The Tommyknockers, dir. by John Power (1993)

Searching the Internet for positive reviews of one of my childhood favorites, The Tommyknockers, turned out to be much more difficult than I'd imagined. Based on what I found, it seems I'm one of about twelve people on the planet who actually enjoyed this film.

The miniseries version of one of Stephen King's less well received novels premiered in 1993, in that period of time when miniseries based on his work were particularly popular. It (another great adaptation with a few glaring flaws and a disappointing conclusion) had come out three years before, and The Stand was right around the corner, as were The Shining and The Langoliers.

I saw the two-part Tommyknockers when I was eleven, on its original airing, and that's probably about the best age to appreciate this film. If my first viewing occurred later in life, no doubt some of its more glaring inconsistencies and shortcomings would beharder to ignore. There are certainly holes in the story, the ending is somewhat unsatisfying, and some of the subplots are left hanging without much resolution. And yet my love for this movie is almost completely undiminished eighteen years after first seeing it.

My parents tolerated, while not quite encouraging, my interest in King's books and movies. At my insistence, we rented Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and had a family screening. I'd put my age at ten and my brother's at eight, so, understandably, our parents made us leave the room during the scene in which the young woman steps out of the bathtub naked and transforms into an old, scary woman, still naked.

Our family was always somewhat technologically challenged; we had one TV in our house when I was a kid, and our VCR's programming would never allow us to watch one channel and record another. If it had been up to me, I'd have replaced the VCR for one that could effectively utilize that function, but I didn't have enough of my own disposable income to buy something like a VCR.

And our television--we had one of those big-box wooden floor models--had a very sensitive volume setting, and if you changed the volume using Remote #1 and then tried to change it with Remote #2, it completely screwed the whole TV up. I thought we'd gotten this problem fixed in time for the Tommyknockers premier. For some reason, I was unable to watch Part One the night it aired, so my parents taped it for me. The TV sounded fine, but the next day, when I put the tape in, the volume was off, very low and fuzzy, making the tape unwatchable.

Fortunately, my neighbors had recorded it as well, their whole family fans of Stephen King miniseries. So I went over to their house and watched the first part; it ended just in time for Part Two to come on. The first half was such a great setup, I couldn't wait to see what the second part offered. Unfortunately, the show takes a bit of a downturn once that second part starts up.

The story is set in Haven (a fictional town which sits next door to Derry, the setting for It and a few other King stories). In the Anderson Woods, Bobbi (Marge Helgenberger) and Gard (Jimmy Smits) have stumbled upon a large, mysterious object, buried in the ground, its topside very near the surface. As they uncover more of the object, strange things begin to occur around town; the residents of Haven are suddenly gifted with bizarre abilities, churning out odd new inventions, while at the same time losing teeth and becoming more robotic and inhuman.

Nearly three hours of build-up leads to a conclusion that, even as a kid, struck me as kind of weak. I won't give it away here, in case you're not familiar with how things turn out for the Tommyknockers and the residents of Haven, ME, though most reviews I've come across pretty much throw it right out there, and the European DVD box art shows an image of one of the Tommyknockers, which is pretty crazy. I was disappointed with the ending, as a kid, possibly only because I wanted something else, something a bit more standard as far as Stephen King stories go. Watching it on second, third, twentieth viewing, I found more to like about the ending, and can't really view the movie the same as I did that first time. The climax comes as more of a surprise than in the book, as the real goings-on in the Anderson Woods are hinted at earlier in the novel than in the movie. And despite its shortcomings, the final revelation of the Tommyknockers doesn't come off nearly as silly as the climax of It.

Also, if you haven't read the novel, it isn't nearly as bad as its reputation. It's one of everal of King's books written in the seventies and eighties that dealt with his own alcoholism, in a veiled, metaphorical manner, and in particular, there are a lot of aspects of the novel that deal with Gard's and Bobbi's separate struggles with dependence, that aren't gone into in as much detail in the film. The Tommyknockers is a pretty good book, and the miniseries is great, especially if you're younger than fifteen.

Stranger In a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961)

I take in a lot more horror and fantasy than I do science fiction, but I've read a few of the classics: 1984, Farenheit 451, Foundation, Brave New World. I picked up Stranger In a Strange Land as part of my attempt to read to completion all the books I started back in elementary school or junior high and never finished. I loved reading as a kid, but didn't always have the attention span for some of these books, and as a result would read a hundred, two hundred, or in the case of this one, three hundred pages, of a novel before discarding it for something else.

I've mostly gotten around to reading all the stuff I only half-completed years ago, and was happy to give Stranger In a Strange Land another shot (these days I only quit a book partway through only if it's absolutely un-readable, and most of the stuff I passed on when I was a kid certainly didn't fall into that category).

The only other Heinlein familiar to me is a collection of short stories called Menace From Earth. Stranger In a Strange Land, by its reputation, compared to his other books and stories, is his more "serious" work. Personally, I find the adventurous stories in Menace From Earth considerably more entertaining, but Stranger is certainly a good one, and I'm sure I got more from it than when I'd first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old.

Valentine Michael Smith, the Man From Mars, is born to human parents, scientists from Earth sent on a mission to Mars. He's subsequently raised by Martians and took on their ways. He's taken back to earth a couple decades after his birth, and his ideas inevitably clash with those of the humans with whom he attempts to acclimate himself.

Smith is capable of extraordinary acts of teleportation, levitation, and a disturbing ability to make objects and people disappear. He's a peaceful guy, and only wants to love his friends, impart his wisdom to the humans, but where he's from, dying, or "discorporating," isn't that big a deal, and when you discorporate, you simply move on to the next level of existence, becoming what the Martians refer to as an "Old One." And so, though he means no harm by it, it's no big deal to him to kill people who pose a threat to him. He learns, kind of like the Terminator,

why he can't do this, why it's different than on Mars--but unlike the Terminator, he never really seems to get it.

Smith, with help from Dr. Jubal, a sort of father figure, an

d Jill, his nurse and friend, comes to prominence living among the humans, with the President of the U.S. as his personal accountant. He eventually finds his way to a bizarre church that professes a sort of Christianity tinged with New Age craziness. Their prophet, Digby, dies early in the story, and is said to join their previous, and head, prophet, Foster, in the sky. Smith takes what he's learned from the Fosterites, decides it matches in part his Martian religious views, and develops his own church, with himself as high priest.

Here's the major part of the book I can't get into. All this talk

of Old Ones, scorned by Jubal, and believed wholly by Jill and other followers of Smith's, and Foster and Digby, is quite fasincating, and good for some multiple-page theological debates between the main characters, but midway into the book, appears the first of a series of brief sections in which Foster and Digby, up in heaven, adorned with halos, discuss, in a somewhat humorous manner, the goings on below, and the facts of the Man From Mars and the Old Ones.

For my money, it'd be better to leave the Old Ones and the two god-prophets to the area of speculation. I might've bought what Michael was saying anyway, and believed the Old Ones really had sent him to Earth on a fact-finding mission, that they were indeed real, without needing it so bluntly stated in a series of three short sections that clash with the rest of the narrative.

The novel loses some of its steam after that, and it's never quite as good as its first hundred-fifty, two hundred pages, but there are some interesting debates towards the end, with the skeptical Dr. Jubal finding it harder to make excuses for the bizarre supernatural occurrences surrounding himself and the Man From Mars.

I have a feeling I'd prefer some of Heinlein's more pulpy novels, though there's a lot to like about Stranger In a Strange Land, and it offers, perhaps, more for the reader to think about and consider.