Needful Things

Rating:
Summary: Hmmm, lets see, could it perhaps be....SATAN?
Review: This is actually not that bad of a film, but if you've read the story I can see how one could be biased against it. Von Sydow plays the part of the shopkeeper/soulkeeper with barely contained glee. But notice, that is how the devil is said to work, through the people around ya. Did not it occur to the townsfolk that it is unusual for anyone to have vintage liquor in a truckstop, wroughtgut town? They never saw him coming...

Rating:
Summary: Awsome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: This is one of my favorite Stephen Kings movies ever. Very Good but very vilent.

Rating:
Summary: A nice adaption of a great book!
Review: This movie, based on the novel by Stephen King, has such a great premise. Its underlying tones focus on the greed and self-love we all have in ourselves, and how the devil can prey on our every weekness, with something as simple as a baseball card. It fails however, in chopping up the novel, and deleting many scenes that could have made this a very important movie. If you can, watch the 3 hour directors cut that aired on TBS, which has more charcters (including Cora Rusk) and in which the sellings of leland gaunt are spanned throughout the whole movie, instead of just in the first half. Great performances all around (JT walsh a bit over the top), while Amanda Plummer shines and chills as the victim Nettie Cobb, who participates in one of the best cat-fights I have ever seen!

Rating:
Summary: Great movie, but....
Review: This was absolutely a wonderful "twist" movie. It's not my most favorite movie, but by the time you finish watching it, you think...wow, that was great. The ending needed more development, though. What's so great about a house exploding? I would try to find an uncut version of the film because it's THAT much better than the cut version, which is what you'll find here on Amazon. The uncut version would get 4 stars...this one only gets 3.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Movie, Horrible Transfer
Review: To start off, I am not a Steven King fan. I very rarely like any of his movies, and I to date have not read any of his books. But this movie really knocked my socks off. Needfull Things is one of those guilty pleasures in life, a strictly fun movie. I thoroughly recoment this to anyone just looking for a fun movie. But, alas, it is pan-and-scan. If you can look past this horrible mistake, especially for DVD, or just don't care, give it a spin. You won't regret it.

Rating:
Summary: It sucked!
Review: To those you who have read my other Stephen King movie reviews, I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record, but I don't care. Even though I've said it before, I'm going to say it again; the book was better, WAY BETTER.

Max Von Sydow barely managed to save this mess from being a complete disaster. It's an extremely watered down retelling of a great story about a man/demon named "Leland Gaunt" (Sydow) who opens up a new store in the town of Castle Rock, Maine. He calls the store "Needful Things" and In it he sells you things that grant you your wildest dreams, but of course there is a shocking and terrible price to be paid for such items.

The script is so haphazardly thrown together, tamed down, and rushed that it will probably seem incomplete even to those people who haven't read the book. The movie doesn't go into nearly enough detail in regard to the extent to which Gaunt goes to pit the towns citizens against each other. Several characters are combined or just plain left out. Biographical facts about certain people are changed, or omitted. Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Ed Harris), for example is a widower in the book. In the movie, however, it is suggested that he is just a bachelor. His lover, Polly Chalmers's (Bonnie Bedelia) true reasons for leaving, and then moving back to Castle Rock aren't even hinted at. The book actually takes time to build up to it's explosive climax. The events in the novel happen over the course of a month, whereas everything in the film takes place in less then a week. Give me a break, will ya?

Overall this was a big disappointment for me. The only real redeeming quality of the whole miserable mess was Max Von Sydow. He was perfectly cast as the demonic store proprietor. I think this would have made a better HBO miniseries to tell you the truth. There's only so much from a 700+ page book that you can squeeze into an hour and 45 minutes. Not that they couldn't have simply made the film longer or anything. I guess making people sit in the movie theater for more than two hours would be tantamount to asking people to get off their lazy asses and pay attention to something for a change. We just can't have THAT. OH, NO!

Rating:
Summary: "Needful Things" provides intrigue, depth
Review: Welcome to Castle Rock, Maine, home of many horror fiction tales authored by Stephen King. In this movie, a new proprieter named Mr. Leland Gaunt (played cleverly by Max Von Sydow)has set up shop on Main Street, and he seems to have something for everyone. But Mr. Gaunt is more taken with pranking than with money. The plot is slowly and craftily thickened through character depth and visual revelations. Ed Harris does a decent, if not perhaps a bit too gritty, job as Sherriff Alan Pangborn, and JT Walsh is in his element as sleazy Danforth Keeton. Perhaps the best performance though, has to go to Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction) as a nervous maid named Nettie Cobb. Dramatic scenes touched with a growing knowledge that perhaps Mr. Gaunt is more evil than depicted makes "Needful Things" a joy to watch. I wonder what they would have had for me.