Loaded Couch Potatoes

Another week, another sojourn into the wonderful world of Stephen King.

This week’s column is going to include a review of the just-aired Syfy remake of Children of the Corn, amongst other goodies.

But first…

The News

*     Fangoria.com has the details of an upcoming piece King has written for the magazine.  Due to be published in two parts (beginning with Fangoria #289, on sale in December), the article — titled “What’s Scary” — is a 7500-word essay: a retrospective critique of the last decade in horror films.

This sounds cool as heck to me; I’m going to pretend it’s a prelude to an updated version of the awesome Danse Macabre.

*     The New York Times has announced TimesTalks LIVE, a series of “intimate discussions with today’s top talents and thinkers.”  These live events will be simulcast in hi-def to movie theatres across North America.  (So far, the only announced participating theatre chain is Cineplex.)

Stephen King will appear as part of the talks with Janet Maslin on November 10, the day Under the Dome is released.

Check the TimesTalks website for ticketing info.

*     It seems to be missing the title and author info, and other such fine print, but the Under the Dome website has the (more or less) final cover:

It’s kinda gorgeous.  You can get a better look at it on the official site.

*     Lilja’s Library has an extremely tantalizing bit of info/speculation.

The section for The Dark Tower at StephenKing.com (King’s official site) has a big banner up top, featuring an illustration of part of a face, with the slogan “Ka Is A Wheel” and “November 2009″ on it.

This could be a teaser for the first issue in the new comics arc “The Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill,” which hits stores late in November, but Lilja speculates that it may mean a new Dark Tower novel is due to be announced soon.

USA Weekend writer Lorrie Lynch posted the following quote in her blog way back in March:

When we were chatting about his upcoming book Under the Dome, a novel with political subtext out in November, King said he had recently had an idea for a short story. “And then I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I find three more like this and do a book that would be almost like modern fairy tales?’ Then this thing started to add on bits and pieces so I guess it will be a novel.” That idea, according to King, is for a new Dark Tower novel, a continuation of his epic seven-part fantasy/sci-fi/Western series about a lone gunslinger named Roland and his ongoing hunt for the Man in Black. “It’s not really done yet,” King admits of his magnum opus. “Those seven books are really sections of one long uber-novel.”

Well, I just popped a nerd-boner.

Further details as they become available.

*     Lilja’s Library also posted details of a potential remake of “Quitters Inc.,” the King short story which appeared in print in Night Shift and was previously filmed as part of Cat’s Eye.  There is apparently a screenplay being written by Johnathon Schaech “for Samuel L. Jackson.”  Presumably, this means Jackson is attached to star.

Schaech is also the screenwriter of the Tobe Hooper version of From a Buick 8 which may or may not ever get made.  That’s one of my favorite King novels of the past couple of decades, and while I’m interested in any version, I’d like to see someone with a bit more talent box-office clout than Tobe Hooper attached as the film’s director.

*     Don’t forget: “The Dark Tower: The Fall of Gilead” #5 goes on sale this week!

Movie Review: Children of the Corn (2009)

Let me establish some credentials right up front:

I’m sure you can guess by the simlpe fact that I’m writing a Stephen King-related column that I’m, well, a Stephen King fan.  I have been since roughly 1987, and I’m primarily a fan of his written work.

That said, I also take a big-time interest in the movies, to the extent that I own every single one of them on DVD … except for the last couple of seasons of The Dead Zone, and those only because I keep forgetting about them. 

Heck, I even own the movies that are only tangentially part of King’s canon, such as The Mangler Reborn and Sometimes They Come Back For More and Creepshow III (still haven’t been able to force myself to actually watch that one).  Those movies are so far removed from King’s source material that it makes The Lawnmower Man look like the model of fidelity.

From all that, you can probably surmise that yes, in fact, I do own the entire Children of the Corn series.  Every last gobsmackin’ one of ‘em.  They’re all terrible, from the original right up to Revelation, but they’re all sitting right there on my shelf nevertheless, and I even watch them once every five years or so.

I do not say this lightly: the remake of Children of the Corn may even worse than the rest of the series.

It’s definitely worse than the original, and I can think of a couple of the sequels I may have enjoyed more, and frankly, there’s not a single one of the sequels I can immediately disqualify from contention as being better.

This thing is fucking awful.

This is no surprise, of course, but I’d hoped that somehow, some way, just maybe it could at least be passable.  Nope.  Not even vaguely.

The remake is directed by a fellow named Donald P. Borchers, who produced the original Children of the Corn as well as other such luminous titles as Meatballs 4 and Leprechaun 2. 

As a director, Borchers’ only other work consists of the Paul LeMat film Grave Secrets and Perfect Fit, which co-starred David Greico, who I am going to assume is Richard Greico’s shiftless brother.

Borchers “co-wrote” the screenplay with Stephen King himself; apparently, this collaboration consisted of Borchers revising King’s never-used screenplay for his own short story.  Hopefully, this was a heavy revision, as most, if not all, of the dialogue is awful.

The original story, of course, is not necessarily a classic, but it’s got style and tone going for it.  This movie has none of those things.  What it has is a lame attempt at social relevancy, coming via a poorly-considered Vietnam allegory which clearly wants to be an Iraq allegory.  However, since Borchers also wanted to be able to claim on DVD bonus features that this film was more faithful to the story than the original film, he insists on setting the film circa 1975, complete with ’00s-style interracial marriage and ’00s-style sundress.

Speaking of that sundress, it is occupied by Kandyse McClure, a greatly attractive woman who did some good work on the television series Battlestar Galactica.  She also played Sue in the underrated television remake of Carrie, so she’s hardly a stranger to appearing in King-related films made by people just because they owned remake rights.

McClure is stupendously awful in this movie, and as much as I want to lay sole blame for that at the feet of Borchers, I just can’t do it.  Even if he and his editor purposefully picked only McClure’s worst takes to use, it’d be on her to explain how she could be this bad in a movie.

To be fair, her character is written to be as unpleasantly shrill a woman who has ever existed on-screen.  And to be even more fair, this comes directly from King’s original story.

The key to making this sort of unpleasant marriage seem realistic onscreen is to … well, to play it realistically.  McClure fails miserably at this goal.  Her co-star, David Anders, fails, too, but not quite as miserably; this may be due only to not having to be as shrill as McClure is called upon to be.

Instead, he gets saddled with what surely must be one of THE worst lines of dialogue ever written: “Put that in your God and smoke it,” he says at one point.  It’s been too long since I’ve read the King story to remember if this comes from it, and I have no way of knowing if — should that not be the case — King might still have penned it as part of his original screenplay.  I really, really hope not.  Can we please get some sort of verification that this was a Borchers line?

Even worse, if you can believe that, is the portrayal of Isaac, the juvenile prophet and leader of the cult of children.  He is played here by Preston Bailey, whom you might recognize as Cody on Dexter.  (Then again, you might not.  I didn’t; IMDB helped me out there.)  Bailey is beyond awful.  Watching him in this movie is like what I imagine watching a production of the screenplay at your son’s elementary school to be like.  He’s that bad.  I don’t blame Bailey for this.  No child ought to ever be held accountable for his performance in a movie; that is something the director is in charge of sculpting, and Borchers clearly has no idea how to do so.

And somehow, Bailey isn’t the worst of the bunch!  There are other kids who sound as if they could get their lines out only by repeating what Borchers — or, more likely, some hapless and unpaid PA — was whispering to them from slightly off-camera.

The only cast member whose performance almost works is Daniel Newman, who plays Malachi.  He’s about a decade too old for the role, and he’s not good, but he’s passable, and in this movie, that qualifies as a legitimate achievement; so I assume, using the transitive property, that he must be a talent to look out for.

There is not one single scare in this movie, nor does one single creepy thing happen during the entire film.  I would, in fact, go so far as to say that there is not one single moment that works, even within the microcosm of the singular moment in which it is taking place.

In a world in which The Mangler Reborn exists, I cannot honestly say that it is THE worst King-related film ever made … but it’s close.

Movies really don’t get much worse than this one.

Story Review: “UR”

Spoilers ahead!

This weekend, I finally got ’round to reading the Kindle-exclusive short story “UR,” which I found to be vintage King.

“UR,” for those of you unaware of it, is a short story King released exclusively through Amazon.com for the Kindle.  The Kindle, for those of you unaware of it, is a portable device used for purchasing, downloading, and reading e-books.

“UR,” therefore, is available only to Kindle owners.  That ain’t me, but luckily, I’ve got friends more up-to-tech-date than I.

There’s one big suprise in “UR” that I don’t want to give away even with a spoiler warning, and I won’t.  However, here’s the short/medium version of the story: a college English lit professor has a breakup with his basketball-coach girlfriend, who at one point has chided him for reading books instead of, like everyone else, reading off of the computer.  As a pathetic attempt to try and win her back — and also to impress his students and colleagues — he buys a Kindle from Amazon.

What he receives is indeed a Kindle, but it’s of a color the Kindle is not manfactured in, and when he turns it on, he discovers a section for “UR FUNCTIONS.”  This leads him to a function which allows him to purchase novels from alternate realities that do not exist in his own: Hemingway novels that his Hemingway never wrote, for example.

From there, things — as you might expect — begin to get creepy.

Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of this story.  I liked the characters okay, but the real draw was the situation: that otherwordly pink Kindle and its untold billions of novels nobody could ever know about.

I also enjoy the fact that while King’s story can be seen as product placement, it’s product placement in which the placement is available only to people who already own the product.  And for those people, the product becomes a somewhat creepier product than it might have been before they read the placement.

Leave it to King to create a commercial that makes people slightly afraid of the thing they already bought.

Most of the reasons I like the story, though, fall under the heading of “I don’t want to spoil that.”

I’m sure, despite its current exclusivity, that the story will eventually appear in one of King’s story collections.  That’ll be a good thing; it’s very solid King, and could rather nicely be a part of, say, Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

That’s all for this week.  Hopefully, next week will include nothing so dire as that goddam Children of the Corn remake.