In Progress: The Dead Zone

We've finally made it to the final Stephen King book of the 1970's! For the first time in his publishing career he actually wrote a novel that is shorter than the one that came before it, but this one is still a pretty hefty tome. I know next to nothing about this book, and probably less about this book than any of the previous ones I have read, so this should be interesting....

November 9 (Page 17): Prologue complete. Authors, if you want to establish somebody as a truly evil bastard, then have them kill a dog. Greg, I hate you already. Meanwhile, who knew that a head injury could give you ESP? John, I'm expecting great things from you!

November 14 (Page 92): Dang it, Johnny, when I said I was expecting great things from you I didn't mean get into a car crash! But seriously, this speaks to me going into this book so blind I didn't even read the back cover, so I thought when it said Sarah didn't talk to Johnny again for four and a half years that she must have eaten a cyanide hot dog or something.

November 21 (Page 279): Almost halfway done and so far this has mainly been the story of Johnny. Greg shows up from time to time just to show he's still a jerk, albeit a jerk with considerably more power each time we see him. Those who have no faith in politics shouldn't be surprised to learn he became the mayor of some unfortunate town in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, I hear that a psycho killer is still on the loose....

November 27 (Page 379): Part One, which is considerably over half the book, is in the bag! While I lack the psychic powers of Johnny Smith, going into the final chapter of this part I got to thinking that the serial killer plot would be resolved by the end of this part. Needless to say my non-psychic prediction did not anticipate how it would resolve. However, it seems fitting that the first part of the book should end with Johnny's greatest accomplishment to date, which also puts him into the lowest place he's been in so far outside of coma.

November 30 (Page 422): If there's going to be an epic Stillson-Smith showdown, it better happen soon! I think we may have witnessed the first appearance of a historical figure when Johnny meets pre-President Carter in New Hampshire. Of course he gets vibes off Carter that he will be the President, but strangely gets no read from Reagan. I guess even in 1979 that was considered a bit too strange? Back in the fictional arena, and speaking of seeming far-fetched for its time, is it me, or does Stillson reek of Donald Trump?

December 4 (Page 561): The battle has ended and the loser depends on your definition of what losing entails. If you say "death", then goodbye Johnny. If you say "irrelevance", then goodbye Greg. I feel like the novel is effectively over at this point, but like any normal person, I did a quick preview of the final, small section ("Notes from the Dead Zone") and perhaps the text of the letters Johnny mailed out prior to his attack on the town hall will shed a little more light on things.

Movie: The Stand (1994)

Will we ever see a theatrical release of The Stand? Until that day arrives, or if it ever does, we have the somewhat-flawed miniseries from 1994 to tide us over. As I've been conditioned previously by some of the other made-for-TV content featured here, I give this one a fairly large degree of latitude. Only until recently have TV production levels been anywhere near those of the big screen, so I was prepared for all the signs of poor aging when revisiting this almost-25 year old series.

With King's longer works the TV miniseries was, back in the day, the only practical mode of adaptation. In our post-Lord of the Rings world this seems a little narrow. Nowadays it seems more plausible that some kind of multi-movie approach could be used (think the new IT), or a more extensive TV series with a big budget (think Under the Dome). Prior to The Stand, network TV had shown adaptations of 'Salem's Lot, IT, and The Tommyknockers, all with middling amounts of success. With the 1990 re-release of The Stand in it's uncut/overwritten glory, which officially made it King's longest work ever, there must have been a renewed interest to finally get his magnum opus to the screen, even if it was the little screen. By 1994 it was actually one of the very few non-Bachman non-Dark Tower novels that remained unadapted (for comparison, Christine the movie hit theaters just a few months after Christine the book).

About halfway through watching this miniseries (my second time around), I realized that the production strongly caters to fans of the book. In fact, if you haven't read the book some parts probably seem incomprehensible. Some of the motivations of the characters that were more evident in the book are glossed over, likely for the sake of squeezing over a thousand pages of material into eight hours. Even with a teleplay by King himself, who unsurprisingly tends to be faithful to the source material, edits and changes were necessary. For example, the character of Joe is relegated to almost nothing and passed off to Lucy, who is also diminished. This is because Nadine, who found Joe in the book, is merged with the Rita character, wiping out the Joe origin story. Also, in general, the characters seems to cross the country with great ease. Even Stu and Tom's epic journey back to Boulder doesn't seem that onerous here.

Given this is television, the acting is all over the place. Some do a great job (Bill Fagerbakke as Tom Cullen, Gary Sinise as Stu Redman), some miss the mark (Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg, Adam Storke as Larry Underwood), and Molly Ringwold (playing Fran Goldsmith) delivers one of the worst performances of her career. The production work shows a lot of corner-cutting, like it was all filmed either on soundstages or within a ten square mile patch of Utah. The cornfield scenes were particularly jarring, and I later learned that they actually grew their own cornstalks to save money because the prop cornstalks were a total ripoff. Who knew corn was such a big deal in Stephen King movies?

While The Stand was successful enough to spur on the burgeoning Stephen King television presence that bloomed in the 1990's and continues on, the Mick Garris/Stephen King director/writer partnership showed considerably more weakness when they returned with an adaptation of The Shining, that was far worse than the 1980 movie. They would later do another miniseries, Bag of Bones, in 2011, as well as a bunch of made-for-TV movies along the way. We'll be seeing more of these; after all I don't have a choice, do I?

Movie: The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Let's be clear right from the get-go that The Lawnmower Man movie has nothing to do with the "Lawnmower Man" short story. This didn't stop them from apply Stephen King's name to the original movie title, in a sad attempt at a cash-grab. Only after a threatened (?) lawsuit did they end up dropping King's name. Since I have shown a great resilience in watching bad movies for the sake of this blog, I figured what the hell, why not watch this one anyway.

Well, this movie is pretty damn awful. I won't quite go to the point of saying this is as bad or worse than Graveyard Shift, but at least that one tried to capture the gist of the short story and primarily failed because the source material was so weak. In all fairness, if they had tried to stick to the original short story here, it probably wouldn't have been any better than this. I mean, was anyone clamoring to read about a naked freak who mowed lawns by eating them and killed all the animals in his path?

In perhaps its only smart move, this movie completely rejects the short story and instead tells a tale of science gone haywire. Pierce Brosnan in pre-007 mode plays Dr. Frankenstein Lawrence Angelo, a frequently-shirtless scientist who somehow invented a way to make people smart a la Flowers for Algernon though the use of virtual reality. Needless to say, a few of the middle steps between "put on VR helmet" and "become smart" are hidden from the viewer. After a monkey goes completely...uh...apeshit...after a little too much time on the VR machine, he does the safe thing and takes advantage of a gardener's assistant who can barely live independently, but is able to build lawnmowers, to take the monkey's place. Predictably, he gets fabulous initial results, but then the Lawnmower Man becomes smarter than him (and apparently more virile) and eventually self-brain-transplants into the machine. While the quasi-government lab in charge of these experiments that never would have passed any unbribed review board is officially horrified by Dr. Angelo's actions, some secret government dude named the Director sanctions it all as a way to, you guessed it, fight better wars. In the end, the Lawnmower Man is able to slip out of not only his flesh body, but also his computer body and infiltrate the "network" (this is before anyone knew what an "Internet" was). Add this to Dr. Angelo finding an unauthorized way to continue his work, and you can already see the plot of the sequel, Bride of Lawnmower Man. Of course I made that title up; they went with Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (yawn), which from what I can tell had little in common with the original in terms of either plot or cast.

As for the cast, Pierce Brosnan turns in a decent performance, given the material he was working with. His accent kind of falls somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic, a little British, a little American. Jeff Fahey bugged me through the whole movie as I racked my brain wondering where I remembered him from. I felt kind of stupid because he's been in zillions of movies, but the connection I was grasping for was the TV show Lost, where is in older and grayer, but unmistakably Jeff Fahey, with his unique face and voice. The only other interesting cast note is the appearance of Dean Norris, sixteen years before Breaking Bad, who was bald even back then, and I won't even begin to attempt a rationalization for whatever accent he was employing.

I think the movie probably got a better reception back when it was released because stuff like "virtual reality" was still considered pretty exotic circa 1992. Then again, considering this was released the same year as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, it suffers a lot in the special effects department. Whereas that movie still seems pretty edgy and cool today, this one seems especially corny. The other day I referred to this as "opposite Tron" is that nobody could figure out that movie upon release, but times caught up with what it was trying to depict, whereas Lawnmower Man feels increasing like reading old science fiction where scientists used slide rules to plan trips to Mars.