Stephen King's Desperation
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Movie Reviews of Stephen King's Desperation
Movie Review: An OK movei
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this movie cause I read the book and really liked it. It was close to the book, but not close enough. I gave it 3 stars because of this. I might have given 4 stars if I hadn't read the book before I watched it.Movie Review: Coyote Ugly
Summary: 2 Stars
Alright: take a step back, and tell me there isn't something decidedly wrong, even militantly spooky, about the American Southwest.
You know what I'm talking about? No? Let me clarify, then.
We're driving, Me & Thee, across some barren stretch of ancient Arizona moonscape, and we've hit upon what I call the Magic Hour: when the Day is laying down its sword in honor of Old Man Night, and the setting sun is really firing up all those sleeping reds and oranges and deep, feral yellows, up on the rocks, the hills, the cliffs, the crags, the bluffs.
Can you see it? Can you hear the coyotes keening and wailing and hi-yi-kee-yi-ing away back up in some box canyon, where those black-rooted stunty trees wave their straggly, evil, twisted arms towards an absentee Heaven?
We still think of America as a young country, and maybe that's just our innocence talking. Because this land is just as ancient as any trod by the African or Chinese, and can't you just smell the Terrible Old Blood-Secrets buried down under the Earth when you're out on the high desert?
Sure. As the town of Desperation's former Sheriff (former, in that he's going through something of a---ah, Midlife Crisis) would say, Gosh, yes.
The guts and sheer, pulpy, bloody visceral glory of Stephen King's novel "Desperation" rides that seam of ancient, buried, hulking horror like a 40-something housewife saddling up the mechanical bull at Gilley's, and that's half its charm---which is why I was expecting so much with Mick Garris's cinematic version, and, no doubt, why I was just so damned disappointed.
The setup, the build, the execution---everything about "Desperation" cuts thematically close to the territory King marked with his bad-doggie tale "Cujo". Remember "Cujo"? Something ancient and unspeakably evil, and deeply stupid and hungry---something nasty lies all coiled-up in a dark cave.Until Cujo---big, bumbling, naive, benevolent---comes lumbering into its domain.
And gets eaten. Devoured. Turned into a shambling, rabid hulk of its former lovable slobbery self, transformed into a ravenous engine of death with one single design: to spread carnage, red and raw and toothy, across the trembling land.
Now, just as the arc and trajectory of the bullet isn't all that mindful of its casing, so too the unsleeping Ancient Evils of Cujo and Desperation aren't too picky about their corporeal hosts. Whether it's a 300-pound dog or a 300-pound lawman, the only real concern is where to pile the bodies.
Or so you'd think. Sadly, "Desperation" is a tiny little bang, and a ton of whimper: 15 minutes of shivery brilliance, and what feels like about 8 hours of unbridled dullness.
That bristling tale of ancient, sleeping, hungry Evil---Tak ripped out of his slumber with the explosion of the charges in the Rattlesnake Pit, and his unquenchable desire to eat his way out into the guts of the little town of Desperation---all of the novel's frantic hardscrabble fight against a mounting, relentless Evil is wasted by Mick Garris's listless, uninspired direction.
It's as if Garris burned up his budget hiring Ron Perlman to run the numbers as Collie Entragian, and then outsourced the rest of the flick to Bangalore. Hell, they even dragoon some worn-out mountain lion to take a chunk out of flabby old Charles Durning's patooshka, and even that doesn't jack up the Excite-O-Meter on this miserable thing.
Not that I'm complaining about Perlman: this sad little flick bumps and grinds and gets its Crawling Kingsnake groove-on *only* when Entragian is on the screen, and Perlman is the perfect choice as the Lawman who goes all Economy on us and squeezes both Good Cop *and* Bad Cop into one body, then goes on to Downsize his jurisdiction. With extreme prejudice. Tak!
"Desperation" has its 15 minutes of brilliance with that fatal traffic stop: everything is just about note perfect. Those lying, impossibly high wild-blue Western skies; the Trooper lurching out of his cruiser, that Gary Cooper drawl just crackling out over the silence of the High Desert, the spike of Dread at the curt command to step out of the car succeeded by a queasy flood of relief when---thank God!---it's just a busted-tail-light.
It's here, in the seconds before "Desperation" lurches forward zombie-style into B-grade horror, that the movie succeeds, that it creeps and crawls the way the book did. It is here that the film conjures up the loneliness of the Vast Stretches, the realization---something most American suburbanites go to their graves without knowing---that there are wild spaces on this crazy planet where you could be murdered and buried without anyone knowing how, or why.
While the coyotes howl, the scorpions scuttle and clatter, the black widows stalk and spin and move itchingly towards their prey.
Gosh, yes.
JSG
Movie Review: TAK-y
Summary: 2 Stars
One night when my friends were over late, we discovered that one of them had locked himself out of his car. To be more precise, the key had snapped off in the lock. It was an old car.
While we were trying to jimmy the lock, a car sped by - it was common for drivers in front of my parents' house to roar down the street with total disregard to speed limits - and a police cruiser drove past soon after. We cheered; finally, a cop was going to pull someone over for speeding!
Instead, the cruiser turned around. The cop and his partner, wary of four teenagers trying to break into a car, went on the offensive. One of my friends, the son of a cop, dared to frown as the cop tried to intimidate him, which just made things worse. As my friend put it, police have "SERVE and protect" on their cars. But there was a lot less serving going on. When we explained that we weren't trying to break into the car, the cops told us to try harder and drove off. They could just have easily arrested us.
I was in the comfort of home turf, in front of my parents' house, surrounded by friends. But what if it were just me alone, out in unfamiliar territory, and the cop accused me of something I didn't do? What then? That's the premise behind Desperation.
At least, that's how it starts. Like so many Stephen King stories, Desperation takes a nugget of everyday terror and explodes it into a full-blown story of terrifying proportions. We discover the fate of two lonesome travelers, Peter (Henry Thomas) and Mary (Annabeth Gish) Jackson, as they are pulled over by sheriff Collie Entragian (the fantastic Ron Perlman) of Desperation, Nevada. A sasquatch of a man, Desperation lets the question hang in the air for a few minutes as to whether Entragian is merely corrupt or truly insane. Once it's clear that he's completely bonkers and afflicted with some kind of debilitating condition, the tension peaks - is Entragian the victim of a disease? Did he really kill off all the inhabitants of Desperation? Or is he just a corrupt cop looking for a bribe?
Unfortunately, Desperation answers. And answers. And won't shut up about it - it's a battle between good and evil, between God and the Devil, between city folk and town folk, between man and nature, between White men and Chinese. In other words, it's every Stephen King movie you've ever seen.
Entragian, the scariest part of the entire movie, disappears to be replaced with a body-hopping spirit. Marching in to fill his place is a cavalcade of King stereotypes: the drunk, the desperate couple, the psychic child. The new addition is a stand in for King himself, John Edward Marinville (Tom Skerritt), who mocks his books and the genre he helped establish with a wink and a nod.
King throws a stream of exotic words at us to cover up the pedestrian plot torn from H.P. Lovecraft's The Temple: a series of stone idols (Can Tah, or ivory statues in The Temple) are unearthed from an underground dimension (Pirin Moh, a parallel for Atlantis) that release a demon from the depths (a "wazeen" known as TAK, a parallel to Gloon from The Temple). By the time the King stand-in has a showdown with TAK, it's clear from the dialogue that the author has given up on trying to scare us and is just laughing all the way to the bank.
Amidst talk about God's plans, ghostly appearances, wild animal attacks, and creepy statues, what started as a battle of wills between people in a desert town turns into a full-blown holy war. Or at least, a war of words. More breath is spent arguing over the existence of God than meaningfully propelling the plot. King apparently wanted to write about his religious view of the universe and decided to do it through Desperation. It's about as exciting as it sounds.
Movie Review: Pathetic.
Summary: 2 Stars
Before I begin the onslaught of how truly awful this was, I wanted to see thie first review of this maybe for a eye shot of adrenaline to get the fingers working, and I really needed a laugh, this "Dr. Dolphin" character (Top 1000 Reviewer) giving Desperation FIVE STARS...hahhahahahahahaahahha, (oh my gut, oh, oh, stop, stop, hahaha) Quote: "The acting: This is what makes the movie." NO, NO, please believe me the acting did not make anything, but you wanting to howl. Oh wow and I thought it was interesting seeing African Americans walking around in Bethel, Maine last summer, indeed this is the formidable icing on the cake.
You want blood, sweat and tears on a review, and not to mamsy-pamsy it to the masses on amazon to get 100's of helpful votes, wherein a person dissents from the majority: then here you go. 2006's 'Desperation' like many amazing king novels which are just absolutely butchered (Tommy Knockers, The Stand, Needful Things, The Dark-Half, etc.), 'Desperation' starts out interestingly enough, I guess. I mean on the lonesome road from nowhere to somewhere in the middle of the land that God forgot, we can place the wooden, and absolutely untalented Henry Thomas (E.T.) in a vehicle, with a conversation that was so unmotivating, I thought, "wait, wait, this has to be a Stephen King based movie." The two carry on this horrible relationship through the first twenty minutes of the movie, and you are praying to your own personal God that either one of them gets mauled to stop the insanity. Ron Pearlman plays this overacted, possessed cop, and during his interactions with the unknowing travelers, his face becomes more grim, as the possession slowly eats away at the cocoon. (see friends, this entity takes control of the host body, and slowly, evidentally eats away at it, therefore each new body finds more feed, that being the unknowing travelers.)
I thought perhaps the superb Tom Skerritt (Picket Fences, Contact, A River Runs Through It) [to name my favorites] could help the overacting and pathetic dialog, while holding on to some semblance while an ensemble forms in the local town of Desperation's police station. It doesn't. It tries to, but what movie doesn't try overtly to become cohesive. The grounding is formulaic, and it's petty. Ok, so let's go back to that acting made the movie comment by doctor death there. Amazing? To whom, Helen Keller? Shane Haboucha, playing the young boy David in the film, who suffers tremendous loss, did a really good job, as he UNDOUBTEDLY carried the entire film, however his acting was pushed, rushed and so scripted, there was no emotional creativity in the least. (His crying scenes were as paltry as Culkin trying to be something other than Kevin McCallister)
Desperation is what you scream out during the last scenes of the movie, because the name is fitting considering how rancid the cutting is. I wont give anything away, but the ending in itself is enough to make most film lovers drop their jaws in horror at exactly why the director would allow such complete absurdity in a film, and a voiceover that you thought would be from a man behind the curtain who you aren't supposed to pay atttention to. While it had its moments, it never found a leg to stand on from the opening scene. (Argento anyone?)
AWFUL, but an extra star because the boy did give it a go.
Movie Review: Mick must be stopped
Summary: 2 Stars
Okay, I've not seen the DVD, but I saw the movie when it broadcast on ABC this May, and I was a bit disappointed. I say "a bit" because "Desperation" is not one of Stephen King's better novels in the first place; Steven Spielberg would've been hard-pressed to make a good movie out of it, much less Mick Garris, who is decidedly no Steven Spielberg.
Speaking of mick, can't we all get together and keep him from making Stephen King movies? He's still not managed to make one that is as good as it ought to be: "The Stand" is good, but also incredibly bad in spots; "The Shining" not only fails to match Kubrick, it fails to replicate the novel; "Ride the Bullet" is like a student film; "Sleepwalkers" is incredibly uneven.
Garris is terrible with actors (they always sound like they're actors delivering dialogue, rather than characters speaking to one another), yet somehow manages to attract good ones -- maybe that's King's rep at work. Here, we get performances from Tom Skeritt, Ron Perlman, and Steven Weber that just don't take flight, despite being very on-the-mark in terms of technique.
Garris also has, apparently, no visual sense; but even that isn't consistent, as he does sometimes manage to pull a very effective shot from out of nowhere. I almost feel bad for railing against the guy, as he does show sings of promise; perhaps somewhere down the road.
But stop mucking about with King! He's suffered enough tepid adaptations; you're not helping!
I expect to get slammed with negative feedback by King fans, but hey guys . . . I'm one of you, too. And it ain't all gold.
Speaking of King, his screenplay is adequate, but that's all. It admirably reduces a lengthy novel to a feature-film length, but as the only interesting elements of said novel were the characters, and characterizations are the things that are the most trimmed in this abrdigement of the story . . . well, it all just seems like a waste to me.
Ultimately, this one generates no strong feelings of any kind, and that's a problem in and of itself.
Buy it if you're a King junkie. If you're just a casual horror fan, though, it is not worth your time, much less your money.