Flick Picks 18: Stephen King's Desperation

WATCH ME!!! I COMMAND YOU! (Don't).

Hello again, Streakers! Boog here, tired and hung over from one of my favorite past times: The Stephen King Drinking Game. Basically, the more Stephen King movies you see, the harder it is to play this game without ending up in the hospital from alcohol poisoning. Today I bring you the aptly named Desperation, so called because it desperately wants to be scary. Or creepy. Or philosophical. Or vague. I'm not sure which. If you want, here is another trailer, but be warned, both of them are redband. SPOILERS! Interestingly enough, this 130 minute slow ride through hell has a pretty strong cast, including Tom Skerrit (Whiteout, Top Gun, Alien), Steve Weber (TV's Wings, Reefer Madness: The Musical), Annabeth Gish (TV's Brotherhood, SLC Punk!), Charles Durning (O Brother Where Art Thou, Peter's Dad in Family Guy), Matt Frewer (Watchmen, the 2004 Dawn of The Dead, Disney's Hercules, Max Headroom), and perennial favorite Ron Perlman (Hellboy, Star Trek: Nemesis). The problem is, the script, written by King, btw, is so linear and bare that none of them have much to do. Now to explain my own personal rules for TSKDG. First, if it's a King trademark, take a shot. Second, if it's a King cliche, take a shot. Third, whether it's a line, plot device, set piece, what have you, if it's being reused from an earlier King flick, take a shot. Now that you realize the peril my liver is in, let's take a look. The film opens on a deserted road, where a couple, including Annabeth Gish, passes by a dead cat strapped to a road sign. Dammit.(one shot). They start talking, revealing themselves to be from Salt Lake City (maybe a reference to Gish's role in SLC Punk!, maybe not), and that they are headed through Nevada to New York. Soon after passing the dead cat, they get accosted by a sheriff in his vehicle, played by Ron Perlman. The couple's names are Mary and Peter, but that doesn't matter, as they are superheroes. As such, I will call them by their hero titles: Boring Man and Idiot Woman. The Obviously Crazy Sheriff gets Boring Man out of the car, and over to the trunk, where he notices the license plate has gone missing. Boring Man opens the trunk to get a tool kit to fix it,  and Sheriff finds a bag of dope in the trunk. He arrests them, throws them into the back of his car, and drives like a madman back to town. The town of Desperation (Shot #2), Nevada, seems pretty empty, except for the bodies of animals and people in the street, giving it an empty, isolated quality (Shot #3).

There is no more fitting metaphor for this film, than this pic.

They get inside what passes for the police station, where we see the obviously dead body of a very young girl, and Boring succumbs to his only weakness: 3 rapid fire gut shots. Idiot Woman runs ahead of him up the stairs, into a one room jail, with four cells surrounding a center desk, with three of the cells already occupied. Idiot Woman gets her hands on a shotgun, but fires slowly enough to miss at point blank range, and then gets hurt by the sheriff pushing the desk into her, twice, while she just holds the gun without firing a second time, then gets the shotgun taken away from her. She gets placed in the only empty cell, and we get some introductions to the other cell dwellers. There's Charles Durning, here playing a character that we never learn his name, but serves as a useless exposition font, there's Matt Frewer, playing a Mr. Carver, a Mrs. Carver, and the most annoying little turd in this film, the Carvers' overtly religious son, David. I'm not saying that religious people are annoying, far from it. One of my best friends seriously considered entering the seminary for awhile. David's brand of religiousness, however, is annoying as all hell.

Seriously, I hate this kid.

 The Sheriff, his bit of scenery chewing over, leaves, and David starts praying. This pisses Mrs. Carver right the hell off, berating her son for praying to a God that would kill his little sister (the girl at the entrance to the building). Mr. Carver tries to calm her down, but she'll have none of it, until David reveals that he prays because of time a friend crashed his bike and should have died, but didn't, and believes it to be a miracle (shot #4). Well, Mom get even more pissed here, as she continues to yell at her son for having faith in a deity that would allow her precious little family to be destroyed. We then cut back to the desert, where we are introduced to Steven Weber, here playing a man called Steve Ames, and his hitchhiking sidekick, a lady named Cynthia Smith.They have some pointless conversation that eventually reveals that Ames works for a writer (shot#5) named John Edward Marinville. Oh, and Cynthia claims to be psychic (shot #6). Everything slows down for a minute as we finally get introduced to our writer/hero, riding a motorcycle, as he pulls over to take a piss. He finishes to find the Sheriff watching him, and after an awkward moment where it appears the Sheriff is a fan of his work, we learn that Marinville was a correspondent in Vietnam, and then the Sheriff uses the same bag of dope from earlier as an excuse to beat the living daylights out of him, and bring to the cells, throwing him in with Idiot Woman. The Sheriff then grabs Mrs. Carver and leaves, leaving a dog to guard the cells, and causing to David to pray even harder. And here's where the film starts to go real wonky. See, the Sheriff has been getting progressively worse, basically rotting little by little. The Egotistical writer even points this out. But that doesn't matter, as we see that David's praying is paying off, by having his dead sister visit him and leave him a bar of glowing green soap. David strips down (shot #7) and squeezes out of the bars, using the soap as a lubricant. He then walks around, finds a gun, comes back, shoots the dog, and finds the key to the cells, letting everyone else escape. They leave the jail area, and run into Steve and Cynthia, and they all find there way to an abandoned movie theater.

They're all getting ready to shoot the script. Literally. HA!

While this is happening, the Sheriff's car comes back, and we see that Mrs. Carver has now been possessed by whatever was controlling the Sheriff, and also speaks with his voice reverberating over hers. While in the theater, Durning's character tries to drink some Vodka, but Marinville talks to him privately, pointing out that he notices the same personal demons he once had (shot #8). We get some exposition from Durning, saying that the town once had a huge mine, worked mostly by Chinese, back in the 1800s, but there was a cave in, and only two workers escaped by pure luck, and that the mine hadn't been used since, until about a month ago, when it got reopened, and the Sheriff went nuts. David then finds a bag of sardines, prays, and passes the bag around the room, where we actually see that no matter what happens, the last tin of sardines pulled out is always replaced, so we actually get a minor miracle (shot #9). Durning then wanders off to the bathroom to get a drink form a bottle he hid in there, but then gets mauled by a window smashing cougar, causing everyone one to rush to his aid. Except for, of course, David, who gets a visit from his sister again, and he follow her to the projection room, where he finds a device he can watch with his eyes closed. (shot #10) This device gives him the true story, that the Chinese were mistreated, they uncovered a hole in the mine that was holding some nasty evil (shot #11), a demon of sorts (shot #12), that caused all the workers, starting with the two closest to the hole, to attack and kill everyone in sight. The two farthest from the hole, scared form the proceedings, run their cart into a wall by accident, causing the cave in. They get outside, only to be immediately hanged for ruining the mine. Well, the attempt at hanging stops when it is revealed that the demon, Tak, is possessing them both, and they escape. Durning's character dies on the floor of the bathroom after the cougar is killed, and Idiot Woman gets kidnapped while everyone looks for David.

Ummm... Why are we in this again?

Now that someone knows what's going on, David starts talking about God's will, and that all of them should go down to the mine to save Idiot Woman and seal the mine again, but Marinville walks off, basically saying it's not his problem, and here come the most idiotic, out of place moment in this film. Marinville turns the corner to be in front of the theater again, only to find himself in a bit a of dream/mystical sequence (shot #13), where it is revealed that the defining moment of his life, a restaurant bombing in Vietnam, happened because of Tak, now bringing the writer into the center of this divine conflict (shot#14). Somehow, David knows about the mystical reveal, because he talks with Marinville about it, and then the five start to head to the mine.

He finally read the whole script, after shooting it earlier.

 We now cut to Idiot Woman, who, after being scared of some spiders and snakes, who are only a small part of the animals being controlled in this movie (shot #15), realizes that they can't hurt her, due to the fact that she was kidnapped to become the next host body for Tak, as human bodies tend to rapidly break down from it's presence. She escapes with some help from the ghost girl, and drives away in the Sheriff's car, after ripping a bit of jaw and an arm from the possessed Mrs. Carver. She meets the others not too far from that location, and we see Mrs. Carver transfer Tak into a nearby bird. Marinville finds a shack with explosives, shoots it open, and grabs some ammonium nitrate. They start heading up the hill,  where Marinville pretends to trip, pushing over David and grabbing a shotgun shell from his pocket from earlier in the movie, that he shouldn't know about because he wasn't there when David acquired it. They get to the entrance to the mine, and Mr. Carver dies from a fatal case of bird force trauma to the head and neck. Idiot Woman, displaying a very out of place moment of badassery, grabs the bird in mid-flight, and snaps it's neck. Marinville then gets Ames to grab David, and tells the others to leave, and leave the shaft caving to him. They do. Marinville goes inside, walks down to the hole, and crawls inside, finding a huge cave with an altar to Tak (shot # 16), and pit I like to call the Donut Sarlacc. Marinville looks into the pit, and tendril of smoke/mist comes out. He puts on his bike helmet, which he didn't have at any point since he came into town, nor was he carrying it when he was outside the mine, and pulls down the visor, because the mist is retarded and can't move downward. The mist, now angry at being move a simple piece of plastic, pulls Marinville into the Donut Sarlacc, giving him the opportunity he needs to pour the ammonium nitrate into and around the hole the Tak mist comes from, plug the hole with the shotgun shell, and then shoot his own gun into the shell, which somehow causes the very rock of the mine's walls to become explosive, and blow the hell up. The four survivors watch some pretty bad CG clouds with Tak's face blow away, apparently signifying his defeat. As they are leaving town, they come across Idiot Woman's car, where she asks them to stop so she can grab an overnight bag. Inside, she finds a yearbook form David's school (which she somehow knows despite him never even mentioning that he want to school at all), with Marinville's handwriting on the front. Inside is a picture of Marinville with his sister, because hey, it's not like he cares about his parents or anything, and this somehow restores his faith in God and his divine plan. Seriously, even if you are in a state of Desperation to watch a Stephen King flick, don't watch this one. And now, to leave you with an explanation of the shots, as per the rules I describe earlier.
1 - Dead animals or people to signify danger (Cujo, Pet Sematary)
2 - Title of book or film used as a place or object name (Misery)
3 - Town or center of action being somehow isolated from the outside world (Dreamcatcher, or any other Stephen King based movie)
4 - Character with blind faith despite having no discernible reason for it (cliche)
5 - Having a writer as a character (King cliche)
6 - Having a Psychic character, or one who claims to be (Firestarter, Carrie)
7 - Stripping or sexualization of children (It)
8 - Main character struggling or having just beaten some personal problem, usually alcoholism (King cliche)
9 - Actual metaphysical evidence of the beyond(The Stand)
10 - Object delivering exposition to character(The Tommyknockers)
11 - Ancient Evil (King cliche)
12 - Ancient Evil being held underground (It, Graveyard Shift)
13 - Main Character getting exposition through a dream or mystical happening that connects them to the main plot(King Cliche)
14 - Main character now placed in center of conflict (King cliche)
15 - Animals being controlled, or being the evil, or some other facet of nature being involved (Pet Sematary)
16 - Cave with Altar or similar markings to the evil force (Graveyard Shift)
Also, I should add 17 - Evil deeds from Town's past coming to haunt them, usually in a parallel to main character (Tommyknockers, Children of The Corn)