The thinking that drives Hollywood trends among executives is always opaque, as proven by the next year or so, when we’ll get two projects from A-list directors within a matter of months about, of all things, the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. So it’s hard to pick out exactly what it is in the water that’s made Stephen King such a hot property again all of a sudden.
Of course, the horror writer, one of the best-selling authors in the English language, and who’ll celebrate his 70th birthday in September, has never exactly been a cold property. His work, whether novels, novellas or short stories, have spawned dozens of film and TV adaptations going back over forty years, with hardly a year passing in that time without at least one arriving.
But King’s definitely having a moment in 2017, with the long-gestating adaptation of his epic fantasy series “The Dark Tower” hitting theaters on Friday, well-reviewed miniseries “Mr. Mercedes” with Brendan Gleeson beginning next week, the eagerly-anticipated first part of a two-part “It” movie adaptation coming next month, Netflix debuting adaptations of “Gerard’s Game” and “1922” in the near future, and the J.J Abrams-produced “Castle Rock” coming to Hulu in 2018.
Is it the success of the King-influenced “Stranger Things?” A reflection of our terrifying times? Or simply a realization among development executives that much of the work of one of our most prolific and talented storytellers, who has provided the source material for some truly great films (and some truly terrible ones) remains unadapted?
To mark all of those upcoming projects, and King’s upcoming birthday, we’ve headed to the figurative Castle Rock multiplex to watch every big-screen King adaptation to date (excluding TV series and miniseries and DTV movies, just theatrically released features, to keep us sane), and rank them from the very worst, to the very best. Take a look at the list below, and let us know how your own rankings would differ in the comments.
37. “The Lawnmower Man” (1992)
There is one way in which director Brett Leonard‘s film, which was legally disowned by King, is a futurist masterpiece: even while watching its “cutting edge” effects in 1992, you could sense the fact it was going to be tragically dated by the time you left the cinema. Now it’s positively dinosaurish, and not just in its borderline unwatchably garish CG. The ’90s fashions, hairdos and attitudes, Pierce Brosnan as the earnest dullard scientist, an awful Jeff Fahey as the mentally-challenged- lawn-care-professional-turned-techno-savant-turned psychotic-megalomaniac and the thunkingly graceless storytelling all serve to remind us that behind this tale of techno-aided superintelligence there’s a whole lot of human stupidity. Didn’t stop Leonard from penning the even-worse 1996 sequel, though.
36. “Needful Things” (1993)
Released as a 2-hour theatrical feature and then a 3-hour TV version (the differences are helpfully outlined here, and include such illuminating additions as “There are more shots of Brian on his way to the shop”) the real shame of Fraser C. Heston‘s dully cynical film is the waste of one of the best King casts: Ed Harris, Bonnie Bedelia, JT Walsh, Amanda Plummer, Ray McKinnon, Don S. Davis and of course, Max Von Sydow as the devilish dude who turns out, to absolutely no one’s surprise, to be the devil. Horror should horrify, but it shouldn’t necessarily leave this sour and misanthropic a taste (the townsfolk here are all deeply unlikeable), and it certainly shouldn’t bore you as much along the way.
35. “Graveyard Shift” (1990)
It’s possible that “Graveyard Shift,” one of King’s earliest notable short stories, could have provided some grisly B fun as a movie, combining some light satire on capitalism and blue-collar working life with a monster movie about giant rodents eating employees at a cotton mill. But the 1990 movie adaptation, somehow released in theaters by Paramount, never even qualifies as so bad-its-good. Aside from Brad Dourif’s scene-stealing exterminator, the cast are bland and their roles uninteresting, while it’s perhaps understandable that debuting director Ralph S. Singleton hasn’t made another movie since. Undiscriminating gorehounds may find something to enjoy here, the rest of us are left pretty starving.
34. “The Mangler” (1995)
Quite a long way from the return-to-form that had long been hoped for from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” director Tobe Hooper, “The Mangler” has such a stupid premise — a laundry press owned by an elderly man (Robert Englund, under some dodgy prosthetics) that becomes possessed by a demon and starts eating people — that you suspect it may have been made on some kind of dare. Aside from the occasional splatter of scarlet and a winning turn from Ted Levine as the cop investigating the deaths, there’s little memorable here, and certainly nothing scary, with Hooper & Co unable, or unwilling, to escape the inherent goofiness of the setup.
33. “Maximum Overdrive” (1986)
Cocaine is a hell of a drug, and reportedly King was fuelled solely by it throughout his only directorial outing. Set for maximum cheapness at a truck stop in the middle of dusty nowhere as a comet (maybe) causes machines to turn on humans, there is some camp value in seeing Emilio Estevez, Yeardley Smith, Frankie Faison and others fend off the prowling advances of psychotic carvery knives, hairdryers, lawnmowers and trucks, and in the howling dialogue, in which f-bombs are deployed like an 8-year-old trying to sound tough and characters get unlikely lines like “It’ll be like Neville Chamberlain giving in to the Nazis!” Mostly though, it unfolds like a very uninspired feature-length music video for its AC/DC soundtrack.
32. “Cell” (2016)
A decade earlier, John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson’s pairing in “1408” resulted in one of the more pleasantly surprising King adaptations, but “Cell” didn’t repeat the trick — indeed, it did quite the opposite. The pair play strangers who are caught in the chaos when cell phone signals suddenly turn people into savage killers, and aside from its sub-“Black Mirror” gimmick (which doesn’t have much interesting to it), this is fairly standard zombie-movie fare, shot with “28 Days Later” shaky-cam tiredness by director Tod Williams, without the budget to pull off the scope that it wants, the engagement of his cast members, or the imagination to do anything new with the genre.
31. “Hearts In Atlantis” (2001)
This week’s “The Dark Tower” actually isn’t the first time a story related to King’s fantasy multiverse of the same name has reached the screen — Scott Hicks’ 2001 film “Hearts In Atlantis” is based on the Dark Tower-related novella “Low Men In Yellow Coats” (though confusingly, the title comes from another story in the same collection, now also getting its own film adaptation), albeit with all the links cut out of it. What remains is the coming-of-age story about a young boy (the late Anton Yelchin in a breakthrough turn) who forms a friendship with his mother’s lodger, who has psychic powers. With a decent cast and a screenplay by the great William Goldman, this could have been something interesting, but it’s instead a dull, tone-deaf, hopelessly sentimental drudge that is only really good for inducing naps.
