Week of Review - Needful Things (1993)

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One of the odd things about Stephen King’s work is that he’s arguably one of the most successful literary authors to dip his toes in the realm of continuity.  If you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, what I mean by continuity is the idea that characters, events, and elements of a world are consistent across multiple stories that aren’t necessary sequels to each other.  Marvel Studios has more or less made their bread and butter with continuity, trusting that story elements like SHIELD or the Infinity Stones can appear in Thor 2 or Incredible Hulk and audiences will know and accept these films as being in the same universe.  

This has long been the case in comic books but it’s rare in literary circles, mainly because connected books tend to just be sequels but that’s definitely not the case with King.  He’s concocted a vast web of interconnecting books that are in no way framed as sequels to each other, mainly through shared geography of fictional Maine towns.  Stories like IT, Tommyknockers, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, Cujo all take place in the same fictional Maine county with its core being the town of Castle Rock, and in 1993 Castle Rock finally got its starring horror movie story in Needful Things.

Week of Review - The Dark Half (1993)

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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)

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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. 

Dark Tower Trailer Analysis

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The fantasy genre is one of the most unrewarding parts of blockbuster cinema in the 2010s.  Fantasy has always been a persnickety genre, with a lot of bizarre or subpar elements populating its history, but the 2000s were a better time for it.  Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and Pirates of the Caribbean the 2000s were flush with cool, epic fantasy blockbusters.  

However, since 2011 the genre has undergone a bit of a stumbling block.  The kings of the genre have only managed disappointing prequels like The Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts, while the most continuously successful films on the block are all up-jumped Disney fairy tales. 

There’s something about that which just doesn’t feel right, even if Maleficent, Cinderella, and Jungle Book have all placed in the highest grossing films of the year they just haven’t stuck in the mind or the culture the way 2000s fantasy blockbusters did.  Even in the realms of TV, the influence of Game of Thrones has begun to wobble with nothing really to replace it.  

This has left a prolonged hole in the fantasy genre for new films to set the attitude, stuff like Dr. Strange and Warcraft.  Now, it looks like we’ll have a brand new blockbuster to try and put its stamp on the fantasy genre, the long-awaited adaptation of the classic Steven King dark fantasy series Dark Tower.

Film Land - The Dead Zone

Edited by Robert Beach 

In case you’re one of my international viewers not paying terribly close attention, America is in the midst of an election year, and what an election it’s shaping up to be. We actually haven’t even entered the election proper. However, we have been slowly making our way through the Democratic and Republican primaries, and we’ve already been confronted by an avalanche of nightmare candidates and idiocy that makes it seem like we’ve all been enveloped by a surrealist political satire and just didn’t realize it. 

Even though I don’t cover politics on this blog, they’re a big part of life as they inform the art and media that I do focus on here. All the terrible politics that have been clogging up the national consciousness this entire year have left me thinking a lot about the idea of political horror. It’s a strange concept, and while we’ve got a pretty good standard bearer for it now in the Purge series, there used to be only one name in this limited subgenre: The Dead Zone. 

Static Thoughts - American Horror Story: Hotel Premiere

So, American Horror Story started its fifth season this past week.  The new series, subtitled ‘Hotel,’ is a major change up for the show as it’s the first season that won’t feature the return of series regular Jessica Lange.  Since the show started in 2011 they’ve kept a very tight knit core group of actors from season to season in what’s been called a modern update of the classical concept of an actor’s company.  They’ve added to the group certainly, like Kathy Bates who joined the show in its 3^rd season Coven, but by enlarge the core group from season 1 hasn’t changed up to this season.  In an attempt to fill the hole Lange left in the production American Horror Story has brought in Lady Gaga to basically serve as their overacting and deadly series matriarch. 

Personally I’ve always had a complicated relationship with American Horror Story that I’ll get more into later in this review but Gaga’s involvement was entirely what brought me back for the fifth season.  I’ve always maintained that Lady Gaga has a unique and commanding screen presence and her history of elaborate and evocative music videos is right in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse.  If anyone could propel American Horror Story into the realms of compelling quality it would be her…it’s just too bad she didn’t do that.

Week of Review - The Shining

And so we come to the end of another Week of Review, though admittedly a much shorter one.  American Horror Story: Hotel will be premiering later this tonight so for the final film in my hotel horror marathon I’ve chosen the most blatantly obvious example there is: The Shining.  The Shining is considered by many to be the greatest horror film ever made and its depth, complexity, and importance continues to echo down the long halls of cinema to this very day.  The film has been analyzed and deconstructed nearly to death with whole documentaries created about its possible meanings such as the death of the American family, the shameful treatment of Native Americans, and even claims that it was Stanley Kubrick’s confession to faking the Moon Landing. 

With a film this well known, this talked about, this discussed and considered by academia, nerdom, and the mass populous alike I normally wouldn’t talk about but I wanted to cover a certain subject that always tends to linger around the film; its connection to the book of the same name.  If you’ve never read it The Shining the book is actually an incredibly different animal to the film and a decidedly less interesting or terrifying horror story, and I’m going to talk about how and why.

Week of Review - 1408

Welcome back to week of review, in which I dedicate 5-8 days to reviewing a collection of films and TV shows relating to a topical subject of my choosing.  5 days from now we’ll see the return of American Horror Story, the hit anthology horror show from FX.  American Horror Story and I have a…complicated relationship to say the least but I at least acknowledge the incredible influence the show has had.  As we speak the amount of anthologies currently in development is pretty staggering and our new found love of anthologies is no doubt partly responsible for the upcoming Goosebumps film.  So given that I’ve decided to produce a Week of Review dedicated to this season of American Horror Story’s theme: Hotels.  I don’t really know why the creators of American Horror Story felt “Hotel” was the perfect confluence of horror trends and American identity to devote an entire season to but thankfully we don't have to understand it, just embrace it.  So to kick things off I’m looking at one of the best and most underrated Stephen King adaptations of all time 1408.