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Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (2006)
Dreadfully boring, not a good sign in horror or anything else...
Many reviewers have never read any of the Stephen King short stories made into these 45 minute pieces of torturous boredom. My problem was I had very much enjoyed "The Road Virus Heads North." Seeing it there on the screen as a tedious emotionally-hollow piece of garbage was the final straw.
I tried to get through the whole set but couldn't force myself to do it. Not everything King wrote was horror but he writes compelling stories and make you want to keep turning the page. These adaptations merely make you sleepy.
For the five of the eight that I could get through: 1) Battleground: This is the only reason it is a 2 instead of a 10. This one was absent any dialog and was an entertaining visual battle between hit-man Renshaw and the green army men of his last victim, toymaker Hans Morris. Intense and worth a watch. The same can't be said of the others.
2)Crouch End: A nod by Stephen King to his predecessor H.P. Lovecraft becomes second rate with terrible actors and bad visual effects. The newlyweds stumble into another dimension through a thin spot and encounter nightmarish things in this other place. There is nothing suspenseful about it and it goes on far too long.
3)Umney's Last Case: The fictional private eye and the writer who created him switch places after the writer loses his son. Escaping from reality, the writer regrets his choice by the end while the private eye tries to get back into the fictional world with no easy routes back. In 2006, William H. Macy (who is great in so many other things) actually got nominated for this hammy role. Its a cheesy character in many ways and feels forced. It is a fair episode at best.
4)The End of the Whole Mess: Howard Fornoy describes how his genius little brother, Bobby, destroyed the world. They altered the water of the world to make everyone more peaceful and end war BUT gave everyone Alzheimer's Disease as a side effect. TEDIOUS. The whole unwatchable episode (not sure how I got through it) focuses so much on describing the genius brother that the mass Alzheimer's Disease outbreak is barely shown.
5)The Road Virus Heads North: An author (played by Tom Berenger)picks up a disturbing painting at a yard sale and begins to realize that the thing in the painting is following him and intends to kill him. They added a subplot involving a colonoscopy and iffy test results... By doing this and a slight romantic subplot, they take a hard edged story about a man running from a monster from "the basement of the universe" into a tiring tale of mortality with the thing pursuing being unimportant until the end. BORING, NOT SCARY.
The Bottom Line: These did not transfer well from King's short stories. They were short punchy stories that were stretched too far in most cases. I know the End of the Whole Mess and Umney's Last Case weren't meant to be scary but the other three were supposed to be and failed miserably at it. They became the worst thing in horror: boring. If a story meant to frighten comes off as repetitive and boring it clearly isn't holding your interest as a good piece of horror does.
Short stories CAN become good television BUT Nightmares & Dreamscapes fails to do this.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Save yourself from the Wicker Man --- Spoiler
SPOILERS ALERT (if such a terrible movie could in fact be spoiled...) In October I set out to watch the greatest scary movies ever made. Searching the internet I found a list of 50 movies that included the Wicker Man. The synopsis suggested it had potential to be good but in watching it I learned the opposite.
The Wicker Man is one of the worst films ever made (more disturbingly, Hollywood decided to remake it with Nicholas Cage decades later). As a horror, mystery, thriller, or any other genre it fails. Even if you were to watch it as a comedy, given how bad it is, you would be disappointed given how dull it is and how its cheesiness just gets on your nerves rather than making you laugh.
Filmed largely in daylight, full of singing & dancing, lots of nudity while singing & dancing, and with the villains being too weird to unnerve the audience, there is absolutely nothing scary about say 99% of the movie.
Then comes the ending which has a slight touch of horror but it is not enough to redeem the movie and in fact makes the viewer even angrier with the makers of the film. Basically, the main character (Sgt. Howie) is a Christian police officer who goes to an island where a little girl has gone missing to investigate. He encounters a pagan populace worshiping ancient deities and comes to a the conclusion that the girl is to be the blood sacrifice to appease the gods and make the crop yields better next year.
The surprise at the end of the movie is that HE is to be the victim and the girl even helps to entrap him when he goes to rescue her at the ceremony at the end. In that moment you the viewer feel a great deal of sympathy for Sergeant Howie as he is dragged off by these deluded townspeople to be burned alive in a "Wicker Man" along with various animals in cages. Christopher Lee's character, Lord Summerisle, has pushed this ritual since he fears his town will sacrifice him if the crops fail the next year.
This moment is the only good part of the movie but it comes after suffering through nearly an hour and a half of utter crap. There is no suspense until the final moments and because of this you merely feel cheated AND furious at the dark ending. To be frank, the townspeople are extremely irritating and the Sergeant is an idiot (five minutes after arriving in the plane he knew something was wrong with these people yet he went UNARMED to the blood sacrifice to save the girl).
This movie could have been saved if as he was being surrounded, Sergeant Howie said 6 words: "Good thing I brought my gun!" That would have made the film a bit more like its distant cousin, Hot Fuzz. That is what Wicker Man is: An old version of Hot Fuzz with none of the qualities that make that movie a classic.
In closing, if you want a good movie with a small town conspiracy, try the comedies Hot Fuzz & Waking Ned Devine, the horror flicks Population 436 & Sleepy Hollow, or even the television series Twin Peaks. I'm sure there are other works I could mention that are far better. Save yourself from the Wicker Man!