Salem's Lot - The Miniseries
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Actor: Andre Braugher, Donald Sutherland, Rob Lowe, Robert Mammone, Samantha MathisDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Miniseries, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.77:1
Running Time: 181 minutes
Published: 2004-10-01
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-12
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Turner Home Ent
DVD Reviews of Salem's Lot - The Miniseries
DVD Review: Not Scary. But Kind of Depressing.
Summary: 2 Stars
Well, the film looks professional enough. It doesn't have low-budget TV movie written all over it. Also, it does a good job of balancing all the multiple storylines, and weaving a large and diverse cast of townspeople into a coherent plot. It's well acted, mostly. I could bitch about Rob Lowe, but I think that would just be mean-spirited scapegoating. Rob Lowe is fine.
But is everything is so well done, why is the film so very boring? Why don't I LIKE anybody? Why is watching people die like ticking items off a "To Do" list?
The film opens with Ben Mears (Rob Lowe), trying to murder a priest, Father Callahan (James Cromwell), in a Detroit food kitchen. Both end up in an emergency room, where an intern decides to practice his bedside manner on the critically injured Benjamin. "Why, as a good Christian shouldn't I let you die?" jeers this charming fellow. Mears replies with two words. "Jerusalem's Lot". Cue to flashback.
Ben Mears is a famous author who moves back to his small town home of `Salem's Lot to write a book. He wants to rent the "cursed" Marsten House, but fellow newcomer Mr. Straker (Donald Sutherland) and his Mysterious Unseen Partner snatch it out from under him. Further misfortunes await Ben, as he is then romantically pursued by one Susan Norton (Samantha Mathis), who has lovely eyes and cheekbones, and a personality cobbled together out of the rejected spare parts of other substandard horror heroines. Let me give you an idea about Sue. When told in confidence that Ben is writing about the haunted house, she "accidentally" lets it slip. But when she realizes his REAL theme is "small town evil", she gets all offended and rats him out ON PURPOSE, turning the whole town against him. Desperate for further abuse, Ben also befriends his in-your-face ex English teacher Matt (Andre Braugher), who lectures him on his cynicism, and tells him how awful his writing is.
Fortunately Ben sticks around anyway, because before you know it, kids start to go missing, people start dying of "pernicious anemia", and Ben suspects the House and its new occupants have something to do with it. Which, of course, it does. We can tell because every time anyone goes there, the camera starts sneaking up on them for no good reason, and the soundtrack makes lots of whooshing and chanting noises. This is not scary, but it does explain why the place was so hard to rent.
This film has Something to Say. To do so, it draws Metaphors between human corruption and supernatural evil, and points out these Metaphors in excruciating voice-overs and forced dialogue, just to be sure we catch on. To further this Important Metaphor, it seems EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the whole town has to be corrupt. The "bachelor" schoolteacher has a secret life in Portland. The priest drinks. The doctor is a self-indulgent materialist who is having an affair with an slutty teenager whose husband is a child-abusing blackmailer. The crooked real-estate agent molests his daughter. Mark Petrie is a delinquent, Mrs. Glick is a snob, and Ben's landlady used to dabble in black magic and sexual perversion. I could go on.
There is some good stuff in this movie, when it relaxes and remembers it's a VAMPIRE FLICK. I liked the cop's understated horror at a certain revelation. I liked the way half the characters proceed on the assumption that there are vampires without truly believing in them, while others who don't consciously believe in vampires at all behave as though they did. When one of the few likeable characters turns into a violent jerk who covers up obsessively in the daylight, we get a brief touch of the pathos and creepiness which is otherwise missing from this version.
But mostly, the film lacks life. Humanity and warmth seem conspicuously - even intentionally - lacking. The changes to the framing device, and to Father Callahan, are particularly glaring examples of a general attempt to leech human decency and affection from the story in favor of misanthropic bleakness. One thing the first miniseries managed to do was make me empathize with Mears before I knew anything about him, simply by allowing me to vicariously experience his fascination and his fear. But here the film stands in judgment of the characters and the town, while at the same time judging the hero for being judgmental. This makes it hard to empathize with anyone.
There is one scary moment in the whole movie. ONE. And it does not involve vampires. Any vampire that shows up, the first thing he does is move around at super-speed, just to show that he can, which immediately kills the mood.
Regarding the spiritual themes of the story: The premise from Stephen King's novel is that vampirism arises from Real Evil. This implies that there is such a thing as Real Good, which is why crosses work. In the 1979 movie, the heroes' mad scramble for crucifixes and rosary beads, even though nobody seemed to be Catholic, was funny and kind of endearing. And it saved the movie from any implication of preaching or pretentiousness. Alas, this remake is nothing if not pretentious. If the screenwriter can possibly contrive it, showdowns with vampires are also showdowns with One's Own Sins. Gay teacher Matt Burke rejects the sexual overtures of the vampire youth he once lusted after, driving him off with prayer alone. The materialistic doctor sacrifices his BMW to save a child. As for poor Ben Mears, his sins and psychology take up half the script. Neither the living nor the dead can shut up about them. "I know where you're going with this" Mears complains, when the vampire he's about to stake regales him with a litany of his faults. Sure enough, the vamp asserts that since Mears uses other people as fodder for his writing, this makes him . . . the real vampire. But Mears is too smart to fall for this. "I'm NOT the vampire," he retorts. "Not ANYMORE!" Oh, please!
The same vamp also gives Father Callahan some incoherent psychoanalysis involving his faith and his drinking problem. Which just goes to prove that Callahan's remarks from earlier in the film were incorrect. Sure vampires are proven to be a Real Evil rather than figments of our Repressed Subconscious, but it doesn't change anything. Freud is NOT dead, and he still gets to spoil all the fun.
Description of Salem's Lot - The Miniseries
The vampiric Stephen King tale returns to the small screen, 25 years after the first made-for-TV "Salem's Lot", a Tobe Hooper-directed ratings hit. This time it's Rob Lowe as a successful writer who returns to his haunted hometown. As a kid, something awful happened to him in the spooky mansion on the hill; now that he's back, the mansion is once again buzzing with evil portents. The physical production (shot in Australia) is convincing, and it's fun to see old pros such as Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, and James Cromwell cutting up in juicy roles. The storytelling, however, feels oddly disjointed, as though King's sprawl had been arbitrarily hacked away rather than adapted (a few big moments are bewilderingly left offscreen). The approach misses the basic assets of a vampire story: the disbelief, the lore, the sex appeal. Instead, it feels like a random collection of bits for short attention spans. "--Robert Horton"Bestsellers in DVD
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