Tag: Stephen King

The Running Man
(2025)

Director – Edgar Wright – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 133m

***1/2

In an America controlled by a TV network producing violent game shows, a poor man signs on for its biggest show The Running Man whose contestants never come back – Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, November 12th

His baby daughter is sick, and medical treatment is expensive. His wife is working as many shifts as she can at a hostess club (we never see it – it’s described in dialogue) in an attempt to bring in some money. But it’s not enough. Ben Richards (Glen Powell) needs to find more money to pay the bills and keep his family alive. While he is good at what he does, he has a tendency to speak up when things aren’t as they should be, and this gets him into trouble. As in, he has been blacklisted by previous employers of whom he’s fallen foul. So, he turns to the Free-Vee TV network that controls and runs everything, providing a subsidised TV to every home and non-stop, reality TV and game show programming.

The network’s chief reality TV series is The Americanos, featuring the day to day lives of its well-off women in black and loosely modelled on Keeping Up with the Kardashians (TV series, 2007-2021).… Read the rest

Tags 29 days, 30 days, 48 hours, Arnold Schwarzenegger, baby, banknotes, blacklisted, car driver, Colman Domingo, contestant, contract, cross-country, Daniel Ezra, death, drone camera, dyke, Edgar Wright, Emilia Jones, fake ID, Free-Vee, game show, Glen Powell, hamster wheel, hostess club, hunt, hunter, hunting humans, Josh Brolin, Katy O’Brian, kill, lay low, Lee Pace, leftist radical, live audience, Martin Herlihy, medical costs, medical treatment, Michael Cera, podcast, postbox, poverty, pursuit, reality TV, selection programme, sickness, Stephen King, street child, survival, tenement, the poor, The Running Man, The Running Man (2025), theatre, TV network, US, VHS cassettes, video updates, violence, William H. Macy

Features Live Action Movies

The Life of Chuck

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 18 August 2025
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Director – Mike Flanagan – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

From the End of the World to the life and essence of what defines one man – remarkable Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, August 20th

This is an adaptation of a Stephen King novella, originally one of the four stories comprising the volume If It Bleeds, published in 2020. King is known as a horror writer, but every so often he comes up with something that defies that mould, including stories that have been turned into such films as Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986), The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994) and Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998). His story The Life of Chuck is different again.

And, as is apparent from its outset, it employs a three act structure – a standard device in classic Hollywood screenwriting that makes the property the obvious basis for a film for any filmmaker savvy enough to spot that element – which the author unexpectedly flips on its head by reversing it. Inspired, in part, by that structure, Mike Flanagan’s film follows this template, starting off with a title card announcing Act 3 and then proceeding to tell its three related acts, all of which in one way of another concern defining moments in the life of a man named Charles Krantz (his dying in hospital, an episode one day in his adult life, an experience in his childhood).… Read the rest

Tags accountancy, Annalise Basso, apocalypse, Benjamin Pajak, billboards, California, career, Carl Lumbly, Charles Krantz 39 Great Years. Thanks Chuck!, childhood, Chiwetel Ejiofor, church, Cody Flanagan, conversation, cupola, dance class, dance in the kitchen, dark, drum kit, dying, end of the world, ex-wife, financially dependable, gain entrance, ghosts, grandparents and children, gridlock, grief, high school, hobby, hospital, identity, internet down, Jacob Tremblay, Karen Gillan, locked, Man made in the Image of God, Mark Hamill, maths, Matthew Lillard, Mia Sara, Mike Flanagan, night, Nobody, nurse, obsession, one day in his adult life, ordinary person, out of bounds, pace of life, padlock, parents and schoolchildren, Pornhub, power blackout, PTA meetings, residential area, reversed three act structure, rhythm, school teacher, slowing down, stained-glass windows, stars go out, Stephen King, strangers, street, sunny day, swirling red dress, talent, The Pocket Queen, three act structure, Tom Hiddleston, TV network transmission cuts out, walking to work, what defines one man, windows lights go out

Features Live Action Movies

The Monkey
(2025)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 21 February 2025
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(2025)
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Director – Osgood Perkins – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m

****

An automaton monkey found by two twins causes horrific deaths to people around them – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

This sets its tone early on with a framing story in which a junk store owner is asked by mild-mannered, bespectacled protagonist Hal (Theo James, who also plays his twin brother Bill) to take a clockwork monkey off his hands, insisting that the object, whatever it might be, is not a toy. The store owner is sceptical. More fool him, because he is about to undergo one of many sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths of which the film offers a gorehound’s smorgasboard.

Other notable characters include their mum Lois (Tatania Maslany from Woman in Gold, Simon Curtis, 2015; Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, 2007), Hal’s estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien from Wonka, Paul King, 2023) and Petey’s stepfather Ted (Elijah Wood from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson, 2001-3).

This Stephen King adaptation comes from the school of horror films which are, basically, an excuse for staging a series of sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths. Inventiveness is high on the menu, provided you accept that killing multiple people in unique and spectacular ways can be said to be inventive.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

The Boogeyman

Director – Rob Savage – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m

*** 1/2

Two sisters recently bereaved of their mother start to imagine something nasty waiting for them in the darkness of night – Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

An uninvited man Lester Billings (David Dalmachian) turns up at the home-based office of therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) wanting to talk. His family died, and he is suspected of murdering them… but, he claims, it wasn’t him who did it. Harper has recently lost his wife, so it’s inevitable that Billings’ story will resonate with him. While Harper excuses himself to covertly call the police, Billings starts wandering round the home in which Harper lives with his two daughters – the teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and the much younger Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair).

The scene in the office is the Stephen King short story (published in his Night Shift collection) and only a small part of the movie. It is, however, a highly significant part – the incident that sparks everything else off. Billings claims his family was slain by a hideous monster, and the impressionable Sawyer is at the age of childhood where she imagines monsters lurking in the closet or hiding beneath the bed.… Read the rest