Stephen King

Stephen King's Storm of the Century

"Give me what I want and I'll go away," demands the black-eyed, stocking-capped stranger Linoge (Colm Feore), who appears in a quiet island community on the verge of the worst storm in decades and brutally bludgeons an old lady to death. Tim Daly, the town sheriff and voice of reason and moral strength, locks up the quiet madman, but the deaths pile up as Linoge acts them out from his cell like a murderous mime pulling psychic strings. Stephen King, whose original teleplay is his best work for the screen since The Stand, transforms the sleepy burg into a Peyton Place of guilty secrets and criminal activity ripped from under a blanket of small town normality while the white-out of the snowstorm completely cuts them off from civilization. Director Craig R. Baxley nicely maintains an icy tension while the waiting game goes on, perhaps a little too long, before Linoge finally reveals "what he wants" and the drama turns into a struggle for man's soul in miniature. The more ambitious special effects and set pieces sometimes disappoint but are more than made up for in King's knack for turning the mundane into the macabre (the children's song "I'm a Little Teapot" has never sounded more sinister) and a few brilliantly realized sequences, the best of which occurs when townspeople are literally yanked out of existence while watching the storm. Storm of the Century is one of the most successful translations of King's brand of horror to the screen. --Sean Axmaker

Creepshow

Inspired by the controversial E.C. Comics of the 1950s--which also provided the title and inspiration for the popular Tales from the Crypt TV series--director George Romero and screenwriter Stephen King serve up five delightfully frightful stories. Utilizing comic-book panels, animated segues, and exaggerated lighting and camera angles, Romero and cinematographer Michael Gornick come very close to replicating a horror comic in film format. The results mix fine acting with the morbid sense of humor and irony that made the E.C. books so popular in their heyday. Actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Hal Holbrook, Ted Danson, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, and even King appear in the stories, which include tales of a sinister father's day celebration, a mysterious meteor, seaweed-draped zombies, a monster in a crate, and a cockroach-phobic millionaire. Fiendishly fun fare from one of horror's most famous directors. --Bryan Reesman

Two macabre masters - writer Stephen King and director George A. Romero - conjure up five shocking yarns, each a virtuoso exercise in the ghouls-and-gags style of classic '50s horror comics. A murdered man emerges from the grave for Father's Day cake. A meteor's ooze makes everything ... grow. A professor selects his wife as a snack for a crated creature. A scheming husband plants two lovers up to their necks in terror. A malevolent millionaire with an insect phobia becomes the prey of a cockroach army. Add the spirited performances of a fine cast (Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, E.G. Marshall and King himself) and the ghoulish makeup wizardry of Tom Savini. Let the Creepshow begin.

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Theatrical Trailer

Salem's Lot

The DVD contains the 184-minute version of the film.

Misery

Based on the chilling bestseller by Stephen King, Misery was brought to the screen by director Rob Reiner as one of the most effective thrillers of the 1990s. From a brilliant adaptation by screenwriter William Goldman, Reiner turned King's cautionary tale of fame and idolatry into a mainstream masterpiece of escalating suspense, translating King's own experience with obsessive fans into a frightening tale of entrapment and psychotic behavior. Kathy Bates deservedly won an Academy Award for her performance as Annie Wilkes, an unbalanced devotee of romance novels written by Paul Sheldon (James Caan), whose books provide Annie with a much-needed escape from her pathetic life and her secret, violent past. After Annie rescues the injured Sheldon from a car accident, she seizes the opportunity to nurse her favorite writer back to health, but her tender loving care soon turns to terrorism as she demands that Sheldon write his latest novel according to her wish-fulfillment fantasies. From this point forward, Misery percolates to a boil as equal parts mystery, thriller, and cleverly dark comedy, with the helpless author pitched in deadly warfare against his number one fan. While Bates carefully modulates her role from doting kindness to sympathetic loneliness and finally to horrifying ferocity, Caan is equally superb as the celebrated author who must literally write for his life. It's essentially a two-actor film, but Richard Farnsworth and Lauren Bacall are excellent in supporting roles as they investigate the writer's mysterious disappearance. Frightening, funny, and totally irresistible, Misery was such a hit that some of Bates's dialogue entered the popular lexicon (particularly her nagging reference to Caan as "Mister Man"), and its nail-biting thrills remain timelessly intense. --Jeff Shannon

A "heart-stopping psychological thriller" (Joel Siegel) this Academy AwardÂ(r)-winning* film is "one of the best horror movies" (Time) ever. Adapted from a Stephen King story by OscarÂ(r)-winning** screenwriter William Goldman (All the President's Men) and directed by Rob Reiner (A Few Good Men), this chiller starring Kathy Bates (Titanic) and James Caan (The Godfather), is "a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse" (The New York Times) gameplayed between two cunning mindsone as sharp as a tack and the other as blunt as a sledgehammer. Novelist Paul Sheldon (Caan) doesn't remember the blinding blizzard that sent his car spinning off the road. Nor does he remember being nursed back from unconsciousness. All he remembers iswaking up in the home of Annie Wilkes (Bates)a maniacal fan who is bent on keeping her favorite writer as her personal prisoner for the rest of his "cock-a-doodie" life! *1990: Actress (Bates) **1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; 1976: All the President's Men

The Night Flier

From Stephen King, comes a new tale of terror. What flies by night in a dark winged Cessna, lands at secluded airports and brutally murders local residents? For one reporter, the story of a lifetime may be his last. ' 'The best King adaptation since Misery.' ' (Fangoria)

Creepshow 2

What is it about hitchhikers that makes them such a sure-fire bet for horror? This question is addressed in the final segment of Creepshow 2, another Stephen King-George Romero collaboration. "The Hitchhiker" is the simplest and best of the three tales on display here, with Lois Chiles as a cheating wife who just can't seem to get rid of a hitchhiker... no matter how hard she tries. The collection gets off to a slow start with "Old Chief Wood'n Head," a sleepy story of Native American justice. "The Raft" is a passable teens-in-peril number, but it worked better on the page than on screen. Romero adapted the King stories but emphatically did not direct, which accounts for the drop-off from the kicky fun of the first Creepshow. King appears as a dimwitted truck driver--a foreshadowing of Maximum Overdrive? In any case, this one's for diehard fans only. --Robert Horton

The Tommyknockers

The Tommyknockers is a TV miniseries based on Stephen King's 1987 novel. An alien spacecraft has been buried beneath the Burning Woods near the small rural New England community of Haven for millions of years, but has now by chance been unearthed by Bobbi (Marg Helgenberger) while digging around in the woods behind her house. The structure in the woods begins to exert a glowing-green influence on the town, causing the people to invent Rube Goldberg-like gizmos, develop the gift of telepathy, lose their teeth, and form a hive-mind mentality bent on digging up the ship and revivifying the desiccated aliens within. Luckily, Bobbi's significant other is an alcoholic poet (Jimmy Smits) who needs to learn to face his fears. He also has a metal plate in his head that prevents the hive-minders from reading his thoughts and makes him immune to the neon-green influence of the aliens. Ultimately, it's up to him to save the day. Although the acting is topnotch, especially from Smits and Helgenberger, and there are plenty of gooseflesh moments, there are also enough plot holes here to fuel a very long and enjoyable evening's conversation. Why do the aliens start in at this time, when they've been causing legends in the woods for ages? Where does an alien ship buried for ages get all that dry ice? How does the Smits character make a living as a poet? One suspects that King's fine sense of New England characterizations is given short shrift here, and that the woods in his mind teem with more alien thoughts than the TV miniseries form could embody. Welcome appearances by congenial actors abound, notably Joanna Cassidy, E.G. Marshall and Robert Carradine. And there's a slutty postal letter-carrier played authentically by Traci Lords. --Jim Gay

Children of the Corn

The murder rate is as high as an elephant's eye in this flaccid adaptation of Stephen King's short story. While driving through Nebraska en route to a new job, medico Burt (Peter Horton) and his wife Vicky (a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton) nearly run over a mutilated boy who staggers from the cornfields. Seeking help, they enter the town of Gatlin, whose under-20 residents have butchered their parents per the decree of junior-grade holy roller Isaac (John Franklin), who preaches the word of a being called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows." King's original story (from his 1978 collection Night Shift) was a lean and brutal mélange of Southern-gothic atmosphere and E.C. Comics-style gore, which scripter Greg Goldsmith effectively neutralizes by adding a youthful narrator (a grating Robbie Kiger) and putting an upbeat spin on the story's morbid conclusion. Fritz Kiersch's direction is TV-movie flat, with the sole inspired moment (hideous religious iconography glimpsed during a bloody "service") delivered as a throwaway. Aside from Horton and Courtney Gains (as Isaac's hatchet man Malachai), the performances are dreadful, and the depiction of the Lovecraftian monster-god as a sort of giant gopher inspires more laughter than terror. Amazingly, the film spawned six sequels; Franklin (Cousin Itt in the Addams Family films) later appeared in and wrote 1999's Children of the Corn 666. --Paul Gaita

Apt Pupil

At the top of his game, Stephen King has a real gift for mining monsters--zero-at-the-bone horror--out of everyday faces and places. Adapted from a novella in the 1982 collection that also spawned Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil looks at first as if it might draw authentically enlightening terror from the soul-cancer that makes blood relations of a Southern California golden boy (Brad Renfro) and an aging Nazi war criminal (Sir Ian McKellen). Turned on by a high-school course about the Holocaust, Todd Bowden (such a bland handle for this top-of-his-class sociopath!) tracks down Kurt Dussander, a former Gestapo killer hiding in the shadows of sunny SoCal. Blackmailing the old man into sharing his firsthand stories of genocide, the teenager trips out on the virtual reality of the monster's memories. There's perverse play here on the way a kid hungry for knowledge can bring a long-retired teacher or grandparent back to life. Truly superb as James Whale in Gods and Monsters, McKellen brings subtlety to this Stephen King creepshow: his dessicated Dussander is like a mummy or vampire revivified by Todd's appetite for atrocity.

Considerable talent intersects in Apt Pupil: It's director Bryan Singer's first film since The Usual Suspects, that enormously popular, rather heartless thriller-machine. The outstanding cast also includes David Schwimmer as a Jewish guidance counselor pathetically impotent in the face of Todd's talent for evil, and Bruce Davison as Todd's All-American Dad, lacking the capacity to even imagine evil. And the story itself has the potential for gazing into the heart of darkness right here in Hometown, U.S.A. But Apt Pupil just turns ugly and unclean when it trivializes its subject, equating Holocaust horrors with slamming a cat into an oven or offing a nosy vagrant (Elias Koteas). Reducing the great spiritual abyss that lies at the center of the 20th century to cheap slasher-movie thrills and chills is reprehensible. Both Todd and the writers of Apt Pupil should have heeded the old saw: When supping with the devil, best use a long spoon. --Kathleen Murphy

The Langoliers

Something bizarre has happened abourd flight #29...a nightmare so chilling, so frightening, so unrelenting it could only come from the mind of Stephen King. Now the master storyteller of our time gives terror a new name in THE LANGOLIERS. A jet leaves on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston. But early in the flight, ten passengers awaken to a startling realization: All of the other passengers have vanished - and the ground below is only...ground. But once they manage to land the plane, the situation doesn't improve. No one is there...the air is still...the clocks have stopped...and a dread, evil presence bent on their destruction is headed straight for them. Based on the novella from the best-selling anthology Four Past Midnight, Patricia Wettig (City Slickers II), Bronson Pincho (Beverly Hills Cop), Dean Stockwell (The Player), and David Morse (The Getaway) stare into the jaws of oblivion in this nightmare from the mind of Stephen King.