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.
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