Watch Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King For Free

Too much of everything

Simply A Masterpiece

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Many reviewers have never read any of the Stephen King short stories made into these 45 minute pieces of torturous boredom. My problem was I had very much enjoyed "The Road Virus Heads North." Seeing it there on the screen as a tedious emotionally-hollow piece of garbage was the final straw.I tried to get through the whole set but couldn't force myself to do it. Not everything King wrote was horror but he writes compelling stories and make you want to keep turning the page. These adaptations merely make you sleepy.For the five of the eight that I could get through: 1) Battleground: This is the only reason it is a 2 instead of a 10. This one was absent any dialog and was an entertaining visual battle between hit-man Renshaw and the green army men of his last victim, toymaker Hans Morris. Intense and worth a watch. The same can't be said of the others.2)Crouch End: A nod by Stephen King to his predecessor H.P. Lovecraft becomes second rate with terrible actors and bad visual effects. The newlyweds stumble into another dimension through a thin spot and encounter nightmarish things in this other place. There is nothing suspenseful about it and it goes on far too long.3)Umney's Last Case: The fictional private eye and the writer who created him switch places after the writer loses his son. Escaping from reality, the writer regrets his choice by the end while the private eye tries to get back into the fictional world with no easy routes back. In 2006, William H. Macy (who is great in so many other things) actually got nominated for this hammy role. Its a cheesy character in many ways and feels forced. It is a fair episode at best.4)The End of the Whole Mess: Howard Fornoy describes how his genius little brother, Bobby, destroyed the world. They altered the water of the world to make everyone more peaceful and end war BUT gave everyone Alzheimer's Disease as a side effect. TEDIOUS. The whole unwatchable episode (not sure how I got through it) focuses so much on describing the genius brother that the mass Alzheimer's Disease outbreak is barely shown.5)The Road Virus Heads North: An author (played by Tom Berenger)picks up a disturbing painting at a yard sale and begins to realize that the thing in the painting is following him and intends to kill him. They added a subplot involving a colonoscopy and iffy test results... By doing this and a slight romantic subplot, they take a hard edged story about a man running from a monster from "the basement of the universe" into a tiring tale of mortality with the thing pursuing being unimportant until the end. BORING, NOT SCARY.The Bottom Line: These did not transfer well from King's short stories. They were short punchy stories that were stretched too far in most cases. I know the End of the Whole Mess and Umney's Last Case weren't meant to be scary but the other three were supposed to be and failed miserably at it. They became the worst thing in horror: boring. If a story meant to frighten comes off as repetitive and boring it clearly isn't holding your interest as a good piece of horror does.Short stories CAN become good television BUT Nightmares & Dreamscapes fails to do this.

I just saw the third week of Stephen Kings' Nightmares and Dreamscapes mini series; meaning, I saw 6 episodes so far. I have to say that the stories are really weak. I have read Stephen King's Skeleton Crew, a collection of his short stories that was published way back. I recall most of the stories were average to poor but there was one that was really excellent, if not outstanding.What I'm trying to say is that just because this mini series is from a collection of stories from Stephen King does not mean that it will be any good. In fact, if his previous collection of short stories are of any indication, then most of this mini series will be average to poor.In Stephen King's defense, I have not read these new short stories. Perhaps they are good as stories in a book and not readily adaptable to television, or perhaps it was the fault of the scriptwriters in trying to write an interesting script. Who knows. Also, these short stories may have been made exclusively for this mini series and not not for print purpose. Maybe that may have been the problem. If Stephen King had submitted these crap stories to an editor, I am sure the editor would have immediately told him to make it more interesting because as is, it is simply boring.What is clear from all of this is that the problem is with the stories/script and not the actors and actresses because this mini series has some excellent people acting on it.Seeing this mini series really makes me appreciate those old "Twilight Zone" series. Each series was only half an hour but it was compelling and riveting. I don't understand why this mini series could not accomplish similar feat. I am sure this mini series had a good deal of money to make a good mini series but unfortunately, something must not have clicked.For instance, this week there were two episodes shown. The first involved a horror story writer who buys a picture drawn by an artist who committed suicide. The writer begins to see changes in the picture as he is driving homeward. Feeling uncomfortable, he throws away the painting but it keeps appearing near him. Also, the portrait of an individual in that picture is killing people and is out to kill him. (I will not even mention the second episode for this week involving criminals and their loot because it was even more boring than this episode!)This premise is interesting and so the story should be good but after seeing it, I was frustrated because there were too many gaps in the story as well as extraneous materials that was shown that did nothing to help the story. After the last scene, I was left with more questions than answers.I tried for 3 weeks to get into this mini series but it was just too aggravating due to poor stories/script. If this was a movie, I would have recommended that people should wait for the movie to come out on cable or such. I would not even recommend that it be rented in your video store. However, given that this is on TNT, a cable channel, I would say if you have not seen it already, then try it for one week. If you do not like it that week, then you will not like the past series nor the future ones, since they all share the same boring trait.

/1/ Battleground had great production values and excellent cast in William Hurt. The first half was slow but it made up for when the doo-doo hit the fan later in the movie./2/ Crouch End is one of the few attempts at interpreting King's Lovecraftian inspired tales into a movie, and it mostly excelled at that. Great cinematography, good cast, imaginative directing and creepy special effects make this episode a perfect compliment to Battleground during the first week./3/ Umney's Last Case is unfortunately a victim of an over zealous writer intent on changing a lot of Stephen King's work in the original short story. Macy does a good job of trying to salvage this movie, but I would skip this story when renting the DVD./4/ End Of the Whole Mess will come across as slow, talky and a bit conventional to many, the writing is probably the deepest of the four aired so far, but that can't help the slow pace and melodramatic performances.

Umney's Last Case: I'm not a big fan of Stephen King: that would be my wife. But I've read enough of his shorter fiction to have a feel for his work, and I really enjoyed this segment; it worked very well. William H. Macy was perfectly cast and Jacqueline McKenzie was very good, as well. Yeah, it's a silly premise, but once you suspend disbelief, it was very well-crafted. The ending was exactly right: no real conclusion, just the realization by both principles that the tables had turned. If only they had done The Stand, or Firestarter as well as this. If I have a quibble, it would be with some of Mrs. Landry's actions, which seemed a bit weird even for a King story. Overall, this is a 9 out of 10.The End of the Whole Mess: As for the second story of the second evening, this was not as engaging, but it still worked fairly well. I liked the idea of doing it as a documentary, but this also meant that some time that could have been used in developing the ideas in it was wasted on showing Ron Livingston's character, Howie, telling the story. I'm sure that this is how King wrote it (I've not read the story), but I think they could have just set it up and run with it, cutting back to seeing Howie talking maybe half as much as they did. But this is a small complaint. The story isn't as creative as the first one of the evening, but it worked well, as far as it went. There are some internal inconsistencies as well, which made it harder to like it. Perhaps the fact that it was grimmer than the first one made it easier to be critical of it. I'll give this a 7 out of 10.