Salem's Lot

 Year of Release:  1979

Director:  Tobe Hooper

Screenplay:  Paul Monash, based on the novel 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

Starring:  David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres

Running Time:  183 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Writer Ben Mears (Soul) returns to his childhood home of Salem's Lot, a small town in Maine, where he hopes to write a book about the nature of evil, inspired by the sinister Marsten House, the local "haunted house".  However, Ben is not the only newcomer to Salem's Lot.  Debonair antiques dealer Mr. Straker (Mason) plans to open a shop with his mysterious partner Mr. Barlow (Reggie Nalder).  Before long the town is plagued by a mysterious disease and a spate of disappearances.  It quickly turns out that Barlow is a vampire who is feasting on the townspeople, who become vampires themselves.  Soon, it is up to Ben, horror-obsessed teen Mark (Kerwin) and Susan (Bedelia), daughter of the local doctor, to stand against a town of the undead.

Directed by Tobe Hooper, who made his name with the classic horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this was originally shown as a two part miniseries on NBC TV in America, and it has been released subsequently as a 150 minute TV movie and a 114 minute theatrical movie which lops off over an hour of material and includes more gruesome alternate takes of certain scenes to increase the gore quotient.  The three hour version has a slow start, and is definitely too long, and has some obvious breaks for adverts.  It also pulls some of it's punches in deference of TV standards and practices.  However, sometimes it really works well. David Soul, best known for the TV show Starsky & Hutch (1975-1979), is pretty bland, but James Mason steals the show as the silkily sinister Straker.  The production is full of veterans, such as Lew Ayres and B-movie stalwart Elisha Cook and soon-to-be familiar faces such as Bonnie Bedelia, who is probably best known as Bruce Willis' estranged wife in Die Hard (1988) and would appear in Needful Things (1993), another Stephen King adaptation about a sinister antiques dealer in a small Maine town; Fred Willard who would go on to appear in This Is Spinal Tap (1983) and the Anchorman films; and Kenneth McMillan who would appear as the grotesque Baron Harkonnen in the David Lynch film Dune (1984).  The novel is a solid slice of early Stephen King, and the film follows it fairly closely.  The main difference is that Barlow in the novel is a suave Count Dracula style vampire, but here he is a grotesque, silent monster, inspired by Nosferatu (1921) with blue-white skin, bat-like ears and rodent-like teeth, with shining yellow eyes.  It is pretty slow to begin with, opening like a kind of off-beat soap opera, but if you stick with it, the second half is genuinely creepy,  The floating vampire children, with their shining silver eyes, scratching and tapping at windows, begging to be let in, are memorably eerie.  The decayed interior of the Marsten House is creepy, and Barlow's sudden appearances are quite frightening, particularly when he appears as a small, crawling bundle on a kitchen floor, before rising up to unveil himself in front of a terrified family.  This has become something of a cult film in recent years, and while some may struggle with the length and slow pace, it is worthwhile sticking with it.

Ben Mears (Davis Soul) in Salem's Lot

Needful Things

Year of Release:  1993
Director:  Fraser C. Heston
Screenplay:  W. D. Richter, based on the novel Needful Things by Stephen King
Starring:  Ed Harris, Max von Sydow, Bonnie Bedelia, J. T. Walsh, Amanda Plummer
Running Time:  120 minutes
Genre:  Horror

A mysterious stranger named Leland Gaunt (von Sydow) arrives in the small Maine town on Castle Rock, where he sets up a strange antiques/curiosity shop called Needful Things.  Gaunt appears to have an uncanny knack of finding the one thing that every customer most desires, and each is priced to just what the customer can easily afford, but there is a catch:  The cash price is only half of the payment, the rest comes in the form of a deed, usually a cruel prank played on someone else in town, and all designed to point to someone other than the prankster.  Before long, the nice little town becomes torn apart with suspicion, paranoia, hate and misplaced revenge. 

While this is far from the worst movie to be based on one of Stephen King's works, it's also far from the best.  Although it really does as well as it could do at compressing King's sprawling, episodic doorstop of a novel into a coherent film.  It's well cast with solid character actors, and the story is interesting.  The problem is that the film doesn't have much of a consistent tone, the mixture of supernatural horror, dark comedy and small town soap opera worked a lot better on the page, where there was more space to go into the characters and their relationships.  The performances are good, especially Max von Sydow as the devilish Leland Gaunt, and the story is interesting enough to carry it along, but it's neither scary or funny, and the climax is ridiculous.

Max von Sydow in Needful Things         

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Year: 1969
Director: Sydney Pollack
Screenplay: James Poe and Robert E. Thompson, based on the novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy
Starring: Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Susannah York, Gig Young, Red Buttons, Bonnie Bedelia, Bruce Dern
Running Time: 120 minutes
Genre: Drama

Summary: Los Angeles, 1932: Robert Syverton (Sarrazin), who once dreamed of being a great film director, is standing trial and recalls the events that led up to him being there. Wandering into a dance marathon which is about to begin in a shabby ballroom, he is recrutied by the event's opportunistic promoter and Master of Ceremonies, Rocky (Young), as a partner for cynical aspiring actress Gloria (Fonda) after her own partner drops out due to suspected illness. The rules of the marathon are cruelly simple. There are 102 couples and they have to keep dancing basically until they drop or quit until there is just one couple left who will win a $1500 cash prize. They are allowed a ten minute break every hour but otherwise they have to keep dancing. As they keep dancing for hours which turn into days which turn into weeks which approach months, they're weaknesses exploited by Rocky for the amusement of the audience (who show they're approval by pelting the contestants with pennies) the contestants find themselves reduced to little more than animals.

Opinions: Even if you've never seen this movie or read the book that it's based on, you will probably at least be familiar with the title or some variation on it as it is referenced endlessly in popular culture. The film is an intense and gruelling watch. Set almost entirely in the claustrophobic environs of the ballroom and the small dormitories and offices set off it. While a film about a dance marathon may not seem particularly dramatic it still works due to the way it depicts the exhaustion and physical agony of the event as well as the desperation of the participants. The film is set during the Great Depression and that is a very important element in the story. The crew wore roller-skates to shoot some of the derby scenes in order to try to capture the sense of frenetic motion, and the film also makes extensive use of flash-forwards to depict future events, which is not a very common technique in cinema. Pollack gets great perfomances out of the actors, with Jane Fonda being particularly impressive as the bitter and cynical Gloria and Gig Young as the monsterous host of the event (with his catch-phrase "Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!").
The film was obviously aiming at big themes, but these don't quite come across. However it is still worth watching featuring some great acting and also being genuinely disturbing. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won one (Best Supporting Actor for Gig Young).




Michael Sarrazing and Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?