1/15/2024 0 Comments Shut in movie stephen![]() ![]() It’s Mick Garris again (this was actually his first collaboration with King), hacking away at another King movie, this time with an original script from King. Director Mick Garris is an old King hired hand - he directed several of King’s straight-to-TV movies, including The Stand and the version of The Shining that had Steven Weber, of all people, in the Jack Nicholson role - and he tries to make this into something much more portentous and profound than it really is. What was a thin, simple premise in King’s novella - widely considered the world’s first e-book, by the way, in 2000 - is extended to little effect in this drama about a man who tries to kill himself, then hitchhikes across the country to visit his dying mother. Bats are much more cinematic.) This movie looks like it was made for about $35, but it does feature a truly insane closing credits song. All right, they’re being killed by … a giant bat! Because bats hunt at night, you see. Wanna guess why? We don’t want to give it away. Its premise: Overnight workers at an abandoned-then-reopened textile mill keep dying, and no one can figure out why. Graveyard Shift is as schlocky as low-budget horror films get. ![]() It’s all terrible, but, you never know, it might be your thing. Eventually the Mangler develops legs and starts chasing people. What, exactly, is “the Mangler,” you ask? Well, the Mangler is a demonically possessed … laundry press! This setup leads to hilarious scenes of an angry laundry press pressing up and down, like a hungry, hungry hippo. Of all the Stephen King adaptations, we must confess that this one has our favorite title. Though, according to King: “I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.” King has called it the worst adaptation of any of his works, and we are not about to disagree. The movie isn’t even absurd enough to have fun with this lunatic premise, and King has zero skills as a director - visually, narratively, or in any other sense. Apparently, a comet has passed by Earth and given mechanical objects sentience, and once they attack humanity, Emilio Estevez helps lead a human resistance. The movie’s tone is set in the opening scene, in which a man (played by King) tries to take money out of an ATM, and the ATM calls him an asshole. The one movie King ever directed, and … well, you know, Stephen King is a wonderful writer who should probably stick with writing. (For the purposes of this list, we looked at theatrical releases only, and excluded Lawnmower Man, an “adaptation” so vastly different from the original that King sued to get his name off it.) With one notable exception, you’ll find the adapted movies turned out much like King himself: They got more serious and substantial with age. Nonetheless, with the latest King adaptation, The Boogeyman, now in theaters, we gave it the old college try. ![]() As his canvas (and reputation) has expanded over the years, his work has been turned into dramas, comedies, musicals, and even a Bollywood movie.īecause of this dissonance, ranking King movies is particularly difficult: The Mangler and The Shawshank Redemption barely seem to exist on the same plane of dimensional existence, let alone on the same list of movies. Sure, a lot of them are horror (certainly a lot of the worst are horror), but that’s largely because the boom period for King movies was the 1980s, when he was known solely as a horror writer. Stephen King’s work has been adapted so many times - sometimes by King himself - that it’s impossible to find a single unifying thread in all of the film adaptations. This story originally ran in 2017 and has been updated to reflect recent releases. Castle Rock Entertainment Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images ![]()
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