Creepshow 2 (1987) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - May 1, 1987]

Considering that Creepshow 2 was made by the same creatives that were grinding out weekly episodes of Tales from the Darkside, it comes as no surprise that this film feels more like a collection of Darkside episodes spliced together than it does a sequel to Romero's visually kinetic Creepshow.

While not an altogether bad film, it does lack the narrative and visual zest of the first film. Old Chief Wood'nhead, the opening tale, is the weakest of the three live-action segments. The Raft is my favorite segment, and even scared me the first time I saw it, because it is a faithful-to-decent adaptation of one of my all time favorite Stephen King short stories.

But the best segment of the film is its final live-action tale, The Hitch-hiker. You might be muttering, or wanting to say, "Thanks for the ride, lady," well after the film has ended. According to an article, or interview, I read in Fangoria, King had written The Hitch-hiker for Creepshow as a possible replacement for the "They're Creeping Up on You!" segment, should it be considered too difficult to film. This might explain why this segment seems to have a tad more energy to it than the segments that preceded it.

The wraparound, like the first film, is animated. But this time there is an actual story being told. One featuring Venus Fly Traps. "They eat meat." Heh.

Carrie by Stephen King / The Swarm by Arthur Herzog - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - April 24, 1975

Finding this ad for the source material for two seminal movies of my youth was a pleasant, even chuckle inducing, delight.

While I do not remember seeing either of these particular editions on bookstore shelves, or nestled in drugstore spinner racks, I do remember picking up one for The Swarm in a used bookstore in Berkeley, way, way back in the day.

The two editions I remember, and actually read, were the movie tie-ins. 

In 1976 I was equal parts fascinated and frightened by the black and white stills in the center of the Carrie tie-in. My interest was fueled somewhat by John Travolta being in it. Because he was one of the beloved Sweat Hogs in the popular sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.

While I did read Carrie, two or three times, it might not have been until 1979, or maybe even 1980. It was long after I had seen the film's broadcast debut on network television. Which was the first time that I saw it.

The Swarm, which I was obsessed with in the first half of 1978, was my "birthday movie" for that year. Like a great many books at that time, I struggled to get through it. It would not be until 1980 or 81 that I would actually manage to read the entire book, from start to finish.

While not a great book, The Swarm could have made for a pretty good movie. If the person making said movie had understood the kind of movie they were making. Which had not been the case with Irwin Allen. So it goes.

Cat's Eye (1985) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - April 7, 1985

Another movie that I missed out on seeing on the big screen whilst living in Hong Kong. But I don't think I missed out on anything all that special, as this anthology film lacks that charm and creative zest that made Creepshow so entertaining.

Director Lewis Teague (Alligator, Cujo) does what he can with the material, but there is only so much that could be done with the first two yarns. Quitters Inc and The Ledge. Both were taken from the Night Shift anthology, yet neither were all that well suited for the cinematic screen. The first leans way too heavily into camp comedy, while that latter fails to generate the high stakes levels of stress the situation calls for. So it goes.

It is all redeemed with the final story, though. Because The General does manage to capture some of the comic book energy that pulsed throughout Creepshow, when the titular cat does battle with a nasty little breath-stealing troll in order to save the life of an endangered girl. It is pure fun and only makes the previous yarns suffer all the more in comparison.

If you haven't seen Cat's Eye, my advice is to just skip to The General.

Carrie (2013) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - October 9, 2013

When I first saw the teaser for this version of Carrie, my hopes spiked that it would contain the section of the book deleted from the 1976 (and subsequent) version(s) due to budgetary limitations.

In the book, after Carrie White sets the gymnasium aflame and kills everybody at that the prom, she walks home and destroys everything and everyone in her path.

Yet, it was not to be. They just did the same thing again, it seems.

At least I can imagine a film adaptation of the maligned musical wherein Carrie walks home singing a song titled "You Know My Name" or something similar, while setting off a torrent of orgiastic destruction and retribution.

The Long Walk (2025) - Review

My earliest recollection of The Long Walk is from the early 1980s. A friend of mine was reading an edition of it that he had checked out from our High School library. The striking cover art both caught my eye and burrowed into my memory.

I love how the film's primary poster art is just a modified version of the original cover art.

Too bad it did not burrow deep enough to motivate me to read the damn thing. The only reason I can think of as to why I gave the book a pass is that it was marketed as science-fiction and, at that particular time, I wanted to read horror and only horror. If a book did not have ghouls, ghosts, or beasts in its title or plot description, I had zero interest in reading it. 

Which was my loss, of course.

I did not crack open The Long Walk until 1987, maybe 88, when it was reprinted and released as part of The Bachman Books omnibus. While each of the four books in that collection had their merits, I felt The Long Walk to be the quartet's most harrowing and memorable read.

Descriptive passages and dialogue from the book have stuck with me and haunt me to this day. A few of those moments managed to make it into this film adaptation that, for decades, I believed was impossible to make.

Because the entirety of The Long Walk is a death march. One hundred (in the book) male youths "volunteer" to walk along a road at an enforced pace, without slowing or stopping, for as long and as far as they can. 

When a walker does slow, or is forced by biological necessity to stop, they get a warning. There is a first warning. A second warning. Then a third, and final, warning. Then they are killed.

The walk goes on and on and on and on... until only one is left alive. That is the winner. If you consider that to be winning...

There were two primary reasons for why I thought a faithful film version of The Long Walk impossible to make. First was the subject matter being just too grim for feature film treatment. Second was the cinematic hurdle of making young men marching along a dilapidated highway, and getting knocked off one by one by one with zero mercy, visually interesting and/or dramatically compelling. That is a tall order.

But damn, screenwriter J.T. Mollner (Strange Darling) and director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games, etc.) somehow manage to translate the bleak ferocity of The Long Walk into a film that, for the most part, works. And does so without taking too many damaging liberties with its harrowing and horrifying source material. But liberties are taken and, well, mileage will undoubtedly vary regarding whether or not they do or do not work in the film's favor.

It begins just as the novel did, with Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) being dropped off at the long walk starting line by his distraught and disapproving mother (Judy Greer). I was sad to see that the signpost commemorating the earliest ever ticket punch was absent. So it goes.

The number of walkers is downsized from one hundred to "only" fifty. Of that group a small percentage is allotted enough dialogue to allow for a modicum of character development. Most of the walkers that do not have any dialogue are the earliest and quickest to get thinned from the group. Save for the very first, played by Roman Griffin Davis (Jojo Rabbit).

As their numbers dwindle, exhaustion and desperation grow. The film does a decent enough job of showing that exhaustion and desperation ebb and flow through the walkers. Because nothing quite gets the adrenaline pumping as fast and as hard as somebody close by, or that you have befriended, getting their ticket punched. 

When the film began, I wondered if, perhaps, it was an adaptation that took too long to be made. What with Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and even Squid Game having covered and mined the very same thematic ground as The Long Walk.

But what differentiates The Long Walk from those others is its stark and unapologetic simplicity. The ending of the book lacked a dramatic catharsis, leaving its readers to wonder what, if any, point was being made. I think that complete and utter absence of catharsis is part of what makes the book so haunting for me. 

The film attempts to inject something akin to a ray of hope into it, but it did not work for me, at all. It felt forced, clumsy, and left a sour taste in my spirit. Because I think the movie lied to its audience about what The Long Walk was saying.

King wrote the book when the draft plucked young men out of their day to day lives of quiet desperation and dropped them into the meat grinder of war. I read the book in the aftermath of that era, before school shootings became a semi-regular fact of life.

Post Columbine and Sandy Hook, The Long Walk should have stuck to its core message of America thoughtlessly sacrificing its youth for some make believe greater good without any real benefit or good being achieved.

That the walk never truly ends and nobody really wins. As The Major himself (Mark Hamill) says, there is no finish line. Save for death, it seems.

As much as I appreciated most of The Long Walk, its ending stumble might have ruined it for me.

Well, there is still the book, at least.

Maximum Overdrive (1986) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - July 24, 1986]

San Francisco Examiner - July 24, 1986

I was in Dallas, Texas, of all places, visiting a friend. That friend and I went to see Maximum Overdrive on its opening day and we had quite the memorable experience.

Although King had made a promise to scare the hell out of his audience in the film's infamous trailer, Maximum Overdrive plays more like a parody than it does as a sincere attempt at "doing a Stephen King movie right."

King's writing, at times, suffers from his indulging in lowbrow humor. In Maximum Overdrive he did not just indulge in it. He both gorged and wallowed in it, like a pig in slop.

One can both laugh at and laugh with Maximum Overdrive. King himself has gone on record stating that he was coked out of his mind, and no doubt drunk off his gourd, during the production and no idea whatsoever of what he was doing. It shows in every single frame.

But I still love it and have zero problem watching it over and over and over again...

Prime Evil - Edited by Douglas E. Winter - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - June 26, 1988[

One of the stories in this anthology, which suffers when compared to Kirby McCauley's far larger and more breathtaking opus Dark Forces, stuck in my memory. David Morrell's Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity. That story managed to wallop me good. I loved it.

I also vaguely remember being somewhat baffled and intrigued by Whitley Strieber's story The Pool. It was the first piece of fiction that Strieber wrote after finishing Communion and the thematic connection between the two seemed clear. Beyond that, I remember feeling lost and confused about what I had just read...

1988 was a long time ago and I no longer have the book close at hand. But I was able to track down its table of contents, so I could check to see if anything else in the book might jog a memory. Only two did.

First would be Stephen King's The Night Flier, which contains a bathroom scene that is equal parts gruesome, goofy, and, being Stephen King, pretty darn scary. Have not seen its movie adaptation, yet.

Then there is Peter Straub's The Juniper Tree, which I must admit to having no memory of reading in this anthology, but when I read it in a collection of Straub's fiction, it really knocked me for a loop. Maybe my psyche was ready for just how close to home this story hits.

There is also a Clive Barker story in the anthology, titled Coming to Grief, but I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Perhaps it is time for a refresher?

The Dark Half (1993) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - April 18, 1993]

I was super excited at being able to see The Dark Half  at a 'sneak preview' screening held at the Alexandria Theater in San Francisco. But the muted and indifferent reaction of the packed house proved to be a dire foreshadowing of the film's lackluster performance at the box office.

Which was too bad, as I liked the film and hoped it would be successful. Not to be, though. So it goes.

Sleepwalkers (1992) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - April 10, 1992]

Hey, today is the 33rd anniversary of the theatrical release of Sleepwalkers. Yay?

It was nice to see heroic cats saving the day, for once. 

The Mangler (1995) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - March 3, 1995]

I remember studying one of the newspaper ads for The Mangler with no small degree of incredulity. How did this thing manage to get a theatrical release? By 1995 this kind of stuff was released direct-to-video, not to big screen venues.

Perhaps it was the film's source material. The Mangler is one of my all-time favorite stories from Stephen King's Night Shift anthology, so I knew I would be seeing it. 

Although Tobe Hooper had done an impressive job directing the 1979 Salem's Lot mini-series, his work post The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 wobbled between disappointing, at best, and dire, at worst.

Robert Englund being in the film did not hurt, but it also might not help all the much. While Englund was game for becoming a Vincent Price style horror icon, his on screen charisma could only carry a film like this so far. Hooper would need to bring his A-game, if that were still possible.

Those were all the pluses I saw in the ad. Yet there was one gigantic minus that eclipsed them all and raised my doubt level all the way up to critical. The name Harry Alan Towers.

Towers was an exploitation writer-producer best known for his numerous film adaptations of works by Sax Rohmer, Agatha Christie, Marquis de Sade, and/or Edgar Wallace. He also produced several of the more "notable" films made by the euro-sleaze-exploitation titan Jesus Franco in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Towers earned my eternal distrust by producing the lackluster sleaze-fest Edge of Sanity, which starred a slumming it for the paycheck Anthony Perkins. The friend I was unfortunate enough to see it with can and will attest that I writhed in my seat throughout most of that film's runtime.

So I was a tad suspect of The Mangler.

It is unfortunate that those suspicions proved to be well founded. While there were some things I liked about The Mangler, such as its production design, theatrical to the point of camp tone, and pitch black humor, I thought it dragged horribly. Cut some ten to fifteen minutes, starting with the extraneous, over-the-top, and painfully drawn-out dialogue exchanges between Ted Levine and Daniel Matmor, and maybe, just maybe, this could have become a campy horror hoot drawn from the same horror-comedy vein as HBO's Tales from the Crypt series.

But it was not to be. So it goes.

The Monkey (2025) - Review

"Everybody dies..."

Having plumbed the disturbing depths of familial dysfunction and generational trauma for the unsettling and effective horror-thriller Longlegs, writer-director Osgood Perkins returns to those very same dark and fertile depths for a good, morbid, and cathartic laugh at the cruel absurdities of life with The Monkey.

Although Perkins takes a great deal of narrative liberties with this ostensible adaptation of Stephen King's short story of the same name, the basic conceit and framework of both are, by and large, the same. A young boy discovers that a toy monkey can and will kill whenever it starts whaling away at its cymbals (in the original story) or its drum (in the movie). Beyond that...

King played it straight with his story, managing to invoke both horror and dread via the nightmarish absurdity of a killer toy monkey somehow being both real and very dangerous. It also seemed to be both sentient and incredibly vindictive. That is how I remember it, at least.

But what might work as words on a page meant to be translated and played out in the reader's theater of the mind, might not work all that well when dramatized for the screen. So Perkins leans into the absurdity and inherent silliness of the concept and the carnage. There were several hilarious and gruesome over-the-top kills in the movie that had both myself and the audience around me howling and cackling.

Yet, even as all that carnage played out, I also noticed how Perkins did not shy away from how traumatic these events were for his protagonist(s). There were quite a few moments when the movie not only acknowledged this trauma, it also weaved it into the narrative tapestry, allowing for some interesting and challenging character development.

The result is a movie that is both laugh out loud funny and also a somber meditation on the longterm effects that grief, trauma, abuse, and neglect can have on a person. Which makes The Monkey a thematically potent gem of a horror-comedy. Maybe even a classic...

The Stand by Stephen King - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - November 5, 1978]

Having just read and reviewed a book about the 1918 influenza epic, why not share this newspaper ad hyping the release of Stephen King's End Times epic The Stand?

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, there was a lot of chatter and jokes about Captain Trips and such. There were even chain letter tweets sharing and spreading, back when there were tweets worth sharing and spreading, the eighth chapter of the novel, which charted the explosive spread of the super flu.

Further back in time, however, I struggled to get through the totality of The Stand. I could make it as far as the end of the plague, but would start to lose patience with the seeming meandering pace of this behemoth novel. Then again, I was all of eleven or twelve at that time and had the attention span of a gnat. So it goes.

I also remember being super disappointed to learn that the Star Wars invoking cover art, featuring a sword-wielding Luke Skywalker type fighting a scythe-wielding crow creature of some kind, did not happen in the book.

Although props should be given for that art, which does a great job of invoking the epic fantasy vibe of the work more so than the epic horror expectations this potential (and future constant) reader had in the early months of 1979.

Further props for it invoking both the grim reaper, via the scythe, and the plague, via that beaked countenance. I love it.

'Salem's Lot by Stephen King - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - October 26, 1975]

I would not make it all the way through the novel 'Salem's Lot until well after the broadcast of the 1979 mini-series, which is what the "major Warner Bros. film" promised in this ad eventually became.

Carrie by Stephen King - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - April 28, 1974]