Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. The film style is a bit outdated. You can tell what era this was made in right from the title sequence. Since it's no surprise that this is a vampire story, I feel comfortable divulging the below. Whenever a vampire pops up (in an attempt to be scary), a horn blows and most times the camera cuts away before anything happens. A bit of vampire biting happens on screen, but it's also often met with similar quick cutaways. With two movie length episodes, the show is a bit a long, but I don't think that's a serious negative here.
On a more positive note, this is a really close adaption of Stephen King's original work. It couldn't have been properly fleshed out in a normal feature length movie time. Even with the 3 hour film time, the show had to reshape a few things from the book to adapt for the screen. None of the decisions felt particularly illogical or unnecessary so I vastly approved of the choices made. Squeezing in the rest would have required a few more episodes and I don't think that would have been best for anyone.
If you haven't read a Stephen King book before, you might expect that they are pure horror. That's actually not the case. Almost all Stephen King books have a deep mysticism, and for lack of a better word, a focus on superpowers. See "The Shinning" if you're looking to dig a little deeper. Some characters have a inherent and unexplained understanding of things they shouldn't. There are unexplained rules and dark "magic" surrounding the entire story. The show does a really good job of focusing on some of these concepts and keeping this from being a pure vampire horror flick.
While the show is outdated, the story is great and it does a good job of dropping you into the real Stephen King universe. Nothing to write home about, but worth a watch if you're into these types of things.
Review by Deluxe3VIP 6BlockedParent2023-05-15T07:30:50Z
Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. The film style is a bit outdated. You can tell what era this was made in right from the title sequence. Since it's no surprise that this is a vampire story, I feel comfortable divulging the below. Whenever a vampire pops up (in an attempt to be scary), a horn blows and most times the camera cuts away before anything happens. A bit of vampire biting happens on screen, but it's also often met with similar quick cutaways. With two movie length episodes, the show is a bit a long, but I don't think that's a serious negative here.
On a more positive note, this is a really close adaption of Stephen King's original work. It couldn't have been properly fleshed out in a normal feature length movie time. Even with the 3 hour film time, the show had to reshape a few things from the book to adapt for the screen. None of the decisions felt particularly illogical or unnecessary so I vastly approved of the choices made. Squeezing in the rest would have required a few more episodes and I don't think that would have been best for anyone.
If you haven't read a Stephen King book before, you might expect that they are pure horror. That's actually not the case. Almost all Stephen King books have a deep mysticism, and for lack of a better word, a focus on superpowers. See "The Shinning" if you're looking to dig a little deeper. Some characters have a inherent and unexplained understanding of things they shouldn't. There are unexplained rules and dark "magic" surrounding the entire story. The show does a really good job of focusing on some of these concepts and keeping this from being a pure vampire horror flick.
While the show is outdated, the story is great and it does a good job of dropping you into the real Stephen King universe. Nothing to write home about, but worth a watch if you're into these types of things.
7/10