Stephen King Despises This Streaming Adaptation: “It felt kind of cheap and thrown together”
Stephen King adaptations run the gamut from quality cinema to complete disaster. Fortunately, the author has a good sense of humor about it and looks back on some of the less effective screen adaptations of his literary output with a critical, yet sympathetic eye.
The author has been candid in admitting that his book The Tommyknockers isn’t representative of his best work. The tome was heavily influenced by cocaine and the result is widely regarded as an incoherent mess. However, King’s disdain for the story doesn’t stop with the novel. The Misery author has a similar opinion of John Power’s miniseries based on the tome.
In conversation with the New York Times, King candidly remarked: “I didn’t like it; I didn’t care for it at all.” He continued, “It felt kind of cheap and thrown together. I felt like they missed the sense of the book.”
King isn’t the only vocal critic of the miniseries. The telefilm has a Rotten Tomatoes critical rating of just 32% ‘fresh’ with 22 reviews tallied. The Popcornmeter (formerly known as the user score) sits at 39% ‘fresh’ with more than 25,000 ratings tallied. The site’s critical consensus reads: “Unlikeable characters, a bloated narrative, and drab scripting make The Tommyknockers a hard watch for even the most die-hard of Stephen King fans.”
Well, they can’t all be winners, can they? And to John Power’s credit, the book is a bit of a mess, which likely made the adaptation a challenging prospect. However, I would argue that there is a certain camp value to the screen rendering of The Tommyknockers.
The setup for this maligned Stephen King adaptation goes as follows:
An unearthly force hits all but the lover of a writer who has dug up something strange in Maine. Based on Stephen King’s novel.
If you’re curious to try to find merit in the adaptation, or if you count yourself a fan, you can find the program streaming on YouTube, as of the publication of this post. The upload is from a fan account. So, check it out while it lasts.
That’s all we have for you at present, dear reader. Stay tuned to the site for more hot takes from your favorite creators in the genre space as we succeed at unearthing them. Also, feel free to hit me up on Threads if you’d like to discuss the merits of the output from Stephen King’s ‘cocaine era.’
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