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.

Predator 2 Is A Downgrade From Its Predecessor With Brief Bursts Of Delightful Goofiness

Each of the three Predator movies has been firmly set in the universe of the original Predator feature from 1986, but they've also all tried to go in their own different direction with brand new aesthetics and none of them retain characters from prior movies. That makes Predator an odd outlier in the world of Hollywood franchises that typically either constantly reboot things or cling onto mythology like there's no tomorrow. The film that established this as the go-to pattern for Predator sequels was 1990's Predator 2, which traded in Arnold Schwarzenegger for Danny Glover and moved the action from a remote jungle to the city of Los Angeles in the then-future year of 1997.