Salem's Lot

"Salem's Lot" is a well paced and perfectly watchable film that often manages to strike out on its own with a considerable degree of success. However, it proves to be a different matter entirely when it tackles the more spooky scenes which had the hallucinatory quality of a fever dream and made the original such a compulsive and memorable viewing experience. It recreates each one of these scenes, but with considerably less effectiveness (this is in large part due to the noticeable absence of Harry Sukman's superb music to magnify and intensify them) and as a direct consequence of this the scenes in question - Marjorie Glick on a mortician's table rising to join the undead, Mike Ryerson returning from the dead and so on - lack the necessary...

Overstays its welcome and isn't as interesting as it could've been, but what's there is still serviceable.

I really enjoyed the cast, I think every member does a neat job - without that being the case, I'd probably be rating this film a touch lower. Lewis Pullman leads events well, while Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard and Bill Camp are able supports. The kid actors are solid as well, the standout evidently being Jordan Preston Carter. Good to see Pilou Asbæk, too.

As noted at the top, this does overrun. It felt a fair bit longer than 113 minutes, a more fitting run time may have worked wonders. I did like how, aside from the obvious, no cast member had major plot armour, admittedly one of the young ones does seem a tad overpowered in r...

For anyone old enough to remember, Coles Notes offered students an accessible summary of famous works, by the likes of Dickens, Shakespeare or Tolstoy.

Something similar can be said of the latest cinematic iteration of Stephen Kings book, Salem's Lot. This is an abridged version of Kings vampiric tale. It plays out in broad, somewhat hurried, expository strokes, absent the deeper essence of the work. Things happen quickly, at the expense of a slowly established atmosphere of creeping dread, as the viewer comes to see whats really going on, in the rural town, of Salem's Lot. Indeed, the core of what makes this tale so terrifying, is revealed in the opening scenes. In short, this is Salem's Lot for the impatient.

Frankly, the first ...

Celebrated author "Ben" (Lewis Pullman) returns to his childhood home looking to do some investigations into his own youth when he discovers that there's something distinctly unsavoury going on in the "Lot". That all seems to centre around the long abandoned "Marsten" house whose basement has recently received a strange package before a local urchin goes missing. Luckily for our intrepid writer, he has hooked up with "Susan" (Makenzie Leigh), somewhat sceptical local doctor "Cody" (Alfre Woodard) and with the savvy young "Mark" (Jordan Preston Carter) and as it becomes pretty clear what's going on, they have to work out a strategy that will keep them all alive! This, sadly, hasn't an original bone in it's body - falling somewhere between me...