Director: Lewis Teague
Cast: Dee Wallace, Daniel Hugh-Kelly, Danny Pintauro, Ed Lauter
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I know.
Did I Like It: Well, I really disliked the novel in my attempts to read it. It belongs in that depressing realm of summer beach reading where the story isn’t so much about the terrifying-bordering-on-the-supernatural terror that looms on the horizon , but more about how brave a bored housewife is for sleeping around on her marriage. Peter Benchley’s Jaws was the same way. It was such a chore that I half wonder if the legend around King not having any memory of writing the novel is only part of the story, and he was so impaired that some lesser author completed the novel under the King brand. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen to a novel.
Unfortunately, this film is a far more faithful adaptation of the source material than Jaws (1975) . There’s a dog who’s kind of scary—or at least meant to be scary—and a rather simple set up that really tries its best to ratchet up the tension, but fundamentally this is a story about infidelity, and not a very well-considered version of that story, either. Matters come to a conclusion, and it is made abundantly clear that the spurned spouse (Hugh-Kelly) is the most vestigial character a plot could possibly handle. He has a dream that something wrong is going on back at home, perhaps beyond just the domestic difficulties. By the time he comes home, gets out to the farm cum mechanic, his wife (Wallace) has already dispatched the dog in question.
Where does that leave the film? Mostly with some mild special effects, some violence, and nothing. Unfortunately this is not one of those cases where we can say the book is worse than the movie. The book and the movie are one and the same.