Rish's Reviews
If you count Knightriders this makes George Romero's fifth Stephen King- related film, following Creepshows 1 and 2 and Tales From the Dark Side: The Movie. It was also the last Romero film to be released to theaters, a full decade before this writing (October 2003).
The Dark Half tells the story of popular writer Thad Beaumont, who, after retiring his pen name, George Stark, discovers a series of grisly murders are being committed by someone who believes he is George Stark, but looks, sounds, and has the same fingerprints as Thad.
Timothy Hutton played both Beaumont and the psychotic Stark, with Amy Madigan as his caring wife Liz, and Michael Rooker as Alan Pangborn, the Sheriff investigating the killings (for you trivia fans, Ed Harris played him in Needful Things, and HIS wife is Amy Madigan).
This story took place in Stephen King's fictional Castle Rock, Maine, the setting of The Dead Zone, Cujo, Stand By Me, and the aforementioned Needful Things. Stuff like that makes it fun to be a King fan. The book was probably the last of King's works to really scare me, but not because it was frightening, but because the older I got, the harder it was to really get to me. The film was quite faithful to the book, not only down to the kind of car Stark drives, but the bumper sticker he keeps there. As usual, King's books make more sense than his movies do, and this one lost a little of the believability and character motivation of the novel. But it still works pretty well as a movie.
With a general spooky air about it, the film is actually scary at moments. The character of George Stark is a chilling figure and Hutton impressed me with his performance. The film was nicely shot and featured lots of pretty scenery. It had really well done makeup effects. And there were some bird effects that were quite amazing. Since this was before CGI*, I have no idea how they did it. It was visually quite impressive all the way through, and looked much more expensive than it was. But it was not a pleasant or fun film to watch.
It is quite talky and unevenly paced, the first death occurring at the half hour mark. It's somewhat slow and if I didn't love King so much, I'd think it was dull. A couple parts are hard to believe, mostly due to the shift in medium from book to film. Though the movie wasn't great, it's hard to truly hate any George Romero movie. I wish I could say that about all my favourite directors.
I'd Recommend It To: King completists, mostly.
*Whoops, they WERE CGI!