King Things

Back when I wrote the Star’s Video File column every week, one of the fun things about the gig was finding connections between movies that had nothing in common but their street date. It was a fun skill to learn – and I just did it again yesterday, noticing that Walter Hill’s The Warriors and Jonathan Lynn’s Clue both take place over the course of a single night, and are constructed as ensemble pieces where the group is a collective protagonist.

If I’d had more time I would also have realized they’re also movies in which the characters are wrongly accused of murder. (Also, I don’t know that I mentioned they were both released by Paramount?) Anyway, this is the sort of thing you miss when you’re on the free tier. Maybe upgrade that subscription? It’s the holidays, give yourself a present.

Anyway, this week I was planning to write about wintry Stephen King adaptations, since Shout! Studios is releasing 4K upgrades of both David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and Dan Attias’ Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. But the Dead Zone disc has yet to arrive, so I have to pivot. Fortunately, Paramount is releasing the King-adjacent prequel Pet Sematary: Bloodlines this week … so let’s talk about movies that try, and fail, to capture what King does best.

Most people remember Silver Bullet, if they remember it at all, as that ’80s creature feature where Gary Busey fights a werewolf. Personally, I remember it for inspiring one of Roger Ebert’s most elegantly pissy reviews – the sort he stopped writing once he started redirecting his sarcasm into culture pieces. But mostly Silver Bullet sits pretty low in the King adaptation rankings, huddled for warmth with Sometimes They Come Back and The Mangler and Graveyard Shift.

The story, adapted from King’s thin novella Cycle of the Werewolf, strains to fill a feature, and the effects just aren’t that great given what audiences had been offered a few years earlier in The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, replacing the sinewy glory of the beast in Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations with a stiff Carlo Rambaldi animatronic.

The cast is strong, but the movie doesn’t make the most of it: Corey Haim is just sort of there as the heroic Marty Coslaw, and though Megan Follows does some nice stuff in the corners as his older sister Jane she’s mostly relegated to the sidelines. The deep and loving bond between Marty and Uncle Red (Uncle Al in the book) is hung entirely on Busey’s shoulders, and he works overtime to sell it. And Everett McGill’s lycanthropic Reverend Lowe is reduced from a complex antagonist into a one-note creep.

You’d think King’s skill with characterization – even in a tale as short and gimmicky as Cycle of the Werewolf – would be the easiest thing to carry over into a screenplay, right? And King wrote this one himself, so it’s even stranger that Silver Bullet should fall so flat. Maybe it’s just that King’s strengths are so purely literary: He embeds us in the lives of his characters, getting us to invest in their ordinariness long before the extraordinary stuff arrives.

The adaptations just don’t have time for that, setting things up as quickly as possible so we can get to what the producers think is the good stuff, and then goosing us with nightmares and jump scares so we don’t get restless. Cycle of the Werewolf let us see that Marty and Uncle Al are basically the same person, and recognize that in one another, and also showed us the slow corruption of Reverend Lowe from tortured victim to a genuine monster who contorts his faith to rationalize that God must want him to be a werewolf. You can look for that stuff in the movie, but you won’t find it.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines has a similar problem with getting the flavor right, though I’d argue that any adaptation of King’s 1983 novel is going to have great difficulty getting something cinematic out of it: The book is an internal study of parental dread and grief, where nothing happens for the first two acts and the third act just sinks into inevitable carnage. There isn’t even a villain, really, just a cursed patch of earth that, legend has it, reanimates any corpse you put into it. And even the legend says “Y’know, you probably shouldn’t do that.” But when you’re a desperate dad whose toddler just got flattened by a tractor-trailer, such warnings are easily ignored.

Written by King as a means of confronting his own anxieties about parenthood, the book is disturbing and unpleasant on a gut level that neither adaptation managed to recapture. At least the 2019 version tweaked the story so Louis Creed’s tween daughter Ellie was killed and resurrected rather than the much younger Gage, allowing for both a mid-movie surprise and a threat one couldn’t avoid by standing on a chair.

Bloodlines is a prequel to that version, with director Lindsey Anderson Beer (who shares screenplay credit with Jeff Buhler) setting the story in 1969 and focusing on a younger version of John Lithgow’s folksy Jud Crandall, the neighbor fella who introduced Louis to the tainted Mi’kmaq burial ground and told him that he’d both seen its power and learned to fear it: “Sometimes, dead is better.”

Remember when it was enough for a gifted actor to say something ominous and let it hang in the air? Well, this is the age of IP so here’s a whole movie that fills in the blanks for you, showing us that once upon a time Jud was a horny young man (played by Jackson White) deeply in love with a nice girl named Norma (Natalie Alyn Lynd) and happy to see his best friend Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern) get back from Vietnam. But Timmy isn’t acting quite like himself, and then there’s that filthy dog that takes a chunk out of Norma’s arm. What’s up in Ludlow? As King’s characters like to say: Three guesses what’s up, and the first two don’t count.

There’s really not much more to the story than that, though Beer and Buhler do their best to gussy up their thin narrative with fun casting choices. Henry Thomas and Samantha Mathis turn up as Jud’s parents, David Duchovny is around as Timmy’s well-meaning father and Pam Grier turns up to be Pam Grier, more or less. And when Jud digs deeper into the history of his poisoned town with the help of an Indigenous friend played by Blood Quantum’s Forrest Goodluck, we also get a labored flashback to the founding of Ludlow in the 17^th century, when the English first arrived and failed to heed the locals’ warnings. I guess that’ll be the next prequel, not that we actually need it.

We don’t need Bloodlines either, not really. Like Silver Bullet, it knows the notes of King’s storytelling but not the melody, and while Beer certainly makes more of an attempt to create a disquieting atmosphere in her movie than Attias was allowed in his, it doesn’t result in anything memorable or effective. It’s just there.

I’ll say this for Shout’s 4K release of Silver Bullet: Restored from the original camera negative, it looks cleaner and brighter than it has in decades, though that does have the unintended consequence of making the effects look cheaper and sillier than ever. The feature on the included Blu-ray disc has also been upgraded, and all the supplements produced for Shout’s 2019 special edition are carried over here – audio commentaries with director Attias and producer Martha De Laurentiis, an isolated score and audio interview with composer Jay Chattaway, interviews with McGill, co-star Kent Broadhurst and editor Daniel Loewenthal and a look at the effects. There’s also a new audio commentary with Eric Vespe and Scott Wampler of the Kingcast podcast. They get it.

Paramount’s Blu-ray of Bloodlines replicates the movie’s flat, digital sheen; this is neither a compliment nor an insult. Beer faithfully follows the 2019 film’s aesthetic of desaturated murk, only pushing against it in the flashback sequence, which has a little more life to it. Ironically. The supplements consist of five featurettes totaling nearly an hour of enthusiastic EPK material, all of which promises a more memorable experience than the film delivers. Sometimes, no prequel is better.

Stephen King’s Silver Bullet is available now in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Shout! Studios. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Paramount Home Entertainment – though the 4K release is only available in the US, for some reason.

In this week’s paid edition: The holiday gift guide becomes a Boxing Day shopping list, starting with the definitive four-disc special edition of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Upgrade that subscription, you don’t want to miss out.