13 Days of First-Time Frights: Misery

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #1: Misery


Like I said in my piece on The Spool for Stand by Me, the best Stephen King movie adaptations tend to be the ones adapting smaller-scale material. When these films try to adapt expansive Stephen King tomes like The Dark Tower or lean heavily on convoluted scares rather than actual people like the new Pet Sematary, these films stumble badly. But when Stephen King film adaptations just focus on easily-explainable scenarios and grounded intense human dynamics, you get gold. The latter case informs Misery, which has a basic premise that could easily happen in reality and turns small tasks, like getting to a door, into monumental obstacles. If you ever needed proof how the more restrained King works make for the best movies, Misery is it.

Tammy Review

This movie made more money in a single day than
The Immigrant has made in a month-and-a-half. We have failed
people. We have become monsters.

Let's get this out of the way; Tammy isn't a good movie. In fact, I'll even be bold and say it's a bad one. It's not abysmally, soul-crushingly awful like God's Not Dead or Transformers: Jesus Christ, That Movie Refused To End, but yes, Tammy is bad. And it's poor quality is only emphasized by the ambition that project contains. Ya see, the movie is really more of a drama than anything else, with numerous moments that are supposed to be devastating in terms of emotional impact. And considering Melissa McCarthy was one of three writers on the project, I gotta give her props for attempting to expand the range of movies she appears in.