This month I’ve done a pretty good job of picking out the best mid-level Stephen King pictures, the INCBIS’s (it’s not CARRIE, but it’s solid). I didn’t think PET SEMATARY would hold up very well, but I was wrong, this was another good one. Good job, PET SEMATARY. Here’s a treat.

It’s a relief to see a Stephen King story where the main guy is not a writer and his marriage is not in trouble. This is the story of happily married doctor Louis Creed and his family of 2 kids and a cat moving to a new town in a house right along a popular trucking route. The road is so dangerous there’s a large pet sematary (sic) nearby, so they start worrying about their cat Winston Churchill. Their worries are not unfounded. But also they should keep an eye on their youngest kid in my opinion. (implied spoiler)

So you got pets and children getting run over, a real fun time at the movies, right? But wait, there’s more. The ghost of a guy the doctor tried to help has been warning him in his nightmares about how he should not do this one thing which, coincidentally his across-the-street neighbor (Herman Munster) shows him how to do: he buries his cat in a Native American burial ground so it will later come back to life.

The cat does come back (the very next day, they thought it was a goner, etc.), but now it’s mean and its eyes glow and it smells like shit. Not sure if it’s cat shit or regular shit but the point is Church smells terrible. Not a fitting tribute to the noted statesman and orator. This zombie cat situation is no good, but at least Dr. Louis didn’t have to admit to his daughter that her cat was dead. So it’s a mixed bag. (more…)

Everybody loves dog movies if the dog is named Air Bud or is a descentdant of Air Bud, and he plays basketball or football, or rides a skateboard or wears sunglasses. But what if the dog’s sport was hunting, and furthermore what if his prey was THE ULTIMATE PREY – MAN. Same prey that Predator chose, in other words. Not so adorable now, is it?

CUJO is another solid Stephen King picture with a high concept about people with marital difficulties being terrorized, but for once it is not a haunted object that terrorizes them, it is a dog haunted only by a viral zoonotic neuroinvasive disease that causes acute encephalitis in mammals. Cujo got his rabies from a bat (the unsung villain of this piece, if you ask me) so now he’s kind of confused and taking his car chasing duties a little too serious. So when the mom from E.T. and the kid from “Who’s the Boss?” get stranded in their car on his property it creates a conflict. There is a strong disagreement about whether or not the dog should be allowed inside the car, basically.

Dee Wallace’s character is married to Daniel-Hugh Kelly, but having an affair with Christopher Stone (the man who put the Stone in Dee Wallace Stone). She just broke off the affair, but also her husband just found out about the affair, so both of the men are pissed at her right now. And the Pinto needs repairs, so she brings it out to the mechanic who owns Cujo and who, it turns out, is not available (i.e. dead). So the car breaks down in the driveway and there’s nobody to help.

Cujo is named after the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, played by Ving Rhames in PATTY HEARST. But the dog does not share those radical views. He just likes chasing rabbits and, sometimes, people. Like Bruce Wayne he stumbles across a bat cave and it changes his life forever. But instead of channeling the experience into good Cujo just gets slimy and bites some people to death. (more…)

To be honest I had written off the possibility of good Stephen King-based movies a while back. It seemed like that whole thing had run its course, but then I saw THE MIST and that was an enjoyable one. So I gave 1408 a shot, what the hell.

John Cusack plays a writer of haunted places guidebooks travelling around to allegedly haunted rooms, testing them, staying the night and writing about them. But he’s kind of a dick about it and doesn’t even believe in ghosts. And it’s indicated that something tragic happened in New York that caused him to leave his wife. But now he wants to go back to New York for the first time to stay in this room he found out about, 1408 at the Dolphin, where a whole bunch of people have killed themselves. And of course he gets in, the room terrorizes him for real, he learns about himself and explores the traumas of his life and faces why he left his wife. Spoooooky.

This is kind of off-topic here, but over the last year or so I have found myself in strong opposition to the sarcastic “really?” You know, let’s say someone is riding their bicycle on the sidewalk and they crash into you, and they say, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” You would turn your voice real snooty and seay “Really? You’re riding your bike on the sidewalk and you’re really gonna blame me for this?” That’s the sarcastic “really?”, and in that case it’s kind of justified. But more often than not the technique is being abused, used to feign incredulousness at things that aren’t that extreme. It’s overused. Some of my friends use it too much, John Stewart uses it too much, Saturday Night Live Weekend Update even has a whole segment based around it. Really? You’re really gonna do a whole segment called “Really?” I say quit it. (more…)