I’ve never really been much of a Stephen King fan. Sure, he has some of horror’s most iconic ideas (murderous writers, murderous clowns, murderous cars, murderous girls on their period, etc). And yet he fills his novels with so much depraved excess, boring details, and odd creative choices which ultimately harm his inventive ideas.
But there is no medium more enamoured with the works of King than the TV miniseries. Apparently there’s nothing creatively better than cramming a dense thousand page novel into a three hour miniseries, like Meatloaf stuffing his handkerchiefs into his sleeves.
There are many dozens of King adaptations across TV and cinema, so it’d be remiss of me not to look at some at some point. Naturally, I’m going to start with the worst one. Because I hate myself.
When I think of Tom Holland‘s (no, not that one) adaptation of King’s novella, ‘The Langoliers’ (from anthology Four Past Midnight), I’m always reminded of that week in the summer of ’03 when I was bedridden with a stomach bug and whiled away the long days watching crap movies on the Sci Fi Channel (it’ll never be SyFy to me).
That I’m perpetually reminded of a torrent of vomit and diarrhoea whenever I think of this miniseries, should tell you all you need to know about The Langoliers; the miniseries which killed off the King TV boom of the Nineties.
Written and directed by Tom Holland (it’s the Fright Night and Child’s Play guy, ok?), The Langoliers aired on ABC in two 1 & 1/2 hour parts in May 1996. As with other King adaptations, you can consider it a long movie and watch it in one sitting should you really wish.
Conceptually, The Langoliers is akin to that Twilight Zone episode stretched to its absolute limit. The flimsy-thin concept behind the story is that a group of passengers on a cross-country redeye flight wake up to find everyone else has vanished. Unfortunately, this includes their pilots – forcing the survivors to pull-off a Chesley Sullenberger and perform an emergency landing. In Bangor, Maine. Fucking Christ.
The survivors find themselves in an abandoned, eerie place: where physics and electronics do not obey their normal laws, and the arrival of strange beings is heralded on the horizon. Just like any airport at night, then. It’s a stagnant place, almost like time has stopped. The group of incredibly boring characters attempt to unravel the mystery of where they are, why they specifically are there, and how they can escape: all the while as something draws nearer and tempers flare.
At this point, I must say that the miniseries does have quite a good atmosphere. It’s not really a concept that existed back then (at least in its current form), but I’m quite reminded of liminal spaces. These are seemingly ordinary places that are utterly devoid of life and possess a strange, haunting quality – think of a shopping mall at night when all the people are gone and the lights are out.
The airport is an oppressive setting with its dour atmosphere and wide open spaces that feel off. There’s nothing but dull fields and woodlands for miles and miles. And yet, there’s the feeling of not being alone. Something is out there and it’s coming. Granted, what’s coming turns out to be really bloody stupid and is preceded by a noise that can only be described as someone munching down Rice Krispies.
Eventually, they learn that they are in a pocket dimension, having travelled through a temporal tear with an aurora borealis. And the things they sense approaching? Those are the Langoliers, strange creatures that are there to devour and remove the dimension from existence. This miniseries is very exposition heavy and all the explanations come from Dean Stockwell‘s character, some fucking writer (of course) who just keeps pulling all this out of his arse and we’re supposed to take it as read.
And what do the Langoliers look like? Well…
The premise is intriguing, marrying pseudo-science themes such as quantum physics, spacial distortion, time travel, with emotional abuse, existentialism, and worthlessness. I even liked the idea of the Langoliers themselves as they’re essentially eldritch versions of Van Damme‘s character in Timecop – serving to correct the time line. But the ropy special effects mean that they resemble a cross between a Ferrero Rocher and that girl’s vagina from Teeth.
Until they appear, however, the primary villain is Craig (Bronson Pinchot), the troubled executive with a bad boss (played by Stephen King) and an abusive father. He absolutely loses his shit, attempts to ruin the group’s plans to escape the dimension and even ends up killing some of them. Craig’s story is all about weighty topics like fatherly abuse, so it probably doesn’t help that his every line is elongated as though the script writer got drunk and held his finger down on the vowel keys on his keyboard.
As I mentioned above, this flimsy plot which works in short novella form doesn’t work so well in a three hour miniseries. There’s stretched out, then there’s a Cenobite from Hellraiser dragging your skin over the surface of a trampoline level of stretched out. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the acting wasn’t so utterly atrocious. But no one wants to be involved, it’s like Operation Yewtree. The most perfunctory actors are the Langoliers themselves, and fucking look at them!
It’s all just so damn silly. Dean Stockwell as Bob does his best ironic ham, but he’s only there to one-up his role as Al in Quantum Leap as the one who spouts all the bullshit techno-babble. And I’ve not mentioned it so far, but would it surprise you to learn that one of the characters (Dinah – played by Kate Maberly) is a blind psychic girl who is the other person who knows what is going on?
All in all, The Langoliers is a story which, whilst not a lot happens, is actually massively epic in scope when you think about it. So, perhaps 90’s tv wasn’t the best medium to adapt such a work. They could have used the rubbish bin instead.
Midnight Cinema Junkyard 
Leave a comment