He’s our guide to the various personalities populating the joint, from outrageous (viva Sam Rockwell!) to outright sadistic (Doug Hutchison’s bastard of a screw). DFĪ spiritual cousin to The Shawshank Redemption, this adaptation of King’s serialized prison novel focuses on Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), a guard who heads up a Louisiana correction facility’s Death Row. But let’s just agree that this isn’t his, or anyone’s, finest moment. Tobe Hooper gave the world The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so he gets a lifetime pass. Then Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund does a weird-as-shit dance, Ted Levine inexplicably has a fridge dropped on him and a New Age-ish hippie casually asks, “Have you considered the possibility that the machine may be haunted?” … and all bets are off. What could possibly go wrong? (Who answered “almost everything”? Your prize is in the mail.) From the moment a worker drips blood into a machine in a factory scene straight out of a hair-metal video circa 1983 or a community-college production of Metropolis – take your pick – you get the feeling that things may be heading downhill and quick. Ok, so maybe the Night Shift short story about a killer industry-press laundry machine wasn’t top-notch source material for a feature – but you’ve got the director behind the best TV adaptation of a Stephen King novel ( Salem’s Lot), armed with two genuine horror-movie icons. The only tragedy is that we’ll never get a prequel that explains how the creature of the title got his pilot’s license, how many hours in the air he had to log in, etc. Not even the pleasure of witnessing the mighty Miguel Ferrer scream obscenities at everyone as he follows the trail of a caped bloodsucker (whose cowl is, per a rustic New England local, “black as a woodchuck’s asshole” – and that’s the best line in the whole film) and get served a literal Bloody Mary at bar can make up for the sheer straight-to-video–ness of every single aspect here. Trust us when we say that this attempt to bring one of King’s cryptic short stories to the screen sounds a lot better here than what you would have seen in a theater. Now imagine he’s covering a story about a mysterious commuter place that keeps showing up at the witching hour, with a sole occupant that leaves corpses in its wake. Picture Twin Peaks‘ forensic expert Albert Rosenfield, only somehow crankier and more foul-mouthed and working for a Weekly World News-style tabloid. (Please keep this in mind when you get to Number Five. And finally, we ranked these movies on a dual scale of the quality of the movie itself and how well it worked as an adaptation of King’s work. We’ve concentrated primarily on adaptations of his work, though there is one entry that fudges that notion a bit … but that we could not bear to leave out. A few things to note: We’re not including TV shows, TV miniseries or TV movies, so a hearty “sorry” to Salem’s Lot, the best of the latter by a longshot. Meanwhile, we’ve gathered 30 of the best-known, most notable Stephen King movies, and ranked them from worst to best. So we’ll leave those completist lists for other folks. Life is really too short for Dolan’s Cadillac. Originally, we’d planned to do a comprehensive worst-to-best ranked list, but the “ugly” proved to be too much for us – the last 10 years alone seem to have brought a wave of adaptations that run from questionable to “Unclean! Unclean!” There’s rewatching The Mangler, and then there’s straight-up masochism. evil clown epic It coming on September 8th – the King movie remains a bankable category unto itself.Īnd like any genre, there is the good, the bad, and the ugly. And with not one but two big films coming out in the next month – the long-awaited blockbuster take on The Dark Tower hitting theaters on Friday and a reimagining of the kids v. So many of his now-canonical horror novels, as well as his non–spooky-story output, have been fodder for filmmakers far and wide the phrase “a Stephen King movie” carries with it it’s own expectations, parameters and conventions. He probably didn’t think: I will also eventually end up one of the big bestselling authors of the next few decades, a highly decorated man of letters, a brand-name – and a one-man cottage industry for the movies. Back in 1973, when Stephen King sold his first book Carrie to a publisher (the manuscript of which he’d originally thrown away, and was rescued by his wife Tabitha), the up-and-coming, already published author might have thought: I may actually be able to make it as a professional writer.
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