Mick Garris

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) It’s easy to admire the way Desperation begins — adapting a weighty Stephen King tome isn’t easy, especially within the limitations of a TV movie, but veteran writer-director Mick Garris (an old hand at King adaptations, albeit not all of them successful) does give it a half-effective try. The opening sequence is not bad at all, as a young likable couple is arbitrarily arrested in the middle of the Nevada desert by a creepy policeman. One of them won’t even survive to detention… and then we cut back to another couple heading in the same direction. It’s a well-handled setup, and it gets us invested in the overall mystery of a small town called Desolation, empty of human life except for that crazy cop locking up everyone and killing a few more along the way. A much grander conspiracy is eventually revealed (most notably through the use of a faux-silent film meant to portray historical events) and a supernatural villain revealed. At that point, seasoned horror viewers won’t really be surprised to realize that Desperation loses whatever uniqueness it had to become a far more generic hero-versus-monster third act. Horror films, alas, are unusually prone to the convergent-premise problem where, no matter how wildly inventive the opening can be, the ending usually boils down to a handful of formulas. Too bad — but there’s still some mildly effective material before then. In the pantheon of King adaptations, Desperation feels ambitious but ultimately just average: perhaps not such a disappointment considering the scope of the original book and the means through which Garris was working with, and still a reasonably effective film.