Book to Movie: Quicksilver Highway (1997)

Book to Movie: Quicksilver Highway (1997)
Teleplay by Mick Garris
Directed by Mick Garris
Based on the short story Chattery Teeth by Stephen King and The Body Politic by Clive Barker

A lot of Stephen King fans loath Mikc Garris. They point to his work on Riding the Bullet and Desperation as just how bad a poor director can mess up a good story. I disagree with most King fans on the quality of Garris’s work. I think he takes some average tales and makes them better.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Quicksilver Highway. He took two average tales – one by King and one by Clive Barker – and makes average vignettes out of them.

The movie opens with a newlywed couple stranded along a rural highway. The groom takes off to look for a spare tire, leaving the bride behind to wait. It grows dark and the lady is getting scared. That’s when Aaron Quicksilver (Christopher Lloyd) arrives on the scene in a Rolls Royce towing a large Airstream trailer.

Quicksilver invites the young bride into his trailer to wait out her boyfriends disappearance in safety and comfort. The trailer is actually a richly appointed suite with fresh fruit and liquor. Once he has her inside, Quicksilver – a tale teller by trade – tells her the tale of the Chattery Teeth.

The script for Chattery Teeth stays very close to King’s vision of it. A traveling salesman purchases the pair of metal, mechanical chattery teeth which walk on little feet for his son. The contraption is supposedly broken.

He hits the road and picks up a hitchhiker who tries to rob him and steal his car. There is an accident during the struggle and the van lands on its top. The salesman is trapped in his seatbelt while the hitchhiker is preparing to carve him up. The chattery teeth come to live, taking down the hitchhiker then dragging him off into the woods.

Terrified of the tale, the bride bursts out of the trailer to see a pair of chattery teeth dragging her new husband off into the desert brush.

The second vignette opens with a professional pickpocket making his way through a carnival crowd, taking what he can lay his hands on. He stumbles across Quicksilver’s tent which promises macabre exhibits. He goes in.

Aaron Quicksilver is there, standing before a candle resembling a human hand. He proceeds to tell the thief so nimble with his hands a story about another man, who plied his trade with his hands until they betrayed him. The Body Politic opens.

Garris alters Barker’s story quite a bit. He makes the man with the traitor hands into a plastic surgeon who starts out by inexplicably dropping instruments and making errant cuts. It progresses from there to strangling his girlfriend.

As in the story, the hands have their dialogue while he sleeps. Right promises to cut off left, to liberate him so that he can raise an army of hands to take over the bodies of the world. The surgeon watches while his arms and hands, completely independent of him, cut off his left hand. The hand makes its escape as police and emergency personnel arrive at the house.

The surgeon is transported to the hospital and is placed in a room under sedation. The hand follows him and pretty soon, hospital patients and personnel all lose control of their hands which rebel and “free” themselves. The hospital is soon crawling with hands with murderous intent.

The hands make their way to the surgeon, whose right hand is regarded as the messiah by all of the liberated left hands. The right hand is still attached to the surgeon’s body, but the lefties plan to remedy that situation.

The surgeon takes off, proclaiming himself messiah. The hands all follow. He climbs to the roof and jumps to his death. All of the hands follow him blindly to his death.

Aaron Quicksilver wraps up his story, telling the pickpocket that there is no moral to the story. It’s just a story. The pickpocket finds that his hands have had enough and act on their own to get him captured by police.

Quicksilver Highway was entertaining television fare. It was awfully light on horror and left a lot of potential material on the table.

First, one has to wonder why Garris chose these two stories. Neither story is particularly great, but neither is bad. Both stories require a huge suspension of belief to work which make them bad candidates for screen adaptation. Both stories also contain an element of camp, and this is what is left on the table.

With Christopher Lloyd acting as the host, dressed in campy costumes and makeup, one assumes early on that this is going to be a campy take on two campy stories. My first impression was that this was going to be a television riff on Creepshow. I was disappointed.

Garris took his movie and the stories upon which they were based entirely too seriously. Both stories lent themselves so well to dark camp, but Garris goes for the straight scare. It doesn’t work because neither story is scary. Christopher Lloyd’s talent (as well as his excellent costume and his stateroom on wheels) are wasted.

There have been much worse adaptations of both authors’ works. Garris has done worse movies (Desperation comes immediately to mind). Quicksilver Highway was an entertaining movie to watch. But one cannot help but wonder how much better it could have been if Garris had taken his movie an entirely different direction, fully utilizing the talents of Christopher Lloyd.

Book to Movie: Autopsy Room Four (2006)

Book to Movie: Autopsy Room Four (2006)
Teleplay by April Smith
Directed by Mikael Salamon
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Adapted from the short story, Autopsy Room Four in Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Richard Thomas plays the leading role which calls for him to lie motionless on a table for most of the episode while providing tension building voice over as pathologists prepare to carve him up while he was still alive.

The short story is almost entirely interior dialogue by Howard Cotrell, a stockbroker who seems to have had a heart attack and died on the golf course. In the television version, we open the same way. Contrell is laid out on an autopsy table. Two pathologist and an obnoxious lab assistant cut off Cotrell’s clothes and begin the physical examination of his body before preparing the “Y” incision to open up his innards.

Thomas does his voiceover bit, screaming inside his mind while his body is unceremoniously tossed and turned. He knows that eventually, the scalpel and rib cutter are coming. This is all in the story.

Smith adds to King’s story by taking us to the moment that Cotrell hit his golf ball into the rough and is bitten by a snake King calls a Peruvian Boomslang. The venom paralyzes the victim and gives the appearance of death. An elderly doctor playing in the foursome behind him pronounces him dead on the course.

We also get a taste of Cotrell’s backstory which Smith weaves well into King’s tale. Cotrell was wounded in Vietnam when an anti-personnel mine tore up his crotch. Smith has Cotrell recall a romantic moment he shared with his wife that ended in his failure to perform. We learn that this sometimes happens to him because of Mr. Johnson’s war.

The two pathologists continue to poke and prod Cotrell’s body while Cotrell’s fear builds. They share a romantic moment over him and he’s forced to look on while waiting to be carved up alive.

In another scene added by Smith, Cotrell’s wife arrives at the hospital and wants to see her husband. About that same time, his golf bag is unloaded from the ambulance that transported him. The obnoxious orderly, Rusty, and another orderly get into an elevator with the golf bag. Rusty wants to steal the golf clubs, figuring that Cotrell won’t miss them. As he’s admiring them, a snake jumps out and bites the guy he’s riding with. Rusty subdues the snake with a golf club. Obnoxious or not, Rusty is determined to get to autopsy room four and stop them from carving up what he now knows is a paralyzed, but very alive man.

Cotrell’s wife is just as anxious to get there and makes her way past security to pathology. Meanwhile, the junior pathologist prepares the bone saw for cutting when the orderly and the wife burst into the room. The orderly tells them about the snake and a careful examination of Cotrell’s ankle reveals the bite. He is administered antivenin and comes out of his paralysis to the hugs of his wife.

King’s original story of course had Cotrell having an erection as the female pathologist probed his genitalia, examining his war wounds. Smith’s script cleaned it up some for television.

King’s story was tense. Smith’s story was black humor. King’s story worked well on the printed page. Smith’s story worked well on television. Forty four minutes of Richard Thomas doing voiceover while the pathologists did their thing would have been boring. Voiceover alone would not been enough to stimulate a television audience. King’s story alone would not have been enough to interest a television audience. Credit Smith for changing the tone ever so slightly and making this a fun episode to watch.

For my generation, it’s going to be impossible to see Richard Thomas as anybody but John Boy Walton. Although The Waltons does not stand the test of time and is not aired today, John Boy Walton remains iconic. I’d like to have seen someone less likeable on that autopsy table.

April Smith hit the mark on this episode because she’s a veteran of television writing. She started with that great seventies television show, James at 16. She also wrote several episodes of Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey.

Mikael Salomon gets credit for not lousing it up. He had a good story, and good script, and a good cast. He made a good episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes. Salomon also directed the 2004 remake of ‘Salem’s Lot, giving him some experience in directing King’s work.

It would seem that experience paid dividends. Too many directors want to tinker with the story too much. Salomon directed an updated version of 'Salem's Lot, but he did not lead the characters astray from King's original development of them. He exhibited the same wisdom in his installment of the TNT miniseries.

Book to Movie: The Road Virus Heads North (2006)

Book to Movie: The Road Virus Heads North (2006)
Teleplay by Peter Filardi
Directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan
Based on the short story The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King from Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales

In my previous reviews of episodes of TNT’s miniseries, Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, I’ve noted how teleplay writers found creative ways to pad scripts to fill out stories so that they could fill 44 minutes of television with a meaningful story. In The Road Virus Heads North, the story is padded in a way that tries to make it a meaningful metaphor for growing older and confronting the health problems that come with it. It’s not done well and Filardi only feints at it, leaving the King story intact and therefore not ruining it for the television viewer.

Tom Berenger plays Richard Kinnel, horror author with an obsessed public. In King’s story, he’s on his way back from a book signing when he happens upon the haunted painting. The story opens with Kinnel arriving at his signing. Mimica-Gezzan makes sure to pack in every cliché about horror fans and makes them into obsessed lunatics who invariably scream at him, “Where do you get your ideas?”

After the convention, Kinnel visits his proctologist where he gets the news that he has some pre-cancerous growths on his colon. He takes the news stoically and heads north from New Hampshire to his home in Derry, Maine.

He arrives at the yard sale and the King story kicks in just as King wrote it. Kinnel admires the painting and hears the sad, twisted tale of its artist. He purchases the painting, puts it in the back of his car, and continues north.

He makes the stop at his aunt’s house. She views the painting and is appalled. She says it’s evil and that Richard ought to dump it in the river on his way home. It is here the Kinnel first notices that the painting has changed. He notices that the driver has turned so that a tattoo on his left arm is visible.

Krinnel continues north and takes his eyes off the road to check the painting for any additional changes. He loses control of his car in a construction zone, nearly kills some construction workers, and apparently tears off his exhaust system. After pausing to catch his breath, he continues north.

I know it has nothing to do with the story, but that scene really hurt the credibility of the story for me for purely scientific reasons. We blatantly see Kinnel’s muffler and exhaust pipe on the road as he pulls away from the near- accident scene. Yet the car is not any louder. It now smokes horribly, but there was no damage done to the engine or radiator. Technical details, I know. But getting technical details correct are important.

He stops at a gas station to fill up and dumps the painting in the river, just as in King’s story.

King makes reference to Kinnel’s ex wife who now publishes newsletters on UFO sightings and other worldly events. Firaldi, for no apparent reason, incorporates her into the story in a completely gratuitous scene. Kinnel stops to see his ex wife who lives in a trailer park. She is dog sitting for him. It is then he finds the painting has made its way back into his car and the driver is definitely moving north as Kinnel recognizes the new landscape in the painiting. He pauses long enough to get a New Age healing session with incense and crystals from his flaky ex wife, played by Susie Porter who is easily young enough to be Berenger’s daughter.

He gets home and we pick up the King story again. At this point, Richard is terrified by the painting and sets it on fire. As it burns, he hears the rumble of a muscle car pulling into his driveway. He opens the door and confronts the long haired menace that is the road virus. He tells the road virus, “You’re the disease growing in my body!” He goes on to reason with the driver that to kill him is to kill himself. The man driving the classic Pontiac Firebird turns to him and says, “I’m not your damn disease, you egomaniac! I’m what you don’t know!” He suddenly wakens from this nightmare in his shower.

Kinnel sees the news report about the woman at the garage sale who was decapitated. He immediately calls his aunt to make sure she’s ok. Just as in the story, she’s gone to the movies and calls Richard back later to tell him she’s ok. As he hangs up the phone, he again hears the rumble of Detroit muscle in his driveway and sees the Pontiac’s headlights in his driveway.

He retreats to his bedroom, but his dog escapes just as the driver walks into the house, brandishing a knife. He exits the bedroom and hears his dog’s barks cut off with a sharp yelp. He looks up on the wall and sees the painting hanging there with the driver silhouetted in his doorway. He rips the painting from the wall and throws it from the open staircase to the floor below, telling the driver he can have it. He tries to retreat, but slips on a paperback copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and falls down the steps. He lands on the painting. It now shows the interior of the car. Just as in the story, he looks at the knife brandishing demon on his doorstep and says, “I think I’m going outside now.”

King’s story about a haunted painting is strong enough to carry it through Filardi’s attempts to booger it up with metaphors. It’s strong enough to carry it through pointless padding. The reason the story works despite Filardi’s efforts to tinker with it is because Filardi keeps King's intact. Most of the dialogue is direct from the story. None of the story's elements were eliminated and it was a strong story.

The Road Virus Heads North is an example of how, sometimes, a good story can overcome bad screenwriting and entertain despite the efforts of an overly ambitious screenwriter to put his own imprimatur on it and make it a “meaningful metaphor.”
Filardi, who did a decent job modernizing and adapting 'Salem's Lot for TNT has not written for television or the big screen since. . .

Director Sergio Mimica Gezzan, who was an assistant director on notable films such as Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and Minority Report truly makes a silk purse out of the sow's ear that was this script. Berenger's understated performance was just what was needed to keep this misconceived metaphor from becoming hoky and foolish. Despite all it's shortcomings, it still made for decent television.

Book to Movie: The Fifth Quarter (2006)
From the miniseries, Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Alan Sharp
Directed by Rob Bowman
Based on the short story, The Fifth Quarter by Stephen King

Sharp took Stephen King’s shoot ‘em up tale of robbers turning against each other and wrote a donut around it to fill it out for television.

The short story is about a recently released ex-con whose former cell mate is shot by his coconspirators in a robbery. The dying man gives him a quarter of a map that leads to the loot taken in the robbery. Our hero then goes to confront the other three conspirators to get their quarters of the map. He shoots it out with them and gets the map. That is the story.

In Sharp’s teleplay, our hero is Willie Evans, recently released from prison to return to his wife and son who live in a trailer. The former cell mate has been shacking up with Evans’ wife, but vacates prior to Evans’ return. Evans promises his wife he’s going to stay on the straight and narrow.

One night, the former cell mate shows up at the trailer, gutshot by his former compatriots. He tells Evans his tale and gives him the piece of the map. Evans sets out to settle the score and gain the pieces of the map to ensure some financial security for himself and his family.

Here we enter King’s story as it was written. The choreography of the gun battles is about what King put down on paper. Evans, who introduces himself as the Fifth Quarter, kills the other three and puts the map together. However he is wounded in the process.

The police arrive the next morning looking for the cellmate. Evans is trapped. He gives the map to his wife and tells her to figure it out. He leaves with the cops, on his way back to prison.

The wife studies the map and tries to discover which of the coastal islands it might represent. As she does this, she sees a flyer for the amusement park where she works. As it turns out, the loot is hidden in a pirate island ride. She goes inside and finds the lock box with the money buried under the fake treasure of a pirate’s chest.

There were no supernatural elements in this story and the King story was rather pedestrian. I like the backstory, character development, and motivation Sharp supplied King’s character. Had this not been incorporated into the teleplay, we’d have watched 44 minutes of crooks shooting at each other inside various dwellings. That doesn’t make for good television.

Love triangles, crooks trying for that one last big score with the noble intentions of taking care of his family, and bad guys trying to screw him out of it while killing his best buddy – that’s good television.

Kudos to Jeremy Sisto for not turning Evans into a caricature of a tough guy. Evans is one tough hombre, but he’s soft spoken. He loves his wife and kid and is pained by the thought of his wife sleeping with his best friend while he sat in the stir.

This was not one of my favorite stories in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. Congratulations to Alan Sharp who pulled off the rare feat of taking a King work, reworking it, and making it better.

Book to Movie: Umney’s Last Case (2006)

Book to Movie: Umney’s Last Case (2006)
Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Writer: April Smith
Directed by Rob Bowman
From Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

As with most of the stories adapted in the TNT miniseries, Umney’s Last Case was expanded a great deal to give the character and the plot more development to make for a meaningful one hour episode of television. Writer April Smith sets up Umney’s disorienting experiences on the nightmarish day he finds out who he is, then takes the story in a different direction, giving it a major injection of romance and diverting it from the dark ending King’s story contained.

The King story starts with Umney starting his day and finding that the world as he knew it to exist, day after day, was changing. The newspaper boy was going to quit hocking papers and get the surgery he needed to be able to see again. His favorite restaurant closed. His pal, the elevator attendant was retiring. The floor of his building where he kept his office was being repainted and his secretary quit.

The screen treatment first takes us through what is a normal day for private detective Clyde Umney. He gives his favorite blind newspaper hawker a dime for a three cent paper. He breaks bad news to a wife who suspects her husband is cheating. He plays grab ass with his secretary before heading off to his favorite restaurant to shoot it out with some bad guys in 1938 Los Angeles.

After having established what was a normal day for the private detective, Smith then brings King’s story into the mix and the action unfolds just as it did in his story with Umney learning that he’s nothing more than a character dreamed up by a writer of detective noir fiction.

That writer, in King’s story, came to claim Umney’s life because he lost his wife and son in a tragic accident. In Smith’s teleplay, only the son has died, having drowned during a house party. Sam Landry and his wife are now distant. Landry can’t write anymore and wants to check out of his 1990s existence.

In the story, Landry, who is God himself to Umney for having created him and having complete control over his life and actions, takes over Umney’s life while Umney is sent to the 1990s. Umney begins to master Landry’s lap top computer and has a few story ideas of his own the new Clyde Umney probably isn’t going to like.

In Smith’s story, Umney goes to the 1990s to find Landry’s wife there. Umney tells her who he is. At first, she does not believe, but Umney’s lusty behavior, antiquated speech, and tough guy attitude soon convince her and she falls in love with Umney.

But Clyde Umney is not Sam Landry. Clyde Umney plays grab ass with the girls and decides to play grab ass with the pool cleaner. Linda Landry is devastated. Umney tells her he is who he is and he’s not Sam Landry.

Meanwhile, Sam Landry, meek and mild writer, is struggling to make it in 1930s Los Angeles. He can’t speak the language. He may write detective stories, but he can’t think like a detective. Most importantly, he’s not a tough guy.

Finally, Umney figures out the computer and rights (writes) things and everyone is where they belong. Landry and his wife rediscover their marriage and everybody lives happily ever after.

William H. Macy’s brilliant duel performance as Clyde Umney and Sam Landry saved this episode from being a disaster. Macy, playing to very different characters face to face, really brings to life King’s vision of his story. It was entertaining to watch Macy engage himself in conversation and interact with himself as two different people.

The romantic ending was not a good idea. Smith didn’t do a bad job of writing it, but King’s dark ending would have worked better. Watching Landry suffer through the trials and tribulations that Umney could have dreamed up and hacked out with the laptop would have been entertaining.

Of all of the episodes, this was the weakest. Thank God for William H. Macy’s stellar performance.

Book to Movie: You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (2006)

Book to Movie: You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (2006)
From the television series: Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Mike Robe
Directed by Mike Robe
Based on the story from Nightmare and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Mike Robe’s screenplay is true to King’s vision of a town dominated by narcissistic rock stars in need of constant admiration and adulation. However, Robe dresses it up just a little for television. Overall, his teleplay is well done.

Just as in the story, Mary and Clark Rivingham are lost in the back woods of Oregon on a remote road. They are driving a vintage 1965 Mustang, perhaps to lend the story a little more of that old time rock and roll feeling.

When they stop to get their bearings, for some inexplicable reason, while Clark is out of the car investigating their surroundings, Mary looks in the vanity mirror and sees herself old and decrepit. No reason or context is provided for this vision and it is no more than a little window dressing to spice up the horror.

They continue down the rutted dirt road until they happen upon the town bearing the name Rock and Roll Heaven, OR. As they sit pondering the town, an old fashioned hippy bus, decked out in psychedelic paint, passes them as hippies cheer and jeer. They start to enter the town with a disco CD in playing. The disc ejects itself and melts on the console. No disco in Rock and Roll Heaven!

From then on, events play out just as they did in the story. Ronnie Van Zant and the Duane Allman are the town toughs, leering at them as they enter the city which is picture perfect. They go to the diner and Clark recognizes the waitress as none other than Janis Joplin. While they eat, Janis starts up the juke box and plays one of her own hits, while she lip synchs for their amusement.

They try to make their escape with Ricky Nelson in hot pursuit. Clark runs Ricky down not once or twice, but three times. But he keeps getting up. Finally, they get on the road and leave Rock and Roll Heaven.

But just a few miles up the road, the hippies have laid a trap. The bus is parked across the road and the Mustang slams into it. Jimi Hendrix steps off the bus and lays down the opening chords of the Star Spangled Banner as Mayor Elvis Presley and Sheriff Otis Redding approach from behind in a cop car. They are taken back to town.

There, they join the audience for what promises to be a really big show featuring the legends of rock and roll – a show that might go on constantly for a year or more. The audience looks on, passive and forlorn, except for Clark. He’s excited to see the show. A fan of that old time rock and roll is Clark Rivingham.

This was the last of the series to air and it went out on a high note. Congratulations to Mike Robe for not screwing up what was probably the most entertaining and creative of the stories from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection.

Book to Movie: The End of the Whole Mess (2006)

Book to Movie: The End of the Whole Mess (2006)
Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Larry Cohen
Directed by Mikael Salomon
Based on the Stephen King short story from the collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Two veterans of bringing Stephen King to the screen came together and created this hour long television show based on one of the better works from King’s 1993 collection of short stories.

Cohen was the first man to take King from the book to the screen, penning the script for the Brian DePalma film version of Carrie in 1976. He also scripted the television miniseries, It, and The Tommyknockers.

Salomon directed the 2004 television miniseries, ‘Salem’s Lot.

Cohen sticks with King’s story, padding it here and there to make it move. The main deviation from King is the main character is not a writer, but a film maker. So, instead of sitting down to write it all, he sits before a camera and recites it. That’s a good change that saved us from a number of “John Boy Walton” moments where we see the writer writing with the actor doing voiceover.

King's story is cerebral and none of that is lost in Cohen’s script. This may have turned off those expecting to see a King monster movie, but to more discerning audiences who enjoy subtlety and nuance in their horror, Salamon directing was masterful. Particularly subtle, yet chilling, is the television reporter stumbling over her script as dozens of happy, mindless people look on from behind.

The end of the story is rather anti-climatic and may not have made for the best television. But taking the story any place else other than where King took us at the end would have belied story. There could be no dramatic end; just a slow fade.

The Nightmares & Dreamscapes miniseries was well executed with some first rate talent doing the writing and directing in the eight episodes that were drawn from stories published in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and Night Shift. As good as this episode was, it ranks in the middle of the pack. This was a good show and well worth the time spent watching the entire eight episode run.

Book to Movie: Crouch End (2006)

Book to Movie: Crouch End
From the made for television miniseries Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Teleplay by Kim LeMasters
Directed by Mark Haber
Based on the story Crouch End from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King


In the notes section of his book of short stories, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Stephen King says he wrote this story for an anthology of Lovecraftian stories written by modern authors. In telling his story, King retains his own voice, but does clearly establish a Lovecraft feel and setting. This episode of TNT’s stellar miniseries felt more Serlingesque than Lovecraftian.

The story opens in a British police station with a woman telling a bobby that her husband has disappeared. We then flash back to a very proper and well to do American couple in a posh British hotel, dining at the finest restaurants and enjoying the finest coffee houses, wearing nice clothes and expensive jewelry. They are invited to have dinner with our hero, Lonnie Freeman’s, law partner who handles their British affairs. He lives in a London neighborhood called Crouch End.

The first cabbie they find won’t take them there. They finally do find a cabbie to take them to Crouch End. The cabbie warns them to beware in Crouch End because unusual things happen there. He goes on to explain about thin places in the universe where other creatures leak through. He says druids used to perform rituals in the area they called Slaughter Towen.

They arrive in Crouch End and immediately encounter the two children who appear in the King story. It is broad daylight, but there are no cars or people. The neighborhood looks cheery enough, but it is deserted (which is the major deviation from Lovecraft). It looks like the strange little town that Serling used to show in so many episodes of his show. It’s picture perfect, but something sinister lurks beneath the surface.

From there, the script deviates wildly from King’s conception of how to tell a Lovecraft story. Lonnie is yanked through a hedgerow and disappears into the yard of an abandoned mansion. When he returns, he is a little off. From there, the couple run maniacally through the town which is more dilapidated now, searching for a main road.

The finally come to a tunnel and Lonnie tries to lure Doris in. When she won’t go through the tunnel, he tries to come out, but some tentacled monster grabs him and takes him to another world.

Suddenly, Doris can hear traffic. She runs until she finds an old couple. When she tells the first part of her story, the old man says, “It’s happened again!” and the old woman tells her, “We want no part of you if you’ve been to the Towen.” They point her in the direction of the police station and flee from her presence.

The story ends with her telling her story to the police.

We don’t get King’s revealing ending with the veteran cop filing the report in a special drawer full of missing person cases from Crouch End.

IMDB.com reviewers only gave this episode a rating of 6.0. I thought it deserved higher. It had some weaknesses like the three street toughs inexplicably morphing into werewolves in a flash scene and the repeated use of those “flashes” of horror that seemed to have no other purpose than to make one jump and do not serve the plot.

But Eion Bailey’s portrayal of Lonnie after he escapes the mansion yard injects a great deal of uncertainty into the viewer’s mind once you know that we are completely deviating from the King narrative. He seems to be the same Lonnie, albeit badly rattled. Yet, he’s a bit off, becoming irrationally pissed about losing his sport coat while being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare. He seems to want to escape, yet there’s something a little off about him.

There's also the transformation of this very stuffy, proper couple at the beginning of the story to the distraught, frantic, and filthy couple at the end. They start the story in beautiful surroundings with beautiful trappings, only to find themselves at the end in a filthy tunnel, surrounded by filth and horrific creatures.

When I say the town was closer to Serling than Lovecraft, that is not a criticism. Lovecraft is an acquired taste. Serling is meat for the masses. I love both and for the TNT audience at 9:00 pm, the Serling look of the town was better suited. The Crouch End of this story was like Lonnie. It had a veneer of normalcy about it, but something was wrong underneath.

The duo who created this episode must have immediately leaped at the chance to work with Stephen King material. The screenwriter, Kim LeMasters, was the executive producer of the television show, Silk Stalkings and his lone genre credit was the abortion of a movie, Wild, Wild West. The director, has a limited Hollywood portfolio with one sci-fi movie to his credit in Alien Cargo.

This series did not have a bad episode. There were many episodes better than this one and Lovecraft fans expecting to see something of their favorite author are going to be disappointed. With its shortcomings, Crouch End still made for decent television and is worth the 44 minutes I invested in watching it.

Book to Movie: Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)

Book to Movie: Dolan’s Cadillac (2009)
Directed by Jeff Beesley
Screenplay by Richard Dooling, based on the short story, Dolan’s Cadillac by Stephen King

In 2009, director Jeff Beesley took Stephen King’s long short story, Dolan’s Cadillac, expanded it, and made it into a surprisingly solid movie.

The King story is the second half of the movie. The first half is the set up that King glosses over to get us to the action. Robinson’s wife, Elizabeth, is out horseback riding in the desert when she stumbles onto our villain, Dolan, brokering a deal for Mexican women. She watches as Dolan (portrayed by Christian Slater), unhappy with the merchandise, kills the delivery men and some of the women. She starts dialing 911 when they notice her. They shoot and she flees, dropping her cell phone. Dolan’s people find the cell phone and take it with them as they tool back toward Las Vegas in Dolan’s armor plated Cadillac Escalade.

A few days later, Robinson and Elizabeth arrive at home to find a dead Mexican woman in their bed; her lips are sewn shut. Dolan has sent them a warning.

Undeterred, Elizabeth goes to the feds and reports what she saw. The FBI is thrilled to have someone that can testify against Dolan, against whom they’ve been trying for years to build a case. They put her in protective custody at a Las Vegas hotel and begin building their case.

Meanwhile, unhappy with his Mexican merchandise, Dolan starts importing women from Europe. While he is happier with the European “merchandise” he is concerned about profit margins on each load. He tasks his people with finding a way to increase profit margins on each load.

Elizabeth and Robinson go stir crazy in their hotel, waiting for the feds to build their case. One night, Elizabeth decides to slip out. Robinson gives chase, knowing that slipping their protective detail will lead to a bad end. He arrives outside the hotel just in time to see Elizabeth blown up as she opens the door of their car.

With King’s backstory properly revealed on film, the King story starts. Robinson goes through the motions of living, but is empty without his wife. He begins following Dolan. He purchases a 44 magnum and prepares to assassinate Dolan as he leaves his Las Vegas suite. As he waits, another group with assassination as their goal shows up and Dolan watches as Dolan takes refuge in his armored Escalade while his men cut down the assailants with cold efficiency.

In King’s story, at one point, while following Dolan, Robinson ends up right on Dolan’s rear bumper at a detour – the detour that gives him the idea for his revenge. In the story, Dolan doesn’t notice him. In the movie, Robinson stops at a rest area for a bathroom break and Dolan and his men show up. The put a beat down on him and Dolan tells him he is too weak and pitiful to kill. He spits in Robinson’s face as he lies writhing on the bathroom floor. Before departing, Dolan delivers a cryptic lecture on the arc of descent, meant to be a warning to leave him alone.

Robinson returns to his life and his classroom as depressed as ever. He is pondering the arc of descent as he starts pushing a line of erasers from his desk into a trash can. We never see any physical signs of epiphany, but we know from reading the story that Robinson has formulated his plan.

Over Labor Day weekend, with the road crews on holiday, Dolan heads for the desert to set his trap. Dolan sets off for Los Angeles to take delivery of his latest cargo. His agent in L.A. contacts him en route and shows him the solution to increasing the profit margin. He explains that they can get a higher yield with more volume per cargo container. This load contains children to be brokered.

From there, events unfold just as they did in the story. Robinson joins the Nevada road crew and learns to operate the equipment. He digs his pit, removes the detour and waits for Dolan to arrive. Dolan’s driver dutifully drives right into the snare.

While staying true to the essence of the King story, burying Dolan in the movie is much more drawn out, with Robinson throwing shovels of dirt on the Caddy while dialoguing with Dolan, tormenting him; making him scream. At one point, Robinson turns off the cellular blocker he is using to talk to Dolan on a cell phone and allowing him to use his onboard computer to watch as he pours more dirt on Dolan’s tomb.

While Robinson goes about his business, he gets a call from the FBI agent working the case. They've raided Dolan's warehouse, arrested his people, and are executing an arrest warrant for Dolan.

With time running out, Dolan eventually gets busy with the back hoe and fills in the hole, leaving a little gap over the sunroof. He places the symmetrically cut pieces of asphalt back in place. Dolan watches with horror as Dolan slides the final piece over the sunroof.

This was one of the finer King adaptations I’ve ever seen and I’m surprised it didn’t receive more acclaim. It didn’t have any corny special effects, tacked on characters, or major rewrites that often ruin King’s stories on screen.

Adding the backstory as part of the plot was necessary to make a movie and it could have been done poorly with a series of flashbacks. To use flashback as a story telling device for this story would have been instinctive. Instead, screenwriter Jeff Beesley tells it in real time, making it much more enjoyable for an audience that had not read the story and King fans alike.

The deviations from the story such as Robinson’s encounter with Dolan in the rest stop added to the tension and were folded neatly into the story. Too often, when screenwriters pad a King short story, they tack on scenes. There was nothing tacked on in this story.

I pictured Dolan as I read the story as a character from The Sopranos – a large, middle aged man of Italian ancestry. Christian Slater was neat, prim, and attractive and played Dolan with a coldness that was striking. Seldom have I seen Slater pull off a roll so well.

In King’s story, Robinson had a cold detachment from his revenge. To him, it was a laborious task to be carried out at the behest of the ghost of his dead wife. He is methodical in carrying it out. King even opens with the Spanish proverb about revenge being best served cold. In the movie, Robinson delights in tormenting Dolan. This took a little away from the Robinson’s character who was supposed to be a mild mannered grade school teacher.

That is but a minor weakness in what was otherwise a superb adaptation of one of King’s finer short works.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Nightmares and Dreamscapes
By Stephen King
Copyright 1993

This third volume of short stories from Stephen King contains almost exclusively new material. Without the restrictions placed on him by various magazine editors, many of the works are long; some are bloated. But the volume also contains some of his finest short work including The End of the Whole Mess and You Know They Got a Hell of a Band.

Introduction: Myth, Belief, Faith, and Ripley’s Believe it Or Not
Stephen King opens his third volume of short stories by telling us that he was a gullible child who believed everything he saw and heard. He absorbed ghost stories and urban myths such as the one about the acid at the core of a golf ball as hard truths. As an adolescent casting his first vote, he sardonically notes, he voted for Richard Nixon because Nixon had a secret plan to get us out of the Vietnam War.

Most of the strange and macabre tales that filled King’s mind, he says, came from the comic book version of Ripley’s Believe it or Not which told of bizarre, but supposedly true happenings from around the world.

It is that ability to openly embrace the weird, the bizarre, and the supernatural that allows him to craft the stories and books that have frightened two generations. It is a necessary component of his psyche that the wisdom of years and the cynicism of middle age have not overcome.

It is also that release of reality that allows us to enjoy his stories. . .

Dolan’s Cadillac
Third grade teacher we know only as Robinson decides he is going to kill the mobster who killed his wife nine years prior. He develops a plan to capture the gangster in the middle of the Nevada desert and see him off.

To do so, he joins a Nevada road crew, working his summer off under the blistering desert sun to learn about roadwork; to gain the knowledge necessary to hatch his plan. Serendipitously, a detour is set on Route 71 – the route the mobster Dolan always takes in his spiffy Cadillac when going on holiday to Los Angeles – for the Fourth of July.

Robinson goes to the detour site and working tirelessly for two days, sets his intricate snare.

This was one of the longer works in the book, but could have easily been more bloated. This character is narrow and single-minded in his purpose. King weaves revenge tales with unabashed creativity and this is a creative end to a wicked little tale. A wonderful story with which to open the book.

Dolan’s Cadillac originally appeared in the Castle Rock Newsletter, February—June 1985.

The End of the Whole Mess
A man recounts in a final journal entry how his genius brother discovers a mineral that promises to end all hostility in the human race – and destroyed mankind with it.

The main character is introduced as a professional writer. He even remarks that he digresses too much as he chronicles how one man destroyed the human race. He knows he’s racing against time to get it all down, but it reads like . . . a Stephen King story with overdeveloped characters. Stephen King remarks in the notes section of the book that the genius brother was inspired by his own brother. The main character writes very much like Stephen King.

The End of the Whole Mess originally appeared in Omni, October 1986. It was made into an episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King that aired on TNT in 2006.

Suffer the Little Children
A grades school teacher, known for being strict and having eyes in the back of her head notices one day (she uses trick glasses) one of her students morphs into a monster when her back is turned. He convinces her that all her students are in fact, just disguised monsters. So, the teacher comes up with a very practical solution to the problem.

I love the dark ambiguity of this story. While it was longer and its primary character more developed, it reminded me very much of Cain Rose Up from Skeleton Crew. We are left with a couple unanswered questions. Was the teacher simply insane, or were her students really monsters?

This story dates back to the days of Night Shift which might explain why to story telling is so tight and disciplined. It was dropped at the recommendation of King’s editor. Suffer the Little Children originally appeared in Cavalier magazine, February 1972.

The Night Flier
Richard Dees, the annoying bastard of a tabloid reporter from The Dead Zone, chases a vampire who prefers to fly – not with the wings of a bat – but with the jet engines of a private Cessna. At the request of his editor, Dees tracks a mysterious creature that travels from small airport to small airport, devouring the blood of those unlucky enough to be there when he lands. After days of flying his small plane south along the east coast, Dees catches up with his quarry.

The first time I read this story, I was reminded of the legendary Kolchak: The Nightstalker. Reading it again dispels that similarity. Kolchak was an optimist. He was always bemused, never terrified as he pursued the supernatural. Dees is a darker personality, bereft of humor. King shows once again that he can add yet another twist to the ancient story of the vampire and make it work.

Night Flier originally appeared in Prime Evil, an anthology edited by Douglas Winter in 1988.

Popsy
A man with a bad gambling problem takes up child snatching as an occupation to pay his gambling debts. One evening, he snatches a lost kid from a mall who is preternaturally strong and with exceptionally sharp teeth. While on the way to deliver the kid to the flesh peddler, he meets the kids father – who bears a striking resemblance to the character from Night Flier.

It just goes to show you that even the children of the undead cannot resist the “must have” toy of any holiday season. One can imagine the difficulty Dracula would have chasing down Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures for his son. This story is much darker than my glib analysis and it is enjoyable to see the vampire play the hero for once without it becoming sappy.

Popsy originally appeared in Masques II, an anthology published in 1987.

It Grows on You
Five retired New England men sit around a stove fire in a general store, recounting the history of a strange, old house in Castle Rock. It’s deadly and eerie nature have kept it abandoned for more than a decade after the death of its builder, a textile manufacturer of some wealth.

The men note that after every evil event that takes place inside the house, a new wing is added to the already expansive mansion. One of the old men notes that someone has started a new wing on the house.

This was a yankee story pure and simple. The language, the mannerisms, and attitudes are all true to form for a provincial yankee town like Castle Rock. King was writing for an audience in this story.

A different version was published in Marshroots Fall 1973 – the University of Maine literary publication. King says he made major revisions from that version for Needful Things. Perhaps, but it is still a yankee story.

Chattery Teeth
A traveling salesman stops at a roadside convenience store in the desert. Besides operating a pet zoo in the desert, they sell gasoline and novelty gag gift items. His mind seizes on a set of metal chattery teeth because they look so unusually large and dangerous. He acquires them and returns to his car, which is now beset by a sand storm. A kid begs a ride and, as they travel the treacherous, sand covered roads in the story, the hitchhiker attacks him. The chattery teeth spring into action.

This is a prime example of the contemporary King – without editorial guidelines, pumping out stories that are way too long to be enjoyed as short stories. This as a great premise and King tells an interesting story. But the literary bloat! Too many words, too much backstory, and too much time building tension.
Chattery Teeth was first published in Cemetery Dance, Fall 1992.

Dedication
A New York hotel cleaning lady receives a copy of her son’s new novel, dedicated to her, saying, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” After work, she sits in the hotel bar and explains to a colleague why that dedication is so true.

Stephen King, meet Alice Walker. Your idea for how to choose a father was done earlier by her in the book, The Temple of My Familiar. King actually defends the story in the Notes section. He then adds that the story shouldn’t need defending; it should stand on its own. It’s just more of that phase King went through in the early 1990s where he needed to prove he could write socially relevant stories. Not badly written, but the story is absolute rubbish.

This story was originally published in a horror anthology entitled Dark Visions published in 1989

The Moving Finger
Howard Mitla is dismayed to walk into the bathroom of his Queens apartment and find a single, human finger extended from his sink drain. Howard is “pee-shy” and can’t urinate with that finger with its single nail, extending from the drain and tapping on the sink. Determined not to spend the rest of his life using public johns, Mitla takes the matter into his own hands and does a little chemical plumbing. He ends up in a battle for his life and his sanity.

Stephen King has said that most of his story ideas start with, “what if.” As he states in his Notes, sometimes it’s fun to read a story without knowing why something happened. King doesn’t take himself or his idea too seriously and the reader comes away feeling as if he’s just read a delightful story from a comic book.

The Moving Finger was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1990.

Sneakers
A recording engineer is at first curious, then apprehensive, and eventually terrified by a pair of old fashioned canvass sneakers in a toilet stall in the bathroom of a recording studio. He is able to learn the legend of the ghost that is supposed to haunt the bathroom. He eventually confronts the ghost.

This was an intriguing and engaging story with a disappointing ending. Too many words and pages expended to have a pointless ending. This story is a real bust.

This story was also published in the horror anthology, Night Visions 5

You Know They Got a Hell of a Band
Rock and Roll will never die! It lives on forever and ever in a remote Oregon town! A couple taking backroads through rural Oregon get lost in the woods and eventually find themselves in the remote town of Rock and Roll Heaven, OR. In Rock and Roll Heaven, Janis Joplin will serve you pie, Elvis will write you a parking ticket, and there is a concert every night!

I loved this story! King doesn’t mind playing with the ghosts of the dead and famous in this creepy story about a town run by dead rock stars. King keeps the tension between the couple simmering and slowly as they struggle to find their way on the narrow gravel roads in the middle of nowhere. Once we get to town, King makes no effort to conceal where he’s going. The reader is trying to guess just who they will see and what they will do.

This story was originally published in Shock Rock, published in 1992.

Home Delivery
The end of the world has come with the zombie apocalypse destroying the world one person at a time. On Gennesault Island, 40 miles off the coast of Maine, the locals prepare to watch over the island’s one cemetery to cut down the dead before they can get going. Meanwhile, a young, timid woman ponders the child in her womb and the world it will come into. Certainly the birth will be a home delivery.

I had forgotten that Stephen King had cranked out one zombie story before writing the superb zombie novel, Cell. This is one of his more graphic stories, written for a splatterpunk anthology called Book of the Dead which used the setting established by George Romero’s zombie pictures as its backdrop. Most horror fans would be surprised to learn that King is not all that graphic in his writing, usually. He ramps it up in this story.

Rainy Season
A couple rents a home in a small remote town to spend a year working on a book. When they get to the town, they are advised that they should leave for the day because this particular day in June, once every seven years, it rains toads in this particular Maine town. Convinced that the locals are pulling a prank on them, they decide to stay and ride out the storm.

Sometimes King takes an overtly absurd, silly concept and makes it horrific. This is one of those tales. It’s not the best story in this volume by far. But perhaps it’s the most creative concept.

This story was originally published in the Spring 1989 edition of Midnight Grafitti.

My Pretty Pony
A dying grandfather delivers a lecture to his young grandson about the nature of time and our perception of it; how it passes slowly when one is young, and gathers speed and momentum as you grow older.

King writes in the notes section that this short story was actually a chapter from a Bachman novel he was working on that fell apart. A gangster is waiting to make a hit. He’s reflecting back on this lecture his grandfather gave him. It’s deep, philosophical, and holds a lot more meaning for me now than it did when I first read it 20 years ago when time was passing somewhat slower.

Sorry, Right Number
In this teleplay, a woman receives a mysterious phone call from a sobbing woman. She is unable to make out what the woman says before the connection is broken. She is sure it someone close to her. She tries desperately to learn the person’s identity. She eventually does, many years later.

The script was originally pitched to Steven Spielberg for his television series, Amazing Stories. Spielberg thought it was too dark for the uplifting show. So King sold it to Tales from the Crypt where it worked much better, in King’s opinion. I’ve never seen the show.

The Ten O’Clock People
Pearson is a smoker who has cut back and trying to quit. One day, as he goes to his 10:00 AM ritual of smoke break, he observes that the president of the bank where he works is actually a deformed mutant. He learns from others who have recently cut back on their smoking that only those who reduce their nicotine intake can see these aliens and that crossing them is a bad idea. Pearson joins an underground resistance movement to kill these creatures.

I was a smoker who quit and I can remember the trippy dreams and strange thoughts that passed through my mind as I endured about a year of withdrawal. The story seems perfectly plausible. It is, however, too long. It consumed more than 50 pages when 20 might have been sufficient.

Crouch End
An American couple goes searching for a friend’s house in suburban London when they find themselves in a Lovecraftian nightmare – complete with homage to Yogsogoth. They struggle to find their way out, but only the wife makes it. She tells her tale to two London police officers.

This was an absolutely fantastic story with King recreating that ominous, washed out, completely bereft of color town like Lovecraft used to do. Reading this reminded me so much of Ramsey Campbell’s work. It may be because the story first appeared in an anthology, edited by Campbell, called New Tales of the Cthulu Mythos.

This story also was made into a screenplay for the Nightmares and Dreamscapes series.

The House on Maple Street
Four siblings, living an unhappy life with an emotionally abusive stepfather discover that, inside the walls of their home, metal is “growing.” The eldest boy figures out that, while they were away on a three month sabbatical with their stepfather, there home was somehow converted into a spaceship. As the hour for the blastoff draws near, they hatch a plan to rid themselves of their wicked stepfather forever.

I believe Ramsey Campbell wrote a story similar to this about an entire city block in London actually being a space ship that takes off. The crux of the stories is the same, but they are different tales. I think Campbell’s is the better of the two.

The Fifth Quarter
After finding his friend gutshot and left for dead, a man hunts down his friends coconspirators in an armored car robbery. Each of these three possesses a piece of a map that, when put together, lead to the location of the buried loot.

King attributes this story to Richard Bachman or maybe George Stark. I hope they write more exciting stuff than this because this was one dull story.

It was originally published in the February 1972 edition of Cavalier. It was also made into a screenplay for the Nightmare and Dreamscapes series.

The Doctor’s Case
In all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories, it is always the narrator, the seemingly oblivious and unobservant Dr. Watson who listens patiently as the brilliant Holmes explains the clues Watson has overlooked and how they fit together. Here, it is Watson that picks up on the important clue that solves what seems to be the perfect locked room murder.

King tries hard to imitate Doyle’s prose and actually does a good job while staying in modern diction and syntax. But I’m not a fan of Sherlock Holmes and this story did not excite me.

The story was originally published in the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes published in 1987.

Umney’s Last Case
A 1930s private gumshoe is disturbed when little details that have shaped his life since before he can remember change dramatically. He arrives at his office to find out things are decidedly different there too, upon orders of the owner. When the owner, who just happens to be God in Umney’s world, shows up, Umney’s life is completely redefined.

I suspect that most writers have had the fantasy of injecting themselves into a world that they have created just for themselves. One has to believe that J.R.R. Tolkien must have longed to sojourn in Rivendell and taken in the fine tobacco of The Shire. Here, we see King writing about an author who actually does take over the life of a character in a world of his own creation.

Head Down
In a piece for the New Yorker, Stephen King documents the pursuit of the Maine Little League baseball championship by the Bangor West team. Kings son played on the team.

A real change of pace in the book. It’s an amusing and enjoyable read for those who played little league baseball and know what life lessons come from it. As many King stories, it’s a little long.

Brooklyn August
This is a poem that is an ode to the old Brooklyn Dodgers of 1956, to baseball itself, and to summer.

I don’t know poetry, but I know what I like. While it’s no Greenfields of the Mind, it is still beautiful.

The Beggar and the Diamond
An Hindu parable about being thankful for what you have and what misfortunes have not befallen you when misfortune befalls you.

King wrote this story in a straight forward manner, with simple descriptions and a simple narrative. It is refreshing and engaging.

Book to Movie: Battleground (2006)

The Night Shift short story, Battleground was adapted as the premier episode for a TNT television miniseries based on the short works of Stephen King. Battleground was the only story from Night Shift adapted for the 2006 television series. The other seven episodes were drawn from the book of the same name or a King collection entitled Everything’s Eventual.

The story unfolds on screen with Jason Renshaw carrying out the hit on the owner of Morris Toys, Hans Morris. Renshaw returns to his apartment to find a package from the Morris Toy Co. waiting for him, just as the short story began.

The action in the apartment unfolds much as it did in the short story. The tiny plastic soldiers have surprisingly effective weapons including helicopters, bazookas, RPGs, and cannons. They shoot it out in the apartment before Renshaw is forced out of the apartment, out on the ledge. In the short story, Renshaw meets his end as he climbs from this ledge onto the terrace.

In the TNT show, the battle continues and Renshaw actually defeats the troops. As he is relaxing in his hot tub, the special surprise makes himself known. In the short story, that was the thermonuclear device. In the screen version, it is a commando who is deadly.

The battle takes them out of the apartment, into the elevators and elevator shafts before Renshaw meets his end, much as he did in the short story, only in a different location.

In my review of the short story, I remarked that this story very closely resembled Richard Matheson’s Prey. This was not lost on King or the producers of the series. The screenplay was written by Matheson’s son, Richard Christian Matheson. A fleeting homage to the Matheson story appears when one of the rockets fired by the toy soldiers blows up a replica of the troll doll from the adaptation of Prey that appeared in Matheson’s television anthology Trilogy of Terror.

I recall reading a review of the miniseries that the screenplay very closely resembled a Twilight Zone episode entitled Invaders which was co-authored by Matheson and Rod Serling. In that episode, an old woman living alone on a frontier, does battle with miniature aliens from a miniature flying saucer. The episode contained just a few lines of dialogue at the end of the episode. Battleground contains just a couple lines of dialogue from a computer.

Unfortunately, the screenplay makes the weaknesses of the short story glaring. As I’ve stated many times, to enjoy horror fiction, one must be able to suspend belief. However, the author should not create a scenario whose real circumstances make it entirely improbable.

What is absolutely unbelievable is that a battle such as the one that takes place in Renshaw’s apartment would go unnoticed and unreported. Renshaw fires dozens of rounds into the floor of his high rise apartment which would have certainly passed through to the apartment below. There are multiple explosions. Shots are fired outside on the terrace and explosions are detonated inside the apartment. Despite all that noise, Renshaw is able to relax peacefully in his hot tub after the battle is fought.

Renshaw’s end in the short story comes much sooner, so it is plausible that authorities had not yet arrived before the miniature nuclear detonation. However, Renshaw’s respite makes that impossible in the film adaptation.

The special effects were top notch. As someone who had a large collection of plastic toy soldiers when I was a kid, it was cool to see them brought to life on the screen, looking as green and drab as they do in real life.

William Hurt turns in an acceptable performance that was not nearly as strong as Agnes Moorehead’s in similar circumstances in the Twilight Zone. The action scenes move nicely and the story builds to a nice climax. However, I can’t get by the improbability of it all and that ruins it for me.