2024 | starring Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp, William Sadler | directed by Gary Dauberman | 1h 54m | 3 out of 5 stars |
This isn’t a review from someone who thinks Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is a sacred text, nor that it’s first shot at adaptation, the 1979 3 hour TV movie, is a classic piece of horror. So take all that with a grain of salt. I get that the book is an epic character piece that swivels around the town and gives everyone their proper storyline and how this movie is going to be disliked for it’s stripped-down CW-style adaptation of a favorite book. That stripped-down, B-movie vampire schlockfest approach worked for me. It’s a completely silly movie, but it’s fast and fun while it lasts. It’s dumb and it knows it.
In the small Maine town of Jersuselum’s Lot, an author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returns home to write a book around the town’s long-abandoned, but highly rumored Marsten House. In town an antique shop owned by Richard Straker is the cover for a large coffin shipped to the Marsten House, holding a master vampire named Barlow who with his henchmen starts kidnapping children in the town and slowly turning everyone into vampires.
This particular movie has been sitting on the shelf for a long time. It was commissioned in the wake of writer Gary Dauberman’s success with the 2017 It adaptation. Dauberman helms this adaptation with a slap-dash attitude, treating it as the direct-to-video low calorie fast food to It’s rich, full meal. The key to unlock this movie’s tone is the involvement of Atomic Monster and producer James Wan. Wan takes the cleaver to King’s book and gives it the Malignant treatment. Strips down the characters, but turns up the style, the pace and the creatively absurd set pieces. The first half of Salem’s Lot, a cliff notes version of the King book that sets up Mears, his attempted romance with his high school sweetheart (Makenzie Leigh) and the maneuvering of Streaker and Barlow. The movie takes a wild turn into cheese when it turns young Mark Petrie (Jordan Peterson Carter) into a full-blown vampire killing badass who runs in and out of the Marsten house and the church only to refill his holy water before going back out for more vampire killing. It crosses the line from Speilbergian kids-on-bikes adventure to some sort of weird author-insert Mary Sue territory. It’s super weird.
But for me the movie completely redeemed itself in its totally loony third act. A wild departure from the book and original movie, this Salem’s Lot invents an entire new grand finale at a drive in movie theater where the entire town hibernates during the day. It’s a ton of fun and plays with vampire rules to make a creative action set pieces. None of this is scary, but it doesn’t seem intended to be. Somewhere between the vampire killing kid and Pullman staking a vampire that snatched him up and falling out of the sky on top of it, any creep factor went out the window. A few other details I loved was the glowing crosses, a more chaotic version of the morgue scene where Mears stitches a cross together with tongue depressers and fate of the town sheriff (William Sadler). In the Salem’s Lot TV movie, the sheriff jumps in his truck and leaves down. In this version, he leaves town and then gets dragged back with a vengeance. It’s a hoot.
If you aren’t taking this Salem’s Lot too seriously and are willing to indulge in the B-movie James Wan silliness of it all, it’s a ton of fun. But King isn’t silly, the TV movie wasn’t silly and given how long this has been sitting on the shelf making fans wonder, that tone will probably go over like a stake through the heart. I was into it. I enjoyed this a whole lot more than other more straightforward Stephen King adaptations. *cough* Pet Semetery.
