Castle Rock Companion - It (2017)

I figured I should start this post off with a disclaimer because despite my usual method of reading and then watching the film, I haven't read It since I covered the book and mini-series in 2014.  So this won't be a blow by blow comparison as compared to some of my past reviews since my memory of the book isn't that fresh.  But there are at least some changes that are glaring enough that I can remember.

The trailers for this film looked promising from the beginning, and while sometimes they can be misleading versus the actual product, in this case I think they did a pretty good job of preparing you for the scares found within.  And this movie does have a lot of them.  Lots of creepy, gross creatures, lots of frightening moments with our child heroes in peril, and lots of clowns.  But one thing I don't think the trailer shows as well that it really should is the strength of the Loser's Club and their friendship.

This is a pretty stellar child cast.  Finn Wolfhard as Richie and Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie stand out in particular, but all of the kids do a great job in their roles.  Eddie went from a pretty typical put upon nerd in the book to my favorite character in the movie.  He's basically 13 going on 45, matter of factly listing all the things that could possibly go wrong with every foolish thing the kids choose to do, and he made me laugh constantly.  Richie is still the wise guy, and his humor has been modernized to be less about doing character voices and more about saying sarcastic or rude things that occasionally cross the line.  The kids don't say "beep beep" at him when he goes too far like they do in the book, but there's one moment where Pennywise says it to him as a nod to that.

The movie is definitely aware of the fact that it's a remake/reboot and that many people are familiar with the mini-series starring Tim Curry.  I think if there's anything that makes these adaptations that are also remakes so distinctive in an unfortunate way is that they often feel the need to spend time doing callbacks rather than just telling the story.  I suppose these little things are meant to be Easter eggs to make people who know the original feel like they are sharing a secret together, but in a horror movie where tension is everything, I don't need a wink and a nudge.  I'd much rather just be absorbed in the moment.

And I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I really loved the Lego turtle Bill picked up and carried with him from Georgie's room into the cellar.  That was a really nice nod to the bigger picture that ties It to the Dark Tower mythology and gives me hope that we may see a little more of that in the next film.  Because this movie is more accurately a half adaptation, as it only features the time when the characters are children.  The timeline is moved forward, setting their childhood in 1989 rather than the 1950s.  They also seem to be aged up a couple years from 11 to 13.  I don't know that a whole lot of time was spent analyzing the differences between childhood in the 50s vs the 80s however.  When Bill tells Georgie to go get the wax from the cellar to coat his paper boat in, my first thought was "No one was doing that in the late 80s."  Perhaps that's a little harsh, but making paper boats and knowing to melt wax to coat them with so they don't disintegrate feels very much like a product of the 50s when kids were still making their own fun.  In the 80s I feel like most of us would have just used one of those plastic tub toys instead.  But we need the first creepy moment in the cellar so it's left in.  It's not necessarily all a bad thing, but to me it just shows a little less thought involved.  It seemed like they just figured they could mention Street Fighter and put Batman on the marquee and call it a day.

There are a few changes to the characters as well, though none of them are earth shattering.  Mike seems to be the one that suffers the most of this, as his knowledge of Derry's history gets transferred to Ben, supposedly doing a ton of research since he's new in town(as he was in the mini-series, and not in the book).  Mike instead has now lost his parents in a fire that killed a large number of people, another example of the awful things that frequently happen in Derry.  He also is initially too kindhearted to kill the sheep that his family raises and slaughters for meat.  While at first seemingly out of nowhere, this change works well, as it both shows how Mike has been hardened by the experiences with It when he is no longer hesitant to kill, and he also brings the bolt gun along with him for their final battle with the creature.

Probably the most troubling change is the one they make to Beverly.  Her father's sexual abuse is covered with just the right level to make him creepy and wrong without spelling too much out for us, and her reactions, hanging out with the boys and cutting all her hair off, are natural reactions to that.  But the big problem is that for the final act she basically becomes a damsel in distress, kidnapped by It and therefore forcing all the boys to come and rescue her.  On one hand, I can see this being a way to get around that awful "Beverly helps them all escape the sewers" plot device that King chose in the book.  Her peril is what is uniting them in this instance, with them all having gone their separate ways after their first fight with the creature.  But her character is stronger than that and she doesn't deserve to become a victim in that way.

The way they fight it is also pretty different.  The kids spend a decent amount of time in the book trying to figure out how they might be able to kill it, like making silver bullets.  Here, the only real weapon they have is banding together and doing their best to not be afraid.  Honestly, it's a good way to save a bit of time and get us straight to the conflict, and it helps you to wonder just how it might even be possible for them to do so.  While it's great seeing the kids band together and slowly losing their fear of Pennywise, I also like that for at least a moment it very much becomes Bill's story.  Having him face the image of Georgie one more time is heartbreaking and effective.  The way Pennywise essentially runs away from them at the end may feel like a bit of a cheat to anyone who isn't familiar with the story, but knowing that part 2 is essential to make this feel whole goes a long way.

Castle Rock Companion - Cell

Unless you are speculating in the science fiction of the future, any story that has a basis in real world technology is going to end up dated.  Such is the case with Stephen King's Cell, written at a time when cell phones were common but still used primarily for phone calls and not much else. Our biggest concern related to them at that point was whether or not they were generating enough radiation to give us cancer. It was also written when the 9/11 terror attacks were still fresh and new and we were all reeling from such a huge event.  King takes those two things and weaves them together, and beyond a few technical details, still manages to write something relevant for today.

When I first read Cell I enjoyed it, though found myself a little frustrated by the ending.  Revisiting it this time for the film, I have since been exposed to two classic works I had not the first time.  Night of the Living Dead and its sequels is the first, and while the "phoners" in the book have more in common with the crazed zombies of 28 Days Later than the slow moving ones in that film, I do think there's a bit of influence in regards to how humans react to such a crisis.  King however mostly stays positive in this one, showing a group of individuals who quickly form a family unit rather than turning against each other.  There is a quick appearance of a bible thumper and a couple nasty people, but I can't help but think that post 9/11 King was trying to focus on the good in people rather than the bad.

The other work is I Am Legend, and the influences here are much stronger.  Much like we learn that the vampires in that book are more than just mere monsters, the phoners form a society as well.  I appreciate greatly that King allows them to evolve as the book goes on - starting out like those aforementioned crazed zombies but becoming more like drones with a shared consciousness.  It's an interesting idea, and it makes you think about them more like people instead of the "just kill them all" mentality that most works will give their monsters.  The main characters in the book initially do have that kill response, and they end up being punished for it.  It's a unique idea and one that helped it all feel interesting to me instead of just a general quest for survival and finding out whether or not our main character's child made it out alive.

Clay Ridell is that main character, and he's a slight twist from King's usual writer protagonist in that he puts drawings to his writings.  The graphic novel he's selling also had some interesting similarities to The Dark Tower series which I figured King included as a wink and nod to fans.  There's not a whole lot to Clay, but that allows us to put ourselves in his shoes, as any of us can understand the desire to find out how our loved ones are doing when disaster strikes.  Clay's companions are much more well defined and real.

Tom McCourt is not King's first gay character, but he seems to me at least like the first one who just happens to have that as a characteristic and not something to be made a huge deal of.  Tom starts off panicky and seeming like he's going to be Clay's tag along that you're just going to have to deal with, but he then gets a hold of himself and even picks Clay up when he doesn't seem like he's going to make it.  If I'm ever being forced to cross the country in a post apocalyptic world, I want someone as sensible and collected as Tom at my side.  And we'd find a way to bring our cats along for the journey.

Alice Maxwell is a teenage girl who does a lot of hard growing up once the disaster strikes.  She's smart and capable and loves horror movies, but she finds a single baby sneaker while they are walking, and she picks it up and can't stop fiddling with it as a kind of nervous twitch.  It's the kind of small detail that makes her feel real, and you both understand why she does it and desperately want her to stop doing it as much as Clay does.

On their journey from Boston to Maine they run into a single remaining student at a prep school and his headmaster.  "The Head" is a classic professor type from King's novels, expunging philosophy and making deductions about the nature of the phoners and whether the normal humans have a right to survive anymore.  The student is Jordan, a classic King kid who faces one tragedy after another and somehow comes out of it okay.

The story is downright short by King standards and moves pretty quickly, but never feels overly rushed.  The idea of humans developing telepathy because their brains are rebooted is an interesting one, though I'm not as crazy about the insistence King suggests that it was done by accident - apparently the never explained terrorists that set up the attack only wanted to make people crazy and kill each other, but I say they could have planned to make them drones as well, perhaps planning to use them for an army or other such purpose.  Ultimately I don't think King wants you to spend too much time thinking about the whys, as much as he's just trying to find a way to make it so that humanity won't remain this way forever.  And while our heroes destroy the main colony gathering in the northeast of the US by the end of the book, you do have to wonder what's going on in the rest of the country if not also the world.

Development for Cell as a film began not long after it was published in 2006, with the original plan being for Eli Roth to direct.  Roth couldn't reach an agreement with the studios however, and eventually left  the project.  King wrote a screenplay for it, but it mostly sat on the shelf until 2014 when the movie was finally filmed with director Tod Williams instead.  After being filmed it sat on the shelf again - never a good sign when it comes to movies.  I was starting to think it would never be released at all, or perhaps given a straight to video release like Mercy, when it was finally announced this year that it would have a limited theatrical release as well as video on demand.  So slightly better handling than Mercy but not much.

Quite frankly, I understand why.  I'm not familiar with Williams' work before this, so I don't know how he stands as a director in general.  Nor am I familiar with Adam Alleca, the other credited screenwriter beside King.  But I can tell you specifically that some poor choices were made for this specific film.  It's been a while since I watched 28 Days Later, but I feel like the success of that film proves there's a good way to film crazed maniacs attacking other people and not have it feel incredibly goofy.  Unfortunately that's exactly what it feels like here.  The one thing I can say is that you can tell the various extras were having a ton of fun on set - but the problem is that results in you being able to see them resisting cracking a smile beneath a lot of their rampage.  The lack of frenetic camera angles and movements just really highlights how silly it can all be.

And while the book's phoners evolve and change over time, the movie's never really do.  They develop the ability to create the fax machine like screech that came originally from the phones and therefore infect others when close to them, but they never stop rampaging.  This added trait basically makes them exactly like zombies, just toning down the gore factor since they don't want to eat you.  Their hive mind manifests in that once one phoner sees you, they all then know where you are to come after you.  I imagine this choice to keep them mostly feral was done to try to keep up the tension and the action, but frankly it just doesn't work for me.

Add to that the fact that none of the characters feel particularly fleshed out or real, and you've got disaster.  Gone is Tom's compassion for his cat (in fact the cat now belongs to Clay, and zero mention is made of abandoning it when they leave) or any real heartfelt moments where he and Clay bond.  Samuel L. Jackson and John Cusack are doing the best they can with the material, there's just not a lot there beyond moving them from point A to B.  Tom now mentions he's divorced, and his ex is a man, but it seems like a half ditched attempt to provide personality rather than a real one.  Isabelle Fuhrman is also fine as Alice, but she really gets no personality at all beyond "teenage girl."

The phones are updated to reflect current times, and while in the book Clay was hoping his son was bored with his phone and therefore not using it, he now says he only uses it for texts and games, not calls.  Tom even keeps his cell phone (which I frankly think is a stupid thing to do given what's going on) and texting does seem to not be an issue with the pulse, though Clay's son only responds in garbled text and they never try to talk to him again.

There's a really great scene in the book when the day after the heroes decide to blow up a large number of phoners who are sleeping in a field, an army of phoners show up, stare menacingly at them, slaughter other humans they found to make a point, and even place Alice's baby shoe on the doorstep in front of them (she lost it in the blast) to prove a point.  In this movie, it's widdled down to just a mound of burned cellphones waiting for them.

The main protagonist in the book is called the Raggedy Man by some and The President of Harvard by others, because he wear a red hoodie with Harvard on the front.  He's chosen as a recognizable figurehead and appears to them all in dreams, informing them that they have been marked as insane outsiders for their crime.  It's acknowledged that as a hive mind he's not really a leader and has no real powers, he's just the chosen one at the time and if he was killed someone else would just take his place.  In the movie it's radically different.  The Harvard part is dropped for I think obvious reasons, but while Alice does mention him labeling her insane, everyone else seems to just have dreams where he torments them.  He also just happens to be the main enemy of the graphic novel Clay was writing before all this happened, as if he had a vision of him.  Another character calls him The President of the Internet for no logical reason I can find, and suggests that killing him will stop it all.  When Clay eventually hits him with a truck and shoots him multiple times with a shotgun, he then looks to be immortal.

In the book, the dreams they are having turn out to be had by all humans, and other people they meet while travelling refuse to associate with them because of their being marked.  In the movie they stop in a tavern for the day, and the people are more than happy to accept them and it turns into a very strange party scene.  Everyone drinks and Tom dances with an older lady, while Clay draws Alice's picture while speaking a non sequitur about angels and humans and calls her an angel.  This is totally not foreshadowing that she's going to die soon.  No, wait, of course it is.  In the book it's a shocking moment, where a human decides to ignore the phoners' orders of leaving them alone and hurls a concrete brick out of a window, striking Alice in the head.  In the film the older lady is drawn to the front door of the bar when she hears a yelping dog, but is instead changed by the phoners when she leans in to listen.  She lets them in and chaos ensues, until she ends up hitting Alice hard in the back of the head with a baseball bat.  Isabelle Fuhrman does a good job with the death scene, but there's just not enough between these characters at this point to really feel it.

As I said earlier, the ending of the book is a bit frustrating.  Young Jordan deduces that there's a worm virus in the programming that turns everyone into phoners that is causing them to start to act differently.  The heroes blow up the gathering of phoners who were holding them for some kind of trial and escape, but Clay stays behind because he knows his son was around somewhere and he's hoping he walked off before the blast.  He finds him, and he's basically acting like an animal, unable to speak or take care of himself.  Jordan suggests this half baked theory that if you exposed a phoner to another phone signal, it might reboot them and make them better, but he doesn't really know.  The book ends with Clay holding the phone to his son's ear.  It's not entirely unlike The Mist, but whereas that ending felt hopeful, this one just clearly wants you to decide for yourself one way or the other what happened.  It feels like a bit of a cheat, or like King couldn't decide himself.

I bring up The Mist because it's worth noting that King said he preferred Darabont's super dark ending to the movie.  People complained to King about the ending of Cell, and he reported in 2009 that he had changed it for the screenplay.  Given the long development time, it's hard to say if the ending we get here is King's doing, Adam Alleca's, Tod Williams', the studios'... who knows.  But it's such a mess that I almost feel like they were intending to pull something like Clue, where different theaters would have gotten one of three different endings, but someone messed up and put all three of them on the video on demand release.  This is what happens:

1. As I mentioned earlier, Clay hits the leader of  the phoners with a truck and shoots him up.  He searches the crowd of phoners surrounding them and a cell tower  for his son, and his son eventually emerges from them.  He and the others start emitting the pulse sound, and we see the leader is still alive.  Clay pulls a very old cell out of his pocket and dials a number that is attached to another cell phone inside the truck that acts as a trigger to a lot of C4.  Huge explosion, fade to black.  That explosive device does come from the book, which is how the heroes escape there.

2. Despite standing in the middle of all the phoners when the explosion happened, we see Clay and his son, who is 100% cured, walking in the woods on the way to catch up with the rest of the heroes.

3. We then cut back to the cell tower and the phoners circling it, with Clay now among them.  His son is nowhere to be found.

I think the idea here is that the explosion never happens, that in fact Clay has simply joined them and he's getting a vision of a happy ending in his mind.  Like maybe every single phoner is now living out some happy little wonderland in their heads, while something else takes over their bodies and has them do whatever.  But we certainly never saw any hint of that before this point, and the cuts between the three scenes are so tonally off that it's not handled well at all.

As a stand alone film, this is an uninspired, not very scary zombie knock off with a poorly executed twist ending.  As an adaptation, it strips the characters of their personality and the plot of its intricacies and leaves only a by the numbers adaptation behind.  I can't recommend it on any level.

Thoughts on removing clutter and the Popeye movie

Some time last year I had the realization that I had two options:  start paying for a storage unit or start getting rid of things.  I've had the collector's mindset for quite a long time, but my house is only so big and I can only hold on to so much.  So I've been going through purges on and off, donating some things, putting others on eBay, or even just flat out throwing things away when necessary.

The process has not been as difficult as I originally thought it might be.  I've found that I've lost that "gotta have it all" collector's mindset, and it's really helped.  My biggest hurdle is that there are things, especially media, that I would like to review before just flat out getting rid of.  The main project of the last few months are the DVDs, Blu rays, and video games that take up an entire wall in my living room.  I'm skipping television series for the moment and focusing solely on movies.  There are some I know sight unseen that I've either outgrown (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) or were an impulse purchase I really shouldn't have made (I went through a period of thinking I needed every Disney animated film, and I don't), but I'm also forcing myself to review old favorites to see if it's really a movie I need to have on hand to watch whenever I might want to.

Some movies are good, but just not something I'm going to return to.  The first Pirates of the Caribbean film, for instance, is a really fun romp, and there's good parts in the sequels as well.  But it just doesn't hold a lot of emotional importance for me, and the CGI effects are no longer as exciting to me as they were when new, and holy crap why did we think all movies had to be two and a half hours around the turn of the century.  So since I had a hard time sitting through film one, I made the executive decision to get rid of all four.  Similar decisions have been made down the line, as well as ones I kept without reviewing, because no way am I getting rid of the Indiana Jones trilogy.

Last night I watched Popeye, a film I had purchased on DVD because we had it on VHS when I was young and I remember us watching it repeatedly.  Watching it again as an adult, I'm amazed I sat through it as a kid.  The film just sort of meanders from scene to scene.  I think they were trying to go for something that would recreate a bunch of Popeye shorts, perhaps, but he only eats spinach once at the very end of the film, so it doesn't exactly work.  I think as a kid I must have mostly sat around waiting for the songs, which while not exactly the best musical score ever recorded, are quite cute and clever in places.  Ray Walston and Robin Williams playing off each other toward the end when they finally meet again is also quite funny.

One of the pieces of advice I've seen in articles encouraging you to reduce your clutter is that the memories are far more important than the objects associated with them, and you don't need the object to keep the memory.  That's certainly very true, but in the case of film, you have to admit that without viewing it, you're not always going to think of those things.  So here's some recollections of what I remember about the Popeye movie:

1. I remember thinking it was so odd that the film version of Popeye didn't like spinach when he always loved it in the cartoons.  Even as a child, I was judging adaptations against their source material.
2. This was, as far as I know, the first time I saw a proper reproduction of an octopus.  I was so used to the cutesy simplified version you always see in cartoons, and I didn't understand why the one they used here looked so strange.  His eye looks so very mean too, that even though it looks super fake to me now, I remember being scared of it then.
3. Even though it's explained by the characters in the film, I remember asking my parents about Bluto's clothes turning yellow as he swims away in the final scene.  "Why would it make his clothes turn yellow?"  My extremely logical child brain wanted to know.  Funny enough, the way Bluto sees Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Sweetpea all in red when he's angry didn't seem to bother me as much.
4. There's a background cast member (I don't think he's ever named so I can't identify him via imdb) who Bluto smooshes down when he's angry.  The scene was striking enough that he looks odd standing up straight to me.  I also have really clear memories of the way the guy Popeye uses like a punching bag shaking.  The attempts at making cartoon violence real in this movie are actually pretty freaky.

That's not a very long list, I know, and that's probably why I won't be keeping this one.  By comparison, I decided to hold on to Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella, because that one is a lot more fun through out and has much better songs.  It's another one I visited repeatedly on VHS as a child, but I think holds up a lot more to viewing as an adult.  Short Circuit is another that will be coming up soon enough, and that one is going to be tough to decide on for very different reasons (hello, uncomfortable Indian stereotypes being portrayed by a white man, why did you still exist in the 80s?).

Castle Rock Companion - Big Driver

With Noel visiting, we decided to do something a little different.  I apologize for the length, being unscripted we go on a little long.

Castle Rock Companion - A Good Marriage

A Good Marriage is a fairly short story in the middle of King's book Full Dark, No Stars, but it doesn't take long to stay with you.  It tells the story of Darcy Anderson, who thinks she has a happy home life and, while not perfect, certainly doting husband, until one day she finds something hidden in the garage that makes her realize he is actually the serial killer Beadie, a vicious murderer who rapes and tortures his victims before killing them.  King took inspiration from the real life story of Dennis Rader, a serial killer whose family had no idea who he was as well.  While Rader was caught by the police, in this story Darcy finds out first and decides to take action on her own rather than allow her family's lives to be ruined by being associated with the killer.

While Darcy's choice may not be the most realistic, I think King does a great job of making her logic sound.  You follow her through her pain and confusion and you really sympathize with her.  I really loved the way her husband comes home in the middle of the night and tells her he knows she's figured it out, and the two of them have a calm though also absurd conversation about it all.  King really does a great job of portraying a serial killer properly.  They're not madmen like Jack Torrence running through the Overlook Hotel, these are cold, calculated people who know exactly what they're doing.  The quiet moments the two of them spend together before Darcy finally goes about getting rid of him are chilling in their own way, and the moment when she finally pushes him down the stairs is appropriately tense and gruesome.  I also liked the appearance of retired detective Holt Ramsey at the end, a man that Beadie was so sure just thought of him as an "innocent witness" but in fact was really close to bringing him down.  His conversation with Darcy is both amusing and tense, and it's nice that he allows her to get away with her crime and have her peace.

I'm naming all these specifics in the story and talking about how they work because the film adaptation, with a screenplay written by King,  is incredibly close to the story and contains all of these elements.  The changes are small, like Darcy being addicted to eating Tootsie Rolls rather than Baby Ruth bars.  Ramsey shows up almost from the beginning of the story, watching over them, I suppose to create some form of tension that Beadie may be caught soon.  A new character is added, their neighbor Betty, who stands in as a model example of the type of women Beadie usually goes after and works to help remind Darcy that Bob will never truly stop this obsession with "snooty" women.  Bob also has a habit of leaving her notes around the house in the film, which I think is a nice clue to show the kind of controlling personality that psychopath's can have.  The film largely plays out exactly as the story does, with only an extra bit of evidence for Darcy thrown in as Bob gifts her the earrings of one his victims.

Unfortunately, despite these similarities, the movie has none of the tension of the story.  Things go by in a super quiet manner.  Joan Allen does a good job portraying Darcy's inner turmoil, but there's nothing about Anthony LaPaglia's performance that feels particularly threatening or dangerous.  We see him stalk women, but I just don't see enough of a detached, chilling manner from him to really show us he's Beadie.  There are a few scenes of Darcy imagining things or dreaming where they portray him as menacing, but they feel so unconnected from the rest of what we see in the film.  The film just sort of progresses along until it reaches the end.  They change around the ending slightly, having Darcy go see Ramsey in the hospital where you think for a moment she might suffocate him in his sleep so that he doesn't tell anyone what he knows, but that tension passes so quickly that you barely get to feel it.  I feel like a lot could have been done with the score, the editing, and the direction to try to make this film far more dynamic and tense.  I couldn't help but think of What Lies Beneath, another film where a woman suspects her husband is a murderer that manages to keep the tension strong throughout.

While I strongly recommend the short story (along with the rest of Full Dark, No Stars) I'm afraid the movie is simply a bland, lifeless adaptation not worth the watch.

Castle Rock Companion - Mercy

This is technically the second post covering the short story "Gramma," which was previously adapted into a new Twilight Zone episode.  If you missed that post, read it here.

As I mentioned there, Mercy had been filmed but shelved by the studio for a while, and was finally quietly released via On Demand and DVD earlier this month.  Given the nature of the release I was not expecting too much, but as a fan of The Walking Dead I was also hopeful that Chandler Riggs might also make this a film worth watching.

Straight off the bat, the movie both shows us that it's making some changes to the original short story and gives us an idea of the type of horror we're in for.  While in the story it is said that young George's grandfather lived to a decent age and kept working up until a heart attack killed him, here we see Mercy (the given name for the grandma) cradling a baby and speaking softly to it while her husband walks up behind her with an axe in hand.  While you initially think he's going after them, he in fact turns the axe around and plants it straight into his own forehead.  If you somehow weren't paying attention, don't worry, there will be flashbacks to it multiple times for the rest of the film.

So while the grandma of the story had nine children before stopping, here she only gives birth once to triplets, and gets her reputation of doing dealings with demons pretty much right away.The other major change is that George has pleasant memories of his grandmother, calling her his best friend growing up.  She eventually becomes sick, has to live in a home for a year (the R. L. Flag home for the elderly in fact) and only returns home because she is dying and the home will no longer care for her.  It is established pretty early on that the demon is overtaking her body and this is the cause for all the odd things going on.

While this introduces some changes, it doesn't really hurt the story.  What we see in the original is really only enough to fill up approximately half an hour's worth of screen time, so making George's older brother Buddy a foodie who loves to cook is a strange but okay addition.  Dylan McDermott's role as a childhood friend of their mother who clearly cares for her tries to make the plot more in depth, but in reality largely just fizzles out toward the climax.  This movie is really all about Mercy and George, which is really as it should be.

The story of the movie in and of itself isn't really the problem as much as the execution of it all is.  I lost count of the jump scares contained within the film, as they are practically constant, and become basically telegraphed after a while.  If you see a character standing somewhere quietly for a moment, you can expect either a jarring jump cut to something else or a person grabbing them from off screen, or in the absolute worst of them, a car barreling down the road at full speed to kill them.  One character in the film is a painter, and her designs are truly creepy, but sadly that's the only form of horror that is effective in the film.  The design of the demon that overtakes Mercy is not remotely Lovecraftian, and is clearly just lazy design, being mostly a cross between a living shadow and Swamp Thing.  I'm usually one to get freaked out at overly elongated people twitching unnaturally, but when Mercy's body starts doing it during the climax it did nothing for me.  And when George talks to the shadow creature standing behind her, asking it a question, and it literally takes her head and nods it, I laughed.

Near the beginning of the film, we see George talking to a young girl, and then find out that no one else can see her.  It doesn't take long to figure out that this is Mercy's spirit, trying to save him from the demon that wants to eat his heart so it can continue to live.  This is a pretty dramatic change from the story, where either Gramma or perhaps Hastur simply want George as a vessel to keep on living.  But this movie did want to attempt a happy ending, so instead George defeats the creature - just don't ask me how.  The story makes mention of Gramma's books, and they tried to incorporate that here with a book that will show you how to achieve what you want if you cry over it.  They even seem to take a page from the Twilight Zone adaptation by the fact that George finds the book under the floorboards.  However the story contradicts itself quite a bit because instead of George seeing how to save Mercy as he cries over the book, he just keeps seeing himself killed.  Yet somehow, while the demon is holding Mercy like a puppetmaster and has George backed up against the wall, his tears on the book kill the demon or at least make him go away.  It seems more like they wrote themselves into a literal corner and didn't know how to get out of it.

So sadly, I can see why the studio wasn't too pleased with this film and didn't think it was suitable for mass audiences.  While the cast is decent, there's just too much nonsense and poor direction here to make this film enjoyable in any way.

Castle Rock Companion - Sleepwalkers

Noel:

Sleepwalkers are an ancient race that's lived alongside humanity, a reptile/feline hybrid ancestor with an ability to cloak themselves and other objects into other forms or invisibility, and feed on the life forces of the virtuous while running from cats, their only natural predator whose scratches are poisonous to them. We learn all of this in the first 5 minutes, thanks to a text screen and opening credits over sketches from ancient texts going back to Egyptian times, because somebody doesn't have a clue how mysteries are meant to be built. This is one of three major flaws I have with the film, as the first half is full of interesting bits of suggestion and slow reveal, but someone said "fuck it", tied that to a brick, and tossed it out the window as they decided to put bright, blinking lights over everything before it even gets to happen.

Our main characters are Mary and Charles Brady (Alice Krige and Brian Krause), a mother-son team of Sleepwalkers who just abandoned the latest of a string of small town homes as they settle in Indiana (despite a reference to Castle Rock being a neighbor). Mary and Charles are striking, attractive, enticing individuals. They also have sex. With each other. Both in human form and in very poorly done full body lizard/cat suits. I'm not sure why. I get them making out, as Charles seems to be the only one who can drink the life force of people, so he has to feed part of what he drinks to his mother, but the sex seems to be there just because it's ooky and King wants to push some buttons.

My jokey attitude and the inserts of the text and opening title sequence aside, I actually really like the first half of the film. If you ignore what they shouldn't have given you, there is a nice, twisted playfulness to the way they gradually reveal what's going on with Mary and Charles, as we see him as a wholesome teen listening to an old record player and reading the yearbook... then carving the first letter of a girl's name into his arm. Then he and his mother dance and glare out the window at cats before revealing they're far closer than they ought to be as he sweeps her up to the bedroom. I have my issues with Mick Garris, but he can be very nice at directing character moments, especially when he clicks with certain actors. He clicks with most of the cast here, and his specific angles and flowing tracking shots bring a nice air of casual unease to the skewed mundanity, which, along with the lazy 50s guitar record Charles always plays, does a much better job of capturing the spirit of Twin Peaks than King managed with Golden Years. Almost makes me wonder how Golden would have turned out had Mick been involved, as I think that story could have mixed well with his style.

Though it also helps that King is far tighter in the writing this time around than he usually is. I read a draft of his screenplay in prep, and it's also much leaner and focused than what I'm used to from his scripts. There's nothing elaborate in the descriptions, no long-winded backstories or extended characterizations that ultimately serve no purpose other than adding color. It's especially noticeable after the bloated drag that was Golden Years, and feels like a breath of fresh air in its wake. Who knows, maybe it was a breath of fresh air for King, too, as he did this right after coming off of that project and probably wanted something to shake that experience out of his system.

That's not to say it's a great screenplay, as there really isn't much story here. Within a week or two of settling in (set decoration could have had some boxes around the house to make it look a little less unpacked), Charles is already locked on a beautiful and "pure" girl, Tanya (Madchen Amick, which also rings some Twin Peaks bells), and starts seducing her into a date in a secluded location. He's also had a run-in with a sheriff's deputy (a fun but not overly hilarious Dan Martin) and the officer's pet cat/office mascot Clovis, who run into him again at the secluded date spot, and from then on, it's pretty much hell breaking loose for the entire second half of the movie as Charles is beaten nearly to death by Tanya and Clovis, and it's up to Mary to hunt her down so the girl's lifeforce can heal her son. Which involves no cat-and-mouse tactics, just Mary showing up at the girl's home, smashing through cops and her parents, and dragging her off by her hair in a stolen police cruiser. There really isn't much to the story, just half introduction and half everything paying off, with no real developments or arcs to any threads, or anything complex going on structure-wise.

And yet, that doesn't bother me all that much, as it's a simple story that, once it tips the hand of what's really going on, doesn't dance around issues any more and just runs with them, going from a son trying to feed his mom to a mom trying to keep her son alive, while everyone else lives long enough to wonder just what in the fuck it is that's suddenly exploded on their lives. Moments are drawn out, but don't feel padded. Characters have distinction, but don't have it spelled out in detail. It all comes in at a lean 91 minutes, and while there isn't a huge amount of depth to the writing, I'll gladly take this over what I usually get from King. Actually, the story reminds me a lot of "Sometimes They Come Back," in that it feels like you could turn it into prose and publish it without going beyond that 30-40 page count, as they just let moments hang instead of trying to staple extra meat to the bones, like that story's adaptation did. And this isn't all Mick, as aside from a page-and-a-half scene of dialogue, there's nothing that was cut from that draft I read. They filmed it as is. Then fucked it up by adding the text and credits sequence, but still, this is King being lean in a way I'm not used to outside his early stories and Bachman books.

However, we do still have two major flaws to discuss. I've praised Garris' direction quite a bit here, but he's also a part of the problem as he's still unable to pull off scares or moments of horror. In scenes like the teacher (Glenn Shaddix!) having his bloody encounter with Charles, or when Charles assaults Tanya in the graveyard, or when Mary is smashing through parents and cops, Mick gets so giddy for each scare that he ends up playing it for camp, complete with monsters going "Boo!", spring-loaded cats, and withered corpses that scream for no reason as they drop into frame. He handles most of the story well because it's not supposed to be weird, it's supposed to be a mixture of mundane and odd, normalcy that's become off-putting. He handles that well, but any time we get to a scare, it's eye-roll time and the shocks fail to deliver. The third act is still impressive just because of the scale of Mary's slaughter, a large portion of which is due to the chilling way Krige saunters through it all, but it's also very clumsy and doesn't work half the time.

And the third flaw is the Sleepwalker makeup. I find it hilarious that Ron Perlman suddenly shows up in the second half, because the cat faces Charles and Mary don when partially transformed are totally swiped from his Beauty and the Beast days. The script describes them as being more reptilian, with translucent skin and soft, white fur, and their transformations have a rippling static effect as, instead of morphing, they're literally shifting perceptive fields of reality around themselves. You see those photos Tanya took of Charles? That's somewhat closer to the effect. Here, we just get some prosthetics we've seen better done elsewhere, and basic, early CGI morphs. The bit where Charles first sees Clovis and goes through a number of transformation is laughable, especially the giant infant head he has for no reason. And those full-body suits of their true form. Oh good lord, no. I'd rather they just stick with the Vincent vamp-face.

It's an uneven film. Ultimately, I might recommend it, which I didn't to expect going in, as my memories from a decade or so back were very vague and not so positive. It has its issues, and the story is not only a bizarrely unexpected reworking of the "General" tale from Cat's Eye, but runs through what it has so briskly that it doesn't leave much impact or impression beyond what's on the surface (probably why the memories were vague), yet I enjoyed watching it. The cast is good (love Amick being introduced through her dance number), what it lacks in depth it makes up for by just running full tilt wherever it's going, and for all the deserved crap I give Mick, his direction actually tips more into the realm of really clicking with the material here than I'm used to. It's not a strong recommend, but enough that I look forward to forgetting most of it again over the next ten years before sitting down for yet another fresh watch. That said, you kind of have to let yourself ignore the info dump up front for it to be effective, which isn't a fair expectation to hold audiences to, and a definite strike against whoever put that on the film.

As a final note, Mick is having a blast playing the cameo game here. Love the completely superfluous moment of Stephen King acting the hell out of that toothpick as the graveyard owner huffing between forensics men played by director Tobe Hooper and author/director Clive Barker. And when those photos are developed, those are directors John Landis and Joe Dante as the technicians. And need I point out an uncredited Mark Hamill rocking that police 'stache as the sheriff in the opening?

Angie:

Things I liked about this movie:

• Cats are the heroes!
• Andy and Clovis, buddy cops!
• Stephen King's cameo (sadly, I did not recognize most of the others Noel mentions, beyond the obvious one)
• Ron Perlman showing up in the final act and basically stealing every scene he's in.
• This is the last King/Garris co-production I'll ever have to watch.  Woohoo!

I tried so hard to defend Garris once, I really did.  Not everything's he's done is awful, and if it wasn't for his version of The Stand I wouldn't be doing this project right now because I wouldn't care about King at all.  But now I simply groan and wince along with everyone else at his poor excuse for scares.  Enough with the jump scares.  Enough with the poorly executed way too brightly lit to be realistic gross out sequences.  Enough with the hammy acting performances.

Of course, not all of that is Garris's fault.  It's also King's fault.  I'm not going to say that incest can never be handled appropriately in fiction, as I've seen some instances where you can at least understand the characters even if it repulses you.  And on the surface, a long lived race on the border of extinction could end up that way.  But the constant love scenes between them are so awkwardly done that while they may start off off-putting they quickly devolve into annoyance with overuse.

I have to disagree with Noel on the pacing, as the film is only 90 minutes long and happens over the course of a few days, yet still manages to feel painfully slow at points for me.  I see King making some of the same mistakes here he made with Golden Years, just in a more condensed form.  Repeated scenes of the cats in the yard, repeated scenes of their flirtations, repeated scenes of Mary stressing to Charles how important it is that they feed soon.  Perhaps if we had spent a little more time on Charles and Tanya getting to know each other, create an actual feeling like maybe he might want to leave his mother behind rather than just her imagined jealousy, this could have worked as something dynamic and interesting.  But as it stands it's two miserable people who make a string of bad decisions and then die for it.

The creature design is also absolutely horrible. The mid-transformation of the cat-human hybrid is okay, but the full fledged Sleepwalker form looks ridiculous.  And why are they so shiny?  If you wanted to go for something close to an anthropomorphic hairless cat, this was not the way to do it at all.  The effects are mostly decently executed, I'm just confused by the design choices they made.

A couple other thoughts:

• While I recognized Lyman Ward as Ferris Bueler's dad immediately, Cindy Pickett looks so different I didn't realize she was Ferris' mom.  It's an interesting nod to that film, anyway.
• What the hell is up with that one awkward moment where the cop asks the sheriff if the parents have been informed that their daughter avoided being raped?
• I have some kind of strange blinders for Alice Krige, where every time I see her in a movie I have to go look her up because I know her voice but I can't remember where else I've seen her before.
• Death by corn on the cob?  No.  Just no.
• While this isn't a particularly notable appearance of Glenn Shadix, it's always fun to see him show up regardless.
• Seeing Mark Hamill play a cop in the opening scene gave me The Guyver flashbacks, and that's not a good thing.

So unlike Noel, I feel pretty confident in not recommending this film.  I last saw it about 20 years ago, and managed to forget everything but the incest.  I don't think I'll need that refresher in another couple decades to confirm I don't like this one.

The Angry Video Game Nerd movie

We all know that when we make donations to a project via something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we don't know what we're going to get.  There's a chance that those asking for donations may never even produce a final product at all, and even if they do, there's no guarantee that it will be any good.  So I want to say right off the bat that this isn't me complaining that I was ripped off.  But still, I can't help but put this in perspective - I paid $100 toward the Indiegogo campaign for the Angry Video Game Nerd movie, and I paid an additional $10 to purchase the film, as a copy was not included in the rewards for the campaign.  I gave the original amount because I wanted to help James Rolfe achieve his dream of making a full length feature film.  I don't regret that.  But it's also hard to not be disappointed when the film itself was downright painful at points to get through.

The last time I wrote about James Rolfe, I was ridiculously giddy and full of happiness.  My thoughts on him as a person haven't changed.  Shortly after that trip, I sent him an email, wanting to say thank you to him for being an inspiration to me, because at the time I didn't get to say any of that.  Despite the fact that he gets so many emails he has to have other people filter through them, he took the time to reply to me, thank me again for the doll, and wish me luck in fulfilling my own dreams.  He was a couple days away from heading out the door in Philadelphia to make a trek across country to L.A. to film this movie, and yet he still did that.  That and other things I've seen with him leave me with the impression that this is a guy who has not let his success go to his head and who definitely appreciates the people who got him where he is now.

Between that time and now, I have to admit that my enthusiasm for his work has dwindled.  Because the majority of his time since then has been spent on the film, a lot of his free content has been much lower effort.  There's a strong emphasis on unscripted videos and he clearly no longer takes the time to research things like he would often do for older reviews.  I would also make the guess that while videos may have originally gotten multiple passes through editing, the number of passes were now greatly reduced.  So you would end up with episodes where he had clearly just let the guest star improvise and go wild for most of it, and he himself didn't take his usual well tuned eye for proper pacing to them and they would just drag.  Or ridiculous glaring mistakes, like a video on TMNT games where he says he can't get the Commodore 64 version to work - when all he needed to do was google the proper command string to type into the computer.  He also let his friend Mike take over producing a lot of content, and Mike is the kind of guy who jumps on every chance to say the word "tits" among other such poor taste jokes.

There's also the simple fact that I'm getting older.  Cursing, no matter how inventively worded, doesn't strike me as automatic funny or cool anymore.  At times, depending on how it's done, it's more like the opposite.  James is a little less than a year older than me, but it's become clear that the fan base he is so appreciative of is always affecting his ability to make a product that's true to himself.  So while the poop jokes are gone, I've noticed that in a lot of the recent AVGN videos, he's trying to recreate the curse filled rants that were present in his early videos and then went away for a while.  Because he would go to cons and everyone would ask him to do those, would badger him again and again asking why he wasn't so angry anymore and he felt like he had to keep them happy.  This happens a lot with people who produce for the internet, where you see them repeating themselves rather than trying something new, no doubt because they are afraid of losing that ad revenue on which they primarily make their living.

Another thing possibly worth considering is that James has been sitting on this script for a long time.  The original draft of it was done in 2007.  Of course, that's both an excuse and it isn't.  Because if you've got something for that long, you've also got a lot of time to do re-writes and revisions, more time to notice things that are clunky, illogical, or just too childish.  You could polish it and make it the best it can be, or you can pull a Southland Tales and make it even more of a mess than it was before.

I'm afraid this is a Southland Tales.*

The movie revolves around the idea that the E.T. Atari game is the Angry Video Game Nerd's most requested review of all time, because it has the reputation of being the worst video game of all time.  A game studio called (sigh) Cockburn Industries is coming out with a sequel to the game that promises to be even worse, because bad is the new good and if the Nerd reviews a game, his fans will go out and buy it.  The Nerd only agrees to review the game if they will go to Alamagordo, New Mexico and dig up the landfill where Atari supposedly buried hundreds of copies of the original game after the video game crash of 1983.  Along the way they also reveal the secret of Area 51 and why that alien crashed at Roswell all those years ago.

So far, not too bad, right?  You've got two urban legends that center in New Mexico that are both at least tangentially related to aliens.  Linking the two is a fairly logical move, and  the way he does so is clever.  The problem is that it seems like he and co-writer/director and friend Kevin Finn also seemed to decide to throw in as many other things that they love as possible.  I love horror movies, let's throw in a scene where the Nerd is chased by zombies!  Aren't dai kaiju movies great?  Let's throw a giant metal monster into the mix!  And then of course there are fans all asking if Mike, the Guitar Guy, the Nostalgia Critic, Pat the NES Punk or other popular internet reviewers will have a cameo, so we better find a way to put them in here too!

Some of these elements work well, and others don't.  The zombies, for instance, come in a very clever dream sequence that serves the plot pretty well.  Most of the cameos aren't too bad, but a lot of them end up padding out moments that otherwise could have been quicker and cleaner if the film had only contained a couple examples rather than trying to shove in as many of people's favorites as possible.  The kaiju is by far the worst of it though.  It is introduced in a scene that completely interrupts the narrative flow and leaves you shaking your head and wondering what that was all about; and then suddenly pops up again for the climax and is eliminated by literal hand waving.

Unfortunately, the convoluted plot isn't the only problem.  There's also the fact that most of the characters are primarily one dimensional and uninspired.  The bad guys are angry and curse a lot.  The good guys are cookie cutter characters at best, and flat and uninteresting at their worst.  Jeremy Suarez, originally a child actor with a decent amount of experience in acting, gives a good performance as the Nerd's sidekick but the problem is that he has so little to do.  I suppose the idea is that they felt like the Nerd should have someone to bounce off of at all times, but by the time the other characters start interacting with the Nerd, he largely becomes irrelevant.

Sarah Glendening is the female "love interest" and co-lead, and her role is far more unfortunate.  She starts off as literally a fake gamer girl - she works for Cockburn and dons fake glasses and pretends to love video games for the sake of getting on the Nerd's good side.  Now I don't think James meant any real harm with this.  One of the things about him that is also obvious if you see any Q&As is that he lives very much outside of internet culture.  It seems hard to believe for someone who makes their living through it, but it's true.  I once saw someone ask him "What do you think of the slash art people have done of you and the Nostalgia Critic?" and he had no idea what slash was.  He admits his confusion and then asks "Do you mean the fan art people did of us after we made the video together?  That was really cool."  So I don't think this decision was more along the lines of a statement of "fake geek girls are real!" as it was coming from his own limited experiences and not knowing many girls personally who are into video games.  Now you would think that doing what he does now, meeting girls like me (and many others who were in that line with me to meet him) that he would know we do.  But I suppose it's possible he's under the impression that we just think the videos are entertaining regardless of whether we play the games?  Ultimately, this character in the film is taking on the classic role of the one who works for the bad guys but hangs out with the good guys long enough that she sides with them and joins them.  She plays a lot of games and seems to enjoy them, and ultimately tells the Nerd that he doesn't have to review the game if he doesn't want to.  But even if James was ignorant of the fake geek girl controversy, it's a little hard to believe that no one involved with this production tapped him on the shoulder and let him know that this might look super bad to a part of his target audience.

Of course, once you factor in that there's a female bad guy ultimately for the sole excuse to see the two women fight each other at the end (seriously, they break the fourth wall to tell you that the fight is just fan service), maybe I'm just making too many allowances here. As he's now a man with a newborn daughter, I would hope that any future films of his don't come out with such childish, narrow views about women.

One thing that's really more of just a minor annoyance, is that the film makes a lot of changes for the sake of avoiding lawsuits or having to pay licensing fees.  So he's not reviewing E.T., it's Eee Tee and Eee Tee 2, and the alien featured on the cover is not the brown big eyed creature we all recognize but a more generalized green alien.  Footage of the original game plays the same, but the graphics were changed/recreated so that there's technically nothing there under someone else's copyright.  It's understandable, but I can't help but feel it takes away from the film to have such inaccurate representations of Atari and NES games shown.  The graphics and sprite movement are a little too smooth for that era of games.

Ultimately, as sloppy as the film is, it's pretty clear that it's meant to be a tribute to the fans of the series and a thank you to everyone who has made the character popular.  He also seems to be trying to have it both ways, and spends a good ten minutes at the beginning of the film both explaining what kind of character the Nerd is and using many, many clips from fans saying how much they love the show and how much he means to them.  On one hand, it's very touching, and on the other it goes on so long that if I hadn't once met that extremely humble guy, I'd think this was someone repeatedly patting themselves on the back for being so awesome.  It happens again later in the film, when you see fans flocking to Alamagordo just to see him and hear what he thinks about the game.   While he has the bad guy say "it's not your hatred for these games but your love for your fans that drives you" to help drive the point home that the feeling is mutual and he appreciates these people, I can't help but wonder if this angle was truly necessary.  The Nerd character is the most entertaining living in his own little world and getting ridiculously upset about video games.  Adding in a kind of meta level that blurs the lines between fiction and reality just doesn't really work.  Do another video and thank your fans personally, don't incorporate it into your movie.

There are various short form videos Rolfe has created, for AVGN and other series, that show he's a competent director.  Technically speaking, there's certainly nothing wrong with the film.  I didn't expect much from this film in terms of quality, but I had hoped there would be enough there to help him properly launch his film career.  He's already talking about making a proper film, he just needs to decide what story to go with.  Unfortunately, I don't think showing anyone in the industry this film is going to do him any favors in terms of financing.  Maybe he'll turn to his fans again for donations, and I have no doubt that many will support him once again.  Unfortunately  I don't think I have enough faith anymore to give much myself.

* It figures that, the evening after I post this review,  I get my copy of the script I was due thanks to the Indiegogo campaign, along with a 22 minute video of James Rolfe and Kevin Finn talking about it and some of the changes they made.  So here are some details and my thoughts based on what they said.

• Finn said that the script went through a total of 85 drafts, according to Final Draft software. In earlier versions, they went more for a Revenge of the Nerds style plot, with a jock villain.  They didn't really explain why they chose to change it.  When he says 85 drafts he may just mean that they saved changes 85 times, but it does sound like they were tweaking it a lot.  They also mentioned that they would only work on it while together or occasionally through Skype, because they lived across the country from each other.  Working on it only two hours at a time with months in between may also play a part in hurting the quality of the script.  They of course call it a bonus, as it forced them to look at the script again each time.  I disagree.
• Considering that during the script commentary video Kevin Finn made such poor jokes as "I'd like to put Mandi in a bag, if you know what I mean" along with getting all excited about a deleted scene with a female nymphomaniac and the woman who wants her breasts signed, I think we can blame him for the representation of women in the picture. Of course James could have vetoed that stuff so he's not entirely blameless, but it seems for his part he mostly was going for the 80s style nerd who is just doesn't know how to talk to girls. It also basically says to me that Cooper is an insert for Finn himself, who perhaps wasn't comfortable taking on such a major role in the film (he has a cameo as a Roswell scientist instead) or had to be the director behind the camera while James was on screen.
• They say that the character of Zandor was originally supposed to be Howard Scott Warshaw (the guy who designed the game) but Warshaw preferred to have a much smaller role in the film.  I pretty much assumed this without seeing their video, as much of what Zandor does fits better as a guy who was a game designer who also happened to work at Area 51.
• Reading the script made me realize that Cooper claims the giant mech kaiju lives under Mt. Fuji. The Atari logo was designed to look like Mt. Fuji. Later, the crazed military guy decides to destroy Mt. Fuji because it's the symbol of "that company the gamers loves so much" thereby waking up the kaiju. So they were trying to build connective threads there, but I do still think it's handled poorly.  The way they convince the monster to go away still makes no sense in the script.
• There are a handful of mentions in the script where Kyle Justin aka the Guitar Guy, is mentioned shown on the side of the road or otherwise almost off frame playing songs that soundtrack the film.  I imagine this was rejected when Bear McCreary signed on to do the soundtrack.  Considering that Kyle's only appearance in the film is an obvious green screen moment with Mike Matei most likely filmed in Philadelphia, I imagine he also couldn't make it out to the locations required to be shown that often.
• The script makes references to specific real games throughout the narrative, which makes me wonder if they only realized later on they wouldn't be allowed to use the footage, and that's why the fake games look way too modern - they were rushed.  There's also a Wilhelm scream joke that may have been dropped because of rights issues (the joke is about how it's overused, so I don't think that would have been the reason to remove it.)
• There are other minor changes, like avoiding a poor taste joke about Asian tourists, but for the most part the version they are providing is very close to the film.
• At the end of the commentary video, James expresses concern about the humor, saying you never know if anyone else is truly going to think it's funny.  He uses the reactions they've been getting at limited screenings to say he's relieved to find out it was.  But I don't think a bunch of die hard fans all packed together in one room is really a good indication for that.  Laughter is infectious, and people who are devoted to you will often laugh even if something isn't that funny.  But if this movie was truly for the fans, and most of them are happy, I guess that's all that truly matters to him.

Castle Rock Companion - Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher is a Stephen King novel that I feel gets a bad wrap.  There are similarities here to both The Body and It, as a tight knit group of friends have an adventure as children, and once again come together in adulthood to defeat an evil.  But it's not a carbon copy of either of those stories by any means; it just so happens that those kind of strong friendships are one of the things that King does best.  I think the main reason a lot of people balk is because of the enemies he calls "shit weasels" and I suppose if the idea of an alien that gestates inside you before coming out along with some severe stinky farts and a lot of blood is something you can't get past, then it is what it is.  Personally, I enjoy the fear that creates, and I appreciate the comparisons King does to the creatures with cancer.

More than anything though, I really love this group of friends, and I like the way we see just enough of each of their respective personalities and history before diving into the conflict with the aliens.  And on the other side we have the military, represented on opposite sides of the coin with Owen, a man who wants to do the right thing, and Colonel Kurtz, who is just completely mad.  Kurtz is one of King's best psychotic villains and he's wonderfully unsettling to read.

The only place I feel the novel goes off the tracks is toward the end.  The internal struggle for Jonesy's mind between him and Mr. Gray is a great one, and I love all the creative touches King adds to it with the memory warehouse and the ever changing prison/safehouse Jonesy has created for himself.  I love the way Mr. Gray slowly becomes more and more human, at first scoffing at our ways before loving the feel of emotions and the simple pleasures in life like a bacon sandwich with mayo.  But then toward the end King tries to say that there is no Mr. Gray and I have a hard time following.  Add to that no real explanation for Duddits' powers and how he was able to give them to his friends except for a small hint in the epilogue that it may have been God's doing, and it just doesn't end strong.

The film is probably even more poorly regarded than the book, and here I can at least understand why.  But that doesn't mean there aren't things to like either.  Morgan Freeman is fantastic as Colonel Curtis, doing a good job at portraying the madness and evil inside him.  His name is changed because they didn't want to have an association with Apocalypse Now, but the thing is he's named that way in the book to exactly make that comparison, so I really don't understand why they changed it.  They also ignored the fact that his real name is Coonts in the book (something that I figure is either a reference to Stephen Coonts or Dean Koontz, take your pick) which would have been a decent enough replacement.

The rest of the cast is also top notch.  Jason Lee is absolutely perfect as Beaver, and Thomas Jane, Timothy Olyphant and Damion Lewis are also great as Henry, Pete, and Jonesy respectively.  I'm a little more bothered by Donnie Wahlberg as Duddits, mostly because the Duddits of the book has down syndrome, and I feel like this would have been a good opportunity for Chris Burke or perhaps another actor with the disability.  But given some of the changes they make, I guess it makes sense that they changed it so that Duddits just has an unspecified disability instead.

There are a lot of places in which this is a strict adaptation, with lines taken directly from the book, including Curtis' great speech before they slaughter the aliens.  Most of the characters are spot on, and while the shit weasels don't look as I pictured them, I think they look really good and appropriately gross and menacing.  Some situations are simplified, like skipping the part where Owen has a crisis of conscience about slaughtering the aliens, or having the army come in and save the civilians and relieve Curtis of duty sooner, but those make sense in terms of tightening up the narrative.

Where I think they went wrong is the struggle between Mr. Gray and Jonesy.  It ends up seriously simplified, and I don't like the way Damion Lewis switches between accents and turns his head to have conversations between the two.  It's not that he does a bad job with it, it just feels off.  I also think dropping the way Jonesy gets Mr. Gray to enjoy his human body was a huge mistake.  It makes Mr. Gray a far less interesting villain.

The most drastic change is of course the final scene, where Duddits is revealed to be another alien of a different race, and he and Mr. Gray are locked in a struggle that Duddits eventually wins.  There's something about it that feels tonally off, like they went a bridge too far with it.  I appreciate the attempt to try to explain what Duddits was and why he had those powers and gave them to his friends as well, but there's something about the execution of it that feels off to me.

It's worth mentioning that the film originally had a different ending that you can view in the DVD bonus features for the film.  In that one, Duddits waves his finger in the same way that he showed Pete to do, and a beam extends from his finger and kills the alien.  He then succumbs to the leukemia, and we see Henry and Jonesy at his gravesite, where they leave his Scooby Doo lunchbox and sing "Blue Bayou" to him one last time.  While still different to what happened in the book, I like this ending a little better as it puts the focus on their bond of friendship.

Castle Rock Companion - Hearts in Atlantis

Hearts in Atlantis is a fairly unique volume for King.  While he's had plenty of short story collections and novella collections published before, this is the first collection where all the stories inside are connected through the characters that appear in them.  He has said this volume was meant to be a commentary on the Baby Boomer generation, on the ideals they had and how they never quite managed to accomplish what they wanted. The first novella also has really strong ties to his Dark Tower series, using a lot of its language and concepts.  One of the main characters, Ted Brautigan, shows up in that series after the events of this story.  While it definitely has supernatural elements, this is not a horror story, and has a lot in common with The Body, as the events of the story are a major turning point in the lives of the young characters and bring them from youth into adulthood.

The bond between a young boy and an older man could easily slip into uncomfortable territory, but I think King does a good job of showing that Ted is the father figure young Bobby Garfield never had.  The way the two of them connect over books is something any avid reader can understand, and I think most of us who do love to read can remember experiencing something akin to what Bobby goes through after reading Lord of the Flies - that first book that really made you think and see things in a different light.  Add to this the Dark Tower implications, and I really enjoy Low Men in Yellow Coats.  I don't think prior knowledge of the series is required to enjoy the volume - there's enough here about the pains of growing up to make it a great read, and King explains enough about the mythos that you're not going to feel lost - but for those of us who are fans of the series it's icing on the cake.

Given the way that the collection jumps around in time and covers many different characters, I can understand why the filmmakers chose to only adapt the first novella, adding in moments from the final short story "Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling" as it's not much more than the epilogue.  I can also suppose that maybe they felt that leaving in the Dark Tower elements might be too confusing.  I disagree with them on that, but I can see how they would come to that conclusion.  The problem is that the more and more you strip out of this story and take it out of its context, you're not left with much else.  It is still a story about growing up and losing your innocence, but it's just too brief to truly feel the depth of it as you do in the original story.

The bond between Bobby and Ted is greatly simplified.  We seem to be told that they're close more than we ever truly see it.  While Bobby was excited to get his adult library card as a birthday gift from his mother in the story, here it is Ted that convinces him it is a good thing.  But beyond that and a brief mention of a science fiction novel, the two of them barely ever speak of books.  There's no mention of Lord of the Flies at all, which is disappointing.  The themes of that book tie heavily into the story itself, both with the bullies who pester young Bobby and his friend Carol, and the cruel men who rape Bobby's mother later on.  It is truly a problem to reference a work within a film?  You don't need to read passages from it or adapt sequences, just discuss it.  Surely that falls within the realm of fair use.  Ted does still take Bobby to see the film version of Village of the Damned, and while I can understand not showing us the film itself, once again the events of that story tie into this one, as Bobby must learn to shield his mind from the low men.  Of course, the low men of the film don't seem to have psychic powers at all here, so it's irrelevant.

Instead of supernatural servants of the Crimson King come to return Ted home, the low men seem to be government agents who want to use Ted's psychic abilities in the FBI.  I suppose that's an alright idea, but it lacks a lot of the danger that the original story has.  It also means Bobby doesn't get to truly do anything at the climax of the film.  He runs to warn Ted just to see him quickly taken away.  The story is much more suspenseful, having the low men torture Ted and threaten to take Bobby with them, forcing Bobby to make a choice and give up Ted to the low men.  It's a choice that he carries with him for the rest of his life and tortures him.  While there might not have been time to show the implications of that choice in the film,  I still think it could have been presented in a way that would work and help give the film more depth.  Bobby isn't just a grown up because he's lost a friend and seen his mother horribly treated, he's an adult because he was forced to make an adult choice.  In the film, that simply doesn't apply.

I think it's pretty clear that I think the film fails as an adaptation.  They remove too much to make this truly the same story; it's really more than an empty shell of an imitation.  As a stand alone film, it's okay.  Anton Yelchin shows a maturity above his years and plays Bobby really well - I'm not surprised to see him having such an established career now.  Anthony Hopkins is as great as Ted as he is in most of his other roles, and his voice is so soothing.  The rest of the cast is also pretty strong, and the setting means we get a great soundtrack of good tunes.  I'm a little disappointed in their choice to make bully Harry Doolin a closeted transvestite as the reason for his behavior, but otherwise this is a simple enough story of a boy overcoming the problems in his life thanks to finally gaining a father figure.  Without any prior knowledge of the story it was based on you could probably enjoy the film easily.  For me, I can't help but be disappointed.

5 minutes about Mad Dog and Glory

I'm so glad I know for sure I like the next film on the list.

Castle Rock Companion - Cycle of the Werewolf/Silver Bullet

I'm always a little confused about where the line is drawn between short story and novella. I'm sure there are page counts that publishers use to differentiate between them, but all I can say is that Cycle of the Werewolf certainly feels more like a short story to me. It was originally born as a story to go along with a calendar that featured illustrations by Bernie Wrightson. King wrote a short vignette for each month of the year. King being King, he found those very limiting and eventually expanded the story and it was published along with Wrightson's illustrations. But it's still only about a hundred pages and very brief.

The story features the town of Tarker's Mill being plagued by a werewolf. Some months are written about the victims the werewolf attacks and others about the people in the town and how they feel about this problem, and a couple more about the man who is the werewolf and his perspective on the situation. It's all very brief so you have to kind of fill in the details yourself, but King still manages to paint some vivid characters in a brief amount of time. Probably the most striking for me was the victim of February, a Miss Lonely Hearts type who wants so badly to not be alone on Valentine's Day that she embraces the werewolf as he attacks her. I also appreciate that even in such a short amount of space, King provides us with some hints early on who the werewolf is and reveals it nicely toward the end.

This story had to be expanded upon in order to make a film, and King himself wrote the screenplay for Silver Bullet. Names for some of the main characters change, and minor characters are very different from the ones in the novella. It's pretty clear that King saw this as a chance to build a slightly different, more fleshed out story than what he had been forced to do with the calendar set up, and I think that's a large part of why we end up with the different name. Much like Maximum Overdrive and "Trucks," King often does this for a reason.

The core of the story remains the same - it's the town preacher who has become the werewolf, and it's a boy in a wheelchair that figures out his secret. I particularly like the idea of the preacher as the werewolf, as it causes him to really question his morals and what he should do about the situation. It's handled better in the novella than in the film, mostly because we get more inside Reverend Lowe's head and find out how he justifies the things he does. He also spends two months only attacking animals, so it's clear there that he is struggling with his problem and only eventually succumbs to the wolf inside him over time. In the film, it seems like the wolf overtakes him much faster.

Marty is a fairly blank slate lead, sympathetic because of his disability but otherwise a fairly bland character, particularly in the film. I suppose the idea is for a kid to imagine themselves in the same position. The problem is I don't really feel for him, and Corey Haim's bland performance in the film doesn't really help. King also gives Marty's sister a bigger role in the film, even making her the narrator for certain scenes, but it doesn't really help. I imagine that making her the narrator was supposed to create some mystery as to whether or not Marty survived the ordeal, because otherwise it feels unnecessary.

Despite the bland child actors there are some decent performances here, particularly Gary Busey as Uncle Red. Terry O'Quinn, Everett McGill, and Kent Broadhurst also give good performances. But the film is hindered by weak direction and absolutely terrible special effects. This was apparently a very troubled production with director Don Coscarelli leaving in the middle and Daniel Attias taking his place. There was also some disagreement between King and producer Dino DeLaurentiis on the way the creature would look, and I'm afraid what we get and what King wanted just don't really work for me at all. The transformation scenes in particular look really poor to me, and the werewolf just a little too cute and fuzzy. Ultimately, I just found the movie really dry and unmoving.

Obviously I can't really recommend the film, and I'm a little hesitant on recommending the novella too. It's a decent short story and the illustrations by Wrightson are great, but the paperback has a pretty steep price tag for the little you get. But if you can find this at the library or perhaps cheap used, then by all means check it out.