Unseen Terror 2013: Day 3

On a flight from Los Angeles to Boston, a small group of passengers awake to find that everyone on board, including the flight's own very pilots, have mysteriously vanished. After introducing themselves to one another, and rerouting the aircraft to a new destination, they land in a deserted airport in an attempt to discover the meaning behind why the flight, and seemingly the entire world, is now suddenly desolate.


Three hours. This movie took me THREE HOURS to finish. Mind you, this isn't the fault of the actual quality of The Langoliers, since this adaptation of the Stephen King novella of the same name was originally a miniseries that aired on ABC back in 1995, so I should have expected it to drag for the most part. But my goodness, this does indeed drag quite a bit. During my review of Carrie yesterday, I discussed about how Brian De Palma and company cut out a lot of the fluff from the source material and made a very good product that won nearly universal acclaim. When it comes to this however, well, I'd implore you to read on.


Admittedly, The Langoliers does do a fairly good job at keeping your attention, despite a story that isn't exactly stimulating by any means. I'd attribute that the performances of Dean Stockwell and Bronson Pinchot more than anything else. In another life, I think Stockwell could have played or voiced a fairly fun version of DC Comics' The Question, given his character's penchant for deduction and borderline paranoid delusions and theories. True, a large portion of those do end up coming true, but I digress. Pinchot is another case entirely though. I suspect he seemed to know that he was cast in a made-for-TV miniseries, as he is playing this as over the top as he possibly could, and in the end, he steals nearly every scene that he is in. Hell, even WITH the ridiculous running time this "film" has, he may be enough of a reason for a viewing (example below).

The characters are supposed to be what you take away from this film, be they good or bad, and what most people remember besides Pinchot's disturbed Craig Toomey (whose own tortured psyche was like a dumbed down version of Henry Bowers from It meets Carrie White), is the character of Dinah, played by Kate Maberly. There is no way to not sound like a bully when talking about child actors, so I'll just have to just come out and say it: she is god damn awful here. The only credible thing I can give to her is that she has a good scream. The revelation of her having a special "gift" to make up for her being blind (or is it BECAUSE she is so?) felt like a subplot to another work King was working on that he couldn't quite finish, so he just crowbarred it in here. If he was trying to pay homage to a secret love of Daredevil, this may have worked, but it just seemed ridiculously silly. Others are given a decent amount of time for us to know them, such as British guy, black guy, nerdy guy, and pretty white girl. It almost feels like a Stephen King version of the Breakfast Club, except nowhere near as interesting.


And that brings me to the inevitable final hour of The Langoliers. I suppose that I should expect these type of things given my recent revisit with the 1990 adaptation of It and the ridiculously terrible ending that gave the audience, but there isn't a doubt in my mind that this trumps it six ways from Sunday. I'm not going to spoil it unless you directly ask me, but let's just say that it involves horrendous CGI, Bronson Pinchot screaming horribly, a final thirty minutes that drag on for what feels like an extra hour, and a fairly nice puke-worthy freeze frame shot. From what I gather, they were taking literally every detail from the novella and putting it in this work, but after the revelation of what caused this catastrophe, you just kind of sit around wondering "so can we end this already?" Alas, it doesn't, which brings about that aforementioned final thirty minutes. I expect a little better out of director Tom Holland (Child's Play, Fright Night), but you're also working with a much smaller budget than you would have for cinema and a fairly bland cast. Maybe down the road a "re-imagining" wouldn't hurt. But for now? A recommendation isn't going to come my way unless you're a diehard Stephen King completist.



Tomorrow, Stephen King takes us back in the air with THE NIGHT FLIER!