Week of Review - Apt Pupil (1998)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider joining my Patreon.

I want to be upfront here; I went into Apt Pupil with “they can’t all be winners” mentality.  I’m aware that digging through forgotten C-list cinema is by no means a sure thing and there’s every chance that among the genuine gems like Needful Things and The Mangler you’re going to come upon stuff that’s problematic or dated like Thinner.  However, I was in no way prepared for just how terrible Apt Pupil was going to be, this movie makes Thinner look like The Shining.  

It’s a film that I fully expected to be dated, tasteless, problematic, uncomfortable and more and while it was absolutely all of those things it was somehow so much less as well. 

It’s a bad movie I’m kind of shocked we ever stopped talking about yet also completely unsurprised it’s been swallowed up by the dust bin of history and banished by its own mediocrity.  I mean, when you’ve got a movie about a teen boy sociopath who forms an unsettling relationship with an old Nazi and it’s directed by Bryan Singer the last thing you expect it to be is so damn boring. 

Week of Review - Graveyard Shift (1990)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider joining my Patreon.

So far in this Week of Review, all the King adaptations I’ve looked at have been fairly unique from one another, barring one crossover character.  That’s about to change with this film, Graveyard Shift.  Released in 1990, Graveyard Shift was adapted from a Stephen King short story of the same name, much like The Mangler.  Also much like The Mangler, Graveyard Shift revolves around a series of mysterious deaths in an industrial building that also happens to function as the lifeblood of a small Maine town and there’s an evil owner involved. 

You know, when you lay it all out like this it becomes A LOT clearer why Stephen King adaptations would more or less flame out hard in 1995 and not really recover till 2013.  Even accepting that The Mangler and Graveyard Shift are actually very different kinds of movies with unique approaches to horror the outward similarities are a little hard to overcome.  Of course the biggest difference, and this is a tough one to avoid, is that Graveyard Shift isn’t nearly as good as The Mangler.

Week of Review - The Dark Half (1993)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider joining my Patreon.

Let’s talk for a minute about George Romero.  Romero is one of the all-time giants of the horror genre, a skilled and storied director most famed for introducing the world to the streamlined vision of zombies that was the “of the Dead” film series.  However, as excellent as that series is (the first four films and the Romero directed remake anyway) the man did a lot of other high-quality work that’s gone unfairly under-appreciated by the public at large such as Monkey Shines or Knight Riders.  

In 1993, Romero decided to dip his toes into the Stephen King pond and turned in one of the best King adaptations of the decade: The Dark Half.  Starring Timothy Hutton and Michael Rooker, The Dark Half is quintessential King viewing, hitting on a number of his favorite tropes and ideas while still realizing them in their best way.  The film also marks the first entry in this retrospective to tie into the Stephen King shared universe of stories, connecting as it does to the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.  So, continuity, quality, and a number of name actors and creators who’ve become beloved in their own right- let’s talk about The Dark Half.

Week of Review - The Mangler (1995)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

On to day two of my look back at the forgotten Stephen King adaptations of the ‘90s, today we’ll be taking a look at the Tobe Hooper film The Mangler.  This was one of the last King films of the Golden Age of adaptations, released in 1995 right before the well of adaptive works dried up almost overnight.  It’s actually somewhat staggering the level of King adaptations that cropped up between 1990 and 1995.  Including TV mini-series like IT and The Stand the first half of the ‘90s saw a staggering 12 King adaptations, the same as the entirety of the ‘80s and double the number that was made in the 2000s.  

That’s also part of why these mid-decade adaptations like The Mangler or Thinner started getting into the stranger corners of King’s canon, most of the more cinematic or standard pulp options like Christie, Misery, and The Shining had already been done so they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel with stuff about Romani weight loss curses or an evil industrial ironing machine from hell.  However, don’t let the goofier subject matter fool you because The Mangler is easily one of the best King adaptations this decade produced.