Who is FANTOMA?...

... More like "Where WAS Fantoma?"!

Citing the usual distribution woes, Fantoma DVD's official website was recently quietly updated for the first time in more than a year, and R.W. Fassbinder's hilarious, nasty masterpiece Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? hit shelves on Tuesday, May 30... Even more surprising and happy-making, among the announcements are a short-n-sweet release calendar. On June 27th, another Educational Archives four-volume collection, this time in novelty "School Locker" packaging, and containing the four discs not included in the pricey and space-consuming (sense bitterness?) Lunchbox Edition. On July 25th, the Fassbinder Collection II repackages Fantoma's Martha and In a Year with 13 Moons discs. The only scheduled new film is Yasuzo Masumura's bloody/weepy Red Angel on August 22nd. The collections seem like obvious placeholders until a release is scheduled for the history-making long-promised Films of Kenneth Anger. Fantoma hints that the Anger discs will be available before the year is out... rocketing this up to the top of Kinetoscope's Most Anticipated list (for the Curious Reader: early reviews of Anchor Bay's Cemetery Man have cooled all anticipation. Blargh).

Kinetoscope doesn't usually bother with DVD news (I know where I go for that stuff, and it's the same places you go), unless I'm particularly jazzed about something. The excitement here is mostly over the return of the Fantoma label. Of the 100-or-so boutique labels worth paying attention to (investigate the sidebar for a primer), Fantoma's been a personal favorite. I like the catalogue, which spans Blue Underground/ Synapse world-class sleazo territory (Blind Beast), but tips more steeply into art house heavies (those Fassbindies that eluded Criterion) and cult genres. I like the attention lavished on minor works from important artists; Hercules in the Haunted World and Fando and Lis are two discs a viewer with even a passing interest in Bava and Jodorowski cannot be without. I like the undeniable editorial taste demonstrated when compiling the Educational Archives volumes, the kind of material Something Weird Video offers in an un-filtered deluge of DVD-R and VHS, which makes similar SWV titles grab-bag party tapes, but frequently dull. I like the uniformity of packaging, with title logo, and director's name listed in red, like the author of a book, along the black spines. A lot of the above may be true of other boutique contenders, but Fantoma's peculiar air of class and cool makes their discs more collectible -- and I'm a sucker for the smart collectible -- and their selection of supplements only when informative and useful elevates Fantoma product from other packed-with-junk but empty-at-heart cult discs.

Fantoma's track record is not exactly spotless, but I'm still glad they are in control of the Kenneth Anger films, even with the years of delays. They've always seemed to me a disreputable little brother to Criterion, and something about Criterion's austerity and reputation has stripped some trashy mystique from their cult and underground releases. Who, after all, feels as titilated or mind-blasted by Derek Jarman's film as they used to, after seeing Criterion's Jubilee? And even Criterion might have drawn the line at the encyclopedia-cum-treasure-chest of Fantoma's One From the Heart, a marvelous, overblown set aimed at so small an audience it's rumored to have almost sunk the DVD label like Coppola's film toppled his Zoetrope. That's the foolhardy movie-love I like in a DVD company, and the kind of devoted craziness that I pray is stalling the Anger DVDs.

Anyhow, welcome back, Fantoma. I was pulling for you the whole time, buddy. Just don't do it again.

The Hammer Drops

O, to see with new eyes
Insomnia is the movie obsessive's oldest friend, worst enemy, asset and origin-story component. Middle-of-the-night film viewing never actually works as a lulling technique for me, but somewhere around 3 AM on Wednesday, staring at the wall and listening to my heart beating far to fast for rest, I thought: "Why don't I watch a Hammer horror movie?"

That, I am sorry to say, pretty much sums-up my relationship with Hammer Film Productions, Limited. With the rare exceptions of the oversexed The Vampire Lovers (1970), pitch perfect Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and magisterial Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), I confess to being a little bored with most Hammer pictures. "Bored" is lazy criticism, and what I mean is that I've never personally connected with the house style. I certainly understand where their admirers are coming from, agree that the cheapo-lavish production values create a beautiful shabby elegance, and I admire the strange dual-engines of graphic bosom-and-gore and innate European classiness. I love the stable of players, from the iconic giants (Peter Cushing, particularly, is my favorite screen Holmes, the only one who nails the detective's utterly alien intellect trapped inside the lovable, flawed shell of a human eccentric) to the pin-up girls to the impressive gallery of pug ugly character actors. I understand the import of Hammer's horror-flood coinciding with the Shock! TV package and I'm grateful for the studio's contributions to my nearest and dearest genre.

But somehow I've always been more excited to read books about these movies than actually revisit them, and I doubt I've seen more than a third of the important "one off" non-series films after their entry into the horror fray. There's just a personal disconnect, which doesn't stop the film critic or film geek in me from admiration, understanding or analysis. I'm reminded of being in audiences at silent comedy screenings; you can tell when audiences are laughing because they intellectually "know" this "was" funny. You can tell because when the timeless, eternally hilarious gag happens, then they laugh for real. The personal disconnect is between the Universal Golden Age and the sleazier, crazier European horror to come, both cycles are dreamier, stranger, scarier, and more packed with geniuses who requires no qualification or excuse to sell me on their charms. The vivid color horror of Hammer looks monochromatic compared to the mad hallucinations of the usual-suspect Italians, and the innovative explicitness just doesn't touch my heart like the elegiac Universal gems. Finally, sprawled on the couch at 3:30 AM, though I've known them for (!) decades, yeah, the House of Hammer finally opened up for me. I must have first seen The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) twenty years ago, but it took twenty years to find it personally affecting.


It was the all-time great entrance of Christopher Lee's creature that finally got my heart racing, and the first time a Hammer production actually frightened me. Frankenstein (Cushing) throws open the door to his lab, a weird barely human figure stands on unfamiliar limbs, too close to the door for comfort. Before we can focus on what feels amiss about the bandaged form, a herky-jerky dolly-in (the speed and shakiness are startling) brings us right up to its face, closer than expected, and not the least bit endearing. This monster isn't here for us to project our feelings of alienation, but a to reflect the alien world of death. Anyone expecting Karloff's puppy dog eyes is met with sickening opaque blue cataracts, and a mask of glacial, stupid violence. It's a wowee-powee moment in a film with a dozen of them, and I realize it's the subtler pleasures of Hammer that keep aficionados coming back, but I needed that wow.

Christopher Lee has always been a performer of iconic grandeur next to Cushing's dazzling nuance; it's the towering and divine next to the warm and humanistic; the difference between Beethoven and Mozart. I like to see the fingerprints all over a character. But Lee's all-movement performance in Curse is star-making for a reason, his joints seeming barley connected until the body is primed for doing violence. These are the kind of nuances I haven't appreciated over the broad strokes in a Lee performance.

The half-hearted liner notes for the DVD make some uninformed remarks about Jimmy Sangster's adaptation being closer to the Shelly novel than previous celebrated versions... don't buy it for a second. Here's a movie where the creature only escapes the castle grounds for a few hours, and seems to beg possible reading wherein Frankenstein has merely gone mad and is murdering housekeepers and peasants himself. The focus of Terence Fisher's film is different from Whales', but not particularly more faithful to Shelly. Here the center of horror is Frankenstein's fixation on his work, and therein was also the magic for yours truly. Curse is the story of a man too driven and too secretive, and ultimately destroyed by work ethic. Singular obsession with one's private passions may lead to great works, but as you hole up in the lab for weeks at a time... or try to maintain artistic careers, and a day job, to say nothing of multiple blogs... be it your great love or no, you necessarily start hacking away those parts of your life which are not The Work. The damage sustained to personal relationships (Frankenstein loses all friends, lovers and ultimately professional credibility) at the cost of blissful immersion in work is the true curse of Frankenstein. Connecting with Curse of Frankenstein in this way was probably not even possible for a child, maybe not for a younger man. I never knew it, but I was faulting the film for being too sophisticated, and addressing an aspect of life I hadn't encountered 20 years ago.

The Blowing of the Mind: THE LAWNMOWER MAN (1992)

Everything bad that's ever happened to you
is superseded by The Lawnmower Man
Dearest readers, 1992's The Lawnmower Man managed to freeze this blog dead in its tracks for 17 days. Probably more. Whenever the thought of having to discuss Lawnmower Man crossed my mind, all desire to write at all fled the scene. It was bound to happen to Kinetoscope at some point, this kind of panic-stricken cousin to writer's block. Because if you know me, I'm someone prone to excess, both foolish and otherwise, and I chart out tasks for myself sometimes merely to prove an ability to surmount them. And if you don't know me: I'm midway through a project of watching every film adaptation of Stephen King's work, in sequence of publication. With a dozen Creepshow 2's and Thinner's as roadblocks, it's a disheartening journey, especially for someone who began because of personal admiration of King's writing. The very project of writing an informal film journal several times a week has gotten a bit out of hand... looking back over the past few months, I see the writing getting more rigid and cold - more polished and formal, to be sure, but rather less incisive; the periods of silence are signaling dishonesty, perhaps. The point of examining the film adaptations of the Night Shift stories was supposed to be a quick and dirty story of the shameful inability of Hollywood or the indies to capture King's magical eye for character or what Michael Chabon called "his incomparable ability to find the epic in the ordinary." If it sounds like a task sour by design, I honestly thought the case-study might provide more bright spots. Some surprising small pleasures were unearthed (Graveyard Shift's goopy earnestness, Maximum Overdrive's eagerness to please), but the sins of Lawnmower Man nearly cancel them out.

One cannot let the Lawnmower Mans of the world get one down.

Early in this non-adaptation of King's short story, a priest played by Jeremy Slate, tells his borderline-retarded handyman, who is named Jobe (Jeff Fahey, looking and behaving as spiritual forerunner to Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber) that "like your Biblical namesake you bring God's wrath upon yourself!" Unless all scholars have been badly misreading the book of Job throughout history, that's simply not what the story is about. But thus does Lawnmower Man set and explain its course: the movie will constantly reference allegorical models it utterly misunderstands, and becomes convoluted to the point where it is difficult to follow Lawnmower Man's actual meaning or guess at the intended metaphor.

Largely ripping-off Flowers for Algernon by way of Altered States, the entirely newly-invented Lawnmower Man unravels as if laboratory designed to irritate and stupefy an audience on every possible level. Chain-smoking Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) blows his stack when his lab chimp goes amok in the night, steals a security guard's gun and starts shooting people under the influence of virtual reality testing and mind-expando-drugs. Would that Lawnmower Man descend into inspired Murders in the Virtual Rue Morgue insanity, perhaps it could win a schlock audience's heart. Instead it is drearily mired in cyber-nonsense cool that was outdated before the film opened. So when Dr. Angelo eagerly resumes research on his lovable Gumpian lawn-trimmer, Jobe Smith, it can be to no one's surprise that just like the monkey before him, he gets super-smart, then mean, then insane. There are brief detours for a Meatballs-flavored uncomfortable adult-preadolescent bonding subplot, and some virtuo-sex that will convince all humans to become card-carrying Luddites. It is mildly surprising when Jobe also gains Carrie White-esque telekinetic powers from prolonged exploration of virtual reality... but "virtual reality" in the world of The Lawnmower Man has little or nothing to do with real VR, either in application or literal meaning. It's difficult to grasp exactly what director Brett Leonard takes "virtual reality" to mean even in the context of this film, and the computer animation is so far sub-The Mind's Eye, that it holds no pleasures as "eye candy" either. ... Perhaps if it did, it wouldn't matter, as the live action photography is singularly ugly anyhow.

Eventually Dr. Angelo has to hunt down the monster he created, now smarter and more telekinetic than him. If he's to become a protagonist in the third act, it's a tough job, since he's an obsessed, short-tempered prick who tortures a mentally handicapped man for the first half of the movie. The film doesn't parallel the Biblical Job story, understand the real consequences of Flowers for Algernon, or make sense as a Frankenstein parable, though all are intended, invoked, and explored. The Lawnmower Man screws up Frankenstein's moral about science misused in specific, and God's domain breached in general - the movie portrays such a nonsensical science it's hard to tell what is being abused, and why fooling around with Virtual Reality is tampering in the creator's work is not clear to this writer. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I guess in The Lawnmower Man, the goal of elevating the basic intelligence of the innocent can destroy the world. The Algernon only applies in the most broad, dumb-tongued Microsoft Paint strokes; Jobe doesn't learn any hard, tragic lessons about the world because of his expanding intelligence: he simply goes insane like an unwitting Invisible Man, which means really no one learns anything.

Despite popular rumor that there is nothing left of King's source material (a delirious sick-joke quickie short story that begins in woozy suburban satire and ends in nauseous mythic horror), the image of a self-running lawnmower tearing through a living room is retained/swiped, albeit in grossly different context. Those wondering why, with all the botched trash made in the name of Stephen King, the writer would sue to have his name removed from this project need wonder no longer. It is easily the single worst film theoretically based on his work.

There's possibly nothing to enjoy but the brief appearance of Kinetoscope personal-fave character actor Troy Evans as a poor cop who investigates the lawnmower-massacre. Lawnmower Man pulls an Obi-Wan on the flatfoot, which is so effortless we may wonder why Jobe doesn't do the same mind-control act on Dr. Angelo.

Really though... don't wonder too hard.

Forged of Blood and Rats, Born in Mud and Bats: GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1990)

There is not a more lamented film based on the work of Stephen King than 1990's Graveyard Shift.

In some ways, maybe there is not a more focused, single-minded, and unapologetic King film, either. Graveyard Shift is a hard row to hoe, and anyone repelled by such a foul, foolish movie is forgiven. It can also be said that Graveyard Shift tries a lot of difficult tasks, and achieves most of them through sheer grit-teethed effort. Light up the flashlights, pull on the hip-waders. We're goin' in.

It's dirty, it's gross, it's slimy. All in a day's work.
In Graveyard Shift, Gates Falls, Maine's dilapidated but still-operating Bachman Textile Mill (tee hee!) has some trouble in its basement, which is overrun with disused machine parts, garbage, and rats. Hordes of rats. A sullen, college-educated drifter John Hall (David Andrews) blows into town, and takes nighttime work running an ominous cotton "picka" machine, under the watch of cruel factory foreman Warwick (Stephen Macht). As crazy Exterminator Tucker Cleveland (Brad Dourif, cranked well past 11, four tires blown, exposed wires dangling out) struggles to flush out the rats, workers begin disappearing in the dank basement.

That's pretty much it, and a rote stalk-and-eat plot, fun special effects creatures, and a bucket of grue at the climax is all it takes to satisfy the monster movie fan. For a film based on a short story first published in a 1970 issue of Cavalier men's magazine, maybe it should be a little sleazier than usual, too. Graveyard Shift has those tangible elements, but it's got something more. Graveyard Shift keeps pushing.

Everything about the film is overwrought, as if screenwriter John Esposito were operating under instruction from Tennessee Williams. There is the requisite "comic relief", but in low-budget horror history, perhaps no film has ever taken itself so very clenched-jaw seriously. The performances are uniformly intense, but the actors refuse to acknowledge the histrionics as ridiculous. Besides Dourif- having an utter blast, as he twitches and whispers through a sick-joke monologue about Viet Cong rat torture, or screaming in triumph as he floods thousands of rats into a polluted stream - there is precious little winking from this cast.

Macht is the standout, and his Warwick is a 6000-lb. heavy, an unnecessary devil-incarnate in a film which already has a giant mutant rat beast as a villain. His attempted Maine accent spans from the deep south to the European continent, but his deadly serious, puff-chested performance turns Graveyard Shift into an insane class struggle melodrama. The tyrannical foreman sends work crew after work crew to certain death, even after it's clear they are being eaten by a mammoth bat/rat hybrid. Warwick's motivation for this nihilistic way of running a factory is anybody's guess. In the film's economy of endless power struggles, it becomes about Warwick needing to control every aspect of his workers' lives, even their very mortality. Warwick talks to all personnel as if psychological gamesmanship were required for simple duty delegation. He is given a history of trading sexual favors for cushier working conditions, and when he repays his secretary (Ilona Margolis) by putting her on the crew list to clean out the scary sub-basement, she smashes his car up with an axe. In turn, he assaults her in front of a crowd of slack-jawed gawking townfolk. ...and in turn, John Hall comes to the damsel's rescue and beats up Warwick. This is how Graveyard Shift works: for every action, there is an even crazier overreaction.

We're privy to any unnecessary number of internal soap operas at Bachman Mills and in the greater Gates Falls area. Upon arriving in town, Hall is immediately beset by the hostility of the townies, who call him names and serve him a dead rat at the diner. In the loony character motivation-obsessed Graveyard Shift, this reads as the locals hicks' repressed self-loathing exploding because of the very presence of a "college boy." David Andrews performs Hall as an unknowable lone wolf, so tightly bound up that he doesn't even look like he's enjoying his smoke breaks, staring intensely at his cigarette and exhaling smoke in thin, hateful streams. He has made a hobby of pegging rats with Diet Pepsi cans and a homemade slingshot. Our hero's slingshot marksmanship is granted cosmic Signs-like significance in the finale, its import foreshadowed in mind-boggling slow motion close ups.

Hall is given a nominal love interest in fellow Bachman employee Ms. Jane Wisconsky (Kelly Wolf), who says she hails from Castle Rock (don't get excited: all lines to larger continuity stop here). Everyone in town seems to be at the mercy of the mill foreman, and their lives apparently would be ruined should they lose their shitty, dangerous jobs. They sweat and scream and fume at Warwick, and all the principles eventually end up not just in the basement, but its sub-basement. And the mysterious corpse-infested river under that. And a massive cathedral-sized bone-filled cavern under that. Graveyard Shift sees to it that everything is 10 times larger than it need be.

More melodrama per pound
than any other giant rat movie.
The unearned gravity given to every moment is silly, but it's fascinating and there's something else going on in Graveyard Shift. Director Ralph S. Singleton conjures an intensely physical world that captures some aspects of King's prose like no other film. This is one of the most convincingly grimy films I've ever seen. One can almost smell the wet fur as armies of rats are hosed down with scummy brown water. Infected-looking mud cakes every surface. The mill workers have to labor at night because of the summer heat, so characters are shiny with sweat before they start working, and coated with dirt, bloody with small injuries, and slimed by unidentified ceiling-drip by the time they finish. The monster rat coughs up rivers of opaque goop when it's in good health, and torrents of ooky crap in its death-throes. All human deaths are gruesome, painful-looking and a hair more graphic than one is expecting. One character's arm is shredded to the bone, and he just keeps screaming and waving it around. Another can't just be decapitated, but has his skull crushed into wet grave-mud by a coffin.

All of this is what's usually missing from King adaptations: either nobody can, or nobody dares try to bottle the vivid, earthy language of Stephen King. Graveyard Shift understands that King's stories are frequently writ-in-body-fluid, but misses all his other easy breezy charms. As an adaptation, Graveyard Shift takes few liberties with the plot, and on paper it sounds smart to beef out the slim 16-page short story with deeper explorations of the characters, but this mad parade was not the easy solution.

The song "Graveyard Shift" (one assumes) that plays under the credits must be heard to be disbelieved. A slow-b.p.m. dance beat grinds like the picker machine, as disembodied dialogue samples from the film are reassembled into illogical conversations. "When was the lahst time you wuh in a grayve-yahd?" asks Stephen Macht, as the drum machine thumps. Answer: I don't know, and I don't know that I want to go back, but Graveyard Shift achieves things no other Stephen King adaptation has even attempted. You may or may not find this admirable.

There are two kinds of people in this world. In Graveyard Shift, there's a scene in which a bunch of rats go surfing on a filthy board, while a Beach Boys song blares from a boom box. Now, everyone in the world is thinking about the money they spent to see this film. The first kind of person wants that money back. The second kind of person has just seen justification for the admission price. Answer for yourself: when was the last time you were in a graveyard?

Minimum NIGHT SHIFT: MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (1986)

Kinetoscope totally hearts Maximum Overdrive
Near the beginning of Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King, the bestselling novelist in America sticks his face in an ATM security camera and calls to his wife "Honey! C'mon over here, Sugarbuns! This machine just called me an asshole!" An AC/DC rocker kicks in on the soundtrack.

That pretty much draws the dividing line for Maximum Overdrive. The world obviously connects with King's darker road trips through the night landscapes of the American experience. It is easy to forget, among the Shinings and Cujos that he has a deep love for the rip-roaring, action-oriented side of American horror. King's directorial debut is amiable and unpretentious, and Overdrive's 16 wheels are firmly in goofy, balls-out gory drive-in action horror. This is wise, because it's a forgiving genre. All you have do do is deliver some inventively icky or crazy setpieces, give the stock characters a few memorable quirks and quotable dialogue, and save the biggest explosions for the climax. Make them laugh a couple times, make them wince a few more, and make them cheer when the villain gets smushed. Thus does Maximum Overdrive deliver in spades.

The plot, suggested by the skeletal outline of King's short story "Trucks," is an instant-apocalypse recipe a la King. Radioactivity from a passing meteor causes the skies to glow florescent green, and machines to come to life, filled with unexplained homicidal rage. Causing the most mayhem are big rig trucks, so powerful, mobile, and fast. At the Dixie Boy gas station and diner in North Carolina, a small band of truckers, wayward travelers and restaurant staff are holed up as the perimeter is circled by a maximumly overdriven trucks.

Even when the trucks begin demanding that they be fed gasoline, and their intentions to enslave the human race become clear... Even when Bill Robinson (Emilio Estevez), the disgruntled short order cook, decides to lead the Dixie Boy survivors in a final stand against enslavement... None of this is really about our relationships with technology. Maximum Overdrive exploits our queasiness on this hoary s-f topic, but uses it to build horrible, comically brutal images. The movie has an unapologetically mean sense of humor, but it is King's ghoulish glee that redeems him. The first huge amazing setpiece involves a traffic jam on a drawbridge, and truckload of watermelons. If this is the kind of scene that interests you, then everything you could want of such a scene is delivered, and then some. If you are not curious about such an event, you may be a lost cause. You will likely not be amused by Little League players being chased by steamrollers, waitresses being assaulted by flying electric carving knives, or a guy getting hit in the balls by a Coke can blasted out of a vending machine with shotgun force. The point here is to be big, loud, messy, and above all fun.

Maximum Overdrive is a far more faithful adaptation of "Trucks" than it is commonly given credit for. King's primary change is in tone, transforming a tense, if improbable, survivalist pressure-cooker drama to a splatter-happy headbanger's ball. The short story is not a void of characterization, but even the stock characters of Overdrive are more colorful. A particular standout is Pat Hingle as nasty diner-owner Hendershot, who is hoarding a stockpile of military firearms in his basement, and swears and spits a lot. Easily the weakest link is Laura Harrington as Brett, a sassy tough-but-sexy (ugh) drifter who hitchhikes in with a lecherous Bible salesman (Christopher Murney - don't worry folks, he'll get smushed). If one grows impatient for Brett and Bill to fall in love in the war-zone, take satisfaction that they will have to consummate their affection in a truck stop break room. Most of the "Trucks" characters do have rough analogs in the film, but this isn't necessarily a blessing. A memorable nervous breakdown moment from the story becomes awkward and misplaced, when a waitress (Ellen McElduff) snaps and rants against the trucks "we made you!"

The film is also one of the rare King adaptations to deal in images that match the earthy language of his writing. In this respect, it is perhaps only bested by Graveyard Shift and Stand By Me. The Dixie Boy survivors grow sweatier and grimier as the day wears on, spit, bleed, blister and snot like real people. In probably the sweetest scene Maximum Overdrive can muster, two men on a recon mission through a tunnel full of raw sewage (don't ask) bond by scaring each other with rats, and cracking wise when they get feces in their mouths.

The cinematography is attractive and bright, but not stylish, and the AC/DC music, while I know King-approved, is not what I associate in my head with his work. That's all that's stopping at least one sequence in Maximum Overdrive from being the closest any film has come to capturing the feeling of reading a Stephen King novel: a young boy, having escaped the steamroller carnage on the baseball diamond, rides his bike down the empty suburban North Carolina streets. He passes mute scenes of destruction and death, some funny (a guy killed by a Walkman), some horrifying, all sort of giggly-yucky and inventive. Arcs of lawn sprinklers shoot up in the background, a moment of simple, strange poetry amid the unabashed schlock, as a young American metaphorically grows up. And then the ice cream truck comes to get him.

NIGHT SHIFT, Second Gear: CAT'S EYE (1985)

Drew Barrymore loses a cuteness contest in Cat's Eye
Stephen King is a man who loves all types of stories. Thus, he tells all types of stories. Night Shift alone contains science-fiction stories, nasty turnabout E.C. Comics-style poetic-justice, Lovecraftian supernatural tales, down-home splatter bucket stories, sensitive dramatic fiction, and hallucinatory absurdist horror-comedy. This grab-bag nature has contributed enormously to the popularity of King's short story collections. It also makes King's screenplay for director Lewis Teague's anthology film Cat's Eye a little scattershot, if still lovable.

Cat's Eye adapts two of the briefest Night Shift stories, and links them via the adventures of a cute cat who also weaves in and out of the plots, before becoming the star of the third tale, a segment original for the screen. Featuring ugly cinematography and a dated, embarrassing Alan Silvestri synth score, Cat's Eye's a lightweight King film, but it gets some things uniquely right.

The Night Shift tales King adapts for the screen are two of the collection's most blackly funny. In "Quitter's Inc.," Dick Morrison (James Woods) is a testy chain-smoker and a bit of a bastard, who signs up with a mysterious stop-smoking company (run by Alan King, having a lot of fun) whose tough-love policy involves electrocution, rape, and worse, if the subject doesn't go cold turkey immediately. In a witty criticism of 12 Step programs, and comical observation about human vice, Morrison can barely restrain himself from sneaking a puff, despite knowing his world is filled with spies and family in danger.

The twin engines of "Quitter's Inc." are the desperation and perpetual grumpiness of nicotine withdraw, and the far more universal fear of Being Watched. It's always seemed to me that the real reason Orwell's 1984 continues to capture the public imagination over other dystopias has less to do with politics than the omnipresent surveillance. King's story reclaims the idea for its inherent horror, and makes it very personal. The They in "Quitters, Inc." is not watching everyone. Their vast resources and innumerable agents are all trained on you. In the most giggly-scary suspense scene, Morrison steals away to his den during a thunderstorm for a midnight smoke, and suddenly realizes, unlit cigarette swinging from his bottom lip, that there very well might be something in the closet.

The omnibus format doesn't require the brief stories to be greatly expanded, so Cat's Eye takes far fewer liberties with the source material than other films of King's short fiction. The writer has taken the opportunity to redraft the plot in this new medium, and makes a few minor alterations. Some of the changes tighten the screws a bit: the stakes for Morrison's transgressions are worse in the film (no threats of raping his wife are in the story), and his off-page retarded son becomes an on-screen retarded daughter. Other choices mostly involve playing up the black humor. In an unfortunate fantasy scene, Morrison freaks out, surrounded by smokers, at an unexplained party. The sequence is supposed to visualize the king of all nicotine fits — revelers drag on fistfuls of cigarettes, blow out 3-minute exhale clouds, and blast smoke out their ears like Roger Rabbit — but James Woods' sweaty, surly performance already does a finer, subtler job of conveying the comedy and restless frustration.

In "The Ledge", a gambling-crazy cuckolded mob boss Cressner (Kenneth McMillan) bets/forces an adulterous retired tennis pro (Robert Hays) to walk the tiny ledge around a high-rise hotel, in exchange for the gangster's wife. That, Constant Readers, is it. It's kind of redundant to point out when a horror film exploits a primal human fear. That is horror's stock-in-trade, if not its definition. So "The Ledge" is about how we're scared of falling from high places, and knows better than to muck it up with complications. To justify the plot situation, "Ledge" dramatizes the grade-school lunchroom plot device "what if somebody put a gun to your head and made you do something you don't want to do?" Unlike the slack-jawed Saw films, "The Ledge" understands the goofiness inherent, and fully embraces all potential for humor. Fear not, it is that rustic Stephen King humor, such as an obnoxious pigeon being kicked off a building.

As with "Quitters", King largely leaves his well-enough story alone, but the changes his script makes are satisfying and cinematic. (Spoilers Ahoy!) The rather predictable revelation that Cressner is going to monkey paw on his promised ante, is handled via conversation in the story, and in a funny visual sick joke in the film: he presents her severed head by kicking it at Johnny. The power struggle at the center of the drama makes far more sense in the film, largely thanks to Kenneth McMillan's Cressner, who is convincingly persuasive when proposing his petty, juvenile, mad wager. Finally, a satisfying open-ended finale to the story becomes a crowd-pleasing violent comeuppance for the villain. The story is more literary, and rather nastier, and the script is easily funnier and breezier, as a movie can show us the vertiginous heights of the ledge without slowing for description, no matter how evocative.

The stories are all linked by a cat (presumably with the titular eye) who is chased around various cities, hitches rides on various transit, is adopted and tormented by the villains of the first two stories, before escaping. In his spare time, the cat is also plagued by weird visions of a ghostly little girl (Drew Barrymore) who appears in TV ads and department store manniquins and begs, Princess Leia-style, for his help (these scenes are completely non sequitur due to some deleted scenes explaining their payoff, and they damage the pace). Cats are more difficult to work with than dogs or horses, and Cat's Eye's ace in the sleeve is their feline star. The cat (sadly uncredited) is on screen as much as his human costars, and actually called upon to emote in several scenes. He is not only very cute, but holds his own with James Woods, Alan King, and Kenneth McMillan.

The third and final vignette, "The General", is original for the screen. It reminds me of a good joke on The Golden Girls, where Sophia wanted to read the new Stephen King book, and Dorothy protested that she hoped it wasn't about a demonic little creature finding creative ways to terrorize a household. In "The General", the stray cat takes center-stage, as he is taken in by little Amanda (Drew Barrymore) and her parents (James Naughton is the nice dad, Candy Clark the bitchy mom). Mom wants to chuck kitty outside because of strange doings late night in Amanda's room, but it turns out young Mandy is having night terrors because a Carlo Rambaldi troll is holding her nose closed and sucking out her breath as she sleeps. The cat, renamed General, engages in epic battle with the horrid troll, which depending on your mood is either over-the-top good times or may be the deal-breaker. Sadly, though marbles are spilled, opportunities are missed for match cuts between two different "cat's eyes."

Among identifiable King motifs are subverting genre tropes he finds irritating — the little girl's parents look at her like she's Steve McQueen in The Blob when she talks about the monster, but she's vindicated in the end — and finding inspiration in/ drawing a line to connect folklore and urban legend, in this case the superstition that cats suck the breath from sleeping children's mouths.

Cat's Eye, because it's from the man's pen, understands better than any films save Creepshow and Maximum Overdrive the intentionally cornpone humor of Stephen King's lighter work, doesn't futz with the plots too much, and keeps a jaunty tone throughout. For King fans, there are an enormous number of inside jokes, some for the casual reader — a red '58 Plymouth Fury almost nails the cat, and if you didn't catch it, the bumper sticker reads "I'm Christine and I'm pure evil" (!) — some jokes way deep inside: the issue of Penthouse that first published "The Ledge" can be spotted on a coffeetable.

All viewers are strongly, strongly advised to stick around for the heavy metal sing-along song "Cat's Eye" during the closing credit roll.

Who Watches the NIGHT SHIFT?: CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984)

Filmmakers have been in a 30-year contest, of which they are not aware, to see who can make the best movie from a Stephen King short story from the author's beloved 1978 Night Shift collection. Or rather, judging by the entries in this race, a contest to see who can make the worst and/or craziest movie.

Films based on the King of Blue Collar Horror's physically massive novels always have to make choices about streamlining the abundance of source material. Just as popular for film optioning are King's short stories. While rich with story, character and world-class gross-out, the stories are all efficient, leanly structured and snappy. No feature filmmaker who takes on Night Shift has been able to resist the urge to rip apart the delicate little stories and pad them back up with added subplots, characters, melodrama, or distracting, invented setpieces.

Does this beefing-up ever work? Why not? Are there other merits or strange pleasures to be had in these maligned films? What is the most faithful adaptation? Least faithful? Best? ...and worst? I've been undertaking the dubiously enlightening job of watching every film based on King's work. Thus far, the most interesting element of the movies as adaptations is a uniform inability to capture more than one or two elements of the texture, the style, the feel of King's writing.

This week, Exploding Kinetoscope examines the films based on Night Shift. Kinetoscope is the doorway, I know what you need, and hey: let's boogie, man.

Warning: This is gonna get spoily.

Village of the Malachai!: Children of the Corn (1984)

Children's main tactic is to wring every ounce of story out of the source. In doing so, the film dramatizes from the beginning backstory which in the story is slowly ekked out as a solution to a mystery. The hook here, after all, is that children live in the corn and kill people. So the movie begins with a small town's adult population being murdered by religious-nut farm kids under the spell of a Corn God preaching weirdo. The power of King's taut original is the Twilight Zone stock situation of unsuspecting travelers stumbling upon a ghost town and discovering the burg's terrible history. The film has shot itself in the foot, destroying any potential mysterious circumstances at the expense of an attention-grabbing opening gore sequence of loony preteens sticking people's hands in kitchen appliances. Likewise a scene in the story where in an empty church, a man studies clues and signs and with dawning horror pieces together the standards and practices of the kiddie sacrifice cult. In the film, he stumbles into a packed church, sacrifice mid-slice.

Try as Children of the Corn might, it cannot make likable one of King's most singularly unpleasant protagonists. In the short story, the real time plot is driven by the marital bickering between a road weary couple. This "Lockhorns"-on-the-road scenario motivates the hero to leave his bitchy wife unprotected in dangerous situations, and fuels "Children of the Corn" with an ugly misanthropy. The film attempts to show a loving couple (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) break down as normal interpersonal tensions are exacerbated by a horrific car accident and increasingly stressful adventures. Too many traces of the human ugliness that haunt King's "Corn" remain, so our heroes simply behave as reasonable people do not, and shout at each other a lot, but not in any interesting way.

The list of failures and injuries in George Goldsmith's screenplay is unyielding. The short story suddenly segues into the supernatural for its nasty snapper ending, and the film turns it into a protracted action sequence and never lets us see the monster. The dum-dum additions also include: a total reversal of the heroes' nasty fates; a couple of cute dissenting Corn Kids used as a viewer-friendly window into the corn-religion (one of whom has the Shine!); a good suspense scene (a woman napping alone in a car being lurked by Children of the Corns) which is revealed to be a Carrie-like dream, even though it contains events that actually happen and shots from other characters' perspectives.

Having grown up in Iowa, where Children was shot (standing in for Nebraska), I can attest that there is potential spooky beauty and weird majesty in a cornfields. Interior and exterior space becomes confused as the rows become tunnels, the stalks and leaves walls and roofs. The very blowing wind alters the landscape, sending ripples and waves that transform solid green fields into strange oceans. Director Fritz Kiersch manages to squelch all the eeriness and most of the prettiness out of the corn. Except that you are being told it is so, there's little feeling that secret horrors are lurking in the fields.

"OUTLANDER!"
The biggest expansion from King's story puts the Children themselves front and center, rather than a lurking, off-stage threat. Sadly, though the characters have some iconic nightmare value for children of the '80, they cannot bear the scrutiny of the spotlight. Some particularly odd-looking and frenzied performers have been cast as the lead Corn-o's. GHD-afflicted John Franklin as head boy-preacher Isaac, and huge-mouthed firecrotch Courtney Gains as second-banana psycho, Malachai both try very hard, which mostly means hilarious histrionic screaming. But by trying to particularize the villains, the nonsense religion and cornsilk-thin motivation of the cult are all too apparent.

The viewer may, however, find themselves shouting "Outlander! Outlander!" and "Seize them!" in best Malachai imitation for many weeks after.

Archie on Exploitation Ballyhoo

Also, did a 1965 Archie's Joke Book forecast by 7 years the Weird Western Tales debut of Jonah Hex?

A: Probably not!