Desperation (2006)


Stephen King often did gimmicks in the late 1990s and early 2000s to sell his books.  Some, like the multi-volume release of The Green Mile, worked.  Others seemed to just gloss over the fact that he was on cruise control, both before and after almost getting killed by a redneck in a van.  Desperation, published in 1996, is a solid Stephen King work with ties to his grander Dark Tower universe.  It's not great, but it works.  

The gimmick was that at the same time he released a "mirror" novel written by his late pseudonym Richard Bachman called The Regulators.  It features the same characters, only in a different setting, fighting a manifestation of the same creature from Desperation.  It is also not bad but, where I remember a good deal of Desperation 30 years after reading it, I had to look up the plot of The Regulators to remind me what it is about.  After being reminded of the story I don't find it surprising that ABC never had any plans to do both films.  That is a relief since they got Mick Garris once again to do a three-hour television film (only a bit over two hours without the commercials) of Desperation that takes the source material and sucks out almost anything good from it despite having a decent cast. 

Peter Jackson (Henry Thomas) and his wife Mary (Annabeth Gish) are traveling cross-country from New York and are pulled over by officer Collie Entragian (Ron Pearlman) just outside of the small mining town of Desperation, Nevada.  When he finds marijuana in their car he arrests them.  To their horror they find that Desperation is filled with corpses with the exception of a handful of people being kept in the local lockup.  One of those is soon to be John Edward Marinville (Tom Skerritt), an author famous for his time as a war correspondent in Vietnam.

When Marinville is arrested he calls his assistant Steve (Steve Weber) who has just picked up a hitchhiker named Cynthia (Kelly Overton).  Together they travel to the town to help rescue his boss.  Meanwhile, the inmates find an unlikely savior in a young boy named David Carver (Shane Ashton Haboucha) who believes God has sent him on a mission to help stop an evil entity called Tak that was freed from the local mine.

This has all the usual reasons I hate Mick Garris films.  The fish-eyed closeups, the dramatic events that turn embarrassingly hilarious, the terrible CGI and awful translation of King's material, all while maintaining a veneer of faithfulness to the story, are present.  Almost all of his films could be included in a class with the works of Uwe Bohl, Paul W. S. Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan as examples of how not to make movies.  It is only a continued friendship with King that allowed him to keep making abysmal movies from his works.  I am happy to say that this was the last one.

Despite all this Ron Pearlman is having a ball playing Entragian for the first half of the movie and Tom Skerritt seems to think he is in a much better movie than he is.  This is the type of made-for-television slop that inspires phoned-in performances, but we get a decent one from Skerritt as Marinville.  Shane Ashton Haboucha isn't bad as the young David Carver but is given some of the worst dialog. 

David is one of the few devout religious characters portrayed positively in a Stephen King novel.  While I do remember God being involved so thoroughly in Desperation, it comes across as awkward and preachy in Garris's adaptation.  It has the feeling of one of those Christian films that at first appears mainstream but then bludgeons the audience with whatever narrow-minded, bigoted interpretation of the Gospel the church that produced it came up with.  It may be in the book, but that doesn't mean it works on screen, something that Garris has never been able to figure out.  

Because ABC premiered Desperation against American Idol pretty much no one watched except me.  I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.  It wasn't a wonderful book to begin with but it was entertaining.  Although Garris did the rare move of keeping the Dark Tower related stuff in the movie that still doesn't save it from being one of his worst films and, considering that even his best is middling material like Sleepwalkers, it is best to give this one a pass.

Desperation (2006)
Time: 131 minutes
Starring: Tom Skerritt, Steven Weber, Shane Ashton Haboucha, Annabeth Gish, Ron Pearlman
Director: Mick Garris  

 

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