Dr Jacques COULARDEAU A miniseries of eight short TV films adapted from Stephen King's rather recent short stories. They are all in the style of the famous Twilight Zone serial but never as dark as the old model. In fact Stephen King in these short stories was trying to use different styles from what he is most known for, horror and terror. So most of the time he did not try to terrify his audience, at most horrify them, but often gross them out, and barely more. So hardly any real violence and extreme fantastic violence. Rather soft estrangement from standard life and the ordinary world of ours. We are thus surprised, disquieted, worried, but never anguished nor frightened. This softening goes along with a theme that is quite common: death and good old time nostalgia. The mind behind these stories has put quite a few years behind his forehead and his probably pot-bellied stomach. The vision is no longer that of a young child, a teenager or a young man who discard and rejects the wisdom coming from older people and for whom older people are danger, the devil, evil, something to get rid of before it dies in their hands. Here we have the vision of an older man, or woman, looking back at the world the way it was when they were young and they compensate the fact it is gone by making it evil. That old time and its characters do not come back into the present to haunt it. Rather the older people of today are transported into that old time of their youth. So it is not Sometimes They Come Back, but Sometimes They Drift Backwards. At time the danger comes from toys, hence children, the next generation, but the danger is seen from the point of view of the older man. The short stories and these short TV films are from an older author who is following the call that comes up from his muscular fiber. He has aged but without really deepening his vision. He has shifted points of view and the present vision is that of an older man probably produced and directed for television in the line of the baby boomers who are starting to get off the labor market and have a lot of time to spend and the desire never to let themselves die into and from inactivity, idleness. So let them have the good old stories about the good old time when they feared nothing but in which they would be absolutely frightened ****less if they had to go there again. Well done but rather too mild to be considered as horror or even fantastic stuff.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

ThrownMuse This fares better than much of Stephen King made-for-TV adaptations, though the episodes are hit or miss: BATTLEGROUND 8/10 - easily the best episode AND an homage to the greatest made-for-TV horror ever, "Trilogy of Terror." There's even a cameo by our friend the Zuni Doll! It goes the "no dialogue" route, and William Hurt pulls it off well. The FX are ace. Loved this one. Unfortunately, it's mostly downhill from here.CROUCH'S END 5/10 - this is pretty awful and Claire Forlani has got to be the worst working "name" actress, but there's something eerie in it's Lovecraft-ness that I appreciated for a bit.THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH 4/10 - Meh. It's good to see Tom Berenger and Marsha Mason working again. I guess.UMNEY'S LAST CASE 7/10 - It has a neat noir-ish feel, mostly created by the inimitable character acting of William H. Macy.THE END OF THE WHOLE MESS 6/10 - eh, this didn't translate too well, but it's watchable.THE FIFTH QUARTER 7/10 - This one's sort of a heist story with great performances (Sisto, Samantha Mathis) and a surprising homoerotic subplot. Good stuff here.AUTOPSY ROOM FOUR 4/10 - another King adaptation ruined by Richard Thomas! YOU KNOW THEY GOT A HELL OF A BAND 4/10 - I remember reading this as a youngster and finding it REALLY eerie. What's not to be scared of by evil dead rocknroll icons? Well, how about really lame evil dead rocknroll icon impersonators? This does not translate well to film.

Sandoz The majority of Stephen King's short stories are little gems, with original ideas that don't take a long time to develop; basically lean and mean--he sets them up quickly in a scarce number of pages, you read 'em, and you're finished before you know you've begun. They're like the equivalent of a carton of McDonald's fries--they taste Really good and you know there's not much nutritional value in them (re: from a literary standpoint, they don't say much about the universal human condition), but you're still gonna scarf 'em down, just don't be a pig and go for the extra-super-sized portion and fill up on too much grease ("too much grease" is a metaphor for the prose in King's novels when find yourself reading one of them and saying come on--enough with the pop-cultural observations or clever Yankee asides--get on with the story already!) He has compiled four books of short story collections. I've read them all--from NightShift to the latest, Everything's Eventual, and they all display an efficiency of getting-to-the-point which is sometimes sorely lacking in his tome-sized novels.But his short stories never overstay their welcome...which brings us to the TV adaptations of Nightmares And Dreamscapes...How in the hell did they (the series' producers) get a green-light to turn stories that usually averaged 15 pages into 50 minute episodes? I'll tell you how--two words--"Stephen King." Stories with his name on them probably didn't come cheap, and one hour shows enable more advertising than half hour ones, so...what should have been an anthology of mostly 23 or 24 minute episodes is turned into double that length, and double the commercial time...Ka-Ching!I'm not going to waste time synopsizing the plots of these stories--this review supposes you have already read the stories and/or seen the show; what follows is merely my gut reactions to what TNT presented... Of the four installments so far, here's my ten cent assessment (from first to worst): Battleground-- Not a classic by any means, but hey, how could anyone argue with keeping William Hurt from opening his trap by filming this episode without a single line of dialog? And the tongue-in-cheek reference and destruction of the killer Zuni doll from Trilogy Of Terror proved to me the producers (and the writer of the teleplay, who is Richard Matheson's son--the writer of TOT) knew their mission with this one was to make the action deadly, yet at the same time, fun. It took longer to get to Hurt's apartment than it should have, but I think it fulfilled it's objective. 8/10Umney's Last Case-- Liked this one primarily because of William H. Macy's performance. I think the writer/Umney should have appeared in the story sooner into the private eye/Umney beginning because he was the actual reality of the story, and anyone familiar with the King short story (probably half, if not more of the audience) knew the Chandleresque set-up was due to get interrupted by the writer's reality, so let's get on with it already, and cut-out the cute and clever hard-boiled repartee' Private Dick banter already. Once the writer/Umney's family tragedy began to reveal though, I thought the show developed an emotional connection that made the viewer (me, at least), feel sympathy for the real-life Macy's attempt to escape his sorrows by usurping his fictional creation's exciting life. 6/10 The End Of The Whole Mess-- Uh, this title is how I felt about this episode when it was over. After twenty minutes, I was ready to scream at the TV--OK, we get it already, the younger brother is a Mega Mensa Genius Prodigy Extraordinaire! We know from Ron Livingston talking to the camera ("time is running out for me"--not fast enough, I thought) that the young whiz kid is going to discover something really bad for humanity--we know this because he's already built an airplane but almost died because he couldn't steer it out of the path of a tree; and, he blew up his chemistry lab while teaching himself chemistry (to think the end of the world could have been prevented if only this kid had some more parental supervision). So much time was wasted on establishing the uber-genius of Henry Thomas, when we finally get to the resolution of his discovery--the end of the world through unintended idiocy--how much do we get to see of the world "ending?"--a cheap video shot of a reporter starting to forget what she's reporting on, and brief radio broadcasts announcing the day of judgement is at hand. Oh, and the brother's parents drooling and singing old songs. My point is, if your story is really about the "end of the whole mess (world)", I wanna see the "mess" as it goes up in flames and crashes and burns. Talk about ending with a whimper, indeed. 2/10 Crouch End-- This episode just ticked me off totally. I could have lived with the taking-forever exposition of the happy couple arriving at their hotel, playing slap-and-tickle, having lunch, and getting a taxi (that was half the episode right there), if once they finally crossed-over into Crouch End the episode delivered the chills, but it failed miserabley. Not only wasn't it scary, it was practically laughable. Ooh, look--a kitty...wait, it turns...oh my god! Look at it's scary eye! Uh-huh. They could have gone a long way towards achieving chills by filming the Crouch End sequence at night instead of in daylight, too...things you might unintentionally find funny can become scarier when you see them in the shadows of the night. But I guess the budget wasn't high enough to afford shooting at night on the fake London sets they slapped together for this one. On the page, this is a very scary story about tourists wandering into places they shouldn't and the terrible things that might lurk there just around a corner. The only terror in this adaptation was the directing and acting--those were truly horrifying. 1/10 Overall Series Average (so far): 4/10

jim47-1 Umney's Last Case: I'm not a big fan of Stephen King: that would be my wife. But I've read enough of his shorter fiction to have a feel for his work, and I really enjoyed this segment; it worked very well. William H. Macy was perfectly cast and Jacqueline McKenzie was very good, as well. Yeah, it's a silly premise, but once you suspend disbelief, it was very well-crafted. The ending was exactly right: no real conclusion, just the realization by both principles that the tables had turned. If only they had done The Stand, or Firestarter as well as this. If I have a quibble, it would be with some of Mrs. Landry's actions, which seemed a bit weird even for a King story. Overall, this is a 9 out of 10.The End of the Whole Mess: As for the second story of the second evening, this was not as engaging, but it still worked fairly well. I liked the idea of doing it as a documentary, but this also meant that some time that could have been used in developing the ideas in it was wasted on showing Ron Livingston's character, Howie, telling the story. I'm sure that this is how King wrote it (I've not read the story), but I think they could have just set it up and run with it, cutting back to seeing Howie talking maybe half as much as they did. But this is a small complaint. The story isn't as creative as the first one of the evening, but it worked well, as far as it went. There are some internal inconsistencies as well, which made it harder to like it. Perhaps the fact that it was grimmer than the first one made it easier to be critical of it. I'll give this a 7 out of 10.