Tag Archives: Stephen King

“The Running Man”: A Fistful of New Dollars

November 23, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Glen powell disguised with glasses, mustache, and boring hair, very tense in a science fiction hallway filled with red WANTED posters for his character Ben Richards.

Hit Man is back! And this time, it’s personal!

Imagine you’re in a harsh alt-reality episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the next question — for, I dunno, a cash prize of six bucks — is “How does this entry about Edgar Wright’s The Running Man begin?” The possible answers are:

  • A. “In the wake of The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck, the best-ever year for Stephen King film adaptations maintains its batting record with yet another home run…”
  • B. “As with his last feature film, the glam-noir psycho-thriller Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright once again spins nostalgic flax into a new generation’s gold…”
  • C. “After his charismatic turns in Top Gun: Maverick, Devotion, Hit Man, Twisters, and more, Glen Powell keeps flying high toward A-list cloud-nine…”
  • D. “I read the book in high school and watched the Schwarzenegger adaptation on late-night cable around the same time, so I wrote 2000 words on all the differences I noticed…”

If you picked an answer, you’re wrong! They’re all lies. And in this harsh alt-reality the producers could drop your loser self into a boiling vat of Crystal Pepsi, film your embarrassing demise, have an A.I. Regis Philbin hologram deliver a mocking eulogy, and sell action figures of you covered in third-degree burns and sticky soda. But if you’re an average sci-fi citizen, of course the part that’d make you maddest in your final seconds of life on Earth is how you’re out the six bucks.

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“The Long Walk”: The World’s Deadliest Walk-and-Talk

September 27, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Orange, black and white shot of a bunch of guys walking at night, accompanied by military vehicles with bright headlights.

A moonlit stroll with a mounting death toll.

Rare are the harmonic convergences when at least two excellent Stephen King adaptations reach theaters within the same calendar year. I’m still upset everyone slept on the heart-melting sci-fi sweetness of The Life of Chuck (admittedly I’ve skipped The Monkey for now), but I can understand the muted turnout for the survival-horror bloodsport of The Long Walk. If I might understate to a subterranean degree: these past two weeks perhaps weren’t the best time for moviegoers to come out and watch young men be gunned down helplessly before their very eyes.

(Then again, when’s a good time for that anymore?)

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“The Life of Chuck”: A Celebration in Dance and Math

June 21, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tom Hiddleston as a four-eyed accountant looking wistful toward an offscreen sundown.

Has the day arrived when we can watch new Tom Hiddleston projects without joking about Loki variants?

Stephen King is large! He contains multitudes! Your elderly parents’ dismissal of him notwithstanding, he hasn’t been “just” The King of Horror since at least the mid-’80s, though it can be hard to keep in mind considering the King-based film majority. Whenever one of his 60,000 works are adapted into something other than a zero-budget splatterpunk B-movie or modestly funded “elevated horror” streamer-filler, the trailers will always caution, “No, hey, don’t make that face, it’s cool, we promise this isn’t the Stephen King of Sleepwalkers or Maximum Overdrive or The Lawnmower Man! This is the OTHER Stephen King! Y’know, the one who single-handedly kept the basic-cable industry alive with looping reruns of Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption!”

That Stephen King returns with a semi-fantasy of bittersweet lyricism in The Life of Chuck, whose box-office figures have been grim, yet might hopefully earn a home-video renaissance in its next medium, where it doesn’t have to compete against the bigger studios’ re-nuked kiddie leftovers. Alas, today’s theaters can only contain up to 1.5 multitudes at a time.

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“Doctor Sleep”: Terms of Psychic Warfare

December 20, 2019 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Doctor Sleep!

“After that night, I could never watch The Tonight Show again.”

I read The Shining during my big Stephen King phase back in high school. devouring nearly all his books from Carrie up through Gerald’s Game. I’ve run across Stanley Kubrick’s version countless times in TV reruns over the years and I think I’ve seen the entire film, but never in one uninterrupted, sequential sitting….though I did catch the 2013 documentary Room 237, which tabulated conspiracy theories about Kubrick’s deep, dark, double-secret meanings with which the film was allegedly fraught if you paid more attention to the backgrounds than to the actors.

Decades later, King returned to the remains of the Torrance family with the sequel novel Doctor Sleep, which I haven’t read. The sequel film it inspired from writer/director Mike Flanagan (Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House) was escorted surreptitiously into theaters in the middle of an unusually packed November release schedule, then quietly ushered out the back doors, as if it were trying to escape the spotlight before Jack Nicholson came after it with an ax. As we prepare to trudge defensively into this long weekend in which internet folks will be slap-fighting over sequels that cling slavishly to their 40-year-old progenitors, why not pause and pay respects to a sequel that struck a dexterous balance between old confections and new directions.

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“IT Chapter 2”: That Previous Evil Clown Movie Before the Next Evil Clown Movie

September 29, 2019 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
IT CHAPTER 2!

No, I am not ready to let go our our Dragon Con 2019 memories or souvenirs yet, thanks for asking.

My Stephen King phase lasted from roughly 1986 to 1993, and began when a late-night cable viewing of Christine spooked me so much that I checked out the novel from my junior high school’s library. Having consumed that, I resolved to catch ’em all. To an extent I inherited the fixation from my mom, whose all-time favorite novel is The Stand. I proceeded to read every novel from Carrie through Gerald’s Game, skipping only The Dark Tower series because the first one was impossible to find when my King spree began. (Drifting away from King’s work wasn’t his fault exactly. 1993 was among my darkest years.)

Though I do have my favorites among them, I have a particularly fond memory of the It reading experience. I sat down one evening with the 1000-page paperback edition and proceeded to devour the first 500 in one go. At 6 a.m. my grandma got up for breakfast and was quite surprised to see I hadn’t gone to bed yet. I haven’t done that in ages and would dearly love to have the free time and concentration power to devote to any task for that many hours in a row at my age. I blame the internet.

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