Stephen King's Sometimes They Come Back

I recently reread Stephen King's Night Shift and was reminded how disappointed I was in Stephen King's short story of the same name. I thought the movie, which I only saw once in the early 90's, was way better. It was on Amazon Prime so I thought, "What the hell? We'll see if I was crazy."

I came very close to giving the movie four and a half stars just because I enjoyed it so much. But the truth is I should only reserve that grade for high-quality stuff. As good and enjoyable as it was, it's still just a cheesy TV movie. And just because the genre of Movies Of The Week back then tended to be so bad (with notable exceptions like, say, Brian's Song), I thought this movie was cool. It's still cool.

Why is this better than King's story? I noted in my recent Night Shift review that I responded more positively to the happy ending. But if that's all it was, it wouldn't have impressed me TOO much upon rewatching it. But I feel like a lot of King's early short story output was simply random crap happening for no reason whatsoever. As the decades have gone on, King has matured as a storyteller and understood that's simply not damn good enough anymore. But the bullies randomly coming back made no narrative sense in the short story, and Jim Norton using black magic and the dark arts to defeat them felt random and unearned too.

But the movie does a smart thing and suggests the bullies died during Wayne's murder itself (Wayne is an older brother instead of a younger one in the movie). Suddenly their roles as restless spirits obsessed with revenge make sense. It's a haunting. And them killing Mueller at the end was brilliant because Mueller says in his dying breath that someone else can come back when he dies, and here comes Wayne to save the day. There is so much shoddy unexplained illogical nonsense going on in the short story that the movie fleshes out and makes credible. Make no mistake: the movie isn't perfect. For example, I would think Norton would have become a person of interest with the police far sooner than he actually was.

And the recurring train motif was an effective visual, and something iconic missing from the story. It reminds me a lot of the train memories from the Batman: The Animated Series episode "It's Never Too Late". In fact, that classic episode always reminded me of this movie.

Besides Tim Matheson and William Sanderson, I'm a little surprised that I don't recognize anybody else in the cast. I'm not a smug enough butthole to suggest nobody went on to bigger and better things, but if they had, I didn't see it. Normally I see a movie or TV show from this era, I see a bunch of young people I recognize years later as major stars. That didn't happen with this movie for some reason. What's odd about that is the performances were actually solid, so you WOULD figure bigger and better things would be in store. But if they were, I never saw them.

Stephen King is an interesting writer when it comes to screen adaptations. He's the only writer I can think of that has a couple of movies based on things he's written better than what he wrote. Stand By Me is one, The Shawshank Redemption is another (although the short story Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption IS magnificent). I also firmly believe both the TV miniseries and two part movie adaptation of the novel IT were vastly superior to that book. And this movie with a satisfying uplifting ending is much better experience than the middle finger young King decided to give the reader.

So yeah, I wasn't crazy for liking this back in the day. ****.