The series launches with William Hurt as a hitman dispatching the head of a toy company before returning home to a platoon of plastic army men, delivered in a plain paper package and entrusted with the task of vengeance. Based on a short story from King's early anthology Night Shift (I think out of the twenty titles therein, there can't be more than a couple that haven't been adapted to visual media at this point), Battleground (***/****) introduces a commando I don't remember from the story but otherwise seems fairly faithful. Completely free of dialogue though saddled with a deadening, hyper-descriptive score by series composer Jeff Beal, Battleground remains the single most effective episode mainly on the strength of Hurt's performance and the niftiness of the special-effects work; however pre-emptively trumped by a series of Army Men video games, the image of the little green guys mobilizing behind miniature Howitzers didn't fail to run a tingle down my red-blooded spine. Although one phone call would probably answer most if not all of the conflicts of the piece, that I read Night Shift in sixth grade granted me a little strength-through-nostalgia to suspend disbelief just long enough. Key thing to take away from this episode? The Zuni fetish doll that terrorizes Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror makes a cameo--talk about knowing your roots. Directed by Jim Henson's son Brian Henson from a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson (son of famed short-story writer Richard Matheson, who scripted Trilogy of Terror), Battleground has the best pedigree by far, proving, as if proof were needed, that King's only good in the translation if the translators are gifted.

Case in point, Crouch End (*/****). Here, King tries on his ill-fitting, ersatz H.P. Lovecraft aspect, all rats in the walls and That-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named posturing that is directly in conflict with King's genuine genius for writing ordinary people and the minutiae of everyday interactions, while the teleplay by Kim LeMasters and direction by Mark Haber merely turn a terrible short story into a terrible short subject. Claire Forlani (terrible) plays a Yankee newlywed on honeymoon in London with her idiot, horror-straight-man hubby (Eion Bailey). They take a wrong turn down a short alley and end up in a place where the barrier between dimensions has worn thin or something like that. I've never been a fan of King's "Dark Tower" series; for as much as I respect the man's desire to expand his genre repertoire, he's good at one thing (well, maybe two--his Danse Macabre is a pretty good, if pretty dated, piece of critical writing), and his dabbling feels arrogant and delusional. Furthermore, the weaknesses of his ability to maintain a mood through just the strength of writing is nowhere on sharper display than when he presumes to appropriate the styles of people like Lovecraft and, next up, Raymond Chandler.

For as much as I dislike King's slippage into fantasy (yes, long stretches of his revered Tolkien redux The Stand bore me to tears) and his "homages" to favourite authors, I genuinely hate his late-career propensity to reference himself endlessly. If it's meant as irony, it fails miserably; if it's meant as self-deprecation, it comes off as self-regard; and if it's a little wink at his long-time readers, it serves no useful purpose but to congratulate his fans on their bad decision to stay with him long past the moment he became too bankable to edit honestly. Umney's Last Case (1/2*/****) is a hard-boiled detective goof mixed with the kind of "Pen of the Gods" bullshit he worked into putty with stuff like "Word Processor of the Gods" and "Ballad of the Flexible Bullet". William H. Macy is woefully miscast as the titular gumshoe and, in a dual role that couldn't be called a stretch by any stretch of the imagination, the titular gumshoe's twenty-first century author. Apparently a tragedy has caused the scribe to retreat into his own fantasy world, literally as it happens, swapping places with his doppelgänger (sort of The Dark Half, sort of not) and discovering that the only thing less interesting than dumbed-down Pirandello is dumbed-down Looney Tunes. Let's be generous and call this one a disaster.

Delving into sentimental King--the one that brought us such genuinely affecting stories as "The Woman in the Room" and "The Last Rung on the Ladder" (and of course "The Body" and "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption") and such bits of sentimental, pulpit-pounding gewgaw as this--is The End of the Whole Mess (*/****), one of the few stories culled from Nightmares & Dreamscapes proper. It's the story of two brothers (one played by Ron Livingston, the other by Henry Thomas) so that one can be the chronicler of the other in high hanky-wringing King style. But the episode reeks of desperation as the smart brother (Thomas) invents the cure for violence, not realizing that hand-in-hand with docility is irreversible imbecility. Draw a parallel to organized religion and you might have something there (indeed, there are mentions of God in the behaviour of bees and wasps), but The End of the Whole Mess has no real subtext: King is taking a pretty interesting opportunity for an allegory on the importance of violence in the continued success of the human beast--even on the struggle between science and philosophy/nature and nurture or, funnier, how Texans might be more prone to violence and retardation--and making it instead into something about a smart guy saddened by 9/11 and lobotomizing the world in an attempt to save it. King's at his best in stories like "The Jaunt" (from Skeleton Crew) that deal with innocence stained by technologically-catalyzed existential crisis; he's at his worst when he's trying to save the world (and rip-off Daniel Keyes in the process)...with a twist! Key thing to take from this segment is the bizarre CGI error of pasting animated honeybees on a meta-The Shining hornet's nest.

A gone-to-seed Tom Berenger plays another of King's writer protagonists in The Road Virus Heads North (*/****), doing the Rose Madder tango as King repeats himself again ad-infinitum, spinning himself into straw. The character is like the one in 'Salem's Lot, and the premise concerning an ever-changing painting produced by a mad genius that apparently predicts/reflects some supernatural eventuality is exactly the type of exhausted fandango King used to resuscitate with flippancy and wit. The first problem is in needing to produce an "eerie" painting that's sincerely eerie and not simply stupid--the second problem is that it's all stupid. Call it the "Mr. Holland's Opus Effect," wherein a work of surpassing achievement is spoken of with great and endless reverence until such time as we witness said greatness with a combination of disappointment and hilarity. Key thing to take away from The Road Virus Heads North? How about the moment that references Cujo for no good reason but to give King's ego a good, hard wank. The look on Berenger's face is priceless throughout, though: it's the look of a man wondering what the hell happened to his career.

Besides the idea of Hurt as a silent hitman, the thing that most intrigued me about this collection was seeing what the writer of a few personal faves (Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, Arthur Penn's Night Moves, Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, and Caton-Jones' Rob Roy) would do with a King short story for a basic cable mini-series. Because I was inclined to give The Fifth Quarter (*/****) the benefit of the doubt, every time I cringed at the dialogue, I found myself wondering if it was Sharp's fault or the fault of the execrable Beal score, which cheapens every line delivery, casting the whole project into this mawkish bas relief of caricatured stock situations and unconvincing emotions. In the end, there's enough blame to go around. Samantha Mathis and Jeremy Sisto play a trailer park couple, the latter a recently-paroled convict who goes on a Byzantine odyssey to recover missing parts of a treasure map left by a dead buddy. King's stab at O. Henry misses its mark and badly, winding up in a genuinely silly place and providing all sorts of weird romantic imbroglios that mean nothing, go nowhere, and lead to unintentional hilarity and no little impatience along the way. Director Rob Bowman imposes a smarty-pants, bleachy-gritty show-offy style that's better suited to the business of dragons. Key thing to take away from this episode? No matter how much they trash up Mathis, I still have a crush on her.

Autopsy Room Four (*1/2/****) is a take on Poe's "Premature Burial" that becomes a first-person venue for the "Hey, I'm not dead, yet" anxiety by doing the sentient autopsy thing I feel like I've seen at least once or twice before. It's not exactly The Serpent and the Rainbow, but it's in the same neighbourhood, making the experience entirely dependent on the skills of Richard Thomas (as the accidental cadaver) as a dramatic voice actor. (What I wouldn't give to see this episode with Billy West--the guy who does Fry for "Futurama"--dub the meat on the gurney.) Alas, when I think of Richard Thomas, I never think of Richard Thomas--I do think of Greta Scacchi sometimes, though, and when she has exactly the same effect on the corpse of Richard Thomas as she has on me, the punchline of the episode feels uncomfortably like that of a bad joke I heard once about menstruating nurses, resurrected corpses, and blood transfusions. "Autopsy Room Four" exhibits all the problems with late King: the meandering narrative, the character slices, the repetitive self-referential smirkiness, and, ultimately, the pussification of premise that finds the master of horror suddenly squeamish about his set-up. The guy who chronicled a person getting pulled through a one-inch slit, toe-first, over the course of several hours--and a drug-runner who ate himself to stay alive--now has difficulty following through on a live dissection from the point-of-view of the victim. The end product is boring, childish, and the kind of limp bullshit that only an established author can get away with.

Exhibit B, a neutered little vanity piece long on King's unfulfillable desire to be a rock star and short on sense, tension, character development, and interest: You Know They Got a Hell of a Band (1/2*/****). On the proverbial road to nowhere, a bickering couple (Steven Weber and Kim Delaney, mutually haggard in the "Nightmares & Dreamscapes" signature style) get lost and end up in a small town populated by dead rock stars. Actually, it appears as though it's only populated by six dead rock stars, none of whom look remotely like they did when they were alive and all of whom want to trap wayward sojourners to be the audience for their eternal concert. Bradbury wrote a story a lot like this one about dead authors living on Mars that was equally without menace (Mark Twain is a lot of things, but a scary zombie is not one of them) and sense--You Know They Got a Hell of a Band similarly reads like fanboy porn of the aimless, embarrassing variety. (For what it's worth, I'm not certain I understand this idea that Roy Orbison is an asshole in the Afterlife.) A centrepiece in a café where Rick Nelson and Janis Joplin sling the hash is squandered when a vintage Wurlitzer doesn't appear to have any new tracks from these molded oldsters (how cool would that be?); and is it un-sporting to point out that the Weber character's transformation from fan to fearful and back again is completely arbitrary? Sufficed to say that there's nothing remotely compelling about this series finale except perhaps the moment I mistook the bad double of Otis Redding for a bad double of the still-kicking Little Richard. Good thing director Mike Robe gives us a close-up of his nametag.

Spread across three dual-layered discs housed in two thinpaks, the whole shebang slid into a standard-size cardboard slipcover, "Nightmares & Dreamscapes" comes home again courtesy Warner in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation that looks barely downconverted from HD. (Note that You Know They Got a Hell of a Band is inexplicably pillarboxed to 1.75:1.) It pops and it crackles, in other words: blacks are black and shadow detail is sharp. A pity that the only episode in which it really matters is Battleground, as the rest depend very little on darkness. Each episode is decorated with DD 5.1 audio that consistently uses the discrete channels with logic and fidelity. The helicopter attacks of Battleground, in particular, are good while, again, the other episodes are shades of talky and/or boring. A few seconds in the corn of Crouch End do the rustle hustle pretty well but any other atmospherics are instantly forgettable. Because all is not unjust in the universe, there's a paucity of supplementary material in this collection--meaning, most importantly, that we're spared the horror of commentary tracks from the bright lights this series assembled.

What we're not spared, sadly, are such puff pieces as "The Inside Look: Battleground & Crouch End" (4 mins.), in which the cast and crew discuss the plot amid snatches of B-roll. If it's not completely useless, it's in the same neighbourhood. "Battleground Special Effects" (5 mins.) is mildly more informational, as Brian Henson spends only half the time re-telling the story of the episode before chatting in the broadest possible terms about the F/X. For his part, Sam Nicholson, the Visual Effects Supervisor, offers a broad primer while unfortunately referring to the army men as "little people." You won't learn anything, but you won't mind too much, relatively speaking. "William Hurt of Battleground" (3 mins.) is an on-set bit of nothing involving plot recitation--ditto the "Eion Bailey of Crouch End" (3 mins.) piece and, yes, the "William H. Macy of Umney's Last Case" (3 mins.) bit. At this point, if I hear that Stephen King has a great imagination one more time, I'm finally going to sue on behalf of E.C. Comics and "The Twilight Zone".

Disc Two's "From the Mind of Stephen King" (2 mins.) is a useless love-in with assorted cast and crew making obvious observations about King that are completely unencumbered by critical analysis and objectivity. "His imagination is fantastical," declares William H. Macy; "Stephen King's an icon because he writes modern myths," raves The Road Virus Heads North director Sergio Mimica-Gezzan; and Samantha Mathis offers that King's stories are "character-driven." Isn't it a bit undignified to ask these guys, already on the payroll, to be whores of a different kind? "Ron Livingston of The End of the Whole Mess" (3 mins.) is a publicity reel featuring Livingston regurgitating plot and defining the challenge of adapting a short story in the most literal sense possible. ("How do you expand a seven-or-eight page short story into an hour-long episode?" Acceptable answers to this rhetorical question? Perhaps "why even bother, given the story," or, "apparently not very well.") "The Inside Look: The Road Virus Heads North & The Fifth Quarter" (3 mins.) expectedly alternates clips from the episodes in question with junket snippets that are plot summaries and worthless observations. Total waste of time. "Tom Berenger of The Road Virus Heads North" (3 mins.) has Berenger's junket spiel, sometimes with the exact same footage as in previous instalments--this is filler by definition. Ditto "Jeremy Sisto of The Fifth Quarter" (3 mins.). "The Inside Look: Umney's Last Case& The End of the Whole Mess" (4 mins.) is more and more and more of the same.

Disc Three sports the ponderously-named "Behind the Drama of 'Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King'" (5 mins.) that is exactly--and I mean exactly--the same material we've already seen: the same opinions from the same people, the same sloppy hagiography of King, and the same lack of explanation for why King himself doesn't once show his face in any of this shit. If you're not irritated at this point, you liked the series, and therefore there's really no helping you or offending you. "Page to Picture" (4 mins.) offers such nuggets of wisdom as "it all starts with the screenplay" as well as the revelation that the director then goes forward with interpreting the script before the editors proceed to edit to the footage shot by the directors. Thankfully, they stop short of explaining that the episode is then broadcast for people to watch and then packaged as a DVD for people to buy. "Richard Thomas of Autopsy Room Four" (3 mins.) and "Steven Weber of You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" (3 mins.) are identically disposable junket/clip-promo pieces while "The Inside Look: Autopsy Room Four & You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" (5 mins.) includes more lengthy plot explanations, clips from the episodes, and not one fucking thing else.-Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
47 minutes/episode
MPAA
Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.78:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
Spanish
3 DVD-9s
Region One
Warner

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Published: November 14, 2006