Stephen King's Desperation
by Mick Garris
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Actor: Annabeth Gish, Charles Durning, Matt Frewer, Steven Weber, Tom SkerrittDirector: Mick Garris
Brand: Lions Gate
Cinematographer: Christian Sebaldt
Producer: Mick Garris
Producer: Bruce Dunn
Producer: Kelly Van Horn
Producer: Mark Sennet
Producer: Stephen King
Writer: Stephen King
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 131 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-08-29
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
DVD Reviews of Stephen King's Desperation
DVD Review: Coyote Ugly
Summary: 2 Stars
Alright: take a step back, and tell me there isn't something decidedly wrong, even militantly spooky, about the American Southwest.
You know what I'm talking about? No? Let me clarify, then.
We're driving, Me & Thee, across some barren stretch of ancient Arizona moonscape, and we've hit upon what I call the Magic Hour: when the Day is laying down its sword in honor of Old Man Night, and the setting sun is really firing up all those sleeping reds and oranges and deep, feral yellows, up on the rocks, the hills, the cliffs, the crags, the bluffs.
Can you see it? Can you hear the coyotes keening and wailing and hi-yi-kee-yi-ing away back up in some box canyon, where those black-rooted stunty trees wave their straggly, evil, twisted arms towards an absentee Heaven?
We still think of America as a young country, and maybe that's just our innocence talking. Because this land is just as ancient as any trod by the African or Chinese, and can't you just smell the Terrible Old Blood-Secrets buried down under the Earth when you're out on the high desert?
Sure. As the town of Desperation's former Sheriff (former, in that he's going through something of a---ah, Midlife Crisis) would say, Gosh, yes.
The guts and sheer, pulpy, bloody visceral glory of Stephen King's novel "Desperation" rides that seam of ancient, buried, hulking horror like a 40-something housewife saddling up the mechanical bull at Gilley's, and that's half its charm---which is why I was expecting so much with Mick Garris's cinematic version, and, no doubt, why I was just so damned disappointed.
The setup, the build, the execution---everything about "Desperation" cuts thematically close to the territory King marked with his bad-doggie tale "Cujo". Remember "Cujo"? Something ancient and unspeakably evil, and deeply stupid and hungry---something nasty lies all coiled-up in a dark cave.Until Cujo---big, bumbling, naive, benevolent---comes lumbering into its domain.
And gets eaten. Devoured. Turned into a shambling, rabid hulk of its former lovable slobbery self, transformed into a ravenous engine of death with one single design: to spread carnage, red and raw and toothy, across the trembling land.
Now, just as the arc and trajectory of the bullet isn't all that mindful of its casing, so too the unsleeping Ancient Evils of Cujo and Desperation aren't too picky about their corporeal hosts. Whether it's a 300-pound dog or a 300-pound lawman, the only real concern is where to pile the bodies.
Or so you'd think. Sadly, "Desperation" is a tiny little bang, and a ton of whimper: 15 minutes of shivery brilliance, and what feels like about 8 hours of unbridled dullness.
That bristling tale of ancient, sleeping, hungry Evil---Tak ripped out of his slumber with the explosion of the charges in the Rattlesnake Pit, and his unquenchable desire to eat his way out into the guts of the little town of Desperation---all of the novel's frantic hardscrabble fight against a mounting, relentless Evil is wasted by Mick Garris's listless, uninspired direction.
It's as if Garris burned up his budget hiring Ron Perlman to run the numbers as Collie Entragian, and then outsourced the rest of the flick to Bangalore. Hell, they even dragoon some worn-out mountain lion to take a chunk out of flabby old Charles Durning's patooshka, and even that doesn't jack up the Excite-O-Meter on this miserable thing.
Not that I'm complaining about Perlman: this sad little flick bumps and grinds and gets its Crawling Kingsnake groove-on *only* when Entragian is on the screen, and Perlman is the perfect choice as the Lawman who goes all Economy on us and squeezes both Good Cop *and* Bad Cop into one body, then goes on to Downsize his jurisdiction. With extreme prejudice. Tak!
"Desperation" has its 15 minutes of brilliance with that fatal traffic stop: everything is just about note perfect. Those lying, impossibly high wild-blue Western skies; the Trooper lurching out of his cruiser, that Gary Cooper drawl just crackling out over the silence of the High Desert, the spike of Dread at the curt command to step out of the car succeeded by a queasy flood of relief when---thank God!---it's just a busted-tail-light.
It's here, in the seconds before "Desperation" lurches forward zombie-style into B-grade horror, that the movie succeeds, that it creeps and crawls the way the book did. It is here that the film conjures up the loneliness of the Vast Stretches, the realization---something most American suburbanites go to their graves without knowing---that there are wild spaces on this crazy planet where you could be murdered and buried without anyone knowing how, or why.
While the coyotes howl, the scorpions scuttle and clatter, the black widows stalk and spin and move itchingly towards their prey.
Gosh, yes.
JSG
Description of Stephen King's Desperation
Cross-country travelers on an isolated highway are arrested by a corrupt sheriff and jailed in a desolate town whose streets are littered with the dead bodies of local residents. The captives manage to escape, only to discover that Desperation, Nevada, is more than just a town gone wrong?it?s the terrifying source of unbridled evil.Bestsellers in DVD
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