Introduction
Midnight – 2 a.m. FIRESTARTER (1984)
Here’s an inauspicious beginning to our little festival. We can start with the resume of director Mark L. Lester, a career on the fringes highlighted by Truck Stop Women, Roller Boogie and Class of 1984. Then there’s the second-rate source material, seemingly inspired by the question, “What if Carrie got her powers before her first period and had a more supportive parent?” Put them together and you have a shoddy little supernatural thriller starring a puffy little Drew Barrymore as Charlie, the girl who sets fires with her mind. Charlie was born with this ability after her parents Andy (David Keith) and Vicky (Heather Locklear) took part in a medical experiment conducted by the shadowy government agency The Shop. This same agency, headed up by Martin Sheen with an impressively poofy head of hair, is now pursuing Andy (who has that kind of ESP that makes your nose bleed) and Charlie, who they believe will develop the capability of burning down the entire planet. To that end, Sheen brings in John Rainbird, a maniacal child-killer with an eyepatch and a ponytail. Would you cast George C. Scott in this role? Mark Lester did. Terrible performances abound – I’m gonna go ahead and guess that Barrymore started drinking on this set – but at least there’s always a chance that the actors will burst into flames. The horrendous score by Tangerine Dream carbon dates the movie to the exact second of its release. The ending is stolen outright from Three Days of the Condor, but at least in the book, King had the good sense to admit that’s what he had in mind.
2 a.m. – 4 a.m. THE MANGLER (1995)
Before he was the world’s best-selling author, King worked in an industrial laundromat and supplemented his income by selling short stories to skin magazines. The Mangler is based on one such story, which concerns an industrial laundry machine that becomes possessed by a demon and starts killing people. And you wonder where he gets his ideas. To the best of my recollection, the short story (found in the Night Shift collection) runs only a few pages. It’s been a long time since I read it, so I’m not sure exactly what director Tobe Hooper and his screenwriters added to stretch it out to feature length. It couldn’t have been much, though. Hooper gives us an impressively Dickensian laundry, all hissing steam and dark grinding gears and sweaty, filthy, bosomy workers. Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund seems to think he’s Dickensian in his layers of old age makeup and clanky mechanical legs, but my guess is his performance was sponsored by Honey Baked Ham. The premise: the gigantic folding machine gets a taste of virgin blood, awakening its inner demon. Said machine begins feeding on the laundresses and then, when it breaks free of its moorings and goes mobile, everyone else. Ted Levine gives an enjoyably unhinged performance as the cop investigating this peculiar turn of events, but there’s nowhere near enough story here to sustain a 106-minute running time.
4 a.m. – 6 a.m. CHRISTINE (1983)
One of King’s recurring themes is Our Machines Will Kill Us. (Perhaps you’ve heard of The Mangler?) Another one is Revenge of the Nerd (as in the abovementioned Carrie). Put them both together and you’ve got Christine, in which nerd meets car, car turns nerd into cool guy, car starts killing cool guy’s enemies. Fresh off his remake of The Thing, John Carpenter directed this solid if undistinguished adaptation of King’s killer car tale. (“Solid if undistinguished” is pretty much Carpenter’s stock in trade; he’s a meat-and-potatoes B-movie guy, and I’m guessing he’d take that as a compliment.) Give him this much: Carpenter was the first to use George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” in a movie – it plays as the red 1958 Plymouth Fury rolls off the assembly line under the opening credits – and Terminator or no Terminator, it’s still the best use of the song ever. Twenty years later, loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) spots the Fury rusting in a vacant lot and it’s love at first sight. Before long, Arnie has ditched his nerd glasses and restored the car named Christine to its former glory, and the bullies who once plagued him are meeting untimely ends beneath her wheels. Carpenter makes spooky use of ’50s rock and roll, which effectively acts as the ghost in the machine, and comes up with a few nifty images, notably Christine ablaze and pursuing one of Arnie’s tormenters like a literal Car From Hell. The pre-CGI shots of the car regenerating itself after being vandalized are a hoot, and the grand finale, in which Christine is run over with a bulldozer and crushed into a cube, is cathartic for any disgruntled car owner.
Part Two