There's something of a cult following on this late-‘70s Stephen King two-part mini-series, a vampire frightener remade in 2004, but without the cult following. Usually in King monster/horror mode, he’ll work up a kickass concept to pull us in, only to discover he’s painted himself into a narrative corner with no way out of his self-made dramatic trap. See IT, both the 1990 tv two-fer and the theatrical iteration of 2017 & ‘19; each of them sinking from 7.4 to overly-generous 6.5 IMDb scores. And King’s recent tv series about a town in a bubble saw weekly drops. Not here! Instead, disappointment sets in right from the get-go as struggling novelist David Soul returns to his old town for a fresh start only to find strange doings. For a 1979 tv movie, there’s a tremendous cast to greet him: tv stalwarts, up-and-comers, plus some grand old B-pic film noir regulars. (Marie Windsor!) No doubt, director Tobe Hooper brought some of these guys in, only to find little for them to do but wait around and turn into vampires after a bit . . . I mean bite. You’d think Stephen King, of all people, would be on the lookout for a fresh angle. But no, it’s straightforward DRACULA in New England. Or, rather, New England NOSFERATU, since that’s how they make-up the controlling vampire suave James Mason fronts for. And that makes James Mason Renfield, right? Say it ain’t so Stephen.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Though hardly flaw-free (it was re-edited and second-guessed to death in post-production), Disney’s film of Ray Bradbury’s SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES /’83 shows real imagination on similar themes & situations. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/something-wicked-this-way-comes-1983.html
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