SECRET WINDOW

                

Perhaps infuriatingly, I won't be watching the King's in order.

Secret Window is adapted from the novella 'Secret Window, Secret Garden' from Four Past Midnight, my least favourite collection of King's - I could never understand why King would re-write The Dark Half, 'The Langoliers' and 'The Library Polieman' seemed too stretched and baggy and would have made better short stories. The true gem is 'The Sun Dog' - a Castle Rock story which has a delicious vein of black humour running through it and is a tale I can return to again and again. I think the reason for this is because I personally read in it a tale about someone wanting to commit suicide but manages to pull back from the brink. I could be reading too much into this.

But I digress.

I watched Secret Window in 2016, a film that I had put off for a long time simply because it came from Four Past Midnight. I didn't watch The Langoliers for a long time as well, but more of that in another edition. So it was with some trepidation that I watched Secret Window, and was instantly put off by the fact that Timothy Hutton, star of The Dark Half, was there playing Ted Miller. It seemed a wholly uneeded meta reference. Johnny Depp plays Mort without any of his trademark weirdness and like Nick of Time, it's refreshing to see him play it straight for a change. The weirdness comes from John Turturro who plays Shooter with undeniable relish and to be fair, you'd have a good time with the film if you had never watched Fight Club beforehand - otherwise if you were unfamiliar with the King novella you'd still be able to see the 'reveal' coming a mile off.

With this re-watch, the film is innofensive enough, Maria Bello is always a welcome distraction as is Charles S. Dutton - an actor whose debut film was in the King anthology movie Cat's Eye (1985) as Dom. It's sadly another case of 'would this have been made if it wasn't a King work?' - it's good to see Depp elevate what is mediocre writing (and this is strange, being from the pen of director David Koepp who wrote Panic Room), but the ending of the film is just awful and it ruined my breakfast because I was so angry at it. Ah well, no need to ever watch it again!

02/01/2022

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Thanks to Andrew Screen who supplied many of the films and TV movies I will be watching this year.