Desperate Dreams

While my ability to read anything longer than a comic book these days has pretty much evaporated, I still remain a loyal (if somewhat backlogged), Stephen King fan. I plan on bringing his latest (The Cell) with my on our trip to Florida next week. In the meatime, I'm catching up on viewing some stuff that was adapted from his works.

Desperation is an interesting novel by King. Published in 1996 as part of a marketing ploy in which Desperation and The Regulators (billed as a lost Richard Bachman book...Bachman being King's alter ego that was "outed in the 1980s). The two novels shared the same cast, just slightly askew (in one book a character would be a young man, in the other it was an old lady...for example). And like most of King's writing it had a very visual flair to it. I still have the image of the crucified cat burned into my brain (and not just because I'm a dog person who's allergic to cats). And I thought it would eb cool if they ever made one into a film that they could do the other using the same cast.

Anyway...at the end of May, ABC aired a three-hour TV movie version of Desperation directed by the King go-to-guy Mick Garris with an adaptation by KIng himself. The story starts off as a "typical" horror story about a psychotic sheriff who arrests and kills people for undisclosed reasons and evolves into a disertation on the existance of G-d and how "he" operates. The novel was a well crafted and sprawling piece with lots of character devlopment. The TV movie is a bit of a mess.

To make this story work on film it either needed to be a mini-series of about 4 or 6 hours, or an effective boiling down of the essence that ran around 2 hours. This seems to be trying for the latter, but doesn't quite succeed. The best example of this is the use of Matt Frewer as Ralph Carver. I'm a bit of a loss as to why an actor of his calibur took on a role that could have been completely removed from the proceedings without really changing anything. Same with Henry Thomas as Peter Jackson (he's dead within the first ten minutes and we don't really get to know much about him).

The casting works pretty well as Ron Perlman makes a forboding Sheriff Entragian and Tom Skerrit does a good job as the writer who's lost his way. But the story's main focus is young David Carver and Shane Haboucha doesn't quite give us what we need to believe in David as a character. At the end of the day, it's not a bad adaptation of a King novel, but it could have been so much better.

King's novels tend to be such rich tapestries of character and story that they are hard to adapt to film properly (in spite of that cinematic aspect his writing does seem to have). His short stories are another entity entirely. Sleek and direct, most of these are wonderfully crafted tales that are perfect for TV. Which is probably why TNT picked up an eight episode anthology series based on the short story collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes (although a few of the stories come from a couple of his other short story anthologies).

The series kicked off last night with one of my personal favories, Battleground, which finds hired assassin Jason Renshaw (William Hurt) receiving a package after killing the head of a major toy manufacturing company. The package contains twenty little green army men, a couple of jeeps and helicopters for them to ride in and a few other surprises. Needless to say, the army guys are there for revenge and Renshaw spends the night defending his apartment from a tiny invasion force.

Brilliantly directed by Brian Henson and adapted by Richard Christian Matheson this story is perfectly adapted to the screen. Running 11 pages in the original hardcover printing it fills out the 50 minutes of screentime (it ran commercial free on first airing) with a wonderfully suspenseful, dark and witty attitude. Matheson has not only updated the story (it was written in the 70s) to take advantage of modern technologies, he has stripped away all dialog from the original story. The tale doesn't need any exposition...it's all in the visuals and William Hurt is the perfect actor for that job. The effects are impressive for TV.

I haven't had a chance to watch the second episode Crouch End yet, but TNT will be airing two episodes back to back every Wedensday night for 4 weeks. The other six stories are Umney's Last Case, The Fifth Quarter, The Road Virus Heads North, The End of the Whole Mess, Autopsy Room 4 and You Know They Got a Hell of a Band. While it's cool to use Nightmares & Dreamscapes as an overall title, if you go looking for some of the stories you'll find them in other collections. Battleground is from Night Shift and both Autopsy Room 4 and The Road Virus Heads North are contained in Everything's Eventual. Let's hope these do well enough in the ratings to warrant more adaptations (like maybe a proper version of Children of the Corn).

That's all for now. Back next week with...something...

Be seeing you.