Week of Review - Apt Pupil (1998)

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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 - 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. 

Week of Review - Thinner (1996)

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A week from today will mark the premiere of a new remake of the Stephen King classic Pet Sematary.  So far the new film has a lot of positive buzz, which makes sense given we’ve entered into a new Golden Age of Stephen King adaptations.  Seriously between The Mist, Gerald’s Game, Mr. Mercedes, IT, 1922, Dark Tower, 11/22/63, Under the Dome, and Castle Rock Stephen King is undergoing a shocking renaissance of TV and movie adaptations in the 2010s with even more films yet to come.  As such, I’ve decided to look to the past, specifically the ‘90s, as that was the last time Stephen King became the go-to thing to adapt in the horror genre.

However, I’m not planning to look at the big names of King adaptations that have always stuck in people’s memories like Shawshank Redemption, no I’m interested in the weird B and C list adaptations the past has to offer.  After all, there’s really not much left to say about a movie we’ve all agreed is good and should be remember but off-beat oddities that pop culture has collectively turned its back on can be so much more weirdly rewarding and it doesn’t get much more weirdly rewarding than 1996’s Thinner.