Move Over, Garlic and Crucifixes

I've been watching so many good Stephen King productions lately I was a little surprised to come across something sub-par last night. 2023's Sleepwalkers was written for the screen by King and has Alice Krige, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman, and Mark Hamill (though he's uncredited for some reason). But it's about vampires who are allergic to cats and it's about as silly as you could imagine that premise being.

Charles (Brian Krause) and his mother/lover, Mary (Alice Krige), are down on their luck vampiric demons who require the souls of virgins too sustain them. Lucky for them, Charles meets the beautiful young Tanya (Madchen Amick).

Tanya's the best part of the movie and I suspect King wrote her as his own dream girl. She works at a movie theatre and she's introduced dancing alone to her headphones while sweeping. The camera gazes long and appreciably at her in the sequence.

I suppose it's the kind of thing you might see in a commercial but, hey, it's Madchen Amick.

The Sleepwalkers, as the vampiric beings are called, have some interesting powers and there a few cool, vicious scenes, like the one where Charles decides to murder his creative writing teacher (Glenn Shadix). I get the sense that King isn't a big fan of creative writing teachers.

Unfortunately, when a cat attacking Charles consists of the actor holding a stuffed prop to his neck and writhing, it looks exactly like what it is. It's hard to make a movie about cats that gives them the majesty we cat lovers know they possess in life. Lots of people have tried, though.

Sleepwalkers is available on The Criterion Channel as part of a Cat Movies playlist on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1807

A normal box for ev'ry pace was checked.
Reflective marble blushed beneath the blood.
The dancing busts in ivy wreaths were decked.
A pterodactyl lifts the deadly bud.
Deducted metals scored for lead in rings.
Remember time when baking space for air.
Whenever pots're washed, enamel rings.
No messaged mind could find a worthy pair.
Aggressive fungal ghosts are sleeping late.
Omitting falls, the water changed to mist.
Forever, questions swirl about the gate.
Perverted sleepers marvel at a kiss.
Returning time has rendered red to grey.
The ancient oak became a paper clay.

Democratic Sin

Last night I finally finished watching Stephen King's Storm of the Century, the 1999 miniseries King wrote for television. I started watching it back in the summer but, considering it concerns a town besieged by a blizzard, it seemed better suited for winter viewing so I saved the last two of the three parter. It was pretty good. Crummy effects and director Craig R. Baxley's unimaginative style aside--but I think that's just what King likes, a director who leaves all the imagination up to King.

The writing was good. It's a "Monsters are Due on Maple Street" kind of story, that kind of Twilight Zone-ish essay story you don't often see anymore (I suppose I ought to finish watching Black Mirror).

Supernatural serial killer Andre Linoge (Colm Feore) psychically manipulates people into killing and taunts other people with dirty secrets from their pasts, setting them all up for a grand finale moral test.

Linoge turns out to be an ancient entity who, it's hinted, was responsible for the disappearance of the first Roanoke colony. As a conspicuously moralistic spirit he could be interpreted as a Puritan's nemesis or exterminating angel. You're left at the end wondering if the people in this town are exceptionally bad people or if secret rot is the common human condition.

Storm of the Century is available on YouTube.

Storm and Murder

These old Stephen King miniseries directed by Craig R. Baxley are consistently enjoyable. They always look cheap and Baxley has little to no creative flair, which I think may have been a good thing in King's opinion. But it's fun watching King's characters play out on screen in long form. Yesterday I watched the first episode of 1999's Storm of the Century.

Tim Daly stars as a sheriff in a small, northeastern coastal town bracing for a massive storm. Meanwhile, a sinister man with monster teeth comes to town and starts killing people.

This guy somehow knows about all the secret crimes people have concealed in their pasts. King gets a lot of nice tension out of the hazardous situations involving people who might deserve a comeuppance.

It's a nice, cosy watch. I think I might have enjoyed it more on a long, lazy day during winter vacation.

Twitter Sonnet #1702

A line of ghosts invade the hidden train.
Besiegers settle not for partial terms.
Museums amount to ancient grinning pain.
Escape we never shall from many germs.
The human heart was stuck in liver town.
For after schnapps, the belly shook a boast.
Frames abide to chop the forest down.
The risk returned to bread, you're eating toast.
No cake was shaped of only syrup yet.
Determined eggs return the flying pan.
With safer yolks your breakfast's sooner bet.
A bigger meal attracts a larger fan.
Surrounding trees conceal the lives of birds.
The heart was washed away with heartless words.

Dream Contained

I've discovered another Stephen King movie is vastly underrated. 2003's Dreamcatcher may not be the best Stephen King movie ever made but I think it deserves better than its 28% Rotten Tomatoes score.

I really like the cast, for one thing. Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, and Damian Lewis play a group of old friends who also all have psychic abilities owing to an encounter in their childhood. In this, the story resembles numerous other Stephen King stories, such as It and Stand by Me. The twist here turns out to be an invasion of toothy alien eels that burst out of peoples' colons.

But not before giving them lots of gas, something Jason Lee's character laughs at as merrily as his breakout character, Brody, in Mallrats. If you're amused by fart jokes, you'll probably find this movie a lot of laughs. I tend to see farts as a mundane human function so I get bored of them quickly. That doesn't matter, though, because I don't think they're played wholly for laughs here. The reflex to see them as comedic helps put the viewer off-balance as they start to work more as a sign of these victims losing control to their bodies. It becomes a malevolent sign of the parasite asserting physical dominance.

I really like the interplay between the characters' abilities and the alien menace they fight. It almost feels like an X-Men movie except, since it's Stephen King, anyone can die at any time. Any resemblance the characters have to superheroes only adds to the horror when their fingers are getting chewed off or their guts exploded.

The dialogue isn't always great. William Goldman and director Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay is absorbing enough when plot stuff is happening but their attempts to make the four friends sound like regular guys fall flat. Lee tells a joke about a Meg Ryan movie that seems like maybe they were trying to tap into the sort of nerdiness Lee exhibited in Mallrats. But it comes off more like an insider reference from a screenwriter who's worked in the industry for a long time and has no clue how regular people process his work. The movie also never really justifies its title.

But I liked the alien design and Kasdan capably threads all the scenes together. Thomas Jane and Jason Lee are two actors very good at playing one, specific kind of guy, and they're not quite playing to their specialties here. Still, it was nice to see them, especially knowing how underutilised both have been throughout their careers. Morgan Freeman and the recently deceased Tom Sizemore also have nice supporting roles.

Twitter Sonnet #1697

A foolish phantom crossed the edge of dreams.
His paper boat absorbed the ink of night.
A darling face was nothing like it seems.
And so the Eyes of Green put out the light.
The pirate building sailed to take a yam.
A ruddy whale was miffed at spinning ships.
The gummy candy crossed the mental dam.
The ducal fleet is little glowing blips.
With shrinking foam, potato heads depart.
Decisive glass divides the tile space.
What fog condemns the shower crushed a heart.
For running deer we hid the monster face.
A Janus language clogged the mirror spark.
A pixel storm has turned the glasses dark.

The Love of a Car

For some people, the only peace they can find is by devoting themselves to projects, away from other people. That certainly seems to be the case for a young man in 1983's Christine. John Carpenter's adaptation of a Stephen King novel I haven't read is partly a nice, raw tale of teenage misery and partly an admirably balls out, violent car chase flick. It's the story of a living car who kills people--and I have to admit, I was rooting for her by the end.

Arnie (Keith Gordon) is a prototypical nerd. He even wears tape on the middle of his black rimmed glasses after a bully crushes them. Yet, the cruelty and insensitivity he suffers from in greater and lesser degrees from parents and classmates is credible. His parents going ballistic about the idea that Arnie would buy a car on his own makes sense, yet their anger also believably crosses the line to disastrously inconsiderate of Arnie's natural need to assert himself.

No, I don't think Arnie is justified in acting more and more like an asshole, but it's also completely understandable. When it comes to the car, I'm inclined to interpret her as something like a wild animal. I've heard in King's novel, the car is definitely possessed by the spirit of a man who killed himself in the car while in Carpenter's film its lifeforce is left totally unexplained. I like Carpenter's concept a lot better. It's far more interesting to study the car and try to discern the nature of its personality and limits of its intelligence than it is to just see some guy's personality in it.

It really is sweet the way she returns the--admittedly compulsive--affection Arnie lavishes on her. And then I also find myself rooting for her because, if you think about it, even if she has the ability to heal herself, it's kind of hard for a car to arrange just the right circumstances where she can kill people. She needs speed and tenacity. My favourite part is when she pulls out of a burning gas station, on fire, to go after the last bully.

That being said, I also really like Harry Dean Stanton as the police detective. I love how sure he seems to be that Arnie's lying about painting the car after it'd been vandalised. As though he's somehow intuited that the car is a demon with healing powers. Stanton completely sells it.

In addition to a lot of '50s classics on Christine's radio, the film also has a particularly groovy synthesiser score from Carpenter.

Christine is available on Netflix in Japan.

Normal Boys and Normal Peril

Four twelve year-olds embark on a journey to find a dead body in 1986's Stand by Me. Based on a novella called The Body by Stephen King, the film has some of the ambient menace of King's horror fiction though director Rob Reiner and his screenwriters made numerous changes to the story. It's a decent film with some exceptional child performances. I watched it last night because I'd talked about it with one of the teachers I work with. It seems to be popular among junior high school teachers here in Kashihara, I think partly because the underlying story is about kids being abused by parents, brothers, or other people in their lives. It breaks my heart when I meet a kid who I slowly realise is probably in an abusive relationship with his or her parents. I've seen they tend to have special relationships with some of the teachers and staffs of the schools who dote on them a little more. I remember a girl at one school who tended to have wounds on her legs she explained as injuries from falling off her bicycle. She walked with a kind of swagger and talked like a gangster and I thought of her when watching Corey Feldman's character. I like how Reiner doesn't zoom in on his mangled ear but leaves the camera on him during some unrelated dialogue as the narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) explains it's from his dad holding his ear to a stove. All four kids went on to be stars--along with Feldman is Whil Wheaton, River Phoenix, and Jerry O'Connell. They're all pretty good in this. The dialogue is entertaining, especially when they argue about things like the species of Goofy or whether Mighty Mouse could fight Superman. Feldman's assertion that it couldn't happen because Mighty Mouse was a cartoon and Superman was a real guy feels pretty authentic for a 12 year-old in 1959. Most of the dialogue feels authentic and, as usual for movies from the '70s and '80s, it's so refreshing to see actors with realistic skin. But I got a little tired of listening to the kids argue all the time by about the halfway point. The climax doesn't quite work as Reiner tries a little too hard to make the experience of finding the body mix with the personal issues of Wil Wheaton's character. The film would have been stronger if the kids simply found the body, talked about it, and went home. The stuff leading up to the climax, though, is mostly pretty strong. Stand by Me is available on Netflix in Japan.

The Fearful Zone of Potential

It was Christopher Walken's birthday on Sunday so I was in the mood to watch one of his movies. 1983's The Dead Zone was right there on my shelf so I watched that. It's with my other David Cronenberg DVDs and Blu-Rays--The Dead Zone is one I don't watch very often I suppose because when I'm in the mood for Cronenberg I tend to reach for Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, or Crash (not the Paul Haggis movie)*. In many ways, The Dead Zone is atypical of Cronenberg--it doesn't have a score by Howard Shore, employing Michael Kamen instead, and there's not nearly as many biological elements as Cronenberg's other films from the era. The lack of spirituality in his work has been commented on extensively and I've heard Cronenberg discuss his belief that the mind is not separate from the body; there's no ghost-like soul animating this flesh. So the story of a man who can see the future seems an odd choice as prophecy generally seems to have a spiritual or religious element to it. Particularly when, as in this case, the prophet in question foresees calamity that through his actions may be averted or is able to gain insight into crime or injustice he may in some way stop or find means of retribution for. It's hard to put down the implicit moral element to the randomness of the universe and maybe that's why I don't consider this a sterling example of Cronenberg's vision.

It's an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, an author who believes in God, whose work often features spiritual elements. I've heard people say they consider The Dead Zone the best adaptation of a Stephen King novel--generally people who consider Kubrick's The Shining a flawed work, though it's interesting to note that in both cases the director is an atheist auteur. We do never see any god or angel in Cronenberg's adaptation and I like how he plays up the strangeness of Johnny's ability. Whenever it manifests, it causes disruption and provokes fear in everyone present, fear and pain in Johnny himself.

At that point, Christopher Walken was probably best known for The Deer Hunter, he hadn't yet become the imitable icon associated with villainous roles he is to-day. But already he was making such remarkably weird choices with his lines. In one scene, his character, Johnny, is sitting down to a meal with his father (Sean Sullivan) which has been cooked by his visiting ex-girlfriend, Sarah (Brooke Adams). When she wonders whether Johnny's father will like what she's cooked, Johnny says, "I'll bet he will, he's fed up with my cuisine."

I'd bet you anything screenwriter Jeffrey Boam didn't imagine this line being delivered in a way anything like the way Walken delivers it. If I were looking at it on paper, I'd think it was Johnny's attempt at charming self-deprecation also meant to be encouraging or polite to Sarah. The way Walken delivers it, he waves his hands in front of him slightly and raises his voice adopting the self-consciously forced quality of a one-liner comedian. I almost wonder if this was Walken's passive-aggressive criticism of the line itself or if he was thinking of Johnny subtly commenting on the artificial normalcy of the moment since he and Sarah had just had adulterous sex before sitting down to this nice normal supper.

The climax of the film famously involves Johnny's plan to assassinate a presidential candidate played by Martin Sheen. It's a bold story to tell, particularly after assassinations and attempted assassinations of political figures had been regular occurrences in the preceding twenty years. It would almost be like if a new movie were made to-day that sympathised with a school shooter or terrorist. Mostly the impression I get from the film's take is what a frightening and unnatural thing certainty is. In what other state could one be so certain it's right to kill someone who is apparently doing no direct harm to anyone? Taxi Driver is a better example of how to treat the psychology of this subject realistically but as a fantasy certainly Cronenberg did much better with Videodrome, which was, incredibly, released the same year as his adaptation of The Dead Zone. What movie has exceeded Videodrome's brilliant depiction of technology transmitting first destabilising stimuli before imparting ideological certainty to the point that a previously ordinary man is turned into a killing machine? Well, now I want to watch Videodrome again.

*Cronenberg has spoken about Haggis' use of the title and he seems to regard it as an insult. I can't say I blame him.

Twitter Sonnet #1221

The counted coins became a tambourine.
A greenish mist prepared the room for sleep.
The brightest crickets start to softly sing.
A bliss awaits in blue and shady deep.
The line of candy carries up the stairs.
A gentle motor's heard across the street.
The eyes recorded minds in many pairs.
The shuffle sound was shoes on nightly beat.
The empty seats above the stage were packed.
No watch was set for boxes built of bread.
The bag had only just to-day been sacked.
The say had only just to-day been said.
In stages nets removed to show the whale.
A banquet starts beneath the gentle sail.