Salem’s Lot
I was excited about “Salem’s Lot.” Besides being a fan of Stephen King who thinks 1975’s adaptation was one of the horror master’s best, I don’t appreciate how Max/WB keeps treating some of its projects like ‘Batgirl’ and ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ with great disdain. This one almost fell under the same curses though it was initially meant to come out in cinemas during Fall 2022 before being removed from the schedule in yet another wave of pandemic-related shutdowns. But after that, all it did was sit in limbo, with many concerned it could be yet another casualty in the tax write off strategy employed by its own company. Finally, it got that announcement when Stephen King himself tweeted a couple of days ago that he has watched it and liked it, just a moment before WB said it would arrive on Max just in time for Halloween. Wouldn’t it be cool if all this hubbub concealed a new slasher hit, a movie that really didn’t deserve to be sailed at the back of the ship? I wish I could say this was true.
The issue here isn’t that complicated. There is a reason why this particular tale has been adapted for the screen in the form of a mini series twice. It simply cannot be done within the confines of a feature film. “Salem’s Lot” 2024, despite its nearly two hour runtime, manages to come off as ridiculously hurried, with particular scenes starting halfway into their action and forgettable visual transitions that make the audience feel a deliberate time lapse to help the story along. It is not an understatement to say that in the movie “Salem’s Lot”, there are scene transitions where one gets the impression that he has simply pressed the “forward” key on the remote control and cuts a few scenes in the middle. Not at all. It is simply believed to have been removed from a film that had just got too many people tinkering with the end product. It is possible to imagine the places of cuts in scenes that some producer wanted to make shorter. This film has been slaughtered so badly that it as cut often that it has lost a huge amount of blood.
Funny thing is, Gary Dauberman knows all too well that King’s any work is really suited to much more than the space of a feature, having written the two parts of Andy Muschietti’s ‘It’. He writes and directs this tale of a writer named Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) who goes back to his roots at Jerusalem’s Lot with an aim of sifting through his own deposition of trauma. This novella of King’s is a typical derivation of the many unpleasant homes in fiction when the protagonist returns to the roots in ‘you can’t go home again’ adage, only in this case, roots are in the town of Vampires.
Well, not initially. Mears learns from his friend that two figures named Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk) and Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward) have acquired the legendary mountain house by ‘Salem’s Lot which is believed to be haunted. And in due time it becomes known that Barlow is a monster and Straker’s Renfield, a vampire whose job is to get food and goods for Barlow. When Straker abducts one little boy and brings him to Barlow, it stirs the entire town, but Dauberman does not allow to drag out anything for so long. Minutes later, Mears, his girlfriend Susan (Makenzie Leigh), Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), a teacher, Matthew (Bill Camp) and a preacher Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) go in search of the vampires.
Strong performances are turned in by members of the ensemble cast although some manage to stick out. Camp is one actor who never disappoints and Hickey perfectly conveys a physically drained and yet devoted character. Pullman is effective at first but is thrown away by a screenplay that is crammed with so many characters and ideas that they do not have the time to work on developing Ben, and poor Susan gets an even worse deal. Once again, Dauberman runs to the next highlight as if time is of the essence and ignores the fact that when it comes to projects of this kind, atmosphere is the most essential quality. To make matters worse, there are places where that version of this ‘production’ emerges through the bad editing of this one, like a brilliant scene where fulfilling his pupils needs, Camps teacher stumbles upon one of his vampire minions, Mike (Spencer Treat Clark), at a bar and starts to go see that something is quite out of place. It is a very disturbing scene but in a movie that fails to unsettle you in the right ways. There is no time for that.
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