I remember watching this on tv when I was a kid. I think it was like a 3 parts mini-series or something. Watched each part only once in my life but even to this date I still sometimes have dreams about this movie.
I read the book long before the adaptation and I'm glad I did. The langoliers in my head were fucking terrifying. It's the sort of thing that no one should really try to depict in live action because it can only look silly. They need to be imagined, not seen. Like Lovecrafitan horrors
Everything nowadays has to be serious, le dark visually, and have some woke element to it. Langoliers is pure kino and Balkie's performance was so insane that it was fun.
difference between this and the modern a24 slowburnerinos is that this movie has actual plot, characters, humor, problems and resolutions, things that are called writing, and on top of that has the slowly approaching horror, which is why it feels like a real movie (even when its just a really low budget made for tv mini-series). modern "atmospheric horror" movies are taking one aspect of these other horror movies and focusing only on it, to the point that its like the movie equivalent of a shitty ambient album. same with that liminal spaces shit, its scary when in a 2 hour movie there is one scene where you briefly see something in a hallway, but its retarded when you make the entire 2 hours only about that. too much of one thing that should be used in concert with other elements.
>what do the langoliers even do
Hmm... That's a good question... What do the flying monster mouths filled with razor teeth do... Hmm... I'll have to ponder this...
>What do the flying monster mouths filled with razor teeth do
In my experience they marry you, but it's okay, they give great headache! No respect, I tell ya!
Eventually Kings tropes become really obvious that they retroactively drag down his work. Like The Shining survives because of based Kubrick. But after that most of his shit boils down to
>Black magic >Disabled magic >Crazy asshole corporate guy >Religion bad >What if domestic animal or car was crazy? >I have an obvious self-insert. >Gonna write myself into my own story jesus fucking christ.
Misery was still good despite the self insert. He’s like Goosebumps but for teenagers instead of ten year olds.
His truly good stuff were his short stories; apt pupil, stand by me, and shawshank. I think they were all in his Four Seasons anthology. He should honestly drop fantasy novels and absolutely stop trying to be funny holy fuck.
>Religion bad
this really isnt true at all. Salems Lot and Desperation for example show religion, Christianity in particular in a very positive light. The Stand is also about absolute good vs evil. If anything King is just against mindless group think and fanaticism.
His writing does start to get very obviously formulaic if you read a lot of his books though, not gonna disagree with that.
i said he's against it, that doesn't mean he is immune from falling into it himself. in his mind he is still an old school anti-establishment guy going against the man, he has no clue what the world is actually like now
True he stopped existing in the real world in the 1970's and has lived in a mansion in the whitest part of the whitest state. His only window to the world is cable news and that shit will scramble your brain.
King's mystique (if there was any) got totally removed with all of his deranged Orange Man bad tweets. Turns out he's just some crazy boomer waving his fist at cable news in impotent rage about a world he no longer understands.
The Dark Tower books really dropped off after The Little Sisters which was really bloated but still worthwhile. The moment I realized I was reading garbage was either when he literally wrote himself into the series, or this big bad spider anti-christ just kind of died on his own journey.
>The moment I realized I was reading garbage was
I was a young teen while reading so it took me longer. specially because I loved King and had read so much to get to that point, but I did start to think something was off by the time the kid who could draw things into reality showed up at the 11th hour and out of left field, to move the story along.
>The moment I realized I was reading garbage was
I was a young teen while reading so it took me longer. specially because I loved King and had read so much to get to that point, but I did start to think something was off by the time the kid who could draw things into reality showed up at the 11th hour and out of left field, to move the story along.
sad but true. Stopped reading him entirely after the 7th dark tower novel. Mom still reads his stuff and tries to get me to give him a shot again, like his next boiler plate is some tour de force and he is back to his former glory. I know better and have moved on.
Yeeeeaah… i kinda see what you mean by that when he tried to integrate all these bullshit ass-pulls into his stuff. Really I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t trudged along with The Dark Tower series since in The Wolves of Callaha there was a black wheelchair-bound woman in an interracial relationship who could decapitate monsters by throwing sharp dinner plates at them. Another red flag btw I didn’t pick up on until too late.
Yeeeeaah… i kinda see what you mean by that when he tried to integrate all these bullshit ass-pulls into his stuff. Really I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t trudged along with The Dark Tower series since in The Wolves of Callaha there was a black wheelchair-bound woman in an interracial relationship who could decapitate monsters by throwing sharp dinner plates at them. Another red flag btw I didn’t pick up on until too late.
its not goyslop because king sincerely wants to write and there is still some creative impetus behind his work. goyslop is when something is churned out by conglomerates/committees solely to be consumed as quickly as possible. its just that kings best work is decades behind him, but because his books sell so well the publishers allow him to put out absolutely any scraps that he is able to put together. i also think he suffered brain damage from getting hit by that van because there is a significant drop in his quality after that accident.
Isn't that just related to him getting sober and drug-free somewhere in connection with the accident?
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
i thought that happened well before the accident. anyway its probably all related, he became a multi-multi-millionaire with multiple kids and a bunch of houses, its impossible for him to recapture that kind of desperate energy his early works had.
The Little Sisters of Eluria is only 120 pages long. https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tower-Gunslinger-Little-Sisters/dp/0785149317
Although Barnes & Noble lists it as 128 pages. Did you mean to be ironic or do you really not know what a novella is?
It was originally published with others in an anthology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_(anthology) It's the one book I haven't read in the Dark Tower series and after book 7 being a steaming pile of shit I have no desire to revisit the series through The Little Sisters. I can agree with you it turned to garbage and I'd argue it was after Wizard and Glass.
No no I’m working from memory about a work I read in college. What was the one where it was about Rolands backstory and it was as thick as fuck? It was definitely more than 138 pages, closer to 850.
there was wizard in glass. that was the one where i started to get worried too, especially since it came after the wasteland which was so good. gave up after the next one, wolves of the calla
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
It was definitely that one since I remember it being the longest book and a great chunk of it was his experiences before the the first book being intertwined with the Wizard of Oz current timeline. Like I said it was a while ago but i just remember the longest one being the last I actually liked.
Fair enough. I had to ask and I'll concede I didn't know about The Little Sisters of Eluria until you mentioned it. And Marvel even made a sequel in 2011 as I just discovered which now makes me hate the series even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Gunslinger_-_The_Little_Sisters_of_Eluria
And you're thinking of book 7 The Dark Tower which is 848 pages. I remember being so excited when it came out in 2004 and bought the hardcover in store. That's when King introduced himself as a character into the series when Roland and Eddie travel to meet him at his home in Maine. FYI Wizard and Glass is 787 pages and Wolves of Calla is 714 pages. He became too self indulgent and couldn't help himself.
I also just learned of this when replying to you. The arrogant sombitch even had the audacity to write this in 2012 and stick it chronologically between the two 700 pagers I just mentioned. Another one I'll skip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Wind_Through_the_Keyhole
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>That's when King introduced himself as a character into the series when Roland and Eddie travel to meet him at his home in Maine.
99% certain this happens before the final book, The Dark Tower. because I remember the part where Stephen King appears as a character and I have never read the final book. Pretty sure it happened in Song of Susana.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
We're both wrong, I just looked it up. It's in The Wolves of Calla. That's how much I've forgotten about the books because I checked out after Wizard and Glass even though I made myself finish the series. It was most egregious in The Dark Tower book 7 though when Eddie and Roland visit King at his home and that's why I thought that.
I fucking hate when a writer writes in dialect that they don't actually speak so I have to sound out shit like 'sho nuff' to figure out what they're saying instead of just reading it.
Liberals are the biggest racists on the planet they think morons are inferior and have to be a protected species. Liberals truly think they are saviors.
It's funny how many people remember this after all these years; in spite of the terrible effects it really was a great tv movie. Cousin Balkie was fantastic.
Anytime King treads in metaphysics its kinda unsettling. The ultimate explanation and the Stockwell insert character make this whole thing much more memorable than it would have otherwise been.
oh and Pinchot and Morse were harsh
honorable mention to "we have Pierce Brosnan at home!"
the rage this movie caused me as a kid.
scared the shit out of me, but didn't know the name of the movie and nobody i asked about it believed it was a real movie.
I would assume it would be an adaptation of the books but since it is astronomically different, I just have no idea honestly. It’s just a shit show run amok that he started in his own series and clearly just let Hollywood cash in since he’s their bitch I guess.
Let's take a 4,250 tome across 7 books and condense it into a shitty 95 minute film. Sounds about right for Hollywood. Fans of the series were justified in being pissed Idris Elba was cast and liberals freaked out calling them all racist because they dared to speak the truth. Why can't he be black? He's only a fictional character! Well, he was literally written to be white and King referenced it several times in the series. Once when Jake saw a poster outside a movie theater for a Clint Eastwood double feature in The Wastelands and he thought to himself how similar they looked. And the second I believe is in The Dark Tower (book 7) when King and Roland meet that Eddie (could be wrong) mentions that they could be brothers. And then of course there's the King Arthur analogy with Arthur Eld. It's all so tiresome isn't it?
> Let's take a 4,250 tome across 7 books and condense it into a shitty 95 minute film. Sounds about right for Hollywood.
I’m still watching it, and it is legitimately insane. The only consistency the movie has with the books is a character named Roland, and one named Randall.
This is 100% a case of Hollywood having a pre-written script and just subbing in certain elements from the books and slapping on a known title. And Stephen King must have said >Lol yeah fine, I still get a check because you use the title right?
Saw this movie as a kid, it was very effective until the reveal of the "monsters", where it kind of deflated. The build-up to that point was fantastic though
Idk about you but if I saw that coming towards me I'd be scared af even though it looks like Pacman from hell it's something about the primitive graphics that makes early cgi look scary, see The Lawnmower Man as well.
When I first saw The Langoliers as a kid (probably somewhere around age ten), the titular monsters scared the absolute shit out of me. Not because they're all that scary looking as they are in the film, but because years before seeing the movie I'd previously had a nightmare with monsters that looked almost exactly like them. So once the Langoliers appeared on-screen in the movie, I was suddenly faced with my old nightmare come to 'life' and it was fucking horrifying.
This movie captures the quality of being in a dream far more than most movies that are famous for their dream sequences. Real dreams arent filled with a bunch of surreal imagery and fantastical stuff with obvious symbolism, theyre usually more like youre in some location that is vaguely or pretty familiar and you have knowledge or awareness of something with little context, like you know that you have to go somewhere or do something or in the case of this movie that something is coming. I think thats why its so effective despite its shortcomings in a lot of other areas, and the low budget made for TV quality probably helped.
Sure
I remember watching this on tv when I was a kid. I think it was like a 3 parts mini-series or something. Watched each part only once in my life but even to this date I still sometimes have dreams about this movie.
Same here, i watched it when i was like 5 and never forgot it. The Stand is also memorable but not in the same way.
M O O N that spells OP IS A gay
Anon, you’re scaring the little girl
Cibola
My life for you!
>Seasons don't fear the reaper
>Nor do the wind, the sun, or the rains
that was so fucking drawn out, that was actually painful to watch
damn. I don't remember this Kung Pow! shit
stream that movie, if you're so great!
was it bad on purpose?
I read the book long before the adaptation and I'm glad I did. The langoliers in my head were fucking terrifying. It's the sort of thing that no one should really try to depict in live action because it can only look silly. They need to be imagined, not seen. Like Lovecrafitan horrors
>like lovecraftian horror
King wishes he was Lovecraft. When he wasn’t ripping him off he was just stealing from films he watched growing up.
>remember Rodan from Toho
Fuck that hack.
That would be Nosferatu
OH RANGORIER
Everything nowadays has to be serious, le dark visually, and have some woke element to it. Langoliers is pure kino and Balkie's performance was so insane that it was fun.
I completely agree with you.
difference between this and the modern a24 slowburnerinos is that this movie has actual plot, characters, humor, problems and resolutions, things that are called writing, and on top of that has the slowly approaching horror, which is why it feels like a real movie (even when its just a really low budget made for tv mini-series). modern "atmospheric horror" movies are taking one aspect of these other horror movies and focusing only on it, to the point that its like the movie equivalent of a shitty ambient album. same with that liminal spaces shit, its scary when in a 2 hour movie there is one scene where you briefly see something in a hallway, but its retarded when you make the entire 2 hours only about that. too much of one thing that should be used in concert with other elements.
well said
horrible movie
SHEEEEEESH
bruh tho imagine if this shit took place in the back rooms tho. shit would be hella fire fr fr
seething boomers
>3 hour tv movie
no thanks
they sound like real jerks
Honestly the setting of the film kind of is the back rooms
yeah almost like the backrooms isnt an original idea at all or something
how tf is this supposed to be scary
how do you think it's not scary?
looks silly
what do the langoliers even do
It's worth a watch. It's spoilers to talk about the creatures
they go inside Italian restaurants and pretend to be meatballs. when they're eaten, they their victim diarrhea
>what do the langoliers even do
Hmm... That's a good question... What do the flying monster mouths filled with razor teeth do... Hmm... I'll have to ponder this...
>What do the flying monster mouths filled with razor teeth do
In my experience they marry you, but it's okay, they give great headache! No respect, I tell ya!
Eventually Kings tropes become really obvious that they retroactively drag down his work. Like The Shining survives because of based Kubrick. But after that most of his shit boils down to
>Black magic
>Disabled magic
>Crazy asshole corporate guy
>Religion bad
>What if domestic animal or car was crazy?
>I have an obvious self-insert.
>Gonna write myself into my own story jesus fucking christ.
Misery was still good despite the self insert. He’s like Goosebumps but for teenagers instead of ten year olds.
His truly good stuff were his short stories; apt pupil, stand by me, and shawshank. I think they were all in his Four Seasons anthology. He should honestly drop fantasy novels and absolutely stop trying to be funny holy fuck.
His self insert is usually the bully who torments the protagonists.
>Religion bad
this really isnt true at all. Salems Lot and Desperation for example show religion, Christianity in particular in a very positive light. The Stand is also about absolute good vs evil. If anything King is just against mindless group think and fanaticism.
His writing does start to get very obviously formulaic if you read a lot of his books though, not gonna disagree with that.
>King is just against mindless group think and fanaticism
>endless AYO LITTLE DONNIE tweets
pick one
i said he's against it, that doesn't mean he is immune from falling into it himself. in his mind he is still an old school anti-establishment guy going against the man, he has no clue what the world is actually like now
True he stopped existing in the real world in the 1970's and has lived in a mansion in the whitest part of the whitest state. His only window to the world is cable news and that shit will scramble your brain.
Desperation was written by Richard Bachman you fool.
King's mystique (if there was any) got totally removed with all of his deranged Orange Man bad tweets. Turns out he's just some crazy boomer waving his fist at cable news in impotent rage about a world he no longer understands.
The Stand and The Dark Tower and genuinely amazing works that everyone should read. I can't believe how awful the adaptation with Idris Alba was.
The Dark Tower books really dropped off after The Little Sisters which was really bloated but still worthwhile. The moment I realized I was reading garbage was either when he literally wrote himself into the series, or this big bad spider anti-christ just kind of died on his own journey.
>The moment I realized I was reading garbage was
I was a young teen while reading so it took me longer. specially because I loved King and had read so much to get to that point, but I did start to think something was off by the time the kid who could draw things into reality showed up at the 11th hour and out of left field, to move the story along.
Steven King is the goyslop of literature.
sad but true. Stopped reading him entirely after the 7th dark tower novel. Mom still reads his stuff and tries to get me to give him a shot again, like his next boiler plate is some tour de force and he is back to his former glory. I know better and have moved on.
Yeeeeaah… i kinda see what you mean by that when he tried to integrate all these bullshit ass-pulls into his stuff. Really I’m surprised Hollywood hasn’t trudged along with The Dark Tower series since in The Wolves of Callaha there was a black wheelchair-bound woman in an interracial relationship who could decapitate monsters by throwing sharp dinner plates at them. Another red flag btw I didn’t pick up on until too late.
its not goyslop because king sincerely wants to write and there is still some creative impetus behind his work. goyslop is when something is churned out by conglomerates/committees solely to be consumed as quickly as possible. its just that kings best work is decades behind him, but because his books sell so well the publishers allow him to put out absolutely any scraps that he is able to put together. i also think he suffered brain damage from getting hit by that van because there is a significant drop in his quality after that accident.
Isn't that just related to him getting sober and drug-free somewhere in connection with the accident?
i thought that happened well before the accident. anyway its probably all related, he became a multi-multi-millionaire with multiple kids and a bunch of houses, its impossible for him to recapture that kind of desperate energy his early works had.
The Little Sisters of Eluria is only 120 pages long. https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Tower-Gunslinger-Little-Sisters/dp/0785149317
Although Barnes & Noble lists it as 128 pages. Did you mean to be ironic or do you really not know what a novella is?
It was originally published with others in an anthology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_(anthology) It's the one book I haven't read in the Dark Tower series and after book 7 being a steaming pile of shit I have no desire to revisit the series through The Little Sisters. I can agree with you it turned to garbage and I'd argue it was after Wizard and Glass.
No no I’m working from memory about a work I read in college. What was the one where it was about Rolands backstory and it was as thick as fuck? It was definitely more than 138 pages, closer to 850.
there was wizard in glass. that was the one where i started to get worried too, especially since it came after the wasteland which was so good. gave up after the next one, wolves of the calla
It was definitely that one since I remember it being the longest book and a great chunk of it was his experiences before the the first book being intertwined with the Wizard of Oz current timeline. Like I said it was a while ago but i just remember the longest one being the last I actually liked.
Fair enough. I had to ask and I'll concede I didn't know about The Little Sisters of Eluria until you mentioned it. And Marvel even made a sequel in 2011 as I just discovered which now makes me hate the series even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Gunslinger_-_The_Little_Sisters_of_Eluria
And you're thinking of book 7 The Dark Tower which is 848 pages. I remember being so excited when it came out in 2004 and bought the hardcover in store. That's when King introduced himself as a character into the series when Roland and Eddie travel to meet him at his home in Maine. FYI Wizard and Glass is 787 pages and Wolves of Calla is 714 pages. He became too self indulgent and couldn't help himself.
I also just learned of this when replying to you. The arrogant sombitch even had the audacity to write this in 2012 and stick it chronologically between the two 700 pagers I just mentioned. Another one I'll skip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Wind_Through_the_Keyhole
>That's when King introduced himself as a character into the series when Roland and Eddie travel to meet him at his home in Maine.
99% certain this happens before the final book, The Dark Tower. because I remember the part where Stephen King appears as a character and I have never read the final book. Pretty sure it happened in Song of Susana.
We're both wrong, I just looked it up. It's in The Wolves of Calla. That's how much I've forgotten about the books because I checked out after Wizard and Glass even though I made myself finish the series. It was most egregious in The Dark Tower book 7 though when Eddie and Roland visit King at his home and that's why I thought that.
The best thing is when he tries to write a black character. They’re all moronish.
The chick with no legs from the gunfighter series was the best example of this, sho nuff.
kek I forgot he wrote her to talk like fucking buckwheat from little rascals
bravo, best writer of the century
I fucking hate when a writer writes in dialect that they don't actually speak so I have to sound out shit like 'sho nuff' to figure out what they're saying instead of just reading it.
It’s every black character. They’re all dumb morons. The funny things is he’s ultra liberal.
Yes and like most ultra liberals he's incredibly racist but in a hamfisted, patronizing way.
Liberals are the biggest racists on the planet they think morons are inferior and have to be a protected species. Liberals truly think they are saviors.
Why can't we just be honest about this? Alt Right and Leftist coalition against moronish behavior. Why can't that be a political party?
It's funny how many people remember this after all these years; in spite of the terrible effects it really was a great tv movie. Cousin Balkie was fantastic.
God damn i could eat all of those
thats a Hispanicy meatball.
Did Dean Stockwell survive?
He did.
Anytime King treads in metaphysics its kinda unsettling. The ultimate explanation and the Stockwell insert character make this whole thing much more memorable than it would have otherwise been.
oh and Pinchot and Morse were harsh
honorable mention to "we have Pierce Brosnan at home!"
Pinchot was probably tired of only being known for cousin balkie and had a chip on his shoulder to deliver a performance.
He was also known as the fag from Beverly Hills Cop movies.
Serge wasn't gay.
No?
the rage this movie caused me as a kid.
scared the shit out of me, but didn't know the name of the movie and nobody i asked about it believed it was a real movie.
Threw on The Dark Tower movie just for shits… and hooooooly fuck has no book/ip ever been butchered as much. Jesus fucking Christ.
The man in black walks into a science portal lab that explains how he walks through worlds.
Was the dark tower movie an adaptation or a sequel to the books? I thought I read it was a sequel. Never saw the movie, never finished the books.
I would assume it would be an adaptation of the books but since it is astronomically different, I just have no idea honestly. It’s just a shit show run amok that he started in his own series and clearly just let Hollywood cash in since he’s their bitch I guess.
Let's take a 4,250 tome across 7 books and condense it into a shitty 95 minute film. Sounds about right for Hollywood. Fans of the series were justified in being pissed Idris Elba was cast and liberals freaked out calling them all racist because they dared to speak the truth. Why can't he be black? He's only a fictional character! Well, he was literally written to be white and King referenced it several times in the series. Once when Jake saw a poster outside a movie theater for a Clint Eastwood double feature in The Wastelands and he thought to himself how similar they looked. And the second I believe is in The Dark Tower (book 7) when King and Roland meet that Eddie (could be wrong) mentions that they could be brothers. And then of course there's the King Arthur analogy with Arthur Eld. It's all so tiresome isn't it?
> Let's take a 4,250 tome across 7 books and condense it into a shitty 95 minute film. Sounds about right for Hollywood.
I’m still watching it, and it is legitimately insane. The only consistency the movie has with the books is a character named Roland, and one named Randall.
This is 100% a case of Hollywood having a pre-written script and just subbing in certain elements from the books and slapping on a known title. And Stephen King must have said
>Lol yeah fine, I still get a check because you use the title right?
I've never been more angry leaving a movie than the dark tower. They tried to compress 1000+ pages of book into 75 minutes and it was all shit
Here's your langolier, bro
Sort of but not exactly. Funny enough you can tell that Araki read quite a bit of Stephen King around the time of Part IV.
it's one of my favorites
I don't care if the CGI looks like shit or the dialogue is garbage, the whole concept is amazingly oppressive and terrifying
Saw this movie as a kid, it was very effective until the reveal of the "monsters", where it kind of deflated. The build-up to that point was fantastic though
Idk about you but if I saw that coming towards me I'd be scared af even though it looks like Pacman from hell it's something about the primitive graphics that makes early cgi look scary, see The Lawnmower Man as well.
>"I'm a musician."
>"I happen to be a mystery writer!"
>"I'm a stoic pilot grieving over tragic news."
>"Yeah, I'm basically the biggest whore in multiple counties."
When I first saw The Langoliers as a kid (probably somewhere around age ten), the titular monsters scared the absolute shit out of me. Not because they're all that scary looking as they are in the film, but because years before seeing the movie I'd previously had a nightmare with monsters that looked almost exactly like them. So once the Langoliers appeared on-screen in the movie, I was suddenly faced with my old nightmare come to 'life' and it was fucking horrifying.
that's kind of funny
it fits also because that paper ripping dude was afraid of those things too without actually ever seeing them (until his demise)
This movie captures the quality of being in a dream far more than most movies that are famous for their dream sequences. Real dreams arent filled with a bunch of surreal imagery and fantastical stuff with obvious symbolism, theyre usually more like youre in some location that is vaguely or pretty familiar and you have knowledge or awareness of something with little context, like you know that you have to go somewhere or do something or in the case of this movie that something is coming. I think thats why its so effective despite its shortcomings in a lot of other areas, and the low budget made for TV quality probably helped.
tbh it's one of the best adaptations of SK. I would put it up there with The Shining and Carrie.
especially the dreams set somewhere normally full of busy people but suddenly empty and quiet. Schools, hospitals, airports.
I would marry Kate Maberly. She's all grown up now.
Whoa, is that the blind girl? She's purdy.
wasnt there some thing with the black guy fondling the blind girl or something in it
maybe they didn't notice it while filming