[Warning: May contain various horror movie/Stephen King book spoilers. If you’re sensitive to those, turn back now.]

My Netflix list is so crazy long right now that the software won’t let me add any more titles to it; it’s that crazy and that long. So, by the time a given movie makes its way to my mailbox, it takes me a minute to remember why I put it in my queue in the first place. Usually I can figure it out — it’s a classic I’ve never seen, or a camp-fest starring an actor I think is cute, or it caused a heated argument between two friends, one of whom swears it’s a great piece of art and the other of whom described the plot by using the phrase “utter horseshit” as every possible part of speech, and I want to see for myself — but when I opened the envelope this time, I had no idea why I would have wanted to watch The Dark Half.

Now, having watched it, I…still don’t. As Stephen King adaptations go, it’s far from the worst I’ve seen, but it’s not a classic; I used to get the swoonies over Timothy Hutton (keep reading for more on my fiery shame), but I don’t anymore; I can’t imagine the movie causing any debate, except perhaps over whether to use the DVD as a coaster or a makeshift Frisbee.

This is not to say that the movie is good, or even average; it’s pretty bad, for various reasons, one of which is that it’s just too damn long, both in chronological time and in terms of storytelling setups and payoffs. George Romero directed and adapted the story for the screen, and I don’t want to tell that guy of all people how to do his job, but I’m speaking as an avid consumer of horror flicks, ghost stories, and Stephen King up through about Gerald’s Game, and the rookie-seeming mistakes here got on my nerves, so let me just bitch about it for a paragraph or two and then we’ll get to the dirt on my crush on Hutton. Ready? Here we go.

A horror movie needs one thing to work: suspense. Horror movies come in two flavors, Spooky and Bloody, and Spookies like The Changeling and The Others work on a more suspense-as-genre level; you don’t see a lot of guts, nobody’s getting beheaded, but it’s still scary because the audience can see supernatural forces at work, but doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Bloodies use suspense, too, just a different kind. The audience already knows the premise, more or less, and Saw II is hardly a triumph of novelistic plotting, but that first scene with the Venus-flytrap spiky death mask is incredibly hard to watch, because Bousman is cutting madly between the clock and the guy’s face, clock, face, clock face clock face and you know that shit is going to spring but you don’t quite know when. The whole movie is like that; it’s just an automated reflex hammer of shot set-ups, like when the guy leans in to look through the peephole, but Bousman did his homework and put an “ohhhh, shit” sting on the score, and sure enough, the guy gets his head blown off. It’s not rocket science, but it’s effective if you read the manual.

The Dark Half isn’t suspenseful in either of those ways. Romero lays the entire premise out for us right up front, which is a fine choice in theory, but in practice, this particular King plot would work better with the Spooky treatment. Romero can disagree if he likes, but if he does, he really has to give us the Bloody-style jumps and scares instead, which he doesn’t do, so it’s neither interesting nor exciting; it’s just a bunch of overacting that wastes time, in the service of exposition we already got an hour ago and character “development” we don’t need in the second place, because we already know what’s going on…except for the key aspect of the climax, namely what it is that will allow Thad to kill George. Yes, yes, the sparrows peck him to bits, I got that. The scene goes on for approximately three weeks and is edited leadenly and without regard for rhythm; I had ample time to discern the cause of death, thanks ever so. Why do the sparrows peck him to bits? Why do the sparrows then stream into an apparent supernova on the western horizon, which then closes around them and in on itself? Beats me; the credits rolled immediately afterwards, and I didn’t know anything except that my butt had fallen asleep.

So, the movie is bad, dull, put together lazily. Again, hardly the worst King-to-film translation on record, but I started thinking about why it is that some of King’s work translates beautifully while some of it physically curdles the celluloid. It is a truth universally bemoaned that, for every excellent film based on a Stephen King story, there is another that’s wretched — why does that happen? Pet Sematary scared the crap out of me when I read it, and so did Cujo — why did those movies turn out so badly?

Well, I’ve got a theory about Stephen King movies and how to predict whether they’ll make the leap. But let’s back up a bit first. I’ve given Uncle Steve a ration of shit of late, and I stand by it; his EW page is weak at best, On Writing is glib and condescending, and if he wants to position himself as American literature’s leading light of self-congratulation, someone really ought to tell him that the job is Updike’s until further notice. With that said, the man has, or at least had, the skills. I stayed up three nights running to read It. I did not leave a room without it under my arm; my mother could barely persuade me to put it aside during dinner, which I would then wolf down in ten minutes so I could power through the dishes and get back to reading. I can’t remember the last book that had my attention that completely. The Secret History, maybe.

It is a scary book and horrible things happen in it, but I couldn’t put it down because of the people — the characters, the human beings. King is a great plotter, but he’s a master of characterization in tandem with that: realistic reactions to unrealistic situations, natural dialogue in unnatural circumstances. The attraction of the horror genre is not just about freaking yourself out so bad that you have to sleep with a light on; it’s about trying to control something that you think, secretly, could maybe possibly happen to you one day, and reading as much as you can about it so you’ll know what to do.

Whether he’s conscious of it or not, King understands that and he writes his characters from that perspective, and it’s not about how clever or outré or upsetting the enemy is on its own merits; it’s about how his protagonists react to it, whatever it is, and sometimes it’s killer clowns or zombies, and other times it’s post-apocalyptic game-show hosts or rabies or life in prison or just trying to grow up. Actually, it’s that last one a lot. Some of his best work doesn’t have anything more otherworldly in it than other people acting like damn fools.

“Get to the theory already.” Here it is: casting is critical to whether a Stephen King movie is going to work. I will except Cujo from that because the dog’s interior monologue is the only reason the story works in the first place, and they cut that, so the movie is just Dee Wallace Stone screaming a lot. But take a look at Pet Sematary. You’ve got a handful of issues in that movie, starting with the animatronic zombie baby that looks like it crawled out of the Cabbage Patch warehouse via the chimney, but let’s say the director had played it smart and taken that off-screen — the audience hears some weird baby-like gurgling, maybe, but as far as what we see, it’s a “Monkey’s Paw” kind of thing where we just have to fill it in with our imaginations. Would that have worked?

No. Because who’s in charge of selling it with the reaction shot? Dale Midkiff. He’s a hard worker, Midkiff, but he makes his living in TV movies, and the guy never met a nuance he couldn’t grind into paste with a hammy grimace. And who’s playing his wife? Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby. Not enough weapon for that fight, really.

Lawnmower Man is another awful King-derived product, and another one for which you could make excuses because of the special effects. The makers of Tron saw that shit and thanked God another movie had finally taken them off the computerized-effects punchline hook. Still. All of Hollywood to choose from, and you cast Jeff Fahey as Jobe Smith? Not if I were Mrs. Fahey would I put him in that part, or give him that miserable perm, and Pierce Brosnan is a better actor than that, ordinarily, but he’s forced to Shatner it up just to register in his scenes with Fahey.

You can point to any number of King-based movies and find reasons why they worked or didn’t besides the casting — Running Man got turned into an action movie, Hearts In Atlantis only used a third of the story, I could go on. Some of it just doesn’t translate (or shouldn’t — Firestarter seems obviously flawed in its inception, to me, but I guess the producers thought they’d find a way). But in a lot of cases, it’s the casting. Misery had great casting. Shawshank had great casting. Apt Pupil‘s didn’t quite work; the two main actors were good, and good for the parts, but didn’t jell together. Hearts In Atlantis had some story problems, but Anthony Hopkins wasn’t right for that role. Graveyard Shift starred nobody of note, and there’s a reason for that lack of note — they sucked, and so did the movie.

The Dark Half has a similar problem, to wit: Timothy Hutton. The rest of the casting is not terribly problematic; Amy Madigan does not really “match” Hutton (she looks too old for him, a little bit), but she’s fine, and Michael Rooker is great as the sheriff. But Hutton is not right for this role, because Hutton is not a good actor, period.

Yes, I saw Ordinary People. I have also seen Turk 182! about three hundred times, because one summer about twenty years ago, HBO aired that damn movie several times a day, and I happened to watch it once while I was…trapped under the couch, unable to…reach the remote? I have no excuse, really. But man, did I think the Hutt was cute. So I watched it every time it came on, the better to gaze upon him and commit his visage to memory. It’s a terrible movie — the premise is stupid, the writing is awful, everyone else’s acting is just as crappy as Hutton’s, and he’s wearing a beret. Believe me, I know. I was thirteen, there was a lot going wrong. But, like most people, I forgave Hutton for his participation in that miscarriage, and for the ridonkulous drama-club-vice-president New York “accent” he affected, because he’s cute — and because of Ordinary People.

But what does he do in Ordinary People besides look stricken, really? Not a whole lot. And it’s kind of what he does in every other role — a little of the wide eyes, a little of the twitching jaw, a little of the impacted “still waters run deep” jerky eyebrow. The problem is when he’s cast against that type, like in Playing God, where he’s trying to lounge around all dissipated sleeps-all-day sex-hair sociopath, but Hutton is so sunken-chestedly implausible as a gangland anything that it’s all David Duchovny can do not to burst out laughing in every scene they have together. Coked up? Sure. Coke dealer? Dude would wet his pants during a traffic stop.

The Dark Half finds Hutton playing evil George Stark with — well, I had a whole sentence here about giving him credit for the effort, but the thing is, he doesn’t really do the job the whole way. In several scenes, you can see Hutton thinking to himself, “This is stupid,” and kind of bailing out of the character. And he’s not wrong; it is stupid. He’s got eight pounds of poorly blended brown makeup on, and his hair is pasted up into a big old hillbilly coif so poofy that I have no choice but to call it a “pwof.” It looks also like Wardrobe padded his clothes to give him a more dangerous-looking physical heft, and put him in a size too large of cowboy boot, but it doesn’t work. None of it works, because Hutton is not the Tom-Sizemore-style fire-hydrant-bodied lizard skeeze who can pull this type of thing off. The scrawny, floppy-haired, too-large-sweater-wearing, perpetual grad student damp hankie Thad? Absolutely. But why not just cast the George part with another actor, instead of one who can’t stick a Southern accent for more than five words in a row and whose idea of a scream of rending pain is actually closer to the gargle of a clogged bathtub drain? Because it is possible for an actor of Hutton’s physical stature to convince me of what he’s doing. Buscemi could do it. Buscemi would not back down from that shit even if the check bounced. Hutton plays it like he cheated on you, got caught, and is now crying about it and making you comfort him about how his parents got divorced and he’s a really self-hating person. This character kills people with a straight razor, Timbo. Get your damn back into it for five minutes.

We’ll see what Bag of Bones ends up looking like, I suppose, but I think we’ll actually know in advance. When the IMDb updates the cast list, we’ll know. And when it inevitably stars a galaxy of WB escapees (or Andrew McCarthy…gah), we’ll know not to see it in the theater.

November 14, 2005

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