The first TV mini-series was flawed, but I still liked it. Especially David Soul’s performance.
Now another potentially cool movie messed up by having such a girly-boy lead. (Once on SNL they caricatured Lowe by having a characterization of him played by a female cast member. Ha!) Aren’t there any *men/i] left in the industry? If anything happens to Russell Crowe, we’ll be SOL.
Donald Sutherland as Straker. That could be good, but I doubt he can top James Mason.
Have you seen the old version of the movie, from the '70s? It’s titled Salem’s Lot: The Movie and isn’t very scary.
I like Rob Lowe. Good actor, lots of range. Does a wicked Shaggy impression.
I like Rob Lowe too. He kicked fucking ass as Nick Andros in The Stand.
The old version was TV miniseries. The version you are referring to was chopped up for theatrical release. It stinks.
I clearly remember the original release.
First of all, for those who had not read King’s book, which back then was most people, the first of the 3 parts had the added bonus of suspense. There was nothing in the ads that indicated that it was about vampires. You had no idea what was going on. The big trunk, the dead dog, the missing kids, the spooky house, it was all genuinely mysterious. You weren’t just sitting there waiting for the hero to figure it out like in most movies. You were scratching your head with him.
This was at a time when nobody except Hammer had been doing vampires (except as camp) for decades, and Hammer’s days were over. You didn’t expect it. Salem’s Lot really marked the return of vampire to film. (To be fair, Langella as Dracula came out the same year, but I would bet that SL was first.)
Severely creepy scenes:
Mike Ryerson jumping down into the grave and opening Danny Glick’s coffin
A very nervous Ben taping-together a makeshift cross from tongue depressors, praying the 23rd(?) psalm while waiting for Mrs. Glick to reanimate.
Danny Glick scratching at the window.
Vampire Mike Ryerson sitting in the dark in a rocking chair in the upstairs of Jason’s house. Giving the vampires reflecting eyes like cats was an effective and brand new technique.
It is not a scary jump-out-of-your-skin movie. It is a creepy movie, a horror movie. And like I said, most effective if you don’t know it is about vampires at the beginning.
Francis, good point – about not knowing the movie was about vampires right away, unless you’d read the book.
I think I was halfway through the book before I realized it was about vampires. Felt like an idiot, like I’d missed something, till I figured out that’s how it was supposed to be. People who read the book later knew it was about vamps.
Good choice of scenes – another good one from the TV miniseries was when Ben and the kid were in the basement, and the vamps start creeping up behind them, from that little room.
I’ve heard people say that King didn’t really start to cross the line (killing off major characters unexpectedly) until later on, but that’s not true, is it? He’s always done it.
I look forward to this remake. There were several good aspects to the original miniseries (which I think can be seen again, finally, on a restored DVD) but it had way too many annoying factors for anyone who comes to it after reading the book. For one, the pointless and utterly unexplicable decision to change 90% of the characters’ names! Floyd Tibbits becomes Ned Tibbits, Matt Burke becomes Jason Burke . . . and so on. I’ve never understood why such changes were made. And the decision to turn Barlow into Nosferatu was good visually but poor in terms of the plot and characterization.
Tobe Hooper really got the sequence in the morgue scene right, though–where Ben makes the tongue-depressor crucifix. That’s scary as hell!
The older series was partially filmed in the town where I went to high school, called Ferndale, in Northern California. It is a “sleepy little town” with lots of churches, near the ocean, with sprawling frontier-era cemetaries on the hillsides at the edge of town. The creepy house was, as usual, 100% Hollywood. They built a huge false-front onto a very small house (that still stands) on the cemetaried hillside.
I was a very small child when the show was being filmed and released, and even though I had inside knowlege as to the creation of the film, when I still lived there, I was not ever able to look at the real house, or walk through the cemetaries, or hike around the public park that surrounds them…without at least a half-dozen hairs on the back of my neck on sentry duty.
Ferndale is quite attractive to tinsel town. They’ve been back many times. To name a few, there was the ill-fated series with the dark haired Duke of Hazard, “Outbreak” was filmed there (this time they built a false front onto my bank and turned it into a hospital) and also “The Majestic”.