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

Cat's Eye

Year of Release: 1985
Director:  Lewis Teague
Screenplay:  Stephen King, based on the short stories "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" by Stephen King
Starring:  Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays, Candy Clark 
Running Time:  94 minutes
Genre:  Horror, anthology

Personally I am a huge fan of anthology films.  It's a fun idea having a selection of short stories instead of one long narrative, almost like a cinematic buffet.  However, like a buffet, the results can be wildly uneven, although if one segment is bad then you don't have to wait too long for something else to appear. 

Cat's Eye has the unique, as far as I know, framing device of following the adventures of a plucky cat who is haunted by visions of a girl (Barrymore) begging for help. On his way, however he is captured by an organisation that will go extreme lengths to stop an annoying yuppie (Woods) from smoking, and by an Atlantic City mobster (McMillan) who forces his wife's lover (Hays) to accept a deadly wager: to walk all the way around the narrow ledge outside the mobster's penthouse apartment at the top of a skyscraper.  Eventually the cat makes it to the girl and finds himself forced into nightly combat to defend the girl form a tiny monster living in her wall.

This is a fun, lighthearted movie.  The first two segments are based on short stories published in King's Night Shift collection (which also supplied the source material for such deathless cinema classics as Children of the Corn (1984), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Graveyard Shift (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Mangler (1995)), the third segment was written specifically for the film.  "Quitters, Inc." is kind of like a weird dark comedy, which has some fun bits, such as a weird nightmare sequence set to the Police song "Every Breath You Take", and James Woods is pretty good as the jittery would-be ex-smoker.  "The Ledge" is a pretty fun, short thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The third story is the only one that features any supernatural elements, and is probably the most typically Stephen King.  The monster effects are good, and Drew Barrymore is very good as the little girl.

Cat's Eye is kind of underrated, I think because it doesn't really feature much of the horror that Stephen King is best known for, but there is something here for pretty much anyone.  It's suspenseful, creepy at times and at times very funny.

Drew Barrymore and friend in Cat's Eye

Dune

Year of Release:  1984
Director:  David Lynch
Screenplay:  David Lynch, based on the novel Dune by Frank Herbert
Starring:  Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jurgen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Kenneth McMillan, Sting, Sean Young, Everett McGill, Dean Stockwell, Patrick Stewart, Virginia Madsen, Max von Sydow
Running Time:  131 minutes
Genre:  science-fiction

This adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 science-fiction novel is generally considered a disaster, and right off the bat I have to say that it's really not that bad.  The story is set in a distant galaxy and involves two feuding families from two different planets:  The Atreides from the planet Caladan, ruled by patriarch Duke Leto (Prochnow), with his concubine Lady Jessica (Annis) and their son Paul (MacLachlan); and the Harkonnens from Geidi Prime, ruled by the sadistic and grotesque Baron Vladimir (McMillan) and his nephews, Feyd-Rautha (Sting) and the Beast Raban (Paul Smith).
The Atreides and Harkonnens are both desperate for control of the desert planet Arrakis (nicknamed Dune), a world devoid of natural water, riddled with deadly, giant subterranean sandworms,  and sparsely populated by a mysterious people known as the Fremen.  Arrakis is however vital, because it is the only source of the "spice melange", the most valuable substance in the universe, which can extend life and expand consciousness.  It's most important property is the ability to "fold space" thereby making interstellar travel possible.

This is a deeply frustrating film because there is a lot about it that is really great, and so much that is really bad.  It's worse problem is that it tries to condense Herbert's long, complex novel, which involves an intricate back-story into a too short a time, and this isn't a short film.  In the event much of the film's dialogue is purely exposition to advance the plot, with a lot of voice-over narration to explain what the hell is happening.  However it is a visually stunning film, with some of the most striking sets and production design that I have seen, and it does create a number of unique worlds and at it's best creates a genuine sense of wonder.  It also hasn't dated too much, except for some special-effects shots, and the very 1980s soundtrack by Toto and Brian Eno.  Watching it is a unique and unforgettable experience, with Kenneth McMillan creating, in Baron Harkonnen, one of the most memorable screen villains in history.  In fact, the Harkonnen scenes are genuinely nightmare fuel.  Again most of the good-looking characters are heroic, and evil is depicted by physical ugliness.  Francesca Annis is impressive as Lady Jessica, who provides the emotional heart of the film, but otherwise there are a lot of great actors standing around in fantastic costumes and sets, struggling to make an impression.

David Lynch famously repudiated the film, and dislikes even discussing it in interviews, and given the fact that he has never made any secret of the fact that he dislikes science-fiction, he was kind of an odd choice to direct it, but there is a lot of Lynch in it's visuals and style.

You may love it or you may hate it, but it is such a striking and unique experience, it is well worth checking out.

 Kyle MacLachlan versus Sting, while Patrick Stewart looks on in Dune