Posted April 24, 2008
By tseigler

The worst movie I ever saw came directly from the mind of Stephen King. When you base an entire film around machines that suddenly come to life and want to kill humans, you’re just asking to be mocked.

I don’t have much of an issue with King’s books, simply because I haven’t read that many of them. “The Shining” was a must-read after I encountered Kubrick’s film version (still the best King adaptation), and “The Dead Zone” seemed almost like a continuation of that one, with the little psychic kid in the former growing up to be Christopher Walken in the latter. But the guy has written so many doorstop-length paperbacks that I defy anyone to actually make it through his body of work without having to say goodbye to friends, family, sunlight, etc.

It’s when lazy screenwriters or directors decide to turn one of his tales into a movie that I get antsy. The horror of Stephen King is so predictable by this point that you really don’t have to read the book or see the film to get the idea: it’s gonna be set in Maine, there’s gonna be a supernatural bad guy who can’t be easily killed, some annoying townspeople will die (there are never any decent humans save for the hero of the piece in any of his work), and then stuff gets blown up to symbolize that this is where the 702 previous pages were heading in the original book.

This is not to say that said movies can’t be good. The non-horror adaptations are worthwhile (“The Shawshank Redemption” is required by federal law to be on TNT every other weekend). The worst crimes against cinema are the TV movies; “Rose Red” and “The Langoliers” are unintentionally funny when they’re not being intentionally bad. King’s update of “The Shining” in ’97 is true to his book, but it still rings false. When you try to replace Jack Nicholson with Steven “Wings” Weber you’re asking for mediocrity. The one time he was ever allowed to bring his own work to the screen by a major studio, the result was “Maximum Overdrive” (the movie I alluded to earlier). When the best thing you can say about a movie is in regards to the AC/DC-penned soundtrack, that’s not a good thing.

Stephen King is a good writer, but my two favorite books of his have nothing to do with what he’s known for. His chronicle of the 2004 Red Sox season is a must-read, and his advice book on how to write would be a perfect text for creative-writing students. But I could go my entire life without reading “The Stand” and not feel bad about it, because I’ve already seen the multi-part miniseries. A supernatural bad guy shows up, annoying characters die, and some stuff gets blown up. Big deal.