Our fabulous Wall O’ Cool has some awesome stuff on it right now:
A whole Hitchcock shelf with classics like; The Birds, Psycho, Frenzy and Family Plot.
Two shelves of classics with titles like; The Great Escape, Patton, All About Eve, The Conversation and Touch of Evil.
A music shelf featuring Jimi Hendrix, The Clash, The Melvins and John Lennon.
A comedy shelf with Office Space, The Big Lebowski and Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
A whole shelf of family friendly films- Tron, Ice Age, Finding Nemo, E.T. and The Sound of Music.
Also a whole shelf dedicated to Stephen King movies!
Plus some new staff picks like American Psycho, Brick and Almost Famous.
Action packed animation, super sci-fi, chick flicks, dark comedies…..tons to choose from!
That’s how Stephen King describes his books. I like his stuff a lot, but I can totally see where he’s coming from with that. He’s written billions of words and when you’re done reading one of his books, you may feel satisfied for a little while but soon enough you need to eat again. Or read. Whatever. Not talking about books anyhow, I’m talking about movies. Stephen King movies.
Carrie introduced us to ol’ Steve’s peculiar brand of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations. In this case, it’s the titular character’s realization that she’s got special powers. These are, of course, hidden to her until the relentless torment from her high-school classmates and her overbearing mother reach a peak, at which point there’s really nothing to do but decimate her school and most of the town with it. Directed by Brian DePalma.
In The Dead Zone, Christopher Walken is Johnny Smith who, after a car accident leaves him in a coma, awakens to discover that he’s got special powers. Johnny can see into the past, present and future of a person simply by touching them. Unsure how to deal with this power, he considers withdrawing from the world, until he shakes the hand of an up-and-coming politician. Now Johnny must decide what do with the shocking knowledge he’s gained. Directed by David Cronenberg.
Creepshow, directed by George Romero, is a collection of five short horror stories all tied together in a horror comic book style like the classic Tales From The Crypt, which itself was made into a successful horror anthology show.
The Green Mile is the name given to the Death Row cellblock at Cold Mountain Penitentiary. Here, there are sadistic guards and equally sadistic inmates, but there are also kinder and gentler types. One of the inmates, sentenced to death for the murder of two small children. Almost child-like himself, the guards soon discover that there’s more to this guy than meets the eye. Yep. He’s got special powers. Directed by Frank Darabont, who also did The Shawshank Redemption and the next one on our list. Frank seems to really get Stephen King’s stuff and he makes great movies from the source material.
The Mist is freakin’ scary. Seriously, the book creeped me out and the movie does as well. A mysterious cloud of mist envelops a small town in New England, leaving a small group of neighbors trapped inside a supermarket. Why? Because there are creepy scary monsters in the fog, that’s why! In the hands of another director, this might have been fairly typical of many Stephen King adaptations, but Mr. Darabont, as I said, gets Steve’s stuff, I guess.
Perhaps this one flew under your radar, but you don’t want to miss The Night Flier, the tale of an tabloid reporter hot on the trail of an apparent serial killer preying on small towns with tiny airports. Turns out this killer is far from ordinary (hey, it’s Stephen King, remember)… it’s a vampire!
The original Salem’s Lot was really pretty good for a made-for-TV movie. But the TNT miniseries staring Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, James Cromwell and Rutger Hauer is leaps and bounds better. When a vampire moves into that creepy old house, how come nobody notices?
Johnny Depp and John Turturro star in Secret Window, the story of recently-divorced writer Mort Rainey (Depp) who, while holed up in his remote lake house, is confronted by a crazed stranger named John Shooter (Turturro). Shooter accuses Rainey of plagiarism and demands justice. Things get ugly, even murderous, before the end of the movie. No, there are no special powers.
Other Stephen King titles in the store include The Shining, 1408, and Dreamcatcher. Come on in and get spooked, why don’tcha?
As Gary posted last night, we have received a grand little collection of Hitchcock along with a whole mess of other groovy stuff!
Some John Wayne classics: The Searchers, The Quiet Man and Stagecoach. Steve McQueen in Bullitt, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Manly stuff.
Stephen King horror in the form of Carrie and The Dead Zone. Other scary and suspenseful titles? 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film The Killing, and a funky 90’s film called Killing Zoe.
Speaking of Kubrick, it looks like we have almost a whole shelf dedicated to the man with A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket.
Got some good comedy! Being John Malkovich, Dogma, Ghost World (great movie!) and the so-bad-it-might-be-good Cabin Boy starring Chris Elliott.
We also have the first 2 seasons of the BBC show Coupling and one of my favorite movies about a dead composer, Amadeus.
New cool! Woo-hoo!