Badmovies.org Forum

DESPERATION (2006) (http://imdb.com/title/tt0129871/) - Great made for TV Horror film written by Stephen King. The film starts out really good with Ron Perlman playing a beyond evil police officer of a small Nevada town. The story is revealed little by little with great desert locations and the mining town which is actually shot in Bisbee, Arizona and not in Nevada. Their is also a couple other interesting characters like the writer and the young boy who prays to God for help and guidance which is really different for any film that I've seen. It's a battle between good and evil.

(7 out of 10 Stars)  :thumbup: :thumbup: 2nd half isn't as good, but it tells the story.

(http://home.earthlink.net/~groomcreek/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/desperation_pos.jpg)

[youtube=425,350] http://youtube.com/watch?v=o_p1d2weqY8

I felt it was ok.  I really enjoyed reading Desperation and was what made me a fan of King's books.  The made for TV film wasn't nearly as good as the book, but that is to be expected.

Your complaint about the second half not being as good as the first half is a complaint that I have with any of King's works.  Hiss stories normally start out amazingly well but the endings often ruin everything that came before.  King's "IT" is a perfect example of that.

I haven't seen the movie but I've read the book.
It was ok.  Could've been better.
It was the whole "kid praying to God" subplot that I didn't care for.
If that hadn't been a part of the book, it all would've been so much better in my opinion.

As for the movie, I've heard mostly negative things about it.
Any Stephen King story, especially one with a large cast of characters like Desperation, almost never turns out right in movie form.
I would like to see Ron Perlman as Collie Entragian though.
After I read the book and heard he was cast in the role, he was the first person I thought could pull it off.
In the book, he's referred to as a "blood gorgon".  (but he's really posessed by Tak)

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I really think they should make Desperation's sister book, The Regulators into a film.
That story was ten times better than Desperation!   :thumbup:
It's just like Desperation, all the characters in it even have the same names but the names are given to different people.
It's about Tak, the malevolent entity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tak_%28Stephen_King%29) in Desperation, who possesses a young autistic boy who lives on Poplar Street.
The boy/Tak, is able to make his favorite characters from the TV show Motokops 2200 physically come to life and terrorize the other residents of Poplar St.

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I actually bought Desperation and The Regulators in hardcover for $5.00 for the both of them.
A local bookstore was going out of business and had a special deal.  That was like $50 worth of books for $5.
If you put the two books together side by side, it forms one big scene.
Here it is:
(http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/9306/desperegvq1.jpg) (http://imageshack.us)

If you liked Desperation, you'll love The Regulators.   :thumbup:

I remember not really liking The Regulators that much.  It was much shorter than Desperation if I'm not mistaken and at the time seemed to me like a publicity stunt to boost sales.  I would like to go back and read it again, maybe my opinion has changed.

On a different note, I still know some people who don't believe that Bachman and King are the same author.  Stupidity never fails to amaze me.

Very true.  Probably the best exception I've read is Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which has one of the best endings I've ever read.  It's virtually word for word of Morgan Freeman's final narration from the film.

It got the job done, but little else. Not as bad as other Mick Garris adaptations (for all the crap he's gotten it looks like he is slowly improving), but it has similar weaknesses. Basically, they're too faithful to King's work, and what works on paper not always works on film.

This is particularly true for King, in his writtings he often uses mundane or humorous elements to make the scares more effective (it's like he's whispering to your ear: "This is happening. It's true". But when Garris has Ron Perlman chant oldies as he beats up Tom Skerrit it looks like nobody knows how to deal with that.

And once again, more than two hours for a TV movie is just too much, specially for one like this, which hasn't much of a plot.

I liked regulators far better,but yeah the movie got the job done.

Haven't seen this one in a while but if memory serves it was a pretty average adaptation of one of King's lesser novels. I remember Ron Perlmann being the best part, anytime he wasn't on screen the whole thing went into the tank.

Oddly enough I own two (!) copies of this DVD. My wife bought one a couple of years ago when our local video store was going out of business, then some time later she came home with another one from the $5 DVD bin at Walmart. I was like "We already have this one, don'cha remember? We both hated it!"  :bouncegiggle: