Format: DVD from Cortland Community Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.
Say what you will about Stephen King, but he’s certainly varied in the sorts of horrors that he concocts. There was a time when I read a great deal of Stephen King. In fact, there were a good many years when one of my sisters, one of my brothers, and I traded King’s books among ourselves. And, naturally, a lot of those books were turned into movies. Needful Things is an odd one both in terms of the story and the movie. This is a film with a surprising cast, for instance. It’s also perhaps King’s most aggressively mean-spirited story.
I don’t mean that as a positive or negative judgment; I mean that as a simple fact. There are plenty of King’s books that involve terrible violence, pain, bloodshed, and even torture. The hobbling scene from Misery is one of the few movie scenes I’ve never been able to watch a second time. And yet Needful Things is spiteful and belligerent. There are plenty of movies that go for the audience’s jugular by killing off a friendly family pet, for instance. In Needful Things, we’re not going to get a family pet killed. We’re going to get a family pet killed and then skinned. And all of this is going to be done by average people, not by monsters.
