30. “Thinner” (1996)
Perhaps best remembered for being released alongside the King-penned Michael Jackson short “Ghosts,” “Thinner” (based on a 1984 book published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman) stars Hal Hartley veteran and former Robocop Robert John Burke as an obese mob-affiliated attorney who runs over an elderly Romany woman while getting road head from his wife (seriously), and is cursed with extreme weight-loss by her 106-year-old father. The various prosthetics work involved are impressive, but the story is sour, undercooked and frankly a little bit racist, and the direction (by Tom Holland, the “Fright Night” one, not the Spider-Man one, who was four months old when the movie came out) highly uneven, so there’s definitely a reason that the movie basically disappeared from theaters.
29. “Secret Window” (2004)
At least until “Mortdecai” came along “Secret Window” had the distinction of being the worst film directed by superscreenwriter David Koepp (“Premium Rush,” “Stir of Echoes,” “The Trigger Effect,” “Ghost Town“), but now it doesn’t even have that. Starring Johnny Depp before the, well, “Mortdecai” era of him being predictably awful, back when he could nearly save this sort of hotchpotch with sheer charisma, it follows a struggling writer whose wife (Maria Bello) has just left him, when he is accused of plagiarism by a mysterious, black-hatted stranger (John Turturro). Tonally uneven, veering from psych-horror to fitful comedy, mostly it proves the old adage that writers shouldn’t write about writer’s block, and the less well-known saying that writers certainly shouldn’t direct movies about writers with writer’s block.
28. “Creepshow 2” (1987)
With the original having found cult success, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures attempted to revive the “Creepshow” brand with this sequel, which brings to the screen a further three King short stories penned by George A. Romero, though the horror legend passed on directing this time out, with his longtime DP Michael Gornick taking over duties there. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly given that the stories told here were rejected first time around, it’s a lesser shadow of its predecessor. “The Hitch-hiker,” starring Lois Chiles, is the least of them, while “The Raft” takes a decent premise and bottles it with poor casting and dodgy effects, making “Old Chief Wood’nhead,” about a vengeful cigar store Indian come to life, probably the most fun, but none are as good as anything in the first film.
27. “Children Of The Corn” (1984)
This adaptation of a 1977 short story by King somehow spawned a more enduring franchise than any other King movie, with seven sequels (an eighth is one the way) and a TV remake following over the last 33 years. Which is a little puzzling, because even the original wasn’t really all that good. Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton play a couple who end up stranded in a Nebraska town where the kids, led by the sinister Isaac (John Franklin), have formed a demonic cult and killed all the adults. There’s something fun in the idea of a blend of “The Wicker Man” and “Who Can Kill A Child?,” but the execution is pretty shoddy here, with the film never feeling like it embraces its transgression, and the obviously meagre budget unable to pull off whatever limited ambitions it had.
26. “No Smoking” (2007)
Undoubtedly India’s finest Stephen King adaptation, if only because it’s India’s only Stephen King adaptation, Anurag Kashyap‘s “No Smoking” is based on the same story featured in portmanteau film “Cat’s Eye.” It is also legitimately, certifiably bonkers with a scrambled chronology and a narrative style so fragmented, encompassing so many different styles from musicals to surrealism to broad comedy to slick action, that it genuinely may qualify as one of the most confusing films of all time. A handsome man (John Abraham) known only by the Kafkaesque initial K, is trying to quit smoking via a labyrinthine scheme (a la “The Game“) in which borderline supernatural punishments befall him and his loved ones if he takes so much as another puff. Completely incomprehensible, but sometimes quite fun.
25. “Riding The Bullet” (2004)
King’s 2000 novella “Riding The Bullet” made history as the first mass-market e-book, but it’s unlikely to be remembered for its quality, awkwardly falling between more genre-friendly stuff and King’s lower-key, more naturalistic work, and the film isn’t able to improve on it much. Director Mick Gariss has made something of a career of King adaptations on TV like “The Stand,” but this story, about a death-obsessed young man (Blandy McBlanderson, aka Jonathan Jackson) traveling to his mother’s bedside before her death, is woolly, indulgent and never especially interesting, and doesn’t play much to Garris’s strengths, despite a half-decent cast (Cliff Robertson, Barbara Hershey and Nicky Katt all appear).
24. “Carrie” (2013)
Given that there had already been a crappy sequel, a crappy TV movie remake and even a crappy musical, a full-on remake of “Carrie” always felt sort of inevitable, and if it was going to happen, it might as well have been in the hands of a director as good as Kimberley Peirce. She knows what she’s doing, and the film isn’t bad as such, though Chloe Moretz is near-fatally miscast in the lead role (Julianne Moore and Judy Greer fare better in the Piper Laurie and Betty Buckley roles). But it’s more that it’s completely and utterly unnecessary, adding nothing new except some not very impressive CGI. If you’re going to do it, at least find a take that’s different from the one 35 years earlier…
23. “The Night Flier” (1997)
As can sometimes be the case with King’s material, there’s a good, creepy film somewhere in “The Night Flier” that’s ultimately undone by a fairly silly monster. Directed by Mark Pavia, it stars Miguel Ferrer as a supermarket tabloid reporter on the trail of a killer who flies to each murder site in a black airplane, and who may believe he’s a vampire. Ferrer makes an appealingly spiky lead, and there’s actually a fairly interesting subplot about his rivalry with a younger female reporter (Julie Entwhistle). But the eventual revelation — the killer actually is a vampire, and he looks shit — undercuts the creepier slow-burn of what’s gone before, and leaving it feeling like a missed opportunity.
22. “Firestarter” (1984)
Lil’ Drew Barrymore is cute a button but can start fires with her mind. George C Scott, perplexingly coded as Native American, plays a menacing villain who wants to kill the whippersnapper partly because it’s his job as an agent of a shady organisation that seeks to control and weaponise people with supernatural abilities, and partly for kicks. This, in a nutshell, is prolific B-movie exploitation director Mark L Lester‘s “Firestarter” a film that has the main flaw of being just a bit too bland for real scares and relying a little too heavily on images of Barrymore’s blankly blond heroine standing in front of massive conflagrations. Given that its main flaw is its unobjectionability, though, strange that King so vociferously objected to it.
21. “Silver Bullet” (1985)
Two years before Corey Haim battled vampires in the career-making “The Lost Boys,” he battled a werewolf, despite being in a wheelchair, in Dan Attias‘ “Silver Bullet,” based on the King’s “Cycle of the Werewolf“. While not as much jokey fun as ‘Lost Boys,’ ‘Bullet’ has its charms, like its stalwart supporting cast including Terry O’Quinn (with hair), Everett McGill, Lawrence Tierney and a surprisingly touching turn from Gary Busey as the ne’er-do-well uncle who is the only one who believes the kids about the one-eyed pastor’s nighttime pursuits. The effects are only so-so and it skews young, so is not frightening at all really, but it just about does the job, even if one does wonder why the werewolf, with his fangs and claws, dispatches one of his victims with a baseball bat.
