Poll Macabre: Stephen King On Film and TV

they missed 'golden years', which i saw and thought was pretty decent, considering everything.

I think it's just a list of adapted works. No Rose Red, Storm of the Century, Sleepwalkers, etc.

read the dead zone a couple of months back due to lol topicality and the movie really is a perfect adaptation, streamlines and tweaks plots so they're more effective and walken really is perfect casting - you get that combination of romantic charm and yet something off center and strange. it was alright but i think w/o curry would be pretty useless and i don't think the kids performances or the handling of that plot in general were very good (cf stand by me).

true, stand by me is def much better wrt the kids.

I never took to dead zone the movie but i havent watched it in a long long time. i loved the book.

watching stranger things makes me want to reread some old sk now

Dead Zone I like, especially how it seems like it's the last time Walken was acting, instead of just being a Walken character.

I watched the TV It a few years ago, and remember that it had some creepily poetic shots. Pennywise at the side of the road with the balloon, when one of them was coming back to town years later, that stayed in my mind. Once the jump-scares start revving up in the new one, it's CGI overkill the rest of the way. Not surprising, still disappointing. It's (or It's) not terrible, but I'll take the TV version.

(I searched for a thread, couldn't find one.)

Yeah whatever the new one has going for it (not hellish much imo ymmv) it's useless as a scarf movie

I know I'm in the minority here but both tv adaptations of salems lot bore the arse off me in equal measure, never got why the hooper is held in such high regard

*scary movie, lol. I can't remember if there were any scarves in it

I completely get where clemenza is coming from re: "CGI overkill" but I liked the movie anyway. Perhaps because of that very thing--if the action is busy and hard to follow, it is kind of hard to be truly afraid while you're watching it play out--I liked it much better as a film about childhood than as a horror film. The cast of kid actors was fantastic (maybe one of the best I've ever seen on film), I responded to both the comedy ("They're gazebos!") and the tearjerker stuff in the exact ways that I was supposed to, and I generally dug the whole 80s nostalgia vibe of it, which struck me as hovering somewhere between Donnie Darko and my beloved Eerie, Indiana.

I barely remember the TV version, aside from that I saw it at the time and didn't think much of it even as a kid. Like, I was legit surprised/baffled when it began to emerge as a kind of general touchstone over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqUopiAYdRg

Even though I gave up on it once (think I got maybe an hour into it), going to give The Stand another go this week for obvious reasons--one of them being I'm running out of pandemic-related viewing, having already watched Contagion, both Andromeda Strands, and Safe.

It's truly terrible.

It's rare that I devote that much time to a movie, even a long one, without finishing. But I feel like I have to do this.

A new miniseries for CBS All Access was actually in production but I guess it remains to be seen how the real-life plague will interfere with the fictionalized version.

Thought The Outsider was fun, even though they left a bunch of loose ends iirc. Casting was A+

Yes, as I noted elsewhere, it was about as close as any King adaptation has come to replicating the feel of a King novel. It seems like some people felt that it meandered too much, but King novels kind of meander. He takes his time fleshing out characters and their world and gives them room to just interact like normal people for a while before he fully brings the hammer down on them. I think that's a strength of his written work that rarely carries over in the translation to a two-hour film adaptation.

Watching only intermittently, but finished the first part of The Stand. Not exactly good, but the contours of what we're going through right now are there, which makes it interesting enough to keep watching. Performances range from passable to poor to Ed-Harris-level poor. Still waiting for Laura San Giacomo to show up.

(I should say that Ed Harris is sometimes a fine actor. When he's in George Kennedy mode, as he is here, he's terrible.)

Doctor Sleep did nothing for me beyond reminding me how few movies ever need sequels. The plot could easily exist, as a kind of horror X men, without The Shining to draw upon, but then who would care? There's a scene midway through with Jacob Tremblay that is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever seen in a movie, and which it has in no way earned the gravitas to include.

A Creepshow Halloween special is being released next month, featuring an animated adaptation of 'Survivor Type'!!!!!!