Film Freak Central

A-Maize-ing Grace: The Children of the Corn Saga

DISCIPLES OF THE CROW (1983) ***½/**** starring Eleese Lester, Gabriel Folse, Steven Young, Martin Boozer based on the story "Children of the Corn" by Stephen King adapted for the screen and directed by John Woodward	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) Stephen King's Children of the Corn **½/**** starring Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin screenplay by George Goldsmith, based upon the story by Stephen King directed by Fritz Kiersch
CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1993) ***/**** starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrier, Ryan Bollman, Ned Romero written by A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler directed by David F. Price	CHILDREN OF THE CORN III: URBAN HARVEST (1995) ***/**** starring Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Mari Morrow, Jim Metzler written by Dode Levenson directed by James D.R. Hickox
CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING (1996) */**** starring Naomi Watts, Brent Jennings, Samaria Graham, William Windom written by Stephen Berger and Greg Spence directed by Greg Spence	CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR (1998) ½*/**** starring Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine written and directed by Ethan Wiley
CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC'S RETURN (1999) */**** starring Nancy Allen, Natalie Ramsey, Paul Popowich, Stacy Keach screenplay by Tim Sulka & John Franklin directed by Kari Skogland	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: REVELATION (2001) */**** starring Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside written by S.J. Smith directed by Guy Magar
CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2009) **/**** starring David Anders, Kandyse McClure screenplay by Donald P. Borchers and Stephen King, based on the short story by King directed by Donald P. Borchers	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: GENESIS (2011) ***/**** starring Kelen Coleman, Tim Rock, Billy Drago written and directed by Joel Soisson
CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY (2018) ½*/**** starring Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Lynn Andrews screenplay by Joel Soisson directed by John Gulage	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2023) */**** starring Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence based upon the short story by Stephen King written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

by Walter Chaw Kurt Wimmer's Children of the Corn prequel/reboot is drab, uninspired, witless I.P.-sploitation. I first read Stephen King's same-named short story in the movie tie-in edition of Night Shift (the one with the red cover) in sixth grade and loved the Lovecraft of it, how it begins in the middle with a car-tripping couple hitting a kid running out of a cornfield in bumblefuck, Nebraska and leads said couple through a forensic reconstruction of the doom that came to Gatlin. I see in its setup and execution both the tendrils leading backwards and the ones nourishing stories like Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities." It has a feeling of the inevitable uncanny that is underestimated in King's best work: a sense that what is happening has almost finished happening, and it's too late to do anything but bear witness to our collective ruin. Of the dozen films in the eclectic Children of the Corn franchise, only the third feature, subtitled Urban Harvest, hints at that feeling of Elder Gods infecting the innocent to act against the innocent and the generational end times attending that. None of the rest deal with the horror of good kids from loving families falling into an apocalyptic blood cult and suddenly murdering all of the grown-ups, choosing instead to paint the victims as abusive or absentee so that they kind of deserve whatever's coming to them. That's a revenge fantasy, not horror.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection - Blu-ray Disc

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen's score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore's work that if I didn't know better... Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What's sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are--so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as--here's another German term for you--overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979's Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone's release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a "name" composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don't think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who's idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you'll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that's true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I'm seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg's voice echoed in my own.

Doctor Sleep (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

***/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

It: Chapter Two (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Calling the monster "It" suggests some BigBad that should not be named in polite company--molestation, suicide and depression, abandonment, abuse (domestic or otherwise)--and Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two (hereafter It 2) covers each of those bases, literally, along the way of what turns out to be a painfully sensitive metaphor for how the things that happen to us in childhood dig their talons into how we function as adults. Not unlike the pointedly named It Follows, It 2 is a horror film about our personal and collective loss of innocence and the many ways we unsuccessfully suppress our trauma: "It" always escapes the containers we put it into--an idea illustrated explicitly at one point in the film as a thing too big for the rituals we use to tame it magnifies in the Jungian sense and explodes in the Freudian, laying waste to our carefully-cultivated gardens. It's possible to outgrow a fear of clowns--a lot less likely that we'll ever outgrow the litany of disasters that fed the fear of clowns in the first place. My mom is dying. Dealing with it has unearthed all of these memories I'd hidden away, of our relationship and of my childhood. I'm not armed. Neither are the "losers" of It 2.

Pet Sematary (1989) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist
screenplay by Stephen King, based on his novel
directed by Mary Lambert

"Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless."
-Jefe (Rubén Blades), The Counselor

by Bill Chambers A VICE UK review of the recent Happy Death Day 2U came in for a shellacking on social media because of a click-baity tweet suggesting it was the "first" slasher movie about grief, a claim that only demonstrated a lack of expertise while making a sacrificial lamb of Happy Death Day 2U (which scarcely benefited from the bad-faith attention). Neither the headline nor the subheader of the review itself is as boldly specious, but there in the body of the piece is this: "Christopher Landon's latest, Happy Death Day 2U[,] might be the first slasher that actually centers on dealing with grief." (The headline--"'Happy Death Day 2U' Is More About Grief Than Horror"--nevertheless bothers me, too, incidentally: grief is horror.) So often accused of cynicism because they're formulated to maximize a body count, slashers are engineered to comment on the capricious nature of existence, and the best ones seize on this to acknowledge the toll of loss on the survivors (Black Christmas (1974), Rob Zombie's Halloween II)--while even the most mediocre ones tend to have a killer motivated by a deep and incurable sorrow (see: The Toolbox Murders (1978), the first Friday the 13^th).

Pet Sematary (2019)

*½/****
starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence, John Lithgow
screenplay by Jeff Buhler, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The best adaptations understand the totality of an author's work, while the worst try to drag something kicking and screaming from one medium into another, largely incompatible, medium. The famous Frank Zappa quote--writing about music is like dancing about architecture--applies, except that it is possible to dance about architecture if you're a brilliant dancer and understand the essence of the architecture you're taking as inspiration. I think Zappa knew that, being Zappa. I like to believe he actually meant that it's possible, but hard. Stephen King's Pet Sematary is exceptional. I reread it for the first time in thirty-three years before watching the new adaptation from co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. I remember, as a child of thirteen, the visceral fear of those last twenty pages or so (and the hot sex scene); now I'll remember it for the extraordinarily observant and sensitive portrayal of grief and loneliness in the novel's first couple-hundred pages. Indeed, the first sentence, talking about how men sometimes meet the man who should have been their father in the middle of their lives, immediately reduced me to tears. Both the Lambert and the Kölsch/Widmyer adaptations focus on the twenty-page payoff, not the two-hundred pages of poetry.

It (2017) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

It: Chapter One
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There's a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she's standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she's still his "little girl." So she has to do this by herself, even though it's embarrassing--but she's doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves "The Losers" because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who's been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don't have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she's a "Loser," too. I read Stephen King's It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the "past" of the book, the flashback portion that's paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you're thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn't entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn't the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood--and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

It (2017)

It: Chapter One
****/****
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There's a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she's standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she's still his "little girl." So she has to do this by herself, even though it's embarrassing--but she's doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves "The Losers" because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who's been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don't have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she's a "Loser," too. I read Stephen King's It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the "past" of the book, the flashback portion that's paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you're thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn't entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn't the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood--and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

The Dark Tower (2017)

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King's revered Dark Tower series, I'd probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence's Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-'90s--the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman", Jamie Delano's "Animal Man", Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol", and Delano/Garth Ennis's "Hellblazer", which of course formed the basis for Lawrence's picture. But I don't. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel's The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn't jibe with images and rhythms I'd conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should've cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he's been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won't you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake's parents' kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he's from, there's no chicken.

Knightriders (1981); Monkey Shines (1988); The Dark Half (1993) - Blu-ray Discs

George A. Romero's Knightriders
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Ed Harris, Gary Lahti, Tom Savini, Amy Ingersol
written and directed by George A. Romero

MONKEY SHINES
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten
based on the novel by Michael Stewart
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

THE DARK HALF
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Timothy Hutton, Amy Madigan, Julie Harris, Michael Rooker
based on the book by Stephen King
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw Knightriders, George A. Romero's very own Fast Company, is another of the earnestly socially-conscious filmmaker's earnestly socially-conscious films, though one without the benefit of a metaphor that holds any kind of water. It doesn't even have an argument that makes sense. It feels like Romero over-identifying with the topic and losing the thread somewhere along the way--and padding the runtime with far too many pedestrian bike stunts. There's something to be said for personal projects (Romero's work seems like it's all personal, frankly), but with that intimacy comes real peril. I will say Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a no-kidding masterpiece. It's one of the best films ever made and perhaps the single most important Civil Rights picture, too. I'm partial to his Day of the Dead as well, for the cleanness of its execution and for the interesting things it has to say about identity and the military-industrial complex. It's fair to wonder, then, if Romero is tied so inextricably to the zombie genre not because (or not just because) of timeliness (and that he essentially invented an entire subgenre with a legion of imitators), but also because without zombies, his stuff is only leaden and clumsy. Without zombies functioning as they do, as both grand bogey and versatile metaphor, Romero's weighed down by a lethal payload of well-meant proselytizing, and just like that the flat artlessness of his films feels less "spartan" on purpose than "affectless" by accident.

Room 237 (2013) - Blu-ray Disc (UPDATED)

click any image to enlarge

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
directed by Rodney Ascher

"A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd."
--Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Part 4

by Bryant Frazer Did director Stanley Kubrick encode The Shining with an admission that he helped create phony footage of the Apollo moon-landing in 1969? Well, of course not. That’s nuts. It’s a cockamamie argument. And it’s one of several cockamamie arguments advanced by viewers given a platform for their unconventional theories in Room 237, an odd duck of a documentary about the conclusions reached by five different Kubrick fans upon very close analysis of The Shining.

Carrie (2013)

***½/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
directed by Kimberly Peirce

by Walter Chaw If you were to boil down Brian DePalma's work, at least his earlier work, into a few ideas, you'd land on the way he took Hitchcock's subterranean perversions and made them perversion perversions, transforming pieces and suggestions into themes and declarations. Looking at DePalma's Carrie today, what's there is a clear attempt--often successful--to elevate B-movie tropes to the status high art, or high pulp: What Godard did to gangster films, DePalma did to Hitchcock, turning the already formal into formalism. When DePalma was at his best, his movies evoked in daylight what Hitchcock inspired in shadow. Of its many technical innovations, his Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King's not-very-good but vibe-y debut novel, was aided immeasurably by pitch-perfect casting: Sissy Spacek, P.J. Soles, John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen. Hip then, it's hip still--and sexy as hell, as befitting a story that's ultimately about a girl's sexual awakening and, let's face it, really bangin' first orgasm. On prom night, no less. What could be more American?

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - Blu-ray Disc (Steelbook)

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler
screenplay by Frank Darabont, based on the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
directed by Frank Darabont

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's a moment in the middle of writer-director Frank Darabont's commentary track for the tenth-anniversary DVD and now Blu-ray release of The Shawshank Redemption in which he marvels at how swiftly and completely that Christian fundamentalists embraced the film (thus allying it with other modern klatch classics like Christmas with the Kranks, The Passion of the Christ, and George W. Bush). He feared, he says, that because the demonic warden Norton (Bob Gunton) is the film's only overtly Christian character, the herd would flock to decry it. Apart from his shocking disingenuousness (if there's a more blatant Christ parable than The Shawshank Redemption, I don't know what it is), Darabont obviously doesn't understand that for the reborn mind, the longer the climb, the better the proselytizing--hence the desertion, the nepotism, and the DUIs actually augmenting Dubya's holiness instead of casting suspicion on it.

The Shining (1980) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Shining has perhaps dated the most of Stanley Kubrick's films. It's not as stylized as Dr. Strangelove or Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick pictures set in the "present" that nonetheless feel as foreign as those set in the future and distant past. Particularly with the earthy orange-pinks and piss-yellows dominating the Overlook Hotel's lobby in the opening sequence, not to mention the child star's shaggy head of hair, the film has deep roots in the late-Seventies to early-Eighties. However, I'm beginning to think that the aging process itself has provided the necessarily alienating "timeless" quality.

Cujo (1983) [25th Anniversary Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Dee Wallace, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter
screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Lewis Teague

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It takes more than Lewis Teague to make a St. Bernard scary. His awkward, lifeless adaptation of one of Stephen King's less celebrated high-period novels is so thoroughly incapable of rendering its central "monster" even slightly disturbing that the end result is more hilarious than horrifying. What's worse is that Teague isn't good for much else in this movie, either: the extended set-up to Cujo's rabies rampage is completely lacking in style or subtext, leaving the occasional titter to be had during the climax as hollow compensation. The director is clearly treating this as a bread job, what with every story beat pursued apathetically and the loaded (if banal) violation of middle-class home and hearth left unexamined. King has peddled some pretty awful ideas in his day, but at least he can be said to have conviction.

1408 (2007)

*½/****
starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub
screenplay by Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, based on the story by Stephen King
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Walter Chaw Boy, do I like John Cusack. He has scary, earnest intensity. No one does the nervous pit-pat like he does; no one else could have been Lloyd Dobler, or Martin Blank. Then there's The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead, Being John Malkovich, and hey, I liked The Ice Harvest (most of it, anyway). And boy, I guess Samuel L. Jackson is sometimes not terrible. The one scene he and Cusack have together in the prestige horror flick 1408 plays like seriomythic garbage-pop poetry: everything's good--the cadence, the words; what I'm saying is that I was well and truly on board with this dumbathon all the way up to the point where Jackson's hotel manager Olin (and as an aside, King has a special place in my heart for opening The Shining with "Officious little prick," referring to a different hotel manager) offers that the titular room in question isn't haunted, it's just an "evil fucking room." Cusack is haunted landmark guide writer Mike (the landmark guides aren't haunted, and neither is he, he documents haunted locations...never mind), not only a bit of a lush who looks like he's gained a few pounds on his liquid diet but a surfer, too, making this one of a sudden slew of films to deal with surfing (Surf's Up, Evan Almighty, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer) while providing 1408 (it adds up to "13," get it?) its Jacob's Ladder/"Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" escape clause. Yes, it's that kind of film--what kind of film did you think it was going to be?

The Dead Zone: The Complete Second Season (2003) - DVD

Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
"Valley of the Shadow," "Descent," "Ascent," "The Outsider," "Precipitate," "Scars," "Misbegotten," "Cabin Pressure," "The Man Who Never Was," "Dead Men Tell Tales," "Playing God," "Zion," "The Storm," "Plague," "Deja Voodoo," "The Hunt," "The Mountain," "The Combination," "Visions"

by Walter Chaw I'll say this at the get-go, that "The Dead Zone", the television series, will never completely escape the shadow of David Cronenberg's enduring feature film adaptation of the Stephen King source novel, and that Anthony Michael Hall is a pale substitute for Christopher Walken, particularly for Walken at what might be the actor's finest hour. Luckily, Hall has an easier time shedding his John Hughes days, having doubled in size (he's still trim, just not Farmer Ted), donned a black leather pea coat (mine found the Salvation Army bin about five episodes in--I never, ever want to look like Hall in Vancouver playing Johnny Smith), and acquired a Vulcan arch to his brow that all but screams "serious actor." Yet there's something since "The X-Files" that rubs me wrong about most American shows shot north of the 49th Parallel: the genericness of the setting doesn't scream Anytown, USA so much as "Canada: it's cheaper and blander up here." Lacking atmosphere and vibrancy, "The Dead Zone" is an extrapolation, especially in Season Two, of the further adventures of John Smith, a reluctant clairvoyant who can touch any person or thing (including air, which raises its own set of problems/questions) and summon up visions of past or future that inevitably put Johnny in the position of a powder-dipped saint in a Mexican parade.

Kingdom Hospital: The Entire Series (2004) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras B
"Thy Kingdom Come," "Death's Kingdom," "Goodbye Kiss," "The West Side Of Midnight," "Hook's Kingdom," "The Young And The Headless," "Black Noise," "Heartless," "Butterfingers," "The Passion Of Reverend Jimmy," "Seizure Day," "Shoulda Stood In Bed," "Finale"

by Walter Chaw The sort of program you want other people to see in the same way you want someone else to smell how spoiled the milk is, the 13-part, 10-hour, Stephen King-scripted adaptation of Lars Von Trier's brilliant Danish miniseries "Riget" (a.k.a. "The Kingdom") is only as bloated, ridiculous, and incompetent as the rest of the master of terror's last decade of work. Auto-cannibalistic like his protagonist in "Survivor Type" and pitched as a cross between "E.R." and, one presumes, the TV version of King's "The Shining" (while playing like a community theatre rendition of "The Singing Detective"), "Kingdom Hospital" is awkward at best and eye-clawing hokum at its worst. There's no other way to describe a talking CGI anteater called "Antubis" (after the Egyptian god of death Annubis, I'm thinking) that fights a Depression-era vampire in the bowels of the titular place of healing. A spooky little girl à la The Shining (played by a terrible kid actor à la Danny from Kubrick's The Shining) describes him this way: "He eats disease, he likes to be scratched behind the ears. He's horrible. Beautiful." Yep.

The Mangler (1995) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C-
starring Robert Englund, Ted Levine, Daniel Matmor
screenplay by Tobe Hooper, Stephen Brooks and Peter Welbeck
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw I think there's probably profit in taking the tactic that Tobe Hooper's The Mangler is his shot at the lurid comic book genre and, more specifically, the weird self-abnegating prosthetics opera of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. But I'm not the guy to do it. Sufficed to say that Robert Englund appears in fright latex, affecting equal parts Dr. Strangelove and Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter as Mr. Gartley, the decrepit, despotic owner of an old industrial steam laundry that features as its centerpiece the massive, four-story long Hadley Watson Model-6 Steam Ironer & Folder, which sits in the middle of his brick sweatshop belching steam like the boiler in The Overlook Hotel.

Secret Window (2004) - DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Johnny Depp, Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro
screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novella "Secret Window, Secret Garden" by Stephen King
directed by David Koepp

by Walter Chaw Secret Window is a checklist for Stephen King fans in exactly the same way his bloated fiction from the last ten years is a rehash of past material (and like old King material is a rehash of classic EC Comics/"Outer Limits" plots). It's an intensely wearying public window into how a popular writer has taken to auto-consumption and automatic regurgitation when inspiration flags. Typewriter intrigue? "Redrum"-like mantra? Curious wife? Lovable black sidekick dispatched with a hatchet à la Kubrick's The Shining? Check, all. Weird religious iconography, wide-brimmed Amish hats, some sort of sinister cornfield à la Children of the Corn? Surely. Popular writer tortured by an obsessive fan who wants him to write something special, à la Misery? You got it. Mysterious alter-ego nom de plume that appears to have been made manifest à la The Dark Half? Uh huh. Murdered pet and secluded woodland retreat à la Pet Sematary? Even that. Country mouse à la The Green Mile? Believe it or not. In fact, the only thing about Secret Window that doesn't stink of the King perpetual mimeograph machine (The Tommyknockers, "Ballad of the Flexible Bullet") is Johnny Depp's sly comic timing and the smooth direction by Stir of Echoes hyphenate David Koepp.

Dreamcatcher (2003) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis
screenplay by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Lawrence Kasdan

by Walter Chaw As stupid as stupid can be, Lawrence Kasdan's splashy comeback on the backs of two writers who haven't really been any good for about forty years between them (Stephen King and William Goldman) is riddled with knee-slapping plot inconsistencies and the sort of dunderheaded conveniences that reek equally of desperation and a lack of respect for the audience. Based on the first King novel written after the author was smeared across a Maine highway by a man who would later kill himself in a trailer, the book is a fine short story trapped in the body of a six-hundred page book. Hopelessly protracted, after the first two-hundred pages, the novel becomes a pathetic exercise in chronic self-reference: the malady of a successful author who's begun to lose the line between reality and his cult of personality. King has become a writer interested in writing love letters to his fanbase and smug gruel for everyone else.

Hearts in Atlantis (2001) - DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Mika Boorem
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Scott Hicks

by Walter Chaw That there is a wistful framing device in Hearts in Atlantis announces from the beginning exactly the kind of Stephen King movie this is going to be. Directed by Scott Hicks, more of a visual stylist than a storyteller, Hearts in Atlantis is a hollow addition to the cottage sub-genre of non-horror adult contemporary King adaptations that includes The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and, most glaringly, Stand By Me. Scripted by two-time Oscar-winner William Goldman (who also adapted King's Misery and the forthcoming screen version of his Dreamcatcher), Hearts in Atlantis is a clunky bit of period treacle. It covers the requisite bases of magic-realism and bully intrigue without even satisfactorily following through on a major plotline concerning a really boss bicycle. Based on the novellas "Low Men in Yellow Coats" and "Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling" from 1999's Hearts in Atlantis, the film of the same name is inferior to its sources in its aversion to addressing the darker elements of childhood.

The Green Mile (1999) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan, David Morse, Doug Hutchison
screenplay by Frank Darabont, based on the serialized novel by Stephen King
directed by Frank Darabont

by Vincent Suarez In his review of The Thin Red Line, your host at FILM FREAK CENTRAL laments that viewers often are inclined to choose whether they prefer that film or its contemporary, Saving Private Ryan. I find that the same unfortunate phenomenon exists among those who've seen both of Frank Darabont's first two films, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. (Curiously, Tom Hanks stars in each pair of films.) While the two share many traits (their prison setting, their writer-director, and their source material: short stories by Stephen King), they are vastly different films. For while The Shawshank Redemption is an institutional morality tale, The Green Mile is a death-row fairy tale.

Stephen King's Storm of the Century (1999) - DVD

Storm of the Century
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Commentary A-
starring Tim Daly, Colm Feore, Debrah Farentino, Casey Siemaszko
teleplay by Stephen King
directed by Craig R. Baxley

by Bill Chambers Donald Trump probably hears it every time he gets a divorce: "Give me what I want and I will go away." Stephen King, prolific author of books beautiful (The Green Mile serial) and banal (Insomnia), recently wove a miniseries, the TV equivalent of an "event movie," around this loaded demand. For three consecutive nights during last February's sweeps week, viewers tuned in to Storm of the Century wondering what the psychic, psychotic Linoge (Colm Feore) could possibly want from the townsfolk of a New England inlet on the eve of a blizzard loosely inspired by the one that was christened "storm of the century" when it passed through the Eastern seaboard in 1993.

Apt Pupil (1998)

***/****
starring Brad Renfro, Ian McKellen, Elias Koteas, David Schwimmer
screenplay by Brandon Boyce, based on the novella by Stephen King
directed by Bryan Singer

by Bill Chambers "No man is an island," goes the famous John Donne poem, effectively summarizing Apt Pupil's central themes. Though hardly a great film, Bryan Singer's ambitious adaptation of Stephen King's same-named novella* is nonetheless challenging, a bleak picture destined to be misunderstood by the masses. But perhaps the most shocking aspect of this inclement psychological thriller is that a major studio got behind it.