Nightmares & Dreamscapes - From the Stories of Stephen King (2006)

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

These short stories are all great fun to watch. They differ in tone due to the different writers and directors, but they are all fun.
I highly recommend this product to Stephen King fans. June 21, 2008

Well worth the effort

Nightmares and Dreamscapes is a collection of Stephen King stories from his anthology of the same name. It boasts a great cast featuring William Hurt, the always-excellent William H. Macy and others (including the woeful Henry Thomas of the Walton's!)

It was filmed in my home City of Melbourne in Australia and I was lucky enough to be present at the filming of one scene, and I've wanted to see this ever since.

Well worth the purchase, intelligent and entertaining set, some hit and miss as always but Mr King never fails to deliver, I'm a huge fan of his work and am in the beginning stages of collecting all his books and movies based on his work.

I won't go into any of the stories as I personally hate spoilers (unless they spoil a woeful film!).
March 25, 2008

A couple of good ones

A little boring, but "The Road Virus Heads North" is a great one. I can't remember all of the titles, but one of my other favorites is the one where a guy gets bitten by a snake and it sends his body into toxic shock and his heart stops beating. He is taken into the autopsy room ALIVE and tries everything to get the mortician to realize he is not dead. The ending is a shocker! March 24, 2008

Baby Boomers prefer it rather soft

A miniseries of eight short TV films adapted from Stephen King's rather recent short stories. They are all in the style of the famous Twilight Zone serial but never as dark as the old model. In fact Stephen King in these short stories was trying to use different styles from what he is most known for, horror and terror. So most of the time he did not try to terrify his audience, at most horrify them, but often gross them out, and barely more. So hardly any real violence and extreme fantastic violence. Rather soft estrangement from standard life and the ordinary world of ours. We are thus surprised, disquieted, worried, but never anguished nor frightened. This softening goes along with a theme that is quite common: death and good old time nostalgia. The mind behind these stories has put quite a few years behind his forehead and his probably pot-bellied stomach. The vision is no longer that of a young child, a teenager or a young man who discard and rejects the wisdom coming from older people and for whom older people are danger, the devil, evil, something to get rid of before it dies in their hands. Here we have the vision of an older man, or woman, looking back at the world the way it was when they were young and they compensate the fact it is gone by making it evil. That old time and its characters do not come back into the present to haunt it. Rather the older people of today are transported into that old time of their youth. So it is not Sometimes They Come Back, but Sometimes They Drift Backwards. At time the danger comes from toys, hence children, the next generation, but the danger is seen from the point of view of the older man. The short stories and these short TV films are from an older author who is following the call that comes up from his muscular fiber. He has aged but without really deepening his vision. He has shifted points of view and the present vision is that of an older man probably produced and directed for television in the line of the baby boomers who are starting to get off the labor market and have a lot of time to spend and the desire never to let themselves die into and from inactivity, idleness. So let them have the good old stories about the good old time when they feared nothing but in which they would be absolutely frightened ****less if they had to go there again. Well done but rather too mild to be considered as horror or even fantastic stuff.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
December 29, 2007

Better than most King adaptations!

I'm a huge Stephen King fan, and as such I am usually disappointed in King adaptations. While, like any anthology show, this one has some stories that are better than others; the whole series is pretty good.
Standouts are "Battleground" (with no dialogue, only sound effects) that was so well done that it held you without the dialogue. William H Macy did a nice job with "Umney's Last Case", and "The End of The Whole Mess"
was also well done. "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" showcased Steven Weber with the same type of quality performance he gave to King's "The Shining"; but the celebrity impersonations were a mixed bag.
I can overlook some of the cheesy effects of "Crouch End" and enjoyed the basics of the Lovecraftian story, but I found Eion Bailey's performance so bad that I was glad he got it in the end. "The Road Virus Head's North" was fair, while "Autopsy Room Four" got to be annoying, and "The Fifth Quarter" was pretty unengaging. So it was definately a mixed bag here. But the production values were good, the stories excellent, and there were some quality episodes; so I rate this better than a lot of King adaptations and would recommend. October 16, 2007

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