The Dark Half on steroids. I liked it, but that opening was too over the top and cheesy (which I'm sure was intentional, but still).
Although it shares some DNA with Wan's graphic novel "Malignant Man", it's not truly related.
https://www.distractify.com/p/what-is-malignant-based-on
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
Haven't seen that one, but wanted to comment on your username. You an ESO fan?
No, but I assume you mean Elder Scrolls Online? A quick Google came up with this:
https://eso-sets.com/set/warrior-poet
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Warrior-Poet
These days I only have time for quick-hit games, so stick mainly to FPSs. But no, I've been using that handle since before online gaming was in it's infancy. I first used it as a gamer tag back with the original Duke Nuke'em, but used it for non-online purposes for some short videos I made back in the 80's in high school. "Warrior Poet" in reverse is a Gaelic translation of my first and last name.
The Dark Half might be worth checking out. It's a fairly descent 90s flick, based on Stephen King's story.
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
Interesting. Yeah, I did mean Elder Scrolls online, although the Warrior-poet title has been around since ES IV Morrowind days at least. It's a title given to one of the 3 gods of the Tribunal, Vivek.
If you play FPSs, hope you've played Doom Eternal. Probably the most fun I've had with an FPS to date, although there are several titles that are also great.
I'll check out Dark Half, TY.
I'm disappointed that I've never see the film you mentioned. I'll have to check it out. Any thoughts on the book?
shareThe best part of the Dark Half movie is the opening. Although its decent enough, with some interesting moments played by Timothy Hutton, it also felt a little lackluster, especially after the opening bit. I find some film, and especially TV, adaptations of King stories after those in the 70's and early 80's (e.g. Carrie, Cujo, the Shining, etc.) a bit lacking, and sometimes even goofy, oftentimes because they stick more closely to the book, which doesn't always translate as well, and in part because the imagination tends to conjure visuals more ethereal and emotional than what cinema is capable of, although I do still enjoy most of them to varying degrees, and there's a few movies that for me rise above the source material, which itself is good (e.g. The Shining, The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption, etc.)
One of the downsides of some of King's novels is extraneous text that should be cut (to me, every now and then they get a bit too indulgent, although not nearly as badly as Robert Jordon). Descriptions and inner thoughts are beneficial, but sometimes King goes overboard (for my personal taste). In the case of The Dark Half, the book is pretty tightly written, however (compared to many of his others), and somewhat plays out in the mind like a movie. King wrote The Dark Half shortly after it was revealed that he was behind the Bachman books, a situation that inspired this story of a parasitic alter ego twin brother who manifests into reality (sound familiar?)
At any rate, I like the book a bit better than the movie, but I do think the film is worth checking out (even if just for the opening segment, which seems to have inspired elements of Malignant, if not perhaps the Malignant Man comic Wan co-wrote in 2011).
As a side note, there's a new adaptation of The Dark Half in development.
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.
Thanks for the extensive breakdown! I agree about the general appraisal of King adaptations. Hell, I still enjoy watching Pet Sematary, but watching it as an adult, I do realize that this movie is just not that good. I'll have to find a copy of the film then, if only to check out the beginning at the very least. I really do enjoy Timothy Hutton, but haven't quite seen as much of his filmography as I'd like.
I actually prefer King's signature "extraneous text" as you put it (it definitely made The Langoliers a lot better than its made-for-tv counterpart lol). I'll have to see what I think about how he went at The Dark Half then. That'll be an interesting comparison.
Oh yes, The Langoliers TV miniseries is gawdawful in my view, while the novella works much better, although that's one of his stories I find a bit too slow with some tangent conversations that seemed unnecessary, or that could have been truncated. But yeah, the book is much better than the adaptation (in one of those instances where in my opinion they stuck too closely to the book, and it doesn't translate well--another example of this is The Shining, where although the TV miniseries is much closer to the book, for me it comes off as a bit silly, and not that well acted, honestly, while Kubrick's work embodies a sense of dread and loss of sanity like few other movies have, although I do wish Nicholson had played his character a bit more straight at the start of the film instead of having a tinge of being unhinged from the get-go). At any rate, The Langoliers is probably one of his stories that shouldn't have been attempted, at least during the era it was made. However, although today the visuals would be better, it's so out there that it probably plays much better in the imagination than on the screen.
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.