The Langoliers

A buncha disparate strangers including, you guessed it, an author wake up in the middle of their cross country flight to find that most of the passengers and crew and people of Earth have vanished. Luckily one of them is a deadheading pilot so he decides to set the plane down in, you guessed it, Bangor Maine to figure stuff out. Turns out they're out of sync with time and are about to be eaten by these little Pac Men creatures who clean up the past. I remember watching this as a kid and busting out laughing at how bad the CG was for the titular monsters was but figured maybe I'd be cooler with it now since even a lot of what I considered "good" CG in the 90s looks ridiculous in 2021 but no, this is still incredibly laughable. 

RATING: 31%

Dolores Claiborne

A fancy New York City writer has to return home to, you guessed it, rural Maine whenever her mother is accused of murder. Well, no biggie, I'm sure everybody's parents have been accused of murder at least once, except this is the (gasp) second time she's been accused of murder, ulp! The first was when her mother was accused but never charged of killing her abusive husband when the fancy writer was just a little girl. This is one a those non-horror Stephen King movies and it's pretty good thanks to Kathy Bates, though the overwrought Danny Elfman score almost ruins it.

RATING:  77%

The Mangler

 An industrial laundry press starts getting an appetite for low wage workers, but inspectors can't shut it down because the boss of the laundry factory (Robert Englund) is loaded. I mean loaded with money not booze. Luckily local detective Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs is on the case, with his spooky brother in law as a sidekick. When I was a kid watching this I always thought when the machine gets up and chases the characters near the end the CGI was really hokey, but now that it's a quarter century old I can forgive it I guess. The rest of the movie isn't that interesting even though it's directed by Tobe Hooper, though where else are you gonna see a showdown with a laundry press? Well, except for this movie's sequels I mean.

RATING: 54%

The Shawshank Redemption

In this, everybody who doesn't like horror movies' favorite Stephen King movie, a dude goes to jail for a crime he didn't commit and learns a thing or two about life and love and friendship and whatnot. How come if every single person in the whole country knows prisons are cruel places we never really get any sort of prison reform off the ground? Morgan Freeman obviously steals the show in this one but everyone's great. And sorry this isn't a "horror movie" but it would be horrorble to be sentenced to life in prison for a crime you didn't commit.

RATING: 89%

Carrie (The Book)

I figured after watching three adaptations of this, Stephen King's first novel, I oughtta maybe give it a read. You all know the deal - a high school girl who is bullied winds up gearing telekinetic powers and kills everyone RIP. Maybe what you didn't know is in the book she kills like everyone everyone. The whole town of 500 people wind up dead! Also the book is half epistolary which is kinda cool.

RATING: 71%

The Stand

The government fails to stop the spread of a lethal flu virus (uh oh) and soon 99% of everybody is a rotting corpse on the side of the road. The survivors get some dreams transmitted into their heads about a nice old lady in a cornfield and a mean dude who can turn into a crow, so they all start trekking across the country and teaming up. There is a poet who is a real jerk (surprise surprise) and it is funny when he gives the woman he stalks a copy of his latest publication "that only pays in contributor copies." Hey, too real dude! For a six hour network television adaptation of a six zillion page novel it's pretty good, even with the most literal deus ex machina ending you'll ever see. 

RATING: 78%

Needful Things

 

A New England town actually has a lot of real bad people in it (in a Stephen King story? Nooooo!) so a Max Von Sydow demon shows up to give them little treasures in exchange for them all pranking each other into a murderous rage. It's pretty bland in general, but it has an amazing building explosion from back when they'd actually for real blow up a whole dang building for a B movie. 

RATING: 56%

The Tommyknockers

 

A quiet New Zealand, erm, New England town gets turned all fliparoo whenever a lady digs up an ancient crashed spaceship, hypnotizing everyone into building inventions like laser lipsticks. It may be the worst Stephen King movie I've watched so far, but at least there's an alcoholic poet who tries to save the day.

RATING: 17%

The Dark Half

Sleepwalkers

 

A mother and son vampire monster duo arrive in a small town to suck the life force out of a local virgin, only they don't count on some heroes - a buncha domestic cats, the soul vampires' one and only weakness! It's majorly silly, but like why not watch it?

RATING: 68%

Monsters - "The Moving Finger"

 

In this episode of the cheapass follow-up to the great 80s show "Tales from the Darkside," a super long finger pops out of a bathroom sink to irritate a nice tall guy. I don't remember the Stephen King story exactly but I guess this is fine?

RATING: 41%

Golden Years

 

A janitor working at that same company (The Company) that turned the little girl from Firestarter into a fire starter gets zapped by an explosion and starts getting younger. Apparently Stephen King saw Twin Peaks and wanted to make something similar, but with a little less fever dream. Well buddy I gotta say that I think the fever dream aspect is a real big part of what makes Twin Peaks so good! 

RATING: 34%

Sometimes They Come Back

 

An English teacher with an embattled past (like, of course - he's an English teacher) comes back to his home town to teach high school, only the ghosts of some 1950s jerks who murdered his brother start showing up and murdering his students. It's pretty well done for a TV movie, and fairly faithful to the short story, though they changed the story's great ending with sympathetic magic in the classroom to a more action packed finale. I "get it" but it's still a real shame!

RATING: 67%

Misery

 

A famous author of schlocky romance novels gets in a snowstorm accident where he almost dies but he is luckily rescued by his number one fan, how sweet! Except, uh, maybe she's a little less than stable, and upset that he killed off her favorite character (named Misery) in his newest novel? Kathy Bates steals the show obviously but I wonder if Stephen King regrets that he never got success in the world of so-called "high literature." He's got several novels where the main character is a writer who laments their commercial success over critical success, and there's a ton of asides in IT about creative writing workshops. Like, sorry for all your international acclaim as perhaps the best known writer of our time? You'd rather have like a National Book Critics Circle award sticker on the cover of your unread books in a bargain bin?

RATING: 78%

IT

 

An ancient cosmic fear monster terrorizes/murders kids in a small Maine town, so the local cadre of misfit preteens decides to stop it in 1960 and again in 1990. For a basically PG-13 rated TV-movie this is pretty well done. Though (SPOILERS) I do think it's a little bunk that while everybody goes out and gets rich the black kid has to stay behind to be a poor local historian and the Jewish kid kills himself before taking on It the second time. 

RATING: 60%

Graveyard Shift

 

In this completely forgettable adaptation of a completely forgettable Stephen King short story, some rats in a local cotton mill are wilding out because of their rat boss, a giant flying rat. Hey isn't a flying rat just a bat? That's what the Germans would have me believe anyway. Anyway who gets called in to solve the monster problem? A salvage crew of course!

RATING: 44%

Tales From the Darkside: The Movie

 

In this anthology, based on George Romero's TV show I've always wanted to see but it's never available to stream or rent, there are three little tales of horror/irony, including a mummy one, an evil cat one, and a gargoyle one. There's also a cannibal Debbie Harry wraparound one. The best one (and the one Stephen King and George Romero wrote) is "The Cat From Hell," in which an unscrupulous pharmaceutical dude hires a hit man to kill a cat he's convinced is trying to kill him. The one they clearly spent all their FX budget on though is the last one, which is also the most boring. Anyway, it's an ok if very 90s anthology if you want to see an extremely young Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and Christian Slater.

RATING: 63%

Pet Sematary

 

A family moves to rural Maine just off a busy highway where they befriend Herman Munster, who helpfully directs the father to a secret resurrection burial ground whenever the family cat dies. The cat comes back, the very next day even, except it stinks and is extra jerky because of going against the laws of God and nature and science and etc. Hey I'd still do it to bring back any of my dead cats. As you can guess, the movie is not just about bringing pets back from the dead whenever the family's toddler is killed by a semi truck in a wild example of poor parenting. First, they shoulda put a fence around their yard as soon as the kid was almost hit by a truck months earlier. Second, the kid runs like 50 yards toward the busy road while the whole family watches and it only dawns on them to try and stop him when they see a truck in the distance. Anyhoo, the kid dies and is buried and his dad is like hmm, maybe I'll dig him up and try that titular sematary again. In movies and shows people are always digging up graves but I hope I never have to do it - it seems like hard work! The kid comes back a little jerkier and killier and nobody lives happily ever after but at least Denise Crosby gets in the last... jab.

RATING: 78%

The Running Man

 

In the distant future of (checks notes) 2019 the evil government frames a dude who wouldn't kill a bunch of innocent civilians in a food riot and sentences him to go on a game show where he fights... to the death! It's peak Arnold one-liner land, which isn't to say they're all winners, but even the bad ones are so unzing they work (hey lighthead!). And really, who, in a life or death situation with the fate of the country at steak would just make relentless pithy jokes, anyway? Oh right, memes.

RATING: 70%

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The Twilight Zone - "Gramma"

 

A kid is left home with his sickly grandmother that he's a little scared of - like, duh! Check out that picture! There's a lot of distracting internal monologuing that screenwriter Harlan Ellison decided to have the characters think aloud, but pretty decent dread from a mostly forgettable Stephen King story.

RATING: 53%

Stand By Me

 A group of four preteen boys hear about a kid's dead body and decide to hike to it in order to be heroes and/or get on tv. Along the way they learn a little bit about life and struggle and puking after a pie eating contest. It's got a great set of 80s kid actors (River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell) who do a real good job goofin and cryin. I do question the frame of the author writing about this adventure, though - what does that add to the story? The ability to tell us who lived and who died? Like, why not add a narrator to a movie about King Arthur? "Everybody died a thousand years ago, deep." Also as a kid my neighbor and I used to blast the oldies soundtrack to this flick while drawing our own versions of Wacky Packages.

RATING: 83%