GRAVEYARD SHIFT has a similar tone, which is to say that it’s surprisingly bleak and gruesome for a monster movie made in 1990. I think THE MANGLER plays a little better today, but no one will ever regard it as an unqualified success. which was, unfortunately for Hooper, NOT a popular mode for horror movies in the mid-1990s. I have already written about THE MANGLER, and made my case for Tobe Hooper’s oppressive storytelling. This brings me to GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1990) and THE MANGLER (1995), both of which I regard more highly than the usual horror fan. I interviewed director Tom McLoughlin at length about this picture, and came away with an even greater appreciation for it. SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK is a more dignified release from the Dino DeLaurentiis camp. Yes, the movie is silly as hell - that’s obvious from the opening credit sequence, in which King pelts Marla Maples with a truck full of watermelons while blasting AC/DC - but that’s the kind of movie that I will always stop to watch if I’m flipping through TV channels on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not hard to understand why the author would want to try his own hand at directing a film based on one of his works, but his only attempt, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (based on the short story “Trucks”), is generally regarded as a travesty. The author sued to have his name taken off of the film, but suckers like me had already paid to see it in the theater. Even more embarrassing is the 1992 cyber-thriller THE LAWNMOWER MAN, which has nothing to do with King’s short story of the same name. A short film adaptation of the original story, titled DISCIPLES OF THE CROW, and packaged in a cheeky 1987 video release called A STORY FROM STEPHEN KING’S NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION, isn’t much better. CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) was one of the worst adaptations of the early 1980s, but it’s a masterpiece compared to its seven direct-to-video sequels and 2009 remake. “Battleground” became the basis for the first (and some say best) episode of the 2006 TNT miniseries NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES.įeature film adaptations have not fared quite as well, illustrating that it’s no easy task to expand on King’s storytelling. “The Ledge” and “Quitters, Inc.” were combined with a third story for Lewis Teague’s anthology film CAT’S EYE (1985). The trend started in the early 80s, when “The Boogeyman” (an effectively moody adaptation by director Jeff Schiro) and “The Woman in the Room” (an early effort by Frank Darabont, who would become one of King’s most successful collaborators) were paired together in a video release called STEPHEN KING’S NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION (1989). Sometimes she gets her degree, and sometimes she gets date-raped by frat boys.Īt this point, many of the Night Shift stories have been faithfully adapted into independent short films. The author once joked that having one of your stories adapted to the screen feels like sending your daughter off to college. For the most part, those adaptations have been out of King’s hands. In comparison, several of the other stories in this collection evolved (or devolved) into films. “The Boogeyman,” first published in 1973, is the forerunner of It. “Night Surf,” first published in 1974, reads like a prologue to The Stand. “Jerusalem’s Lot,” written in 1967 as a college term paper, eventually became Salem’s Lot. Several of the short stories in Night Shift proved to be the seeds of his more famous novels. It comes after reports in Israeli media that military and intelligence officials had dismissed highly-detailed reports of Hamas's planned attacks on kibbutzes along the border prior to the 7 October raids.One of the things I realized while re-reading Stephen King’s Night Shift collection is that the author seems to write short stories as a way of capturing new, and potentially fleeting, ideas. Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and former adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu, was quoted by the NYT as saying: "The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible." Soldiers rushing into battle were only armed for brief combat, and helicopter pilots were told to follow the news to pick their targets, the investigation said. The IDF did not have any plan to respond to a "large-scale Hamas attack", the newspaper said, in a report detailing the apparent failings of the military in response to Hamas's sweeping raids of southern Israel.Ĭurrent and former soldiers and officers told reporters that they "made it up as they went along". Israel's military was so poorly organised that soldiers communicated with each other via spontaneous WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for their information during the 7 October attacks, a New York Times investigation has found.
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