Top 10 Best Stephen King Adaptations

Welcome to a special edition of "Movie Reviews..", where today, thanks in part to not having seen a good movie to review, I introduce my newest feature, the ol' Top 10 List. And what better way to kick this new segment off than with my favorite author, whose many novels and short stories have been optioned to film over the years, some meeting with critical and box office success, others not so much. Here we will celebrate what I feel are the ten best page to screen translations.

#10. The Dark Half. Directed by George Romero, from a screenplay also written by him, this stars Timothy Hutton in the dual role of Thad Beaumont/George Stark in a story of a writer (Beaumont) attempting to "kill off" his pseudonym (Stark), only to have the pseudonym come to life and try to bump him off. It's a nice, intense, cat & mouse game as Stark goes to lengths to track down Beaumont and his family and tries to assert himself as a real person. Really faithful to the source material, with exceptions to things that couldn't be shown on film that appear in the book, like one instance of graphic violence involving genitalia. Character actor Michael Rooker, usually seen as a bad guy, does a good turn as Sheriff Alan Pangborn, a semi-recurring character in King lore.

#9. Firestarter. After her starring role in "E.T.", Drew Barrymore was cast as Charlie McGee, King's little pyrokinetic. The story concerns Mcgee and her father, on the run from a covert government agency bent on capturing the two because of their psychic abilities: his to "Push" the minds and will of people, and hers, the destructive power of fire. Most of the book is on display here, the film keeps a good pace without losing too much of the material. Also on display are veteran actors George C. Scott as the scheming Rainbird, and Martin Sheen as Cap, the head of "The Shop". You can also find a pre-Tommy Lee Heather Locklear in the film.

#8. The Green Mile. Adapted by Frank Darabont for the screen (SPOILER: you'll see this name again), this is one of King's more melodramatic works, and that feeling is translated well to the screen. With only a hint of the supernatural, most don't know this as a King work (actually released as a series of novellas over a period of months), it deals with a group of prison guards working a stretch of Death Row in Depression-era Cold Mountain Penitentiary known as "The Green Mile" because of the flooring. Best performances in this epic film come from Michael Clarke Duncan as the gentle giant John Coffey, and Doug Hutchison as slime-ball prison guard Percy Wetmore, a villain so cruel, you can't wait for him to get his.

#7. Pet Sematary. One of his creepiest books was turned into a damn creepy movie as well, thanks mostly to the performance of young Miko Hughes as Gage Creed. The story is about the Creed family who move to a rural area in Maine that happens to have a busy highway running in front of it. The family cat gets killed by an eighteen wheeler while most of the family is out of town, so kindly neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) takes Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) to the local "Pet Sematary" and the cat comes back to life, although not quite right, to the tune of having to kill it again. Eventually, Gage is killed in the same fashion, and Louis, sick with grief, takes his son to the Sematary, with predictable results. Very faithful to the novel.

#6. Misery. A pure psychological horror ride, this is one of King's earliest melodramas, without a hint of the supernatural. Kathy Bates turn as the psychotic Annie Wilkes earned her an Oscar award, and she remains one of the greatest villains on film. James Caan is perfectly cast as Paul Sheldon, where normally he would be the tough guy, here he is reduced to a helpless invalid at the mercy of a deranged killer. The stark, snowy setting of the film lends to the coldness of the killer, especially when she callously murders who you expect to be the saviour of the protagonist. This film also features one of the most brutal scenes of torture ever involving a block of wood.

#5. The Dead Zone. Featuring the always great Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, "The Dead Zone" is another psychic themed story about a man who awakes from a five year coma with the ability to touch someone and see their past, present and future. Though the film only showcases a fraction of the book, it is a very accurate telling of that portion. Martin Sheen also appears in this film, but as a different character altogether than the one he plays in "Firestarter", here he is Presidential hopeful Greg Stillson, whom Johnny sees as eventually starting a nuclear war with Russia and decides it is his responsibility to stop him. Directed by David Cronenberg, also a heavyweight in the horror industry.

#4. Stand By Me. Rob Reiner makes another appearance on this list with his adaptation of the story "The Body" from the book "Different Seasons". Featuring a great young cast of actors-yet-to-be, this is also one of King's earlier melodramas without a horror undercurrent. It's just a coming of age story of four boys on a journey to see a dead body, and their happenings along the way, namely a race against a train, outrunning the neighborhood junkyard dog, and facing down the town bully in a test of wills. The boys learn more about each other than they ever knew and become stronger as friends for it. The late River Phoenix is here in his second role, and the one that put him on the map, and listen for Richard Dreyfuss as The Narrator.

#3. Creepshow. Not technically a direct book-to-movie port, (some segments were written specifically for the film), the two best segments were based on short stories: "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" ("Weeds") and "The Crate". King himself starred in the "Verrill" bit, about a dim-witted farmer who happens upon a crashed meteor that eventually turns him (and his entire house) into a rain forest. "The Crate", featuring veteran Hal Holbrook and the buxom Adrienne Barbeau, is about a crate containing a mysterious, carnivorous something. The rest of the stories are good, too, and feature a who's-who of Hollywood: namely Ted Danson, Leslie Nielsen, and Ed Harris before they became well known names. This also features the first time King and Romero worked together, and King's son Joe plays the kid in the vignettes between the stories.

 #2. The Shawshank Redemption. Adapted from the same collection as "The Body", "Shawshank" is a melodrama focusing on one man's 20 year journey through the prison system as a wrongly convicted man. Although met with critical success at its time of release, it didn't go over well with audiences until available on home viewing outlets, and has since gone on to cult status. This was Frank Darabont's first King adaptation, and is very faithful to the source material, with two glaring exceptions: the poster covering Andy's escape tunnel is Rita Hayworth, not Raquel Welch and Morgan Freeman's character Red is a white guy in the story. But only die-hard fans will note these exceptions, they don't detract from the movie. Also, one of the funniest scenes from the book was filmed, but cut from the movie.

#1. The Mist. Coming in as the best adaptation, "The Mist" is about a small community that gets overtaken by a mysterious mist after a big storm, and there are deadly things in the mist. But just as deadly are the townspeople who are confronted by something they can't explain or defend against and eventually start turning on one another, forming two camps in the supermarket they are holed up in: the religious zealots and the "down-to-earthers". Being that the source material is a short story, of course certain elements had to be added to lengthen the movie, but everything added actually fit, and where the story had an ambiguous and open end left to interpretation, the film version has one of the most shocking endings ever. All of the characters felt lifted straight from the pages and the actors picked to portray them were spot on. Marcia Gay Harden has you wanting the slap the shit out of her character every time she is on screen, and that is precisely how I felt about the character while I read the story. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, this is yet another Frank Darabont adaptation (told you that you'd see that name again), and it is his best. Clearly, he understands King's work and knows how to translate his words to the visual media. If I see Darabont's name attached to a King project, rest assured I will be there.

Friday the 13th (1980 & 2009)

Hello, readers and friends, welcome back. It is time for another installment of "Originals vs. Remakes". I could have selected from any number of horror films out there that have remakes (or re-boots as they are calling them, and there are plenty), and I will probably eventually cover them all, but after having already reviewed a John Carpenter film and its lackluster update, I was reluctant to do "Halloween" just yet. Instead, I decided to go with the movie that was inspired by the aforementioned film, "Friday the 13th" and its 2009 remake. The original was directed and produced by Sean S. Cunningham (no relation), who previously worked with another horror pioneer in the form of Wes Craven on his first picture, "The Last House on the Left". The script was written, believe it or not, by a guy who mainly wrote soap operas for television. Originally panned by such renowned critics as Siskel & Ebert and Leonard Maltin, it still managed to rake in impressive box office numbers on its opening weekend, and over the years has become a cult classic and a standard bearer for horror films to come. Eventually, even Maltin softened his stance on the film, but only because a sequel came out that he hated more.

M. Night approves of your twist.

For the uninformed, the story goes like this: in 1957 at Camp Crystal Lake, a couple of fornicating camp counselors are unaware of the drowning of one of the children, Jason Voorhees, because they were, well, fornicating. A year later, at the same camp, a couple of other counselors sneak away from the camp-fire, presumably to engage in coitus, but are savagely murdered by an unknown assailant before they can fully disrobe. We then flash forward to the summer of 1979, and the owners are preparing Crystal Lake for re-opening, despite legends and superstitions from the locals warning of danger. One of the new counselors arrives at a local diner looking for a ride to the camp and gets a lift halfway there from a friendly trucker. Shortly after the trucker drops her off, she hitches a ride with someone else (whose face we never see), who promptly proceeds to murder her ass. Switch to the camp, where the counselors who have made it there without a serious case of the deads are preparing for the opening, going about tasks like painting, setting up the archery range, and smoking dope and screwing. One by one (or sometimes by two) they are picked off by the mysterious assailant, until only "Survivor Girl" Alice is alive. She then meets up with a Mrs. Voorhees, who says she's an old friend of the camp owners. Alice proceeds to tell her tale of terror, which is met with little shock from Voorhees, who, in a twist that Shyamalan wishes he came up with first, reveals that she is the mother of the child who drowned 21 years previous, and that today, Friday the 13th, would have been his birthday. She then attempts to kill Alice, with the result being Voorhees' head falling off of her neck due to a well timed machete swing. Still not feeling too safe, Alice boards a canoe and drifts out to the middle of lake to safety, that is until Jason pops up out of the water to drag her down. But wait! She wakes up in the hospital, that last part possibly being a stress induced nightmare, the rest all too real. Closing credits.

This scene is directly responsible for Jason X.

The film originally was not supposed to end this way, however. Make-up effects veteran Tom Savini gets credit for the final scene, based on the fact he had just seen "Carrie" and thought they need a "chair-jumper" to close the film out like the end of that movie. Coincidentally, had that scene not been included, the entire franchise may not have existed, because script writer Victor Miller never intended on the younger Voorhees to be used outside of mentions in the script, much less a full fledged character: "Jason was dead from the very beginning. He was a victim, not a villain.". Also worth noting, the iconic sound effects that occur whenever the killer shows up, since Mrs. Voorhees wasn't actually shown in person until the final reel, is based on what she says when chasing Alice, in a falsetto as though as Jason, "Kill her, Mommy!", ("Ki, ki, ki...ma, ma, ma..."), and was recorded by film scorer Harry Manfredini by speaking those words and looping them through an echo reverberation machine.

Does Jason do requests?

After the success of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reboot, Toby Emmerich approached the development and production team of that film about doing the same for "Friday the 13th", but instead of a direct remake, the film would be a re-imagining of the story, using the first four films in the franchise. The problem with that is that the first film of the franchise is whittled down the the first five minutes of this film, basically just there to show you why Jason is the murderous bastard he is. But I was okay with that. Going in to the film thinking reboot instead of remake helped, of course, but I was there to see Jason whack some stupid teenagers, and they gave me just the amount of information I needed to set me down that path. It's 1980, and a young Jason witnesses his mother being beheaded. After the initial opening sequence, we advance 30 years to present time and are introduced to our first set of teens, who are invading Camp Crystal Lake in the search for marijuana that is apparently growing there in the wild. They eventually split up and Jason starts killing them off in great fashion, leaving the last girl surprisingly alive, and taking her captive, because she reminds him of his mother. Six weeks later, another group of teens lands in the area, this time across the lake from the camp at one of the kids' lake house. Also in town is Clay, in search of his missing sister. He makes his way to the cabin where the other kids are, and predictably, so does Jason. Death and mayhem ensue in the traditional Voorhees fashion, with a few exceptions, namely Jason RUNS now. Before, he would just stalk, never breaking his pace, and then BAM! there he is, no matter how fast you ran from him. Now, running is useless because he's just plain faster than you.  And that makes it more terrifying, because it makes it more real.

KICK. ASS.

So, which of the two did I like more? Well, I don't prefer one to the other, I view them as both separate, yet equal works. The remake stays faithful to the source material, while adding its own spin and freshness for the new generation. I like them both, the first version for what it represents in the annals of film and horror history, and the second as a pure thrill ride and well-made horror film with a fresh voice for a mute killer, also probably one of the most sentient zombies in film history. I'd rather not see the series get extended to the point of putting Jason in space again, in fact, I hope they leave it where it is. Although, a Jason vs. Freddy vs. Ash movie would totally kick ass.

1980: 7 out of 10 Fists

2009: 7 out of 10 Fists

Zombie Women of Satan

Foreign films are a tricky lot to deal with. Often times there are things that are lost in translation, whether it be cultural differences, or just plain mistranslation from language to language. Watch a Japanese movie sometime with the captions and dubbing running at the same time and spot all the differences in the translations, sometimes you almost get two different dialogues. Foreign subject matter is steeped in their culture, things us silly Americans would have no or little knowledge of, thus making some of their films a bit hard to understand. So, oftentimes, I'll give leeway to a foreign film if I don't get it, as long as it is wrapped in a pretty package, i.e.: good acting, production values and things like that. The British get none of these considerations; occasionally, I actually hold their work to a higher standard. They've been doing this acting thing longer than we have, although I think we are about neck-in-neck in the actual film-making department (citation needed). I have previously reviewed a British film I thought very highly of, but I held no reservations going in to this latest film, and you only need to read the title to understand why.

You can write a script too!

I am writing this review after having just watched this movie. I still don't know what the point of it was, other than a chance to have gratuitous violence and nudity on display for an hour and a half. There seems to be a couple of different story threads going on at the same time, but only one of them is fully explored, leaving the more interesting of the two with no explanation, although it is probably easier to fill in the blanks on your own. The main gist of the story is some rocker chick looking for her missing sister that may be involved with some weird sex cult, and has a Jim Rose-esque freak show along for the ride. The sex cult is apparently run by a trio of siblings, a sleazy dude and his two sisters, although the point of the cult seems to be in sexually satisfying the dude...I don't see what the sisters were benefiting from this. Oh, and they have an even loonier dad, who is conducting experiments on the girls that have been drugged into the cult. The results of the experiments seem to be turning the chicks into zombies, which he turns over to the matriarch of the family, who also happens to be chained up in the "lab" the dad is operating out of. You don't know what he is attempting to figure out and they never tell you. He's just doing some Mengele type stuff, I guess. At this point I really didn't care why he was doing what he was doing. Anyway, some blood from one of his experiments gets mixed in with the punch used to drug the sex slaves and, of course, all zombie hell breaks loose.

THE authorities on British zombies.

This movie is a convoluted mess. It's hard to stay focused on any one thing because the film-makers never establish a central theme. Also, the title is false advertising, as there is no Satan in any part of this picture, unless you count the guy who sold his soul to get this made in the first place. It's pretty hard to screw-up a zombie movie, it is a very simple formula: outbreak, death, zombie hordes, survivors, triumph. Sure, the bar may have been set high with "Shaun of the Dead", but that doesn't mean you have to limbo under it. There were a couple of things I did like about this film, namely the gore. I also liked the hat the leader of the freak show is wearing the entire film, as it has the Punisher skull on it. And there are some great boobs in it.

1 out of 10 Fists.

Source Code

Welcome back for another installment of "Movie Reviews...", this time around I'm going to review a film fresh out of theatres, "Source Code". It has been a little while since I've seen a first-run movie on the big screen: as much as I like movies, I prefer the more intimate setting of home viewing, and it's cheaper too. Besides, if you have a big enough television and loud enough sound system, the theatre effect is quite easy to re-create, and control at your will, i.e.: bathroom breaks, snack breaks, tobacco breaks, annoying kids, etc. It usually takes a REAL special movie (or special event) to get me to go, most likely a comic book movie or a Stephen King adaptation, but every once in a while, I'll catch a random movie I wasn't planning on seeing, which in some cases works out (Die Hard) and in others, does not (Memoirs of a Geisha...don't ask).  This happens to be one of the times when it worked out.

Also not a literary genius.

I went in to this movie thinking it was an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, so I was expecting a total and complete mind-warp. For those unfamiliar with his work, first understand that the man was completely bat-shit insane. His mind has given us such great literary-turned-cinema works as "Total Recall", "A Scanner Darkly", and a little film you may have heard of called "Blade Runner". He is credited as being the most adapted sci-fi writer of all time. But this isn't his work, I only found out later. Does that lessen my opinion of the movie? Not one bit. "Source Code" starts off with a bang, quite literally. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Colter Stevens, a decorated army helicopter pilot who wakes up on a train in a body that isn't his. After naturally freaking out and trying to figure out what's going on, suddenly the train explodes and he finds himself strapped in to some sort of capsule surrounded by computers and monitors and the like. He is brought back to "reality" by Capt. Colleen Goodwin, played by Vera Farmiga, who explains to him that he is inside the Source Code, which allows him to be transported to the last eight minutes of an individual's life, in this case a teacher on the exploding train named Sean Fentress. Goodwin explains to Stevens that they want him to gather information and try to pinpoint the bomber before he can set off another, deadlier dirty bomb attack. They explain to him that he can't change events or save anyone because it's not like a time machine, but more like a VCR, allowing you to rewind and watch events, but not alter them.

"Huh?"

Along the way, Stevens (as Fentress) meets and becomes drawn to Christina Warren, played by Michelle Monaghan, a woman who travels the train every morning with Fentress and has a friendly relationship with. Stevens becomes determined to not only find the bomber, but try to stop the events from even happening and save Warren's life along with everyone else, even though he has been told numerous times that he can't. He also tries to figure out what happened to himself, and why he is in this program in the first place, which leads to many twists and turns that I can't reveal here. But they aren't the kind of twists that will get you lost either, everything is pretty well spelled out along the way. You don't find yourself scratching your head and going "Huh?", too often, and if you do, you weren't paying enough attention. Shame on you.

I recommend picking this one up as a definite rent when it hits, or, if you're a Gyllenhaal fan, a purchase. He does a great job here, though he's not quite ready to be the next action star. Everyone else on display does a fine job, the best perhaps being the creator of the Source Code, Dr. Rutledge, played by Jeffrey Wright. You never know whether to look at him as a good guy or a bad guy, he seems to be straddling the line of neutrality that is so easy to fall on either side of. There are a couple of small plot holes, nothing to ruin the overall experience, but they may inspire some debate. Also, for the trivia buffs out there, keep an ear out for Scott Bakula, in a voice-only performance.

7 out of 10 Fists.