Thanks to his incredible skills as an author, writer Stephen King has had dozens of feature films and TV series adapted from his novels and short stories. Given the sheer amount of adaptations, clearly they can’t all be masterpieces. When speaking with Yahoo! Movies, King revealed that he wished audiences had been kinder to Dreamcatcher and Cell.
“There are ones that I frankly don’t understand why they reviewed so badly,” King explained about the poor reviews.
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“I guess I’ve got to go back and look at Dreamcatcher, which has just been kind of lashed. I’d like to take a look at that again. And I frankly never understood why people didn’t like Cell, because to me that was a terrific, eccentric movie with some really eccentric, strange performances in it. John Cusack at his best, and Samuel L. Jackson is terrific. So I would say Cell for sure; Dreamcatcher, I don’t know, I better look at it again,” he added.
Dreamcatcher currently sits at 30% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety calling it an “overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements” while L.A. Weekly claims that in the film “both character and metaphor have gone to the dogs, leaving a slew of fart and burp jokes.”
Cell, unfortunately, fared even more poorly, sitting at only 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“Not a polished work of filmmaking. Some of the nighttime scenes are so poorly lit it’s difficult to tell what’s happening. The editing is ragged and adds to the confusion. More than a few of the supporting performances are embarrassingly amateurish,” The Chicago Sun-Times said of the film.
“I thought it was OK at the time. But I’m one of these people where the worst movie I ever saw, I thought it was f**king great! So you know, even things like [1953’s] Robot Monster when I was a kid, I thought, ‘Oh man, that’s great!’ ” King said of the film.
Based on the early positive responses to the latest adaptation of IT, King should feel confident that fans will connect with it in ways they didn’t connect with his other works. Even King himself was surprised with how much he liked it, having seen the film twice to take it all in.
“I’m sure my fans will enjoy the movie. I think they’re going to really enjoy the movie. I think that some of them will go back two or three times to actually savor the thing. I went back and saw it a second time and felt that I was seeing things the second time through that I missed the first time,” the author revealed in a recent featurette.
It opens in theaters Friday, September 8.
