24 Hours of Movies: Dirty Kings

 by Patrick Bromley

Let's get Dirty.

If you're a Patreon subscriber, you might know that Adam Riske and I recently did a bonus episode on the 1990 Stephen King adaptation Graveyard Shift. On that episode, Adam coined a certain kind of Stephen King movie as "Dirty Kings," a label I have become obsessed with since our recording. I can't exactly define what makes a Dirty King (maybe Adam can), but it's kind of like that Supreme Court porn cast quote in that I know it when I see it. I wanted to celebrate a Certain King of Stephen King movie with its own 24-hour marathon. Grab some popcorn and some soap and let's do this.

10 am - Pet Sematary Two (1992, dir. Mary Lambert)

We need to set the tone right off the bat, so let's start with not just a Dirty King, but the dirtiest of Kings: director Mary Lambert's 1992 sequel to her own Pet Sematary (itself a Dirty King, but not the kind we could watch first). It's about as dark and mean-spirited as studio horror gets, keeping all the nastiness of the original film but removing any of the soul, as though Pet Sematary itself came back from a Pet Sematary. Clancy Brown steals the show as the ugliest of an ugly lot. I know it may seem like a weird choice on which to start our marathon, but ever since revisiting this one for a Pure Cinema marathon I programmed a few years back I've been convinced that this movie would play in front of an audience. We could be that audience.

Noon - Children of the Corn (1984, dir. Fritz Kiersch) 

The earliest Stephen King adaptations were classy productions directed by master filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, and Stanley Kubrick. It wasn't until the 1980s when several lesser and/or for-hire directors began adapting King for the screen that the number of Dirty Kings exploded. The first Children of the Corn is one of the OG Dirty Kings -- the scuzzy tale of a couple (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) who find themselves stranded in a farm town run only by murderous children who killed their parents in the name of some blood sacrifice. The direction (by first-timer Fritz Kiersch) is crude, the special effects are cheap, and even the story feels like something King hammered out in an afternoon (his original script actually got thrown out in favor of something we can safely assume is worse). In other words, it's perfect marathon fodder.

1:45 pm - The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999, dir. Katt Shea)

I know, I know, our second sequel in just three movies, but this one fits the bill so well I had to program it. A sequel to Carrie is already a bad idea, but it seems as if director Katt Shea just asked herself "What if Carrie but Dirty King?" What we get is more a remake than a sequel, minus some unnecessary Sue Snell stuff that threatens to ruin the movie, only updated to be very much of the 1990s in terms of the overall aesthetics. It's more or less the same movie but made explicitly for teens and without the veneer of class that De Palma gave his version. Yes, I just called a movie that opens with a five-minute slow motion shower scene "classy."

3:30 pm - Sometimes They Come Back (1991, dir. Tom McLoughlin)

This is kind of a cheat because it wound up being a cable TV movie, though I want to say it did get a limited theatrical run in other parts of the world. Tom McLoughlin (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) directs another King short story adaptation about a school teacher (Tim Matheson) being terrorized by the same group of greasers (including Robert Rusler) who killed his brother 40 years prior. It's textbook Dirty King: low-budget and trashy but with an air of nostalgia to the whole thing and weirdly comforting vibes, like a movie you want to rewatch every time Summer starts turning to Fall. Somehow there were two sequels, including the hilariously titled Sometimes They Come Back Again in 1996.

5:15 pm - Thinner (1996, dir. Tom Holland)

An Adam Riske Dirty King classic. Based on the Richard Bachman novel of the same name, it centers on an obese lawyer (Robert John Burke under silly prosthetics) who ends up on the receiving end of a gypsy curse and begins to lose weight very, very rapidly. Second only to maybe Pet Sematary Two in the mean-spirited department, Thinner is a nasty, ugly film about ugly, nasty people being ugly and nasty to each other. The material hasn't dated great, what with its antiquated depictions of fat people and gypsies, but this was a movie made in the '90s and based on a book from the '80s, neither decade known for its sensitivity or self-awareness. I liked this one better on recent rewatch than I remember.

7 pm - Cujo (1983, dir. Lewis Teague)

It's basically accepted wisdom at this point that Dee Wallace should have gotten an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of an adulterous wife who, along with her son (Danny Pintauro), gets trapped in a car by a rabid St. Bernard. Released just a few months before Christine, this is the Dirty King of 1983: grimy and sweaty and cheap and widely derided by critics at the time. I'd like to point out that they were very wrong and that Cujo is a terrific horror movie: taut and scary and sad and brilliantly acted. Lewis Teague, an underrated director (who also made the Dirty King anthology Cat's Eye), directs the shit out of Cujo. It's insane to me that it was so dismissed upon release because it's really great.

8:45 pm - The Night Flier (1997, dir. Mark Pavia)

Another King short story adaptation originally intended for theaters but which wound up going straight to cable (in this case HBO). What was for a long time Mark Pavia's only directorial credit (he has since directed the decent slasher Fender Bender) casts the great Miguel Ferrer in a rare lead performance as a tabloid journalist on the trail of a serial killer he probably shouldn't be chasing. There's plenty of cynicism about '90s era (era) tabloid journalism -- it's kind of Ace in the Hole by way of a horror movie -- plus the KNB makeup effects are cool and it all builds to a memorably gory climax. For years this could be called Underrated [Dirty] King, but audiences have slowly caught up to how good it is. Giving it a Blu-ray release would help matters even more, of course, as it's still stuck on an out of print DVD.

10:30 pm - Graveyard Shift (1990, dir. Ralph S. Singleton)

The movie that birthed this whole marathon. I know I said Pet Sematary Two was the dirtiest King, but in a literal sense that title belongs to Graveyard Shift, a movie that takes place primarily in filthy and wet underground tunnels where a cleanup crew is working and being picked off by a giant rat monster. We'll kick off the overnight section of our marathon with pure watchable garbage in which a bunch of actors sweat and shout (and in Stephen Macht's case adopt questionable accents) in the service of selling material that might be too thin to stretch to feature length. This might be the worst of the Dirty Kings that I still totally enjoy.

Midnight - Maximum Overdrive (1986, dir. Stephen King)

We continue the trashiest portion of our already-trashy marathon with Stephen King's lone directorial effort based on his short story "Trucks" in which the passage of a comet causes everything (mostly cars) mechanical to become sentient and homicidal. Another Dirty King that was widely derided upon release, probably because King opted to direct it himself, but which has developed a fervent cult following in the decades since. I can't quite get on board with loving it but it's incredibly entertaining and would play perfectly in the midnight slot when we're tempted to fall asleep but can't because of all the AC/DC on the soundtrack.

1:45 am - Creepshow 2 (1987, dir. Michael Gornick)

For as fun and colorful as it is, the original Creepshow is classy King if for no other reason than because it's directed by the great George A. Romero. the 1987 sequel, however, is total Dirty King. Written by Romero and directed by his cinematographer Michael Gornick, the whole anthology feels cheap and scuzzy in a way that its predecessor never did. Popular wisdom is still that the middle segment, "The Raft," is the best of the three, but I've grown weirdly fond of "The Hitchhiker" on my last few viewings. They're both good at any rate. "Old Chief Knockhead" will never be good.

3:15 am - The Mangler (1995, dir. Tobe Hooper)

I tried to not repeat any of the titles from my original Stephen King 24-hour marathon from years ago this time around, but there's no way I can do a lineup of Dirty King and not include my man Tobe Hooper's 1995 adaptation of The Mangler, one of the best of all the Dirty Kings (his second King adaptation after the much classier TV adaptation of Salem's Lot). Ted Levine plays against type as a normal human being investigating a death at an industrial laundry only to discover that the giant pressing machine there is haunted and hungry for blood. Robert Englund is on hand to ham it up in exaggerated old man makeup. This is one of the Tobe Hooperiest of all his filmography, cranked up way past 11 in its tone and its style, borrowing from German Expressionism and once again indicting capitalism in a way that's none too subtle. Tobe was never a subtle filmmaker. 

5 am - Silver Bullet (1985, dir. Daniel Attias)

One of the things I love about Silver Bullet, based on the Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf and recently well-covered on Reserved Seating, is that it's a total Dirty King that has delusions of being classy. The tension between those two things is fascinating. It is, at times, hyper gory and over the top in an unintentionally silly way, but presented through a lens of gauzy nostalgia and Harper Lee-style narration, desperate to be something that it's not. The performances are great almost across the board, which doesn't always jive with the jarring tonal shifts or the cheapness of the werewolf suit. I don't mean any of this as a knock against the movie, which I unabashedly love.

6:45 am - The Lawnmower Man (1992, dir. Brett Leonard)

This is one of the few Dirty Kings I don't much care for, but since I plan to watch this marathon with Adam Riske and he loves it I feel it's only fitting that it get slotted in. I've read the short story on which this movie is "based" and it has nothing to do with virtual reality or cyberspace or any of the early '90s tech nonsense in which Brett Leonard's adaptation (and filmography) gleefully traffics. Jeff Fahey goes full Simple Jack on his way to going full Algernon and Pierce Bronson is the scientist who gets him there; how this all connects to virtual reality I will leave for you to discover. This will be a weird way to greet the morning but I can't see placing it anywhere else.

8:45 am - Firestarter (1984, dir. Mark A. Lester)

Let's end our marathon on what might be the classiest of the Dirty Kings in our lineup, probably because of the residual John Carpenter DNA that exists in director Mark A. Lester's adaptation of King's 1980 novel about a young girl (Drew Barrymore) and her father (David Keith) who both possess special powers as a result of secret government tests. Besides what's left of the Carpenter version (he was fired by Universal after The Thing bombed), there's an A-list cast that includes George C. Scott and Martin Sheen and Art Carney, plus incredible pyrotechnic effects and a Tangerine Dream score. It may have more gloss than fellow DKs like Graveyard Shift and Pet Sematary, but a Dirty King can't escape its nature. Weirdly enough, the 2022 remake starring Zac Efron is not a Dirty King despite coming from the same source material. That version is also terrible; this one rules.