The Mist

[The Boy]

Anyone seen this then? It's based on a Stephen King novella which is usually enough to put me off a film.

However, it was actually pleasantly surprising and, even though it's 2 hours long, it didn't feel like it.

Basically, a mysterious mist descends on some small town in America, and a load of people get stuck in a supermarket. There are things in the mist, but the people end up being just as big a threat as what is outside. Has a great ending too.

The mad religious woman was a bit much for me, mind.

 

[Orang Utan]

Yeah, decent old fashioned B movie horror with a fantastic ending

 

[Dead Cat Bounce]

Yeah, decent old fashioned B movie horror with a fantastic ending

The ending was a load of shite , I could see it coming from a mile away.

 

[DotCommunist]

the setup looked cool, survivors huddling away from the thing and that tentacle . I passed out one death in tho. torrent time

 

[The Boy]

The ending was a load of shite , I could see it coming from a mile away.

See, I didn't see it coming at all. I was expecting a Hollywood-friendly, happy ending then it went bad. Then you got the "oh the world isn' really over" bit.

But it still wasn't a happy ending.

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Pretty dull really and not a touch on the suspense of the short story that it was based upon and which is, by the way, the best thing that Stephen King ever wrote (in the collection of short stories called Skeleton Crew)

 

[Yossarian]

I'd like to give the story a read - I reckon that there, unlike in the movie, the characters might be a little more than a bunch of one-dimensional bores who I couldn't wait for the monsters to hurry up and kill already.

 

[ajk]

I've read the story, no, they're not.

Part of the short story collection Skeleton Crew IIRC.

 

[Grub str. hack]

Stephen King is a god awfull hack writer in the same league as Wilbur Smith.
Having got that off my chest his stories do sometimes translate well to the screen. I wouldn't read his books, but I'm keen to see this movie. Afterall the Shinning was based on King's work and thats a very good movie, Salem's lot also freaked the living shit out of me when I was a kid.

 

[Orang Utan]

He's actually a very good writer

 

[Grub str. hack]

He's actually a very good writer

Good story-teller theres a differance

 

[Orang Utan]

Good story-teller theres a differance

He's a good story teller and a good writer.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

He's a good story teller and a good writer.

The parts of writing he isn't very good at result in the parts he is being underrated - he can do some excellent descriptive prose for instance. I wouldn't call him a particularly good writer though.

 

[Orang Utan]

The parts of writing he isn't very good at result in the parts he is being underrated - he can do some excellent descriptive prose for instance. I wouldn't call him a particularly good writer though.

He's got a great instinct in knowing what'll excite or thrill and he knows exactly what he's doing. His characters are never particularly well drawn, but I wouldn't call him a bad or hack writer - he's no Dan Brown, Lee Child or Jeffrey Archer.

 

[ajk]

He can be a very good writer, but he can be fucking awful. Sometimes both in the same sentence.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

My thing with King is that he's best when he's just being entertaining. I tried reading The Stand once and found it fucking boring.

 

[Grub str. hack]

Knowing how to keep someone turing pages on the beeach doesn't make you a good writer. Its about finding a personal, distintive way of telling a story. And still making it just as gripping as if Stephen King, Wilbur Smith, Lee Child or Jilly Cooper had penned it.

 

[ajk]

the Shinning

 

[FridgeMagnet]

He's got a great instinct in knowing what'll excite or thrill and he knows exactly what he's doing. His characters are never particularly well drawn, but I wouldn't call him a bad or hack writer - he's no Dan Brown, Lee Child or Jeffrey Archer.

He's good on plots, but that's part of the storyteller thing (which I would certainly say is an important part of writing books that anyone would ever want to read).

He's not a bad writer certainly. A lot of people do slag him off because of the number of people who got godawful shlock-horror airport novels published based on his success. (Dean R Koontz, I point the monkey's finger.) I remember reading a three-page description of a damn room in The Stand that I didn't get bored by.

 

[mentalchik]

Love ole Stephen King.........


just about to sit down and watch The Dead Zone (with Christopher Walken)which i haven't seen in an age !

 

[Balbi]

I watched the first half of that last night. Walken as a youngster (relatively) still looked dead creepy

 

[AndrewNumLock]

Yeah, I really liked it. It kind of made me want to watch more horror films, and I loved that it had the most bleak and depressing ending imaginable.

 

[T & P]

Many of the most successful Stephen King adaptations (though by not means all of them) appear to have been from novellas and short stories. Shawshanck Redemption being probably the best known one.

I thought The Mist was alright, though I too guessed the end well in advance. Whether this is the same in the book I don't know. Have not read it, but I can imagine the religious nut woman being as unsettling in the novella as she was in the film.

 

[goldenecitrone]

I read everything by King when I was a teenager and I loved his stuff. I remember reading The Mist and it stayed in my mind for quite a while. The only good film version of his stuff that I've seen was the made for TV film of Salem's Lot. Scared the fuck out of me. I still love vampires.

 

[DexterTCN]

King's stories don't really transfer to the screen so well, imo, because there is always a great deal of 'thinking'.

A large part of story is what goes on in their minds. The films that usually work better have voice-overs. Shawshank, Stand By Me.

(I remember the "Director's Cut" of The Stand. 1015 pages or something like that? He wasn't as good after that.)

 

[Orang Utan]

Stand By Me is the best adaptation by far. Not a huge fan of Shawshank.

 

[Orang Utan]

I watched It the other day - wasn't very good