Movies about Stephen King novels almost always suck, and this is no exception. I read this book a few years ago and remember thinking, “I hope they don’t try to make this one a movie.” I’m a fan of Stephen King. I’ve read almost everything he’s got. I’m not sure when it happened but at some point, everything became blurred together. Here is the basic King plot: 15 chapters on setting up the location and characters. 10 chapters on making the characters likable of disliked. 10 chapters on getting the characters and the plot line moved along. 2 chapters on building up to the climax, no climax to follow. 1 paragraph on explaining what the fuck just happened. 1 chapter on unrelated post story life. The end.
It’s like he spends the whole time building the exposition and the narrative and when he gets tired, he just ends the book and says good night. I HATE that about his books. He spends the whole book drawing you in and then closes it down in two pages. “OK, I’m tired and want to go to bed, the monster is a… it’s a, a, a tennis ball and it is defeated by… um… popcorn. Good night.”
Case in point: Childhood friends save retarded boy from bullies, become close friends with Douglas (who can’t say his own name clearly so is known as “Duddits”.) The friends grow up and stay in contact by going hunting every year at the same cabin though none of them have seen Duddits since childhood. Through flashbacks and exposition we learn that Duddits had psychic powers of finding things and some telepathy. The boys picked up these powers as well. Now they are all at the hunting lodge, drinking a toast to their old friend Duddits who they haven’t seen in years. OK, now we’re more than half way through the book. Time for one of King’s twists.
Aliens have crash landed in the woods and the government has a “black ops” team that responds and quarantines the entire area. Animals are running around with weird orange fungus growing on them. A lost hunter is taken in by the boys and soon he starts to exhibit the orange fungus too. He dies and the alien escapes from his body. We don’t actually see it explode from his chest like in “Alien” but the creature is almost identical looking. Actually, I don’t think we want to see the alien escape from his body this time because he was sitting on the toilet when it happened. If I see a giant worm with teeth shoot out from anyone’s ass, I think I’d have to turn the movie off. So through telepathy, one of the guys is able to contact what’s left of his group of friends to warn them that the alien has taken over his body and is trying to escape. The government team is detaining every person it finds in fenced off camps. The team is led by Morgan Freeman who just wants to kill everything and his protege who thinks that they might be able to save some of these people. One of the gang talks Freeman’s protege into escaping with him and finding his friend with the hitch-hiking alien in him. The alien is trying to get to the city water supply and infect the whole population. The chase is on; we have the alien being chased by the protege being chased by Morgan Freeman. After talking into a pistol as though it were a telephone, some how our friend talks the protege into stopping to pick up Duddits because he can solve the whole problem. We get to the water supply all at the same time and Morgan Freeman is in a helicopter trying to shoot the protege who is trying to kill the alien who is trying to get into a manhole that leads to the water supply. Just when things look hopeless, Duddits leaves the car and shows up at the doorway. He turns into an alien and the two aliens battle it out and kill each other. The day is saved. The end.
Now what kind of military officer is this protege guy? He lets a civilian talk him into countermanding a direct order, escapes a quarantine zone, hands his pistol to the civilian who then talks into it like it were a telephone, then stops to pick up a retarded kid who no one has seen in years. Is this believable in the least? I can believe in telepathic aliens before I believe this nut is actually in our military somewhere…
It was bad. Even by “King adapted movie” standards it was bad. But, I expected as much, so, I really didn’t lose anything.
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