Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (2006)

hyped garbage

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

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.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

As a considerable Stephen King fan, especially of his short stories, I was anxious to see this series. I bought the DVD set as I don't have cable and have watched it several times. While I agree with much of the content in the reviews, I have some notes to add. I guess I will go through each show... 1. Battlefield: Excellent. Special effects were of high quality. Agree with another reviewer that the people downstairs probably would've heard something...... 2. Crouch End: One of my very favorite of SK's short stories, however, I will regretfully agree that Claire Forlani's acting was atrocious and it did not translate well to the small screen at all. I completely agree with the commenter who said that what they envisioned in their mind while reading was much better than what was presented. I did enjoy the Melbourne scenery, though! 3. Umney's Last Case: Not my favorite short story, but well done thanks to William Macy. 4. The End of the Whole Mess: Rang true to the original story and was well executed. Yes, he could've done a bit more research on the La Plata population, but I guess time was of the essence. 5. The Road Virus Heads North: A great story by SK, remember it really effecting me when I read it, and quite frankly, this one really bit the big one. Something was missing for sure. 6. Autopsy Room 4: Good suspense, but I don't really think in real life that the hospital staff would be that disrespectful, inappropriate or pathetic. The attempts at sexual tension over the body were laughable. 7. They Got a Hell of a Band: Good story, but really should have picked a different story all together. It didn't really translate well. 8. The Fifth Quarter: Good story, well presented. Not horror, of course, but good just the same. Relatively happy ending for King. Hardly recognized Cody from Let Me In, what a great little actor he is.I wish they would do another, though. Call me a sucker for punishment.

I do like a good horror anthology series (Tales From the Crypt is coming soon…), but this series is only half horror. The other half is not that good (thriller, action, crime, etc). All the episodes are based off of Stephen King's short stories, and the guy is not strictly a horror writer, I admit. I just wanted a show with the word "nightmares" in its title to scare me, not make me chuckle at a goofy William H. Macy performance. Only a couple episodes really stand out, one of which is the Lovecraft-inspired "Crouch End." I know… Me? Like Lovecraft? Don't act so surprised! The episode starring William Hurt as an assassin besieged by green army soldiers come to life is different because of the lack of dialogue. It's an interesting choice, and cool at first, but after a while I just wanted Hurt to at least scream an obscenity at the toys instead of grunting like a cave man. Other episodes have their own methods of storytelling that work better, like in "The End of the Whole Mess," which has the main character telling much of the story into a video camera.Since I'm not an avid reader of King's, I don't know if there are better shorts of his that remain untapped. All I know is that half of these stories probably shouldn't have been made into a TV show. Interviews on the discs indicate that some of the original short stories were less than 10 pages long. Turning that into a 50-minute show means an awful lot of pointless filler. Most of the draw lies in the fact that each episode has some recognizable star power. That doesn't mean Jeremy Sisto, Claire Forlani, Ron Livingston, and Steven Weber never act in crap. Still, I feel safe recommending this series to King fans. They can watch "Umney's Last Case"in flesh and blood at last instead of a "Dark Tower" movie.http://www.movieswithmark.com

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.