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Let's talk King adaptations! The brilliant: - Shawshank, obviously. One of the best movies of all goddamn time, let alone best adaptations of his work. - Stand By Me is another classic, I love that movie so much  - The Mist has to be the best adaptation of his horror work by a long, long way. The mediocre: - The Stand had its moments (IE: mostly just the first episode). Rob Lowe and Gary Sinise are the two best things about it by far. Randall Flagg looks ridiculous in his all-denim outfit. Are they trying to make him look like a badass? The awful: - The Lawnmower Man - how did this even get to call itself a Stephen King adaptation? It had nothing to do with the story! - Dreamcatcher - although I've heard the book is terrible too, so maybe it's faithful after all? Also, inexplicably, being possessed by an alien makes you talk in a British accent. The non-adaptatons: - Storm Of The Century was an original miniseries right? Anyway it's a bit slow but I really liked it. The things Stephen King adapted: - Kingdom Hospital - takes the hosed up, super-scary Danish black comedy and turns it into... loving trash. With gigantic armadillos.
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Jan 10, 2011 14:22
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King actually got his name removed from The Lawnmower Man movie since he agrees that it has absolutely nothing to do with the original short story. When I worked at a video store in 99 we actually had the old copy of the tape which still called it "Steven King's The Lawnmower Man" which a copy now doesn't say.
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Jan 10, 2011 14:37
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Hedrigall posted:Let's talk King adaptations! You're missing an obvious one for Brilliant (at least 'very good'); The Green Mile. Even if you have issues with the film or its length, it was made extremely well, just as well as Shawshank.
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Jan 10, 2011 15:28
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:You're missing an obvious one for Brilliant (at least 'very good'); The Green Mile. Oh I was just listing what I'd seen 
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Jan 10, 2011 15:42
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Ooh. Maximum Overdrive IT The Shining (two versions) The Running Man Silver Bullet Wildly varying in quality.
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Jan 10, 2011 17:21
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Sergeant Rock posted:The Shining (two versions) I am dumb for leaving these out, I have seen both! The Kubrick version is masterful. The miniseries version is "There was no miniseries version :I"
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Jan 10, 2011 17:24
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I liked 1408 quite a bit; how well was that adapted to the original story? Of the two endings I actually preferred the one where he survives and his ex-wife hears their daughter's voice on the tape.
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Jan 10, 2011 17:45
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I find that Stephen King's movies work best when he has little to nothing to do with their creation. Well, actually, Creepshow was okay--but his acting wasn't exactly Oscar caliber. I'm reading "It" right now, and it may very well be the creepiest book he's ever written. If not for Pennywise, then for every scene involving Beverley. The part in the dump where she walks up on the bullies lighting farts went way overboard. Jesus Christ, King. \/Yeah, I know it gets worse. I've heard the legends. OMG JC a Bomb! fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jan 10, 2011 |
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Jan 10, 2011 18:23
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OMG JC a Bomb! posted:I'm reading "It" right now, and it may very well be the creepiest book he's ever written. If not for Pennywise, then for every scene involving Beverley. The part in the dump where she walks up on the bullies lighting farts went way overboard. Jesus Christ, King. You're right. That part's pretty graphic. Please come back when you're finished
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Jan 10, 2011 19:10
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brylcreem posted:You're right. That part's pretty graphic. I haven't read it. What happens? I don't mind it being spoiled.
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Jan 10, 2011 19:47
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Rupert Buttermilk posted:I haven't read it. What happens? I don't mind it being spoiled. She fucks everyone.
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Jan 10, 2011 21:14
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Hedrigall posted:Let's talk King adaptations! As well as The Shining, you left out Carrie (pretty good). Shame the same can't be said for the TV version of IT. Tim Curry was good as Pennywise, but everything else about it was poo poo.
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Jan 10, 2011 21:21
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withak posted:She fucks everyone. Speaking of movie adaptations this, and Storm, are probably my favourite mini-series ones. Odd that scene was left out though, mm wonder why .. Rose Red meandered through the last hour or so with the Professor just running wild outside the house - actor had the nerve to die on set so they really couldn't finish his parts, shame it wasn't Nancy Travis - and the fat mothers boy just stank the movie up. Julian Sands was excellent though and needs to be in more movies. I liked the new version of the shining but the kid was annoying. It looked like they had to make him say his lines by poking him with a stick. He did perform masterfully in the parts where he had to sound like he was traumatised though and his acting ability probably helped. Weber was good though and did a good job of the transformation but the happy happy "That's what I've been missing" ending really really loving sucked.
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Jan 10, 2011 22:49
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Hemp Knight posted:As well as The Shining, you left out Carrie (pretty good). I have a soft spot for the IT adaptation because it was my first 'real' horror movie that I didn't feel compelled to turn off halfway. Yeah, that doesn't speak well to its scariness, but I don't think it was a pile of poo poo. That said I haven't read the book, and have been meaning to. Does the book really blow the adaptation out of the water? For reference I know about how they leave the sewers in the book, so I'm really asking more in terms of prose and specific literary devices that can't translate from film to book or vice versa.
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Jan 10, 2011 22:51
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The book is odd to read now. The modern setting being the 80s is as much of a period piece as the part set in the 60s. But the best parts of IT were the interludes where Mike was writing about Derry and all that good crapola Pennywise got up to. The fire in the black spot also has another King character in it and is a drat fine short story in itself as is the one that goes back to when Derry was still primarily a logging town. Also, more character development (of course) and the ending is really loving sad and a hell of a downer. Spoilers go here, avoid them: "Thanks kids for almost killing Bob Grey and then coming back and reconnecting and taking him out for me, now I'm going to make you forget how you were all misfits who found each other and had such a wonderful bond which I had to use so you could defeat IT and send you back to your lives like you'd never known each other - Love, The Turtle." The books worth it alone for the part where they originally meet Pennywise as children. Ben and the mummy, Beverley and the drain and Mike and Bill looking through the photos. Brrr that was creepy as hell. Oh, and the miniseries missed the best part. In The Shining, the hotel is haunted. In Bag of Bones, the cabin is haunted, in IT King goes well out of his way to show that the entire town is haunted and that's just another level of creepy and he knocks the idea out of the ballpark with some of the imagery. Local Group Bus fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jan 10, 2011 |
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Jan 10, 2011 23:09
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Well I think you just sold me on checking IT out. I've heard too many mixed things--spoilers included--about The Dark Tower and The Stand (though I'll probably read the Wastelands just in and of itself, does it work as a stand-alone?) to read those, but I do want to check out some real 'classic' King. So far I've got Salem's Lot and IT. Anything else that is absolutely can not miss?
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Jan 10, 2011 23:42
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The shining and if you want something more recent grab from a buick 8. Not many people liked it, but I loved it. First person multiple narratives, a mystery that is more about the people surrounding the mystery instead of the object itself and a wonderful statement about how people deal with grief and death and continue just going along with their life while the mystery remains ever present in the centre of it.
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Jan 11, 2011 00:06
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mind the walrus posted:(though I'll probably read the Wastelands just in and of itself, does it work as a stand-alone?) You can figure out what happened in the previous books, but a big chunk recalls back to the first book specifically and why events are going the way they are. Also, the book ends on a huge cliffhanger so be prepared for that.
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Jan 11, 2011 01:30
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Adaptations Two that have yet to be mentioned, at least on this page, are Needful Things and Salems' Lot. Needful Things, from what I remember, actually does a pretty decent adaptation with Max Von Sydow as Gaunt and Ed Harris taking on the protagonist role. Salems' Lot has been adapated as a mini-series twice. I've only seen the recent version with Rob Lowe. They updated the time frame, and let Rutger Hauer chew up scenery as Barlow. The only other difference between the book and this recent adaptation is the ending, which I want to say veers off from how King ended the book. Also, there was a direct to DVD version of Dolan's Caddillac with Christan Slater as Dolan and Wes Bentley as Tom Robinson. There's really no need to see the movie, unless you just want to see Christian Slater act like a supreme dick. I think the film adaptation sleazed up Dolan for effect. I want to say the novella implies that Dolan was into shady poo poo and a gangster, but it never really states what he was doing. The movie heightens this up as well as Robinson's grief.
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Jan 11, 2011 17:08
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I think anyone who hasn't read all of the Dark Tower books is doing themselves a disservice. Yes, the 5th and 6th are kind of suck but each have decent stretches of good story in them and noone will judge you for skimming through the bad parts. The 7th is also at least decent all through out.
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Jan 11, 2011 18:47
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I loved IT, it was one of my favourite books; I loved all the Derry interludes and the early stuff about Pennywise. I can't read it any more though because of all the weird sex stuff. I find this with a lot of horror books; there's often some kind of weird sex scene that doesn't actually advance the story at all. Anyone know why this is?
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Jan 12, 2011 01:40
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fishmech posted:I think anyone who hasn't read all of the Dark Tower books is doing themselves a disservice. Yes, the 5th and 6th are kind of suck but each have decent stretches of good story in them and noone will judge you for skimming through the bad parts. The 7th is also at least decent all through out. I honestly think that 5 is better than 2 or 4. And also that despite the Crimson King showdown, 7 is really well done. 6 is the only one that I found really dull, and even then it's short and not actively terrible so it's easy enough to get through it. The series really could have been just 6 books, though - pretty much everything that happens in Song of Susannah could have been condensed into a few dozen pages in Wolves of the Calla and The Dark Tower and not a whole lot would have been lost. I've said it before here but it does seem that people reading the series for the first time now, at a single go, are more willing to give books 5-7 a better opinion than people who started reading the series back in the 80s and waited like a decade for the last three.
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Jan 12, 2011 03:15
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The Gecko posted:I loved IT, it was one of my favourite books; I loved all the Derry interludes and the early stuff about Pennywise. I can't read it any more though because of all the weird sex stuff. I find this with a lot of horror books; there's often some kind of weird sex scene that doesn't actually advance the story at all. Anyone know why this is? Horror and sex are pretty much interlinked as themes though. A bad writer can gently caress up the link between sex and horror - James Herbert - but a good one can use sex to say something about what is happening to the characters. You have three levels of vulnerability: Physical, mental and emotional. I'd like a writer to be able to use all three if they are trying to get to me and having a standard sex scene in a horror novel would be pretty silly if instead the author can give it a twist that turns it into something that is creepy and non-standard. But it has to serve the plot or character development somehow. Throwing in a sex scene just to have a sex scene will make me dislike the book just as throwing in a wedding just to have a wedding will do. If it serves the story bring on the weird sex, bring it as dark as you can, but it has to fit the overall story. I'm thinking of Gentle and Pie in Imajica here (although not horror, the first sexual scene we experience has your standard horror twist involved) but also something like the sex scenes in Joe Hills Heart Shaped Box. At first it's about the kink because that is what the main character would like to believe he is all about and how he views the women he is with, but later on in the character arc the sex changes because the main character has changed as has his feelings toward his partner. I guess it just depends on the author and how well they use a sex scene. Koontz has them in there to establish a connection emotionally between characters and he uses it as a shortcut which is crappy writing. Barker and other darker horror authors use sex to show something about the characters that wouldn't be there without it. To bring Barker back into it the sex scenes in Damnation Game are a great example. The threesome on his night in London with an old friend is cold and clinical and depressing - he wakes up to her vacuuming the floor and just bails - but later on the scenes with the main female character are all about intimacy over physical need and Barker throws in a mind-reading evil that is there experiencing the sex (and disgusted by it) through the female character in an inverse manner to that first threesome. So, wow a lot of words, but sex and horror are interlinked. Both happen when we are at our most vulnerable and the good writers use it to illuminate that fact and the bad writers use it as a shortcut or just to roll around in the pulp of it (Herbert again.) Edit: Oh, and to answer your question that sex scene in IT seemed to be a case of Beverly subverting the almost-molestation at the hands of her father when he was charmed? Possessed? By Pennywise. Beverly and her father had a sick sexual dynamic running through the whole earlier parts of the story and I think King just hosed it up because King cannot write sex. I get the impression he wanted Beverly to have control over her actions and to choose to have sex instead of being accused of doing something she hadn't. And, of course, to set up the screwed up relationship she has as an adult. It's just creepy (not in a horror way) and that is where it falls down. Instead of leaving the reader with a sense of the re-established emotional ties between the losers who were lost under Derry and freaking out King just leaves us with a giant What The gently caress? because of either a) crappy writing or b) cocaine binges. Local Group Bus fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jan 12, 2011 |
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Jan 12, 2011 03:46
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Chairman Capone posted:I honestly think that 5 is better than 2 or 4. And also that despite the Crimson King showdown, 7 is really well done. 6 is the only one that I found really dull, and even then it's short and not actively terrible so it's easy enough to get through it. The series really could have been just 6 books, though - pretty much everything that happens in Song of Susannah could have been condensed into a few dozen pages in Wolves of the Calla and The Dark Tower and not a whole lot would have been lost. The Waste Lands is probably one of the best reading experiences I ever had. I tore through it in 1994 over the course of three days while I was home sick from school with the flu and higher than God himself on codeine. After that 4-7 were bound to be disappointments.
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Jan 12, 2011 04:34
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Wizard and Glass wasn't bad but I definitely think it was a misstep that killed any momentum that had been building throughout Drawing and Wastelands. Really didn't help that after that the series takes such a nosedive as King obviously cranks out the books just to finish them.
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Jan 12, 2011 05:04
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The Gecko posted:I loved IT, it was one of my favourite books; I loved all the Derry interludes and the early stuff about Pennywise. I can't read it any more though because of all the weird sex stuff. I find this with a lot of horror books; there's often some kind of weird sex scene that doesn't actually advance the story at all. Anyone know why this is? I'd like to think that King wanted to maintain an atmosphere of depravity and make the reader as uncomfortable as possible--so he crossed boundaries that nobody would have ever expected him to cross. I hope that's what he was trying to do, because any of the alternatives are not something I'd want to consider.
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Jan 13, 2011 21:53
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OMG JC a Bomb! posted:I'd like to think that King wanted to maintain an atmosphere of depravity and make the reader as uncomfortable as possible--so he crossed boundaries that nobody would have ever expected him to cross. I hope that's what he was trying to do, because any of the alternatives are not something I'd want to consider. The King newsgroup had a resident troll, Robert Whelan, who would scream endlessly that King was a depraved pervert who belonged in prison because that scene in 'It' was evidence that he had incestuous designs on his own daughter.
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Jan 14, 2011 00:47
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OMG JC a Bomb! posted:I'd like to think that King wanted to maintain an atmosphere of depravity and make the reader as uncomfortable as possible--so he crossed boundaries that nobody would have ever expected him to cross. I hope that's what he was trying to do, because any of the alternatives are not something I'd want to consider. Didn't he say as much in an interview? Of course it could also have been because he was high as gently caress while writing it as per usual.
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Jan 14, 2011 01:00
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Hedrigall posted:Let's talk King adaptations! In the long run it didn't: wikipedia posted:The film's original script, written by director Brett Leonard and producer Gimel Everett, was titled Cyber God and had nothing to do with King's short story. New Line Cinema held the film rights to King's story, and decided to combine Cyber God with some minor elements of King's "The Lawnmower Man". The resulting film, originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, differed so much from the source material that King sued the filmmakers to remove his name from the title.
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Jan 14, 2011 03:31
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Needful Things That had to be the dumbest final showdown ever and he used the world's worst plot device (i.e. demonstrating how hosed up the situation is by getting a character to murder an innocent pet) I haven't read a Stephen King novel since then. I don't trust him to not be an rear end in a top hat in his books
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Jan 14, 2011 06:21
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I just finished Full Dark, No Stars. I absolutely loved it. The shortest of the 4 stories, "A Fair Extension", was a bit ho-hum and the collection would have been just as strong without it... but I don't mean to complain about getting more stories for my dollar. The best would be either "Big Driver" or "A Good Marriage", both about women struggling to deal with a catastrophic change to their life, and the ways they take matters into their own hands. The collection's theme is "retribution", and it does pop up in all 4 tales, but the two stories about women do it better than the two about men. Actually, it's interesting, the retribution that the two men seek ("1922" and "A Fair Extension") can be objectively judged as reprehensible, while the retribution the two women seek can be seen as forgivably fair. I really, really recommend this book.
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Jan 14, 2011 06:40
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I'm a Stephen King junkie, and I've read everything he's published that I could get my hands on, usually, many times over. I started with The Shining when I was 10, and it's still one of the best, scariest books I've ever read. To date, the only SK books that I haven't read more than once are Cell and Dreamcatcher. I read Desperation a second time, thinking I'd enjoy it more after The Regulators, but I just didn't enjoy it much at all, either time. I think that for me, the biggest draw of SK books is the humor. In It, the dialogue & insults among the Losers can still make me giggle out loud. In the books I didn't like, that humor is missing. In fact, when I think of Desperation, the only word that comes to mind is "grim". In his best works, there's usually this thread of sunny optimism that offsets the horror & tragedy and that's what resonates, even when the story is fairly ridiculous. My favorites are It, The Stand, The Shining, Bag of Bones, Eyes of the Dragon, The Talisman.... well poo poo. Depending what's going on in my life at the time, the list keeps changing. But Dreamcatcher, Cell, and Desperation are just awful. Side note - I'm thinking of starting a general horror thread in TBB for reviews, recommendations, and so on. Would anyone be interested, or are there too many recommendation threads already? Note on the other side - there's already a thread for Joe Hill, if anyone wants to talk about his (freakin awesome) work.
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Jan 14, 2011 19:19
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Word to the wise, don't read The Shining when you've got a fever. I read it as a teenager when I had the flu and I spent the next week terrified to walk into the bathroom
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Jan 14, 2011 19:24
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Bad adaptations of Stephen King: 1408 Dolan's Cadillac The Langoliers The TV adaptations of The Shining, It, and The Stand are all okay, but not amazing.
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Jan 14, 2011 19:56
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The only Stephen King story that will never ever be adapted in any way is Dedication.
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Jan 14, 2011 19:58
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April posted:Side note - I'm thinking of starting a general horror thread in TBB for reviews, recommendations, and so on. Would anyone be interested, or are there too many recommendation threads already? I would be interested, and I know LooseChanj is ok with it because I inquired a couple of weeks ago about starting my own horror megathread. I haven't gotten around to posting it yet because every time I try to type up a "sub-genres of horror" section and get to Lovecraft, I get discouraged because I know any mention of his name will spark a multi-page derail over the man's racism, but I can't in good conscience start a horror thread without mentioning him  .
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Jan 14, 2011 20:39
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cheerfullydrab posted:Bad adaptations of Stephen King: I thought that 1408 was pretty decent aside from some mis-steps (the fake-out where he thinks he made it out of the room, tiny Samuel L. Jackson in the refrigerator). The short story would have been over in about 5 minutes if adapted directly, they did a pretty good job building tension and mindfucking the audience over the course of the movie instead of just resorting to jump scares. It wasn't amazing but that fact that it tried the Jacob's Ladder approach to horror in the age of Saw made it a nice break. I do find it ironic that, despite his reputation as a supernatural horror writer, some of King's best adaptations (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption) are period dramas with no supernatural elements or really any overt horror.
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Jan 15, 2011 04:43
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IT was actually a pretty good read, and the movie was good. At least to me. But after all this Dark Tower nonsense King suckered me into reading I saw that there is a version of IT that, of course, plays off the Dark Tower. Somehow IT follows the path of the turtle or tortoise and now every time a character sees one of those things there starts paragraphs on how the character finds the turtle significant. Dark Tower just ruins everything it touches.
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Jan 15, 2011 08:45
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Acquire Currency! posted:IT was actually a pretty good read, and the movie was good. At least to me. But after all this Dark Tower nonsense King suckered me into reading I saw that there is a version of IT that, of course, plays off the Dark Tower. Somehow IT follows the path of the turtle or tortoise and now every time a character sees one of those things there starts paragraphs on how the character finds the turtle significant. Dark Tower just ruins everything it touches. I actually think that that was in IT first and he worked it into the Dark Tower to tie it into IT, and not the other way around. I might be off with that, though. I always figured it was King making a reference to Discworld, in either case.
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Jan 15, 2011 09:01
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Chairman Capone posted:I actually think that that was in IT first and he worked it into the Dark Tower to tie it into IT, and not the other way around. I might be off with that, though. I always figured it was King making a reference to Discworld, in either case. You are probably right, I may have just skipped over all of the Dark Tower references in my first read. At that point I was still unaware that if the Keyhole with a rose and a gun image was on the back cover it meant a Dark Tower connection. Before that little Steven King image micro started to appear on ALL of his books.
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Jan 15, 2011 10:05
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