OK never mind, here’s one more review for the year.
This is a collection of early Stephen King, and it’s his second collection. It’s also the collection that a) scared living hell out of me as a kid — maybe entirely from that creepy original mass market cover I put in this post, and b) was trawled for any imaginable movie they could make from it. While Skeleton Crew came out first, this is the one that has many many bad movies as a result.
So, some of those movie stories. First, we get “The Lawnmower Man” which you might remember as a movie in which a mentally disabled man is given smart pills via virtual reality and hooks up with the scientist’s wife (the scientist is Piers Brosnan) and then becomes a computer. Well, in this collection, it’s about a naked fat guy who mows the lawn with a robot lawnmower and eats the grass as an of sacrifice for the god Pan. Same difference.
Then there’s “Sometimes they come back” a movie I was forbidden to watch, but luckily got a taped off the tv copy. Tim Matheson plays a high school teacher in a small town and his students are slowly killed off and replaced with ghost students of the boys who murdered his brother when he was a kid. It’s more or less the same here, but they somehow made like four sequels of it.
There’s “Graveyard Shift” which is also about the same as the movie in which a summer worker at an old mill is asked to clear out the basement of rats only to find much bigger than normal rats.
And then lastly, among the many other stories in this collection, we get to the two main (and only good) parts from Cat’s Eye, a portmanteau movie that centers around cats — or more so, one story about cats and two stories that put cats in even though they’re not in the stories or important to the plot. “Quitter’s Inc” which starred James Woods in the movie is about a man who signs up for a violent, but effective anti-smoking treatment, and the ledge, about a guy sleeping with a mobster’s wife who is told he can live, and have her, if he successfully walks around the outside rim of a building.
And that’s it! See you next year! Unless I decide to write another one?
(Photo: https://www.discoverbooks.com/Night-Shift-Stephen-King-Edition-First-PB-Editi-p/0451126564.htm?cond=0004&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImp-Jg7bd5gIVSrzACh1pxwLCEAQYBCABEgKsAvD_BwE)