Stephen King

In the Tall Grass (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2020) In horror, hooking an audience is easy – but getting them to an appropriate conclusion is the hard part. In the Tall Grass, based on a novella by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, at least gets the first part right, as a brother and sister hear cries for help from a tall field of grass and head in… only to find themselves unable to get out. From that point on, the film becomes far less successful: strange and disturbing elements accumulate, but when it comes time to wrap it all up, the film can’t quite make sense of everything it has smashed together. It certainly looks great – director Vincenzo Natali has enough experience to be able to make us believe in a sinister field of grass trapping its victims. But it’s on a narrative level that In the Tall Grass is either incoherent or facile. Considering that the film messes with unreliable geography and time travel and hallucinations, you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing in this film makes sense longer than the images it features. What could have been a clean, solid plotline ends up overcomplicated beyond belief to no clear purpose. By the time some characters do make it out of the grass field, we’re just happy it’s over.

Sleepwalkers (1992)

Sleepwalkers (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, October 2020) On the shelf of Stephen King movies, Sleepwalkers distinguishes itself for being the first to have been directly written by King for the screen (rather than having written the source material, or adapting his own short stories as he did for Maximum Overdrive). The result isn’t particularly distinguishable from countless other mid-budget efforts—although it does have its quirks. Featuring an incestuous mother-son duo of energy vampires, the story takes place somewhere in the Midwest, where the pair is once again on the prowl for a young woman to drain her lifeforce. The one plot flip that does add much interest is that they fear cats, leading to the feline forces acting as support to the heroes as they fight the villains—it’s good fun to see the cats play to the good side for once, although that does come at a price: I don’t recall a film that kills as many cats as this one does on its way to its conclusion. Feline body count aside, Sleepwalkers does have its issues. The film’s self-awareness comes across strangely at times, with odd bits of comedy clashing with its more traditional intent to scare. King himself makes a tertiary role appearance as a defensive cemetery caretaker, while Ron Perlman is conspicuous the moment he shows up and Alice Krige does look good as the hundred-year-old villain. (Other cameos include Joe Dante, John Landis, Clive Barker, and Tobe Hooper.) The plot itself will only make sense if you’re not paying attention, with the younger member of the evil pair leaving a conspicuous trail of violent deaths well before being able to target his prey—isn’t he supposed to know better than this? Still, the Sleepwalkers’ big finale is the fun part of it, with cats clawing at the villains until the heroine manages to put an end to this nonsense. Meow!

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(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.

Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2020) Surprisingly enough, Dolan’s Cadillac is a faithful adaptation of a Stephen King story, in which a grieving man plans an elaborate revenge scheme that culminates in a tense standoff on a deserted road. The premise is fine, the third-act concept is intriguing (if overdrawn—just bulldoze the dirt on top and call it a day) and Christian Slater has a chance to chew scenery by the mouthful as the villain. Curiously, the Canadian prairies stand-in for a Nevada/California highway. (The film being a Canadian production, it’s a frequent rerun on Canadian cable channels even a decade later.) Where Dolan’s Cadillac falters is in trying too hard with its dialogues and direction—even by neo-noir standards, Slater’s dialogue is unnecessarily verbose and the protagonist’s narration isn’t much better. Some cuts would have done wonders here—the best lines would have been even better without the surrounding clutter, and even Slater’s magnificent monologues would have been more memorable with a bit of culling. Still, Dolan’s Cadillac is a fun little film, and a nice change of pace in seeing King go from northeastern settings to the American southwest. (Although there are plenty of such examples in his oeuvre, from The Regulators to The Stand.)

Doctor Sleep (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2020) The recent second-generation re-ignition of interest in Stephen King’s adaptations is a beautiful thing to watch: I like King and I think that history will have great things to say about him, but it’s good to see the consecration happen in real time. With Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan is at his second King adaptation and he continues to prove his suitability for the material. After several well-received low-to-medium films, Flanagan is now working in the big-budget leagues, and this translates into an increased ability to play with strong unusual images (the snake-like overhead shot of a caravan sticks to mind). For Doctor Sleep to rely so much on its association with The Shining is not necessarily a good thing at first, as it puts the bar too high for the film to ever reach—and it’s a bit of a bait-and-switch in that the essential plot of the movie has little to do with The Shining. No, here we’re tracking down a bunch of evil soul-stealers as they go kidnapping and harvesting psychic energy from unusually gifted children across the United States. Against them we have Terrence (returning from The Shining decades later) and another gifted child. While Doctor Sleep is imperfect, it does have quite a few things going for it. Like many of King’s adaptations, it’s a horror film that goes well beyond the boring monster features that so often pass for horror—there’s a little bit more to it, and parts of the film bring to mind more recent TV shows that use horror as a blend in their magical realism mix—at times, especially at first, there’s a cross-country Americana vibe to the film that could have been interesting in its own right… but here it’s a prelude to a good-versus-evil battle featuring flawed characters and unusual powers. Ewan MacGregor has a good role here, helped along by a large supporting cast. In many ways, Doctor Sleep does feel like the culmination of something that has been brewing in earlier episodes. Some clever set pieces are a highlight, such as when the bad guy has tables turned on them by one of the protagonists acting like a horror movie monster. The return to the Overlook Hotel at the end doesn’t quite work—again, too strong a reference to a previous work without hope of attaining it, with a payoff that is slightly disappointing. Still, the result is worth a look, especially in how it steps away briefly from what could have been a far more conventional story. We can thank King for that, and Flanagan as well.

Maximum Overdrive (1986)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2020) I remember watching bits and pieces of Maximum Overdrive as a young teenager and being disgusted by it. (That soda-dispensing machine and bulldozer killing little leaguers—ugh!) Fortunately, a second look at the film as a middle-aged reviewer is far more positive. If nothing else, I’m far more jaded now, and I can recognize that this horror film written and directed by Stephen King is very playful in the way it mixes an impossible premise with the dark humour typical of genre horror and overblown set pieces designed to make viewers roll their eyes. It’s certainly not a perfect film, and maybe not even a good film. As a director, King does a serviceable job at best, and the script isn’t fully cooked: the opening bridge sequence, for instance, doesn’t have any plot links with the rest of Maximum Overdrive, and is sandwiched between another introduction sequence and the introduction of our protagonists. The premise is still remarkably dumb, but the impossibility of what’s happening is very much part of the fun. Fortunately, the film does find its groove once its characters are stuck in a North Carolina service station by roving trucks intent on subjugating them. The sense of atmosphere is pretty good, and there are some spectacular heavy iron special effects. (The irony is that the film is big on heavy metal, both as a threat from the machines and through the AC/DC soundtrack.) Alas, the finale leaves the truck stop just long enough to lose a lot of energy. Emilio Estevez makes for a likable protagonist (Also of note—a live-action performance from Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson in The Simpsons.). Still, Maximum Overdrive definitely has some entertainment value even with its shortcomings—it does remain a bit of a unique sell, though. If you’re not already attuned to the very specific brand of genre horror humour… maybe wait until you are.

It Chapter Two (2019)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2020) To clown a phrase; there are a whole lot of conclusions in this conclusion to the It diptych. At a staggering two hours and forty-nine minutes (for a horror film!), It Chapter Two clearly sets out to provide the ultimate definitive adaptation of Stphen King’s novel and succeeds despite some middle-act fatigue. The story skips forward twenty-seven years after the events of the first film, as the killing cycle begins again and the Losers, who won a temporary reprieve in Chapter One, are called back to Derry to finish Pennywise once and for all. If there’s one thing to be said about this film, it’s that this is big-budget high-grade horror: Director Andy Muschietti gets to use plenty of good special effects in the achievement of the film’s vision, also making an effort to dig into thematic concerns (about memory) and go beyond the obvious scares to deliver something a bit deeper. Having A-grade actors also helps, with Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy providing most of the dramatic heavy lifting, with Bill Hader as the self-recognized comic relief and some fine work by others, such as Isaiah Mustafa and obviously Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise. The meta gets thick once Stephen King shows up as “The Shopkeeper” in order to criticize his stand-in writer for bad endings and the adaptation of The Shining. But, as good as It Chapter Two can be in bits, pieces, intentions and means, the overlong duration eventually takes its toll, leading to exasperation during the schematic setup of the film, and then again during the ending that can’t stop ending. On the other hand, there’s nothing more on the other side of that ending: it’s refreshing to see a horror film that dares do a definitive conclusion without any hint of a follow-up. While it has its issues, this wrap-up to the It series is a success: it knows what to adapt from the original novel and what to forget (readers know what I’m talking about), and the result is likely to be the best adaptation of that novel we’re likely to get.

Children of the Corn (1984)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2020) Blending some folk horror with “kids are evil” old narrative chestnuts, Children of the Corn ends up being somewhat of a mixed bag. The premise, not uninteresting, has a couple accidentally stopping in a small town where all the adults have been killed by children in a pagan crop-saving ritual. The usual shenanigans follow, with the adult protagonists being hounded by the killer kids and fighting back. It’s all executed in standard 1980s-horror-movie fashion, which may (or not) strike a chord with those who like horror films of the era. It does have its assets: It’s impossible not to like 1984-vintage Linda Hamilton, obviously, but the film around her isn’t quite so interesting. Those who know Children of the Corn’s production history will tell you all about how Stephen King wrote a screenplay adapting his own story, only for the screenplay to be thrown in the garbage by the film’s producers, who then went on to do their own thing with the premise. As such, there’s no attempt at cinematic excellence or respectability here: it’s a straight-up genre exercise, made to make a buck with the era’s undiscerning theatrical audiences. There have been many sequels (8) and remakes (2) to Children of the Corn, almost all of them intended for the home video or streaming market—not that the sins of the children should be inflicted upon the forbears, except as a hint toward how compelling the premise could be for other filmmakers.

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, June 2019) Growing up geek in the early 1990s, The Lawnmower Man ended up becoming a reference to my group of mid-nineties Computer Science student friends even despite being the farthest thing from a good movie. Watching it again today, I can offer no defence of the result: The plot is pure unprocessed cliché, while its main claim to fame—the digital special effects—have aged terribly and are only impressive as a snapshot of what was then state-of-the-art. The premise borrows liberally from Frankenstein, Flowers to Algernon and Tron, what with a cognitive scientist boosting the intelligence of a dim-witted manual labourer, and said super-intelligent antagonist turning irremediably evil. A murder spree predictably ensues. The only twist here is that this is all taking place thanks to virtual reality, with early-era CGI portraying now-grotesque chunks of the plot. (I’m such an early-nineties geek that I still remembered that some of the CGI sequences were repeated from the video compilation The Mind’s Eye.) The obsession about Virtual Reality is also pure early-1990s stuff, ridiculous except for the fact that I lived through it at the time. My nostalgic feeling should not be confused for any kind of appreciation for the result, which is alternately dull or actively irritating depending on how often that exact same cheap take on technology has been repeated before or since. Behind the camera, I have to acknowledge the work of writer-director Brett Leonard, grafting minimal elements from a Stephen King story onto a statement about VR as it was perceived then—not only would he also write and direct the slightly-better VR thriller Virtuosity three years later, but he would remain active at the cutting edge of movies and technology until now. Those who like actors rather than technology will be amused to see Pierce Brosnan is the leading role as an obsessive scientist and a few scenes with Dean Norris as a menacing figure. Still, much of the appeal of The Lawnmower Man today is as a snapshot of the wild expectations and easy plot possibilities of virtual reality at the earliest possible moment when it became possible to think of it. It’s irremediably dated, and that’s part of the point.

Silver Bullet (1985)

Silver Bullet (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I’ve been rediscovering a few surprisingly good Stephen King movie adaptations lately, but Silver Bullet won’t be one of them. At best, it’s a middle-of-the-road adaptation, compensating for a familiar premise with a few quirky details, occasional good moments and a fun performance by a crowd-favourite actor. Another take on the well-worn werewolf mythos, Silver Bullet tells us about a pair of teenagers and their quirky uncle taking on a deadly threat stalking their small town. As the bodies pile up, we’re quite obviously stuck in a 1980s horror film aimed at teenagers—the blood flows, the scares can be silly, and the overall atmosphere is more comforting than any kind of horrifying. Werewolf or not, the structure of the film—with its escalating death count and final confrontation—won’t surprise anyone who’s seen any other horror movie before. Still, a few things do save Silver Bullet from all-out mediocrity. The somewhat sympathetic portrait of a teenage protagonist in a wheelchair (played by Corey Haim) may have been intended as exploitative but ends up interesting in its own way. Having Gary Busey step in as an eccentric, alcoholic uncle isn’t played for laughs as much as you’d think (even the film acknowledge that the guy has issues) but remains distinctive due to Busey himself. Finally, there is some good directing here and there, whether it’s a foggy sequence, or the clever revelation of the human identity of the werewolf—although it’s unclear whether these touches come from credited director Dan Attias or the film’s first director Don Coscarelli. In other words, expect a standard werewolf movie and you just might be mildly satisfied.

Thinner (1996)

Thinner (1996)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, April 2019) One of the most wonderful things about Stephen King is he has written so much that you can have yourself a weeks-long marathon of King film adaptations, with a wide variety of quality from the grotesque to the sublime. In that Stephen King Cinematic Universe, Thinner is likely to go unnoticed. Not that it doesn’t have a good hook on its own—what with an obese lawyer accidentally killing a gypsy woman, and her father putting a fatal thinning curse on him. But good hooks aren’t rare in the King oeuvre—what’s more important is the care with which they’re executed and that’s where Thinner loses points. Clearly looking like a mid-tier 1990s film, it’s a horror film made like a horror film, with little intention to aim for anything more. There’s also a very specific aspect to the story’s requirements—the makeup—that would at best be weird, and here feel simply grotesque. Simply put: any story that has a 300-pound man thinning down to skeletal proportions was a tough special effects assignment without top-notch 2010s digital wizardry, and there’s no going around that much of it looks unconvincing, especially in the later stage where makeup is applied to lead actor Robert John Burke’s face in order to create hollow depressions. Then there’s the script, noticeably sillier than other King adaptations even when it does a fine job adapting a weird story. But those things combine make Thinner feel like a minor work—an extended Twilight Zone episode with enough filler required to make it to the end, the point of the film being in the ironic ending. Not unlike the novel, really—King wrote it as Richard Bachman at a time when he was still aiming for airport-grade potboilers. I still enjoyed it, but as a B-movie with a number of excesses rather than a better kind of film. This being said, there’s a lot worse in the King Cinematic Universe—being forgettable isn’t all that bad.

Needful Things (1993)

Needful Things (1993)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, April 2019) The more I think about it, the more I realize that the way that Hollywood and I consume Stephen King’s novels has much in common: big binges every few years, between which King has the time to write an entire set of books that would put other authors’ entire bibliographies to shame. Now that King is very much back in vogue as inspiration for horror movies for the third time after peaks in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, it’s time for me to take a look at a film adaptation that was released during King’s second Hollywood binge and read during the first of mine. Needful Things is memorable in that it’s a thick book that uses most of its duration to make us comfortable with an entire small New England town—an ensemble cast of ordinary characters whose existence is upset (or terminated) by the arrival of a mysterious man who can find something special for you somewhere in his new shop. It’s a familiar setup—what if an entire town sold its soul to the Devil?—but in King’s hands it becomes a sweeping, comfortable novel with big ideas in a small context. The movie obviously doesn’t have the running time to do justice to the entire story, but it does manage to nicely condense the narrative in the time it has. The cast is cut down, the plotting is streamlined and if the immersion isn’t nearly as complete, the result is more effective than not. The big sweeping opening sequence begins the inglorious work of establishing the geography and the characters. It’s easy enough to watch, and quietly fascinating in the way the plot and director Fraser Clarke Heston gradually manage to work itself up to an explosive climax after setting half the town against each other by weaponizing small sins. Movies of this kind depend on their actors, and we have a capable lead trio in between the ever-dependable Ed Harris, a very nice Bonnie Bedelia, and a savvy performance by Max von Sydow, who manages to find an appropriate balance between the creepiness of his character and the innate campiness of the concept. In short, an unspectacular but effective adaptation that should please both King fans and casuals. Movie aside I have one semi-related complaint: Why do movie channels such as AMC, heavy on muting out bad language, even choose to broadcast movies with language to mute out? It’s really annoying and makes a mockery of the channel’s so-called cinephile orientation.

The Running Man (1987)

The Running Man (1987)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) As a former but unrepentant Science Fiction critic, I know better than anyone else that we’re not supposed to grade SF films of past decades on a prescience scorecard where more points are accumulated for accurate predictions. This goes double for dystopias, as we’re perhaps more sensitive to the bad things than the good ones. Still, it’s really hard to resist the impulse when it comes to The Running Man, considering the richness of its vision. Adapted very loosely from the Richard Bachman/Stephen King novel (notably softening the ending but frankly just taking the name of the characters and the rough premise), it ends up being an over-the-top Arnold Schwarzenegger film set in the near future. (To underscore the difference from contemporary films, Schwarzenegger sports a rather cool goatee and otherwise delivers a film that fits well in his classic streak of action films.)  The bare bones of the plot have to do with a totalitarian USA using a TV Show to kill its dissidents, but the execution (once past the setup) is repetitive, with the protagonist dispatching one opponent after another using one-liners, steadily making his way back to the TV show host. The action is bloody and choppy, reinforced by cinematography that’s pitch-dark to the point of exasperation. A few wrestlers—and future co-Governor Jesse Ventura!—make up the opponents, with the romantic interest played by the beautiful but underused Maria Conchita Alonso. (The producers make sure they get their money’s worth by having her character exercise in lingerie.)  The film is limited by 1980s technology in its presentation (such as the early cheap-looking CGI opening credits) but does prove disturbingly prescient in its satirical dystopia, anticipating the 2001–2019 slide of America into cheerful authoritarianism, airport checkpoints, entertainment/capitalism synergy … and reality TV. Also notable without being so flashy is solid-state video. So, while there’s no real point in grading The Running Man for accurate predictions, it’s the kind of additional material that does help the film distinguish itself from many far more generic action films of the 1980s. It has some kind of verve in spitting out groan-worthy one-liners and work its way up to a big spectacle of a conclusion. Not necessarily my go-to-choice for films of the era, but somewhat better than I expected.

Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Dolores Claiborne (1995)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, March 2019) The history of Stephen King movies across the 1990s is … shaky, but Dolores Claiborne is not going to count as a bad one. Much of this success can be traced back to the original material, which (despite featuring murder in most unusual circumstances) lends very little freedom for filmmakers to go wild in bad ways. Keeping the tone close to the novel, screenwriter Tony Gilroy and director Taylor Hackford deliver a film that sticks close to reality—and thankfully so, considering the film’s themes of domestic violence and abuse: inserting supernatural elements would have been a distracting mistake. A great sense of place, in a small island community off the coast of Maine, certainly helps in creating the film’s convincing atmosphere. Dolores Claiborne is Kathy Bates’s show as she delivers a full-featured performance, but the supporting cast is unusually strong, what with Jennifer Jason Leigh as an estranged daughter, Christopher Plummer as a detective and a pre-stardom John C. Reilly as a policeman. There’s some skill in the way the film blends a modern-day timeline with flashbacks, complete with specific colour schemes and makeup. The eerie colour manipulation throughout the film—and most intensely in the eclipse sequence—clearly prefigures more ambitious (and now commonplace) efforts in current movies. The result, as skillful as it is, can’t avoid a few missteps that reinforce its melodramatic nature—the soundtrack is too insistent at times, adding far too much to something that didn’t need it. The slow start of the film reinforces the impression that it is too long and overdone—a shorter climax would have helped. Still, Dolores Claiborne does stand as a rather good adaptation of the King novel, despite taking a few justifiable liberties (notably in beefing up and adding more characters to the present-day frame). Dolores Claiborne is probably too often forgotten in the King filmography—not horrific enough, not necessarily fitting the mould of what people expect from him—but it’s a successful effort, and one that can still be watched with some satisfaction nowadays.

Gerald’s Game (2017)

Gerald’s Game (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, August 2018) I first read Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game decades ago, but I was able to remember a surprising amount of it while watching its straight-to-Netflix adaptation. Thanks to writer/director Mike Flanagan (following up on a series of increasingly successful horror movies), the adaptation is surprisingly faithful, a feat made even more amazing given that the novel is as interior-driven as anything else in King’s biography. After all, how can you portray a woman being chained to a bed and left alone with her husband’s corpse for days? What Flanagan does, aside from the obvious use of flashbacks, is to literalize the heroine’s fantasies and delirious visions: Suddenly, the deceased husband gets up, talks to her and gets her to express her feelings. And then, later, there are other, more tangible horrors: A dog, then something else… And still, throughout, the terrors of being left to die alone. The thirst, the cold, the isolation. Carla Gugino is near a career-best performance in the lead role, being on-screen for almost the entire duration of Gerald’s Game and being asked to carry a wide range of emotions. Bruce Greenwood does get a mention for his not-so-brief time playing a not-so-good husband. The film is so close to the novel that it does share a few issues later on, namely the collision of a good-enough premise with a serial killer story that doesn’t entirely serve the rest of the plot. I was dubious about it when I read the novel so long ago and I’m still dubious about it now. Still, it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t add much, so what is left of Gerald’s Game is still remarkable. Flanagan has done much with little (the film has only barely a dozen roles in a largely single location), delivering quality chills and thrills in a compelling package. This is probably his best film yet, and it suggests even better things in the future.