Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) You can certainly see glimpses of better Stephen King stories in Sometimes They Come Back—having a character confront supernatural horrors from an event thirty years before certainly smacks of It, and having an American classic car take centre stage is obviously reminiscent of Christine. We’ll never know how much of this was producer Dino De Laurentiis leering at other King properties he didn’t have the rights to. Not that it matters, considering that the film is weak stuff all-around: a ghost story spanning three decades, it’s about a schoolteacher coming back thirty years later and being forced to finish what he had started in avenging the death of his brother at the hands of a greaser gang. Sometimes They Come Back is not strictly terrible, but it’s intensely generic: production values aren’t that high, and the casting is indifferent at best. There are clearly worse King adaptations, but not so many of them that this warrants attention.