Desperation
Desperation is another in a long line of adaptations from the novels of Stephen King. It starts brightly enough with a psychotic sheriff rounding up an eclectic group of characters and then goes rapidly downhill as they face off against some kind of vague ancient evil spirit. They managed to pull together a decent cast for this so it is a real shame that the awful finish didn’t live up to the early promise.
We open with a couple travelling down a remote highway in backwoods America. Surrounded by scrub and desert they pass a road sign which rather ominously has a cat nailed to it. A short way on they get pulled over by Collie Entragian (Ron Perlman), the local sheriff of the nearest town which happens to be named Desperation. He seems friendly enough at first but then he finds a bag of grass in their boot and arrests them. On the drive back to the station it becomes apparent that he is seriously disturbed and the couple are in for a horrible time of it.
Entragian gets increasingly irate and turns violent. He seems to be possessed and we learn that he has been on a bit of a random murder spree. For reasons which are unclear he has kept a group of people alive as prisoners in the cells at his office and they begin to work together to escape. It is the usual ragtag band of characters you might expect to find thrown together in a King novel. Yes of course there is a writer, John Edward Marinville (Tom Skerritt), his assistant Steve (Steven Weber), a screaming hitchhiker (Kelly Overton), the female half of the couple Mary (Annabel Gish), a timid man (Matt Frewer) and his revolting god obsessed son David (Shane Haboucha) and there is also a local old man (Charles Durning) who serves the plot purpose of explaining what is going on to the rest of them before getting conveniently murdered.
King himself penned the screenplay for this and it was directed by long time collaborator Mick Garris. The direction is completely without tension, there are no scares here and the performances he gets from the cast are wooden and bored with the notable exception of Ron Perlman who is excellent. In fact the early part of the film starring Perlman as the creepy cop who behaves erratically is really engaging. He is seriously unnerving, casually injecting under the breath phrases like “I’m going to kill you” into the conversation. If only the film hadn’t strayed into supernatural territory with a horribly clichéd back story about the Chinese mine workers being taken advantage of and an ancient evil called Tak who sounds an awful lot like the ancient evil clown Pennywise from It.
Ultimately this is tired and familiar stuff and the made for television sheen comes through. King seems to be re-treading familiar territory and as it wore on the film sank further and further into cliché. There was also a terribly heavy handed Christian theme put forward by the young boy David. There were too many characters, it dragged on far too long at over 2 hours and the ending was a horrible mess devoid of logic. I would advise you avoid this no matter how desperate you are.
