Friday, October 19, 2007

Kooky King

I never thought trees could scare me until I read "The Shining". And a clown as the essence of all that is evil is nothing new but Pennywise surely set new creepy clown standards. Stephen King has been called The Master Of The Macabre. I'm not sure if that's true, but the guy certainly knows what scares people. So when he says "I'm going to scare the hell out of you" people take notice, just as if a good comedian said "I'm going to make you laugh so hard you'll piss your pants." It's bold and ballsy, but the guy has the stuff to back it up. So what the hell went wrong here? Did he truly think that a killer soda machine and an ATM machine were truly terrifying? Or was he just talking about Emilio Estevez' performance?


4 comments:

  1. Pretty damn awful movie.

    Frankly, King doesn't scare me all that much. He simply recycles the same three plots over and over, and people just snap it up every time.

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  2. Never seen Maximum Overdrive. No desire to. Thank you very much. :)

    Incidentally, Piper, everytime you spell the title of Kubrick's film with two n's, it reminds me of that hilarious exchange between groundskeeper Willie and Bart Simpson from the "Treehouse of Horror" episode.

    WILLIE: You've got the shinning!

    BART: Don't you mean shining?

    WILLIE: Shh! You wanna get sued?

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  3. Anyone whose ever adapted a King novel to film and had him complain about the outcome must look at Maximum Overdrive and remind themselves that King's opinions on movies don't hold much water.

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  4. Damian,

    Very polite way of telling me I can't spell. Thank you, I will make the change.

    And speaking of the Shining Tony, King complained very loudly about Kubrick's adaptation and then went on to help make a pretty lousy TV movie.

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