Savior Gaming

 So this year’s IT remake is crushing box office records, and rightfully so. If you grew up anytime between the 80’s and 90’s, chances are you’ve heard the tales of Stephen King. If like me you grew up with parents that liked horror, some of your first nightmares came from a King based movie, so I just wanted to give you all my list of best King adaptations. Granted, these are just my personal favorites, listed from least to greatest.

5. The Mist- holy shit this movie is sad. Like seriously heart wrenching shit. Simply The Mist is about a group of people who loose it trapped in a grocery store during a mysterious monster filled mist. I loved that the mist wasn’t so much the true horror as it was religious madness that spread throughout the people. The characters are relate able, there’s a fair amount of gore and good acting so definitely check it out before watching the show.

  4. Misery- I second guessed being a writer after this way too real horror story of a writer who finds himself face to face with his batshit insane biggest fan. Someday soon I will be doing a combo review on the book and movie and while I like the book better the movie is pretty damn close. Kathy Bates is amazing as the psychotic Annie Wilkes in a performance I can’t credit enough.

 3. Carrie (2002)- A lot of people aren’t even aware this even exists and it’s a damn shame. Everyone knows the original 76 movie and many know of the well publicized 2013 remake, but I adore the 2002 made for TV remake much more. First, I love Angela Bettis as Carrie, being sympathetic, desperate, but showing a delicate inner strength I think fits the character beautifully. The effects are epic and I appreciate how close to the book it stays, straying away for a new ending I liked very much. Harder to find but definitely worth the time.

  2. IT (2017)- Quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen all year, this remake took me greatly by surprise. I love the mini series for all it’s whacky shit but the remake is gritty and dark, full of both great child actors and Bill Skarrsgard is amazing as Pennywise, it’s one hell of a ride.

 1. Pet Sematary- The movie that introduced me to Stephen King, a movie that still lingers with Michael Myers and a hive of Aliens in the depths of my earliest nightmares comes the story that dares to ask what if the dead didn’t have to stay dead? Roughly 30 years old this movie holds up great with memorable performances, freaky imagery, and a sad second half that will let you know why sometimes dead is better.

I picked this poster above for one reason, the promotional art for Covenant kind of sums up the movie, bland and much of it a retread of something from another Alien film. Of the six, Covenant is probably my least favorite but after rewatching it I found some good, just at the end of the day don’t ask too many questions because god only knows you won’t get answers.

Covenant picks up a decade after the Prometheus disappeared with a colony ship heading to a suitable planet to terraform and colonize it. An android, Walter (also played by Fassbender) waits on the ship while the crew, colonists, and embryos sleep soundly. Until they hit the neutrino storm and after a malfunction, the captain of the Covenant dies in hypersleep by burning to death. The ship is partially damaged, the crew is distraught and saddened by the death of there Captain and they are years away from there destination. The religious second mate is promoted and tensions flare when he tries to put his foot down and urges them to push on rather than allowing them to mourn for a little bit. While repairing the ship in space, Tennessee, the ship’s pilot gets a strange transmission from a nearby planet. He captures it with his helmet and upon inspecting it, it’s a woman signing John Denver…yep…so Daniels, the Captain’s widow and Oram the new Captain butt heads when he decides to cut there trip short and investigate the planet that they detect can sustain human life. Daniels smartly calls this stupid. But nope…here we go. Ok, alot of this is derivative of other films in the series. They go down in normal gear, no space suits or even protective gear, nothing, which off the bat that level of idiocy already kind of hurts the movie because what happens next, I can’t bring myself to feel much sympathy. They find the Engineer ship crashed from the end of Prometheus and Shaw’s dogtag. A guy goes to take a shit in the woods and triggers a reaction from a tiny pod on the ground, releasing a spore form of the black ooze that drifts into his ear. Another dude inhales it on the crashed derelict. They get pale and delirious. Idiot 1 gets brought back to the shuttle, comatose kinda as something rips through his back. From his entrails we see a creature, the baby Neomorph attack Tennessee and Oram’s wives, and in a mishap the shuttle gets blown up. Idiot 2’s throat gets broken open by another neo and in a cool scene the group is attacked by the feral creatures. A hooded figure rescues them and brings them to his home, a Engineer Colosseum full of dead Engineers mummified in the pathogenic goo. The figure is David. Throughout the next half hour we learn Shaw is dead, killed by David as well as the thousands of Engineers and for ten years David has been experimenting with life forms and the goo in an attempt to create the ultimate lifeform- the Alien essentially. The neomorph finds it’s way into David’s sanctum and kills some more people. The crew catches on David is insane but Oram corners him, falling into David’s true experiment, the room of eggs. In a ridiculously fast time the creature we know and love is birthed from Oram while another dude has a facehugger on for three seconds and somehow gets impregnated…ok so the alien makes a pretty epic entrance and the ship scene we get from the trailors is fucking cool and intense, I give it that.

  In the end the finale feels very close to classic Alien only modernized and we find out David killed Walter and now he’s got a whole colony to experiment on and no one to stop him.

Ok, so Covenant is my least favorite of the series for good reason. Every other film in the series has it’s own unique identity while I feel Covenant is trying too hard to be others. It borrows a shit ton from Alien, Prometheus, and Alien 3. A complaint I hear about Prometheus was they felt the symbolism and messages were pretentious but Covenant kicked it up five or six notches. The characters were meh at best except Danny Mcbride as Tennessee and of Course Michael Fassbender as David and Walter. All the YouTube promotions they did, giving the characters more depth should have just been in the damn movie to begin with, seriously Scott just because Overwatch got away with it doesn’t mean you can too. What hurt most of all was there was a truly terrifying, beautiful movie in this but all the Prometheus criticism got to him and now we essentially got a knock off of two other movies wrapped around 25 minutes of good material. I’m shitting on this more than I want to but it is the biggest disappointment I’ve seen in a while, but if you want a movie that looks beautiful with some good kills and gore or you love Michael Fassbender, you’ll appreciate it. I don’t hate it but I wish we got Paradise Lost instead.