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You can count the number of decent Stephen King movies on one hand! The man’s produced so many best sellers it’s inevitable the movie deals would come rolling in but did we have to be subjected to so much rubbish? Why do his stories constantly fail to draw the big directors, even after some big celluloid hits? The only films ‘based on a story by Stephen King’ I can honestly say were thoroughly enjoyable were “The Shining”, “Stand By Me”, “Carrie”, “Misery” and “Creepshow”. What’s the one thing they all have in common? Good directors!

Anybody who’s had the misfortune to site through “Cat’s Eye”, “Silver Bullet” or the truly awful “Sleepwalkers” will know that a good story does not make a good movie. So why do his books get adapted for the big screen by no-hopers? Probably because there are so many of both!

There was a time when the name Stephen King became synonymous with horror and his name on the front cover of a video or a cinema poster was box office gold. Films like “Pet Cemetery” and “Cujo” already had an audience who’d read the book and already wanted to see the film. Do you honestly think film producers and studios were bothered about the movie’s quality? Not a chance, they just wanted to churn out a movie with a King title and adaptation and they were guaranteed a hit. Not any more, we’ve wised up and so has King after he asked for his name to be taken off the well below average “Lawnmower Man”!

It’s possibly no surprise that two of King’s biggest film adaptations have been non-genre adaptations. Rob Reiner’s under-rated “Stand By Me”, adapted from the short story “The Body”, did modest box office business but was a big video hit due to word of mouth and a young cast that was beginning to blossom (Corey Feldman, Keifer Sutherland, River Phoenix, John Cussack and a cameo and voice over from adult star Richard Dreyfuss) that gives the film a fresh look today and a look that won’t date because of its flashback setting. It was also more of a character study than horror movie, of interest to adults and teenagers who were both able to identify.

The over-rated “Green Mile” was also adapted from a series of King short stories, serialised in six volumes. Not so much a horror move as a fantasy moulded with a prison movie, it has a TV movie look about it for me and dragged. It also suffered from unfair comparisons to the immense “Shawshank Redemption”, but was always going to be a hit due to the cast, interesting subject matter and continuing popularity of King. It’s rumoured King allows any budding film maker to adapt his short stories for next to nothing, strange that these three movies were all adapted from shorts instead of the novels that generally result in poor films.

Then of course there’s King’s own attempt to direct, not quite following his horror writer rival Clive Barker into film folklore. Whereas Barker fully realised his novels in “Nightbreed” and “Hellraiser”, King’s “Maximum Overdrive” has a claim to be the worst horror film ever made. The idea is enough for a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode at best as a Comet that brushes past Earth causes all electrical appliances to develop a mind of their own, including trucks! He also felt the need to remake Stanley Kubrick’s haunting version of “The Shining” with one of his own that, whilst admittedly sticking closer to the novel than Kubrick, wasn’t a patch. King once described Kubrick’s movie as “A big shiny Mercedes with no engine”, presumably “Maximum Overdrive” could be described as a small dirty tractor with a flat tyre.

Stop laughing at the back there!

This isn’t to say King’s novels aren’t good. Most of them have good, if rather one dimensional, stories that appeal to a mass audience by not becoming bogged down in complex plots and metaphysical ramblings that prevent a lot of Clive Barker’s books reaching a wider audience. It may be for this reason that many of the adaptations fail to live up to the novel’s successes, there’s not as much substance for a director to get his or her teeth into. There’s very little else to “Christine” than a car possessed by the devil, hence a film that does nothing more than feature a car that drive’s off by itself (shopping trolley’s do this all the time without the devil’s help and they’re not scary!). Or it could just be that directors such as Mary Lambert (“Pet Semetery”), Daniel Attias (“Silver Bullet”), Lewis Teague (“Cujo”) and Ralph Singleton (“Graveyard Shift”) could never reach the heights of George Romero (“Creepshow”), Kubrick, Reiner or Brian De Palma (“Carrie”) in getting the best out of King’s visions.

“Beware the moon and stay on the path…”