The Kingdom Rests on Uneasy Ground...

[thedeadlyhook]

Confession - I'll be a bit behind on posting my reactions to last night's Angel. Reason being, I put off watching it until today to catch Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital. How could I resist - it's the Hollywood adaptation of The Kingdom, the Lars Von Trier-directed Danish TV drama from a few years back, a show that had me and the man riveted to the set for a multi-hour consecutive block (we watched the whole thing twice in a row - and this was subtited, and in Danish). Verdict on the update: lovingly faithful to the original - which was fantastic, shivery stuff to start with and remains so even transplanted from Denmark to somewhere on the Eastern seaboard; King's additions are hallucinogenic fun (an anteater!?), and the cast includes a number of dead ringers for the original Danish players, such as the eerie, laughing dishwashers and loveable ghost-sniffing hypocondriac Mrs. Druse. The whole thing is like this gigantic love cookie for horror fans. And yeah, it's annoying as hell that it's going to be airing on Wednesday nights, but that's why they made VCRs. (The day may come when we'll need TiVo.)

And damn, but Stephen King's developed a very Jay Robinson-sounding voiceover, hasn't he? Brr....

Comments

[nazlan.livejournal.com]

Uh oh. Now that you've recommended it, I'm gonna have to watch the darn thing.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I'm bad that way. : )

[zerographic.livejournal.com]

It's an anteater? The only other person I know who saw it thought it was an aardvark.

Of course, I have no idea what it is, 'cause I was a frickin' idiot and didn't remember to tape it >:(

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

King is sweet that way. He has it actually eat an ant onscreen, just so you'll know. ; )

I'm still trying to figure out if that was a real animal, or about the most convincing effect I've ever seen.

[magista.livejournal.com]

aardvark = anteater, so in any case the other person wasn't lying. *g*

I didn't watch it. Of course, I completely forgot about it, in any case. Now it sounds like I have to catch up. Well, with the WB now not showing Angel for five stinking weeks, I guess I can.

It wasn't well reviewed in our paper, and King quite often doesn't translate well to screen (except for some non-horror works) probably because horror depends so much on the reader's visual imagination. What we think of is way scarier than anything we could actually be shown or describe. That's why he lost me at the end of the book IT, because he told me too much. "Oh, I can imagine that. How boring." vs. The Haunting of Hill House (novel or first movie).

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

horror depends so much on the reader's visual imagination.</i. Right there with you. That's actually why I liked this adaptation so much - it's playing to King's strengths of adding little bits of story color rather than having to establish the universe through description. Since this isn't his work, and the visuals are already there, he only has to maintain tone, which I thought he seemed to be doing a good job of so far. Is it really a five-week hiatus? Well, at least that gives me time for that massive site update I've been plannning...