's basement, they find themselves being picked off one by one by this huge mutant rat from the sewers. It came from raw sewage! As a matter of fact, so did this movie.
IT (1990) ***1/2
My personal favorite from the Stephen King cinema collection, a made- for-TV effort that, even though it's over three hours long, never bores you for a second. (Well, maybe during the last half of the closing credits, but that's not important.)
The small town of Derry, Maine experiences some strange goings-on (killings, maimings, the usual King stuff) every thirty years like clockwork (You could set your calendar by it.), but the only people who realize it are seven kids, "The Losers' Club" (and, yes, I have been formally invited to join), who in 1960 all receive hallucinogenic visits from Pennywise the Evil Clown (played by Bill Clinton--excuse me--Tim Curry), who personifies the supernatural force behind the deaths. The kids band together to destroy It in the sewer and succeed, promising to return to Derry if It ever does.
Guess what, It does thirty years later (like clockwork--you could have set your calendar by it) and faithful resident Tim Reid (Venus Flytrap from "WKRP in Cincinnati") calls up the other six, including Harry Anderson (Judge Stone from "Night Court") and John Ritter (Jack from "Three's Company"). Are made-for-TV horror movies the last stop for aging sitcom stars or what?
The first half of IT tells the story of the seven kids through flashbacks, as their adult counterparts get the phone calls and remember the traumas of the past. The second half has the adults returning to Derry to relive the evil of the past and fight It again. As Harry Anderson says, "You can forget calling me up when I'm seventy to fight this thing."
It has none of the gore of the typical King movie, but it's just as frightening--if not more so. Maybe because the three-hour running time allows plenty of chances for us to get to know and care about the characters. Can't we all identify with the loser-type who is rejected and stalked by his peers and finds his deepest and darkest fears coming true? Well, I can, okay?!
THE LANGOLIERS (1995) **1/2
The latest of the Stephen King stories-turned-movies-of-the-week, this one a straight adaptation of the 250-page novella from FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT. See, I read the story, I know what I'm talking about. And, given the circumstances (a four-hour TV mini-series), The Langoliers is the best movie it could have possibly been. A two-and-a-half star rating for a low-budget TV-movie is comparable to a three-and-a-half star rating for a big-name theatrical Hollywood blockbuster. Many of the Stephen King novels have been drastically altered the page to the screen, and many suffer in the process, but rest assured THE LANGOLIERS doesn't stray at all. You could almost read along while watching the movie.
About thirty minutes into a plane flight, ten passengers awaken to find everyone else has disappeared, including the pilot and co-pilot. All that's left of the vanished passengers are watches, dental fillings, surgical pins, etc. Luckily, the main character just happens to be a pilot, so he and the other nine continue their course across the country, noticing the complete absence of life and power below them. I won't get into the detailed plot summary this time, but the explanation for everyone's disappearance is the old rip-in-the-fabric-of-time science-fiction premise. It sounds trite, but THE LANGOLIERS manages to stay original and cliche-free for three hours, without ever succumbing to boredom.
MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (1986) 1/2
Stephen King tried his hand at acting in CREEPSHOW, with disastrous results. That's nothing compared to his title of screenwriter and director of this turkey. He says he set out deliberately to make a stupid horror movie. Hey, there's nothing I like more than mindless violence (unless it's mindless sex), but you need a sense of humor about it. King plunges into this movie with a completely serious approach, a tragedy in dialogue and acting.
I read the short story this movie is based on, "Trucks" from the NIGHT SHIF collection (still gathering dust in my garage) and liked it. I thought no way the movie could be as stupid as everyone said--then I saw the movie. Sometimes everyone is right. No Stephen King story has the embarrassing cliches of dialogue contained in MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE. It would be more suited to a poorly dubbed 50's monster movie, or a parody thereof.
Surprisingly enough, the premise is original and interesting: Machines suddenly have a mind of their own and rebel against their human owners. Too bad the typewriter Stephen King wrote the MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE screenplay on didn't hurl itself out the window. The movie is centered around a truckstop, where several country bumpkins are trapped inside by a group of big rigs patrolling outside.
King has no excuse this time. Other stories of his have been butchered on the way from the page to the screen. King may not have had any control over that. This time we wrote the screenplay and directed--and it's the worst King movie ever made, even worse than GRAVEYARD SHIFT. I've said it before and I'll say it again--Stephen King should stick to writing and leave t he movies to the professionals.
MISERY (1990) ***
This Rob Reiner-directed film ranks among the best of the Stephen King movie adaptations. This one I have read the book on, and let me tell you, the two are nothing alike. It's as if two people were given the same basic premise and were told to let their imaginations from there, which is probably not that far off from what happened.
The same basic premise--best-selling fiction writer Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has a near-fatal accident during a blizzard and is rescued by ex-nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who he finds out is his "#1 fan." He also finds out she's not quite right mentally once she reads his latest manuscript, which contains too many "dirty birdie" cuss words, and forces him to burn the only copy. She later reads his latest book, the last in a series of romance novels featuring Misery Chastain, who is killed off at the novel's conclusion. It turns out Annie loves fictional Misery almost as much as Paul hates the character. She demands he resurrect her. Paul, bedridden and trapped alone with the crazy woman, must literally (literarily) write for his life.
That's what the two have in common. The differences are too numerous to mention. Most notably, we find out Annie is crazy and violent around page 20 of the book, while this information doesn't surface until the second half of the movie. Still, I'd recommend the movie over the book (but if you have the yearning to take in both, go right ahead--don't let my petty recommendations stop your fun), for Kathy Bates' absolutely fabulous (isn't that a TV show?) performance.
And if you're in the market for parodies, check out Comedy Central (home of "Absolutely Fabulous") for airings of the "Saturday Night Live" episode with "Misery II," featuring Roseanna as Dana Carvey's #1 fan, who can't believe he's killed off the Church Lady. >From those nostalgic days when "Saturday Night Live" was actually funny.
'SALEM'S LOT: THE MOVIE (1979) *1/2
The first made-for-TV Stephen King effort, which was originally broadcast when I was one year old--and I probably would have liked it better then. Now it just seems boring ... and the video version has almost an hour cut out from the original miniseries.
David Soul of "Starsky and Hutch" fame (aren't you glad the 'SALEM'S LOT producers made sure to get a really big star for the lead role?) plays a writer (It's always a writer in those Stephen King stories) who goes back to his hometown, Jerusalem's Lot in Maine (it's always Maine) to write a horror novel (it's always ... forget it), when he stumbles upon some strange goings-on going on. More specifically, an old house and its strange owner. Is that specific enough for you? Fine, I'll just come right out and say it--The town is inhabited by vampires. Don't pay the money to rent this movie, because all you'll find out is that everyone in this movie is a vampire. Sorry, I don't usually give away the plots of movies like that, but I just haven't been the same since that freaky bat bit me on the neck.
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) ***1/2
It's hard to believe the same guy who wrote MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and GRAVEYARD SHIFT is also responsible for this dramatic, moving story of an unjustly accused convict. The author, of course, is venerable horror novelist Stephen King (from the DIFFERENT SEASONS collection) and, while it is by no means a horror story, it does contain several elements of the macabre. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION is the best movie based on a King story, though it's not my favorite (IT receives that honor. There is a difference between "favorite" and "best," but don't ask me to explain it), and is very true to the original novella, which I did read. It's not gathering dust in my gar age like NIGHT SHIFT; I checked it out of the library. Yes, there are still such things as libraries.
The two-and-a-half hour running time allows for a significant amount of details and characters to be added to the foundation of the novella. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a rich banker, is convicted of murder (he's innocent, of course, but a series of unfortunate coincidences incriminate him) and sent to Shawshank prison, where he is tortured and raped (that makes two nominees for Best Picture in 1994 with anal rape scenes) by the "sisters" (no offense, Elton).
He soon becomes friends with Morgan Freeman, the man who can "get you things" and serves as the narrator from King's novella. Andy also becomes the warden's pet, as he is the only inmate who can offer investment advice and money laundering expertise, and soon is doing taxes for every guard in the prison. All the while, there's a dark, under lying tension, as Andy finds proof of his innocence in the form of a young, uneducated inmate, and we find out how a man can become "institutionalized" to the point where he can't survive on the outside.
Stephen King can write more than just horror. Shawshank is an intelligent human drama that plays on the emotions without ever succumbing to sappiness (King is way above being sappy). I proudly give it my wholehearted endorsement. Geez, you'd think this was a letter of recommendation instead of a movie review.
THE SHINING (1974) **1/2
I've got this thing about horror movies--I usually don't like them unless the words Friday and 13th are in the title. Actually, this one's not too bad. Forget the fact that it's almost two-and-a-half hours long, doesn't make any sense, and only two people die during the whole movie. So why do I like it? I haven't really figured that part out yet. I think most of it has to do with Jack Nicholson's portrayal of a writer gone insane. Even without his nine-iron, Jack's still really scary. Of course, I've been scared by the Pillsbury dough boy before, so don't take my word for it.
This movie is based on a Stephen King novel, but for some odd reason, the director removed all the parts that explain what's going on, so the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But don't take my word for it. It was hard for me to follow the plot of ERNEST GOES TO JAIL, too.
SILVER BULLET (1985) **1/2
Another fairly entertaining slasher movie based on a Stephen King book. This one's about a small town terrorized by a werewolf (I hear it's based on a true story...) and the kid in a wheelchair who must stop it. And, as with many other horror movies, we see the "evil preacher" stereotype as well as a whole lot of graphic violence.
I tell you, only in the 80's would they have disembodied heads fly through the air aimlessly. But it's a pretty good movie, with no sex or nudity, a plus to parents like mine who couldn't care less about bloody heads but go nuts whenever anyone starts holding hands on-screen.
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