Fantastic!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Not having read the book, I assume this TV movie veered away from its source material, at least in part, and probably due to a minuscule budget. At least that's the impression I get from reading some of the posts here. A long-buried spaceship begins to have an alarming effect on the residents of a small town in Maine. Basically, it turns them into zombies, although they think they are evolving onto a higher plane of existence. There are some creepy moments involving the newly unearthed ship, but the movie is done in by incredibly cheap effects and some awful casting, among the worst being Jimmy Smits as an alcoholic poet and Traci Lords as a perpetually horny postal worker (had her frequent love scenes been handled more realistically, instead of childishly, this movie might have been a lot more interesting). I have watched this lengthy adaptation several times over the years, and I sometimes wonder if it was intended as a comedy. Probably not, but it definitely has its share of laugh-out-loud moments.

Usually the norm for Stephen King adaptations, particularly with those directly adapted for television or as a miniseries, to stay away. They're mostly produced by hacks who have to cut apart King's works, even then ones that don't need or shouldn't be adapted (or the ones he comes up with himself like Storm of the Century), and place them in a set running time meant for commercial breaks and to (sometimes) tone down explicit language and whatever bloody violence tends to happen in the original stories. But somehow Tommyknockers came to me (via the wife of all people), and decided to give it a chance purely based on the premise. It's about a small town in Maine (for King, color me shocked and awed!) and what happens to them when one of the townspeople, local writer Bobbi, comes across a strange object buried in the ground. She keeps digging and digging, and it just becomes an obsessive thing to unearth the entire metal-maze that seems to be underground. But then a green substance or other overcomes her, and the town, and they're slaves to some extraterrestrial entities - all except for one, a man with a metal plate in his head who can't be made zombified.With a good premise and a few interesting cast prospects (Jimmy Smitts, Marg Helgenberger, EG Marshall, Traci Lords), I was prepared for anything. It could have been a horrid telling of the story, or perhaps something truly surprising and brilliant. It's in the middle; it's not very brilliant nor bad at all. The Tommyknockers works, more or less, how one sees a Stephen King book (one of the really good ones) work as a story: introduce the characters, let us get to know them very well and maybe empathize with them or sympathize with their troubles (alcoholism, infidelity, superstitions) or just understand them, and then just put them through total HELL (in caps). Most of the first half is just set-up, seeing the relationship between Bobbi and Jim, who has been on the wagon until an incident that sends him in turmoil, the fractured marriage of a cop and a postal worker- the latter cheating with a sultry temptress (Lords) every day- and the little boy who wants to master, and believes, in magic.But once the effects of the Tommyknockers spreads through the town, it gets equally interesting and hokey. Some of the acting is just terrible, as one might expect (the kid playing the would-be magician is the kind one would usually find on low-rated episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark), and some of that green visual effects stuff is rather cheap even when nifty coming out of a lipstick container. And the writing in some scenes is silly too, and I'm not sure if that's a criticism of the movie or of King. Yet what does work is that it's a solid story, told with a degree of professionalism and some creativity that makes it worth watching. Smitts and Helgenberger give as good as they've got, which is a big boost, and some scenes like the 4th of July climax of the first half of the movie are staged in a creepy manner and style (cutting between the zombies, the dolls, the kid repeating and the telekinetic typewriter typing Tommyknockers over and over). Even the aliens are a lot of fun to watch towards the end, with the end result revealed as just a rip on what would later be seen in the Matrix.Some of this is predictable, and silly, and its ending is equally tragic and unintentionally funny. But I was entertained and didn't want to get up or stop the DVD during its running time, and that's my two cents.

Granted, the book in this case was not much better. This movie just did not have the best scenes from the book, it tacked on an ending that was just a bit to happy, and it was horribly miscast as when I read the book the pictures of the characters I got in no way resembled what we got here. Sometimes they get it near perfect, here they were off by a whole lot. The story is basically taken from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with some Stephen King twists and perversions added to the mix, the book has the perversions, the movie takes all that kind of stuff out. In the end the movie is a dried husk of the book which was not particularly strong either. Jimmy Smits is awful in it, but then so is everyone else, and the fact it is a two parter and extended needlessly does not help matters out either. So all I can say is be prepared to see a lot of green light, a very toned down ending (granted I can see why they could not do the whole woman being naked at the end), and also be prepared for a very unmemorable ride. I would suggest reading the book instead, but it is not really all that worth finding either.

The I rating is for the moment the credits went up on this utterly boring tripe.It makes no sense and its like 2 or 3 movie excerpts were stitched together. Logic? There was none-dolls that come to life for no reason and daft sub plots about cheating husbands. Science fiction should have an element of at least mystery and at least some logic but this has none.Why make a kid disappear through a magic trick? If these aliens who emerged towards the end had been used right they'd have scared people into submission yet one gets attacked with a shovel? Really this is an insult to viewers who enjoy proper science fiction like War Of The Worlds or The Invaders or Quatermass. The average zombie film makes more sense It says nothing in the end only you wasted time watching it