Part 1. (Machen, Lovecraft, Ghostbusters)
Part 1.5. (More Lovecraft)
Part 2. (Lovecraft Country, Jeroboam Henley)
Part 3. (Batman)
Part 4. (More Machen, Helen's Story)
Part 5. (Black Tom, Vellitt Boe, Ring Shout)
Part 6. (Stephen King)
Here's three more Stephen Kings! And a bonus goodie!
The Dead Zone (1979)
Firestarter (1980)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
Last time, I mentioned I did the movie of "Dead Zone" to not throw the book count off, and was gonna save the book for marathon 4 so that book count would be balanced.
Screw that rule. Anyway, Ma mentioned "Dead Zone" in her diary, so that broke the tie, and the rule, and I bumped it up from marathon part 4 to now.
"Tommyknockers" mentions "Firestarter" and I'm sure I recall Ma loving it, and saying it was better than the movie, so it became a late addition, even more than "...Tom Gordon".
"..Tom Gordon" turned up excavating Ma's library. I separate King's classic era and modern era by his car accident; and "Tom Gordon" came out during his accident recovery, so it's right on the line.
So, these definitely needed tacking on to my mom-dedication-King-a-thon.
Anyway, since I discuss the changes between book to film, heavy-duty spoilers ahead.
The Dead Zone (1979)
Same plot as the movie: guy goes goes into a coma, comes back out of it with touch-telepathy precognition, sees a local politician in the future as president launching World War 3, ponders assassination.
Hi-jinks ensue!
In the book, a carnival wheel of fortune becomes a repeating theme, and central metaphor of the whole story. So much so, it's on the original cover of the book.
I don't have that cover, alas. Mine is the movie re-issue. See above.
In the book, Johnny has a previous concussion he got as a kid, and he has a weaker version of his powers before the car accident.
His powers went into remission for awhile, then he wins 500 bucks at the wheel of fortune on his first date with Sara before the accident.
In his goodbye letter to Sara at the end, instead of saying "it wasn't in the cards for us" he uses the metaphor of the wheel of fortune from the fair coming up zeroes.
The movie cuts all of this out. You don't really need it, and you have to cut something to cram a movie into two hours, but I really liked it.
All of Johnny's prequel backstory is cut to get right to the accident as fast as they can.
It's a damned shame, cuz it's all great stuff.
The book also has it that normal people experience physical effects being in the presence of Johnny using his power.
Sara gets ill when Johnny is locked in predicting the numbers on the wheel of fortune.
This is the first hint we get of this.
King doesn't really go all the way down the rabbit hole of explaining this, and no character makes a conscious note of it. It doesn't happen to everyone. It's seemingly random.
It just kind of floats around there as a weird thing.
The movie totally cuts it as a subplot. I liked it as a disquieting little note; like you don't how much if at all Johnny's actually damaging the people he loves.
The book devotes quite a bit of pages to making Johnny and Stillson parallels to each other like Batman and Joker, or He-Man and Skeletor.
As we get Johnny's prequel backstory, we keep switching tracks to what Stillson is up to.
We first see him at twenty one as a failing Bible salesman kicking a farmer's dog to death.
When Stillson has his rage fits, he gets a headache, and sees sparks and flashes.
He's got some brain thing going on too, so he's really evil opposite Johnny.
We don't get an origin story for it though.
We get hints it could be from his dad beating him, but we don't get it as a definitive scene.
King leaves it vague like the effect of Johnny's power on others.
The threat of Stillson is a slower burn than the villains in "Firestarter".
Stillson has to gain power from the ground up.
The Shop in "Firestarter" is already established.
The book makes it a more gradual thing that Johnny's hunches are slowly but insistently inching him towards Stillson.
The movie makes it random, and gets it over with.
Reminds me of "Unbreakable" with the protagonist slowly inching his way towards being a superhero.
Stephen King did it first.
Stillson doesn't die like in the movie.
Stillson kind of symbolically fades away in Johnny's final vision as he simultaneously literally walks away and disappears.
Retroactively, in book-verse, Stillson lives to cause more trouble in "Needful Things".
I might read that someday.
The book of "Needful Things" has lots of familiar faces, but that all had to be cut for the movie.
I was unimpressed by the movie, but as this reading journey is revealing, every time a King movie lets me down, I should immediately grab the book.
Re-watched the movies of these ones for comparison.
"Firestarter" the movie is a better adaptation of its book, but "Dead Zone" is the better movie in spite of making more extreme changes to the book.
Well, Cronenberg is the better director.
Both "Dead Zone" and "Firestarter" the books are better.
King-verse shout-outs:
-Salem's Lot as an in-world location.
-"Carrie" as a book. So, if King is an author in the King-book-verse, then "On Writing" can count.
He's obliquely referenced in "Tommyknockers" too.
Maine stuff shout-outs:
-Old Orchard Beach.
-Westbrook.
-Scarborough Downs.
-Cole Farms.
-Newington Mall
(New Hampshire, but close enough, and the Newington Mall was across the street from Star Discount Outlet AKA Shady Dave's!!).
Um, yeah, awesome book, great movie.
On to...
Firestarter (1980)
Past reviews of the movie-
Basic plot- The government tests a super-LSD that creates psychics. Two of the psychics have a little girl, and she has flame powers. The government hunts her.
While I couldn't prove it in a courtroom, I'm dead certain Stephen King inspired the adult renaissance of superheroes in the 80's.
King has never done the costumes and codenames thing, but "Dead Zone" and "Firestarter" are about powered beings dealing with the world's reaction to their abilities in a frank and modern way.
Frank Miller and Alan Moore get the credit for injecting that aesthetic into actual comics, but I give the credit to King. Totally.
Also, "Stranger Things" totally ripped this off.
"Firestarter" is R rated "Stranger Things".
And IMHO, better.
Weirdly, the only clear memory flicker I have that Ma read this, was she mentioned someone getting their fingernails being ripped out.
That scene really crawled around in her head, I guess.
Turns out it was government goons torturing Charlie's mom.
And it's not graphic. We don't see it transpire; its already happened when her body is found.
It's in the movie too, but it gets brushed past as a background makeup detail.
We meet our main goon-villain, John Rainbird, and he's nothing like George C. Scott.
He's almost 7 feet tall, his face is mangled by a grenade that went off near his face, and he has a missing eye with an exposed socket.
I'm picturing a bigger disfigured Anton Chigurh.
Drew Barrymore was perfect goddamned casting, but George C. Scott was so fundamentally wrong it's kinda offensive.
Rainbird in his mental reverie (that we don't get any of in the movie) uses an awesome metaphor.
He studied safe cracking with an old master safe cracker.
Old-safe-cracker tells him a story of some guys who tried to crack a grocery store safe.
They tried to "peel it from the back", they tried to drill the dial, they finally blasted it open, and burned up the money.
The moral is, it doesn't matter if the safe opens, if you "kill the money", the safe has fucking beaten you.
Rainbird says words to the effect of the FBI and CIA had a long track record of killing the money.
You couldn't even tell them that.
All they could see was the word "results" in flashing neon like a Vegas jackpot.
And every time, they were left with a handful of singed and shredded money, and a dumb look on their faces like "how could this happen?"
Every American intervention since WWII has been America being beaten by the safe.
Iran is Trump being beaten by the safe.
From now on, I'll call bumbling buffoons that destroy the object of their goals "moneykillers".
Like I said in the "Dead Zone" review, the "Firestarter" movie more closely resembles the book.
The core story is all there.
Side plots and characters are snipped, and bits are shuffled around to cram onto a straight timeline, but overall, the book is there.
Like "Dead Zone" had a subplot of Johnny physically affecting people around him with his power, "Firestarter" had a subplot that if Andy (Charlie's dad) exerted too much mind control pressure, or if he planted a sloppy command, it would make the person's mind implode on itself.
This goes down a whole rabbit hole of Andy accidentally triggering a baddie losing control of his secret repressed sexual kinks, and having a freaky suicide that would put a South Park episode to shame.
The books are always better, folks.
You don't need that stuff for a movie, but it adds spice.
King/Maine trivia:
-King dedicates the book to Shirley Jackson!
-Humpty Dumpty gets another shout-out.
It's a rebuttal-quel, cuz it's anti-government like "Tommyknockers" and anti the sexism of "Thing on the Doorstep".
Charlie McGee brought girl-power to the meta-Lovecraft-verse before Vellitt Boe and Aphra Marsh.
Those ones just do it more directly on the timeline.
Now!! To rank the rebuttal-quels!
"Firestarter" shares a tier with "Skeleton Crew" but that changes the meaning of B tier.
I'm gonna have to add a C tier, and bump stinkers down to D tier.
Golden tier-
"Dead Zone" "Dolores Claiborne" "Vellitt Boe"
A Tier-
B tier-
"Black Tom" "Skeleton Crew" "Firestarter"
C tier-
All of "Lovecraft Country"
Yup. Golden tier for "Dead Zone".
"Dolores" resonated for Ma, and thus vicariously resonates for me.
"Dead Zone" resonates for me directly, and I truly consider it one of King's underrated best ones.
Ah! But we're not actually done!
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)
Pretty short. I think it was supposed to be a short story, but grew into a novella.
Basic plot:
The titular Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is Trisha McFarland.
She's on the Maine/New Hampshire end of the Appalachian trail.
She wanders off from her dorky family, like "Home Alone" in the outdoors.
Hi-jinks ensue!
It reminded me an awful lot of "Sooz".
A girl on a quest through the forest; a supernatural antagonist; an antagonistic companion in the form of her dark inner voice. Rather than the stony-girl in "Sooz".
I like this better than "Sooz". Natch.
I like everything similar better than "Sooz".
I gaslit the shit out of myself trying to find positive meaning in that mess, but "Tehanu" gave me permission to tell Beagle once and for all "you blew it, old man".
"Tehanu" "Vellit Boe" now this.
Along the way, inside Trisha's head, a little girl version of the debate between theism, deism, and Spinoza-ism rages. Which, actually, if one found oneself confronted with a Stephen King monster, would indeed be on one's mind. The way King tackles this is quite fascinating.
Trisha listens to a call-in talk show on her Walkman.
Stephen King uses this to inject his trademark humor.
I was gonna spoil one of the jokes, but I'll let you find it. 😉
I can't find anything that makes it a Lovecraft rebuttal-quel.
No fascist overreaching government agencies.
No bigots.
Just a girl vs a forest monster.
So, that's why it's not in the score tally above.
King-verse link:
She listened to her Walkman on the Castle Rock station WCAS.
Little bonus just for me:
The tape in the Walkman is Chumbawamba. Anarchists! 😎👍
So, yeah, it's a cute story. Kind of like a modern Red Riding Hood.
Not one of the all time greats, but I dug it.
Now, the bonus goodie...
The Twilight Zone: Gramma (1986)
Mercy (2014)
Plot recap of the story:
An ailing Gramma is left alone with the put-upon and terrified child protagonist, and at one point, she calls out for tea.
Barking it wickedly like "Tea!! Tea!! Tea!!".
Gramma turns out to be not just a witch, but a Cthulhu-cultist!
The Twilight Zone: Gramma (1986)
Archive.org had it. I have it now in my treasure trove.
We find out in audio flashbacks the whole idiot family knows Gramma is dangerous. Magical dangerous. Making them leaving her with George even more infuriating.
Harlan Ellison did the adaptation, and he indeed made the Lovecraft connection more explicit.
The story only talks about her forbidden books. Georgie finds them in a trapdoor with red glowing and moaning inside. The books are Gramma's diary, and the Necronomicon itself! Then the Necronomicon has Abdul Al-Hazred, Hastur, Yog Sothoth, and Cthulhu.
On Cthulhu, Georgie says "what a dumb name for something".
Gramma said "Yog Sothoth!! Cthulhu!!".
I didn't hallucinate it. Phew.
Gramma does indeed say "Tea! Tea!! Tea!".
The shitty uncle is just a voice in an internal flashback rather than a whole character like in the movie. The voice is Harlan Ellison.
Maine stuff-
-Lewiston is mentioned!
Mercy (2014)
Hey, yeah, "Skeleton Crew" dropped one year before the TZ episode, and the flick dropped one year after that old Lovecraft blog post.
It was cloaked by the title change. It slipped right fucking by me.
It's a Blumhouse. You kinda know the style you're gonna get from the brand.
Good parts-
-Creepy atmosphere. Scenery looked like Arthur Machan stuff.
-Cthulhu-esque paintings and Hastur set up the Lovecraft link.
-"The Weeping Book" looked like a Raimi Necronomicon.
-The short story was more or less there.
-R. L. Flag nursing home was a Randall Flag wink.
Actual improvements-
-The brother was injured by the supernatural force pushing back, and not a case of the sniffles, or him breaking his leg playing sports, or whatever the original dumb excuse was.
-The parents don't flat out leave George alone, he has potential protectors, but they get taken out by the evil force.
Bad parts-
-Too much prequel stuffing.
-Too slow.
-Bland score.
Odd bits-
-Chandler Riggs plays George like the kid from "Creephow". He's fascinated by Gramma/Mercy...until the shit hits the fan, then suddenly, he's scared.
-The imaginary friend girl who turns out to be Gramma/Mercy's astral projection.
Worst part-
-Forced happy ending.
Worst-worst part-
She never asked for tea!!!! 😮😲😵🤯
No tea. Tea is the whole thing.
Gramma without tea is like Freddy without his fucking glove.
They got the Lovecraft in there, they got the Randall Flag in there, they left out the goddamned tea.
Neither the episode or movie mention it being Castle Rock.
Only the story.
But the R. L. Flag nursing home in the movie at least gets that King link in there.
Yeah, you need the story, the episode, and the movie all together to trace the evolution to understand why some things happen in the movie.
The movie people clearly studied the story and the episode.
Bonus materials on the fucking DVD would have been nice.
If you weren't a lifelong fan of the short story like me, you get nothing out of this.
Not a great flick, but I'm glad I have it in my collection.
Its no "Mouth Of Madness" for goddamned sure.
It's not a great King adaptation, but unfortunately, I've seen far worse.
Episode is still better than the movie.
Story is better than both.
It's not the greatest story to begin with.
It's only special to me cuz of Ma & Gram.
I wouldn't at all recommend this unless you're on an obsessive scholarly kick like me, or are a full-blown Stephen King addict who has to have everything.
And, that's all of that! I'm done!!!!
9 comments:
Fun fact, Martin Sheen played John F. Kennedy in a big fat TV miniseries the same year as he played Greg Stillson. 1983. Nobody really watches that miniseries much anymore. Guess they're all too busy watching "V."
I thought the 1983 Cronenberg film was okay, but definitely overshadowed by the other Cronenberg movie that year, "Videodrome," filmed in friggin' 1981 which makes all the social media/Internet/TV shit it predicts even more stunning.
I've heard an astonishing number of Christopher Walken-impersonators do the "ICE!!! is gonna BREAK!" line over the years.
Sheen was a pretty good Stillson but I've never known what to make of the fantasy sequence where Stillson orders the nukes, in his pajamas, on what looks like a little device made by Atari or something. I actually sort of like it and have gone back and watched it a lot but it seems hilariously low budget.
The TV series with Anthony Michael Hall had Johnny shaking Stillson's hand and when he did we got these big special effects scenes of towns burning to a nuclear waste. I didn't watch much of the show (it was reasonably well received back in the day as I recall!), but I did remember that.
"Firestarter": It got an ignored sequel and a totally unnecessary, immediately-forgotten remake like everything else these days, and I guess the book is still selling, but I never got the impression this was one of King's more well-regarded or all that widely-read works.
I read it in high school though and liked it back then, so there's that. The part I remember best involves the hero doing the government drug experiment or whatever it was, and thinking he hallucinates someone leaving a big bloody handprint on a blackboard or something like that, and later he sneaks back into the building where the experiment took place and the bloody handprint was still there. Uh, for some reason I thought that was a good horror bit. Stuck with me from when I was a kid way better than anything in "The Shining" which I kind of don't like anymore.
I also remember a lot of the gore, like the little girl melting Rainbird to death, or people being decapitated during the big melee at the end, and someone yelling the hilariously bad bit "Climb, you cunt!" and the part where the hero makes that one poor dude who was a closeted transvestite (hey, that's the word they used back THEN!) stick his hand in the garbage disposal (right?) and the government agent "Steinowitz" (lol) getting impaled through the throat and flopping around like a fish after the girl melts his face, and the chapter that ends with the hero almost giving up and King simply writes "Sitting in the darkness, Andy moaned." Oh, and Rainbird saying he wanted to know the little girl intimately and Hollister looking at him horrified. And the LOTR reference when Rainbird is called "a troll, an orc, a balrog of a man." Or that one guy doing an impression of a mom scolding a kid for pooping his pants for Hollister and Hollister being embarrassed...why do I remember all this shit? Because I was scanning King books for evidence of his drug problems back then?
I have only seen parts of the movie, like George C. Scott's eye patch, or...wasn't Heather Locklear in it? and parts of the big melee at the end. It hadn't occurred to me until you said so that "Stranger Things" ripped it off, but it did. I don't feel like watching the whole thing, or its sequel which had Dennis Hopper and Malcolm McDowell (as Rainbird!) who I have little doubt turned in great performances and were not at all in it for the paychecks.
If King is going to keep referencing Maine stuff maybe he should drop a reference to the Maine true crime story that's popular on various subreddits and such:
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/kidnap/stefanie-damron
I'll leave it to you to decide if you want to see "The Odyssey" in theaters. It was okay but I'm not really convinced Nolan came up with enough of a new way to tell this tale so that it didn't end up just seeming a couple notches above same-old same-old, and some of the anachronisms were embarrassing like when one of Odysseus' men yells "okay okay! I'm not going to hurt you!" at Circe. I'm not bothered by the casting of Elliot Page or Lupita Nyongo who between them are on screen for maybe four minutes, but Zendaya needs a second facial expression. Good scenes of the sack of Troy and a decent non-Zimmer musical score but the movie was too long. Believe or not the crummy 1997 miniseries may have managed a better Scylla-Charybdis scene. It was also, of course, a bit too long, and the visual style is kinda desiccated like the new Dune movies, though not that bad. I'm not ranking it as one of Nolan's better works, but I'm not exactly planning on ceasing to watch new Nolan movies either.
Re: Dead Zone-
Oh yeah, the "ICE!!! is gonna BREAK!" bit. I forgot to put that in the review. I had to cut something.
Yeah, in the book, his student was an almost-grownup teenager who was an athlete with no social anxiety, but had a learning disability for reading, and instead of thin ice, it was a fire at a bar for his graduation party.
The father was actually a nice guy, and paid Johnny's medical bills for saving his son.
Dunno why they made the father an asshole for the movie.
I get why they changed the fire. King does too many fires. "Carrie" had just had a fire, then his next one was friggin' "Firestarter".
Re: Firestarter-
Yeah, you see I ranked it lower. I had my personal reasons for reading it.
Yes, Heather Locklear is in it as the mom who gets her fingernails torn out.
She's in it for all of 5 minutes, tops. They really speed through the origin stuff in the movie.
Yup and a nod to all your memories of it.
I glossed over the transvestite guy, but that's what I was referring to, yes.
Re: Maine stuff-
Odd what Maine stuff King puts in his books and doesn't.
Warren Cole who owned Cole Farms restaurant was our local Epstein.
Cole Farms really was the pizzagate pizzeria.
The scandal hadn't come out when he put Cole Farms into "Dead Zone" so I got a morbid laugh at that.
Maine has kinda wanted to drink amnesia potion about that whole thing.
I haven't read and don't plan to read King's entire mountain of books, so he may have buried something about the scandal in there, but you'd think it would pop up in the Stephen King wiki written by people who have read the whole mountain.
But, big details for "Dolores Claiborne" the book weren't in any wiki.
I don't want to read his whole library just for Cole Farms.
Yeah, the only movie I have an inkling to see is the new Spider-Man. I'm waiting for a cooler day. Movie theater air conditioners don't try very hard. I just finished "Revival" and dug it a lot. "From a Buick 8" and a revisit of "On Writing" left to go. Then I'm gonna do "Cthulhu's Daughters" and the two Lizzie Borden books. Then the four LOA books starting with Joanna Russ.
I almost saw the He-Man movie cuz all my fellow gen-x geeks were gushing about it, but I'm pissed at Mattel for fucking over He-Man's creator. Poor bastard died in crushing medical debt, and Mattel pitched in a measly 1000 bucks. Were you the one who told me that? Anyway, it stuck in my craw.
It's been ages since I've seen "Dead Zone." Or, for that matter, most Cronenberg movies that aren't his best two, "Videodrome" and "Dead Ringers." He lost me with "Maps To The Stars" which nobody liked and I haven't seen any of the stuff he's done since. This is par for the course with a lot of the aging auteurs these days.
Somehow I didn't know there WAS a He-Man movie.
Had you, living in Maine, heard of Stefanie Damron? The missing person case that the true-crime crowd is most obsessed with is Asha Degree, a little girl who left her house in North Carolina one night in 2000 with a backpack and was seen on a highway a long ways from her home, then disappeared.
I'm sure I heard of Sefanie Damron on the news, but when no new knowledge comes along, stuff like that gets buried other other junk, and you forget.
*Googles New Sweden Maine*
Oh!! Damn!! Way the Hell up in Maine's Batman hat. That's the boonies of the boonies all right. Shit, I didn't know there were people up there.
You said "the boonies of the boonies" - Much of the speculation around the Stefanie Damron case concerns her family, who were living off the grid in yurts and homeschooling their kids, and a lot of suspicion has fallen on them because they're those kinds of people.
Some have claimed that the family are being railroaded just like Lindy Chamberlain was in Australia in the early 80s (the "dingo ate my baby" lady, who was part of an odd religious sect that people didn't like and that history has made out to be one of the biggest "deserving of an apology" people ever) but I dunno. The interest in the case mostly concerns these people's way of life.
Yeah, I missed out on it somehow. I'm not ignoring ya, I'm chipping away on the next review thingy. In the home stretch.
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