I didn’t really have high expectation for The Avengers. Or “Marvel’s The Avengers” as it’s officially titled (and good for them. They’ve earned it). I enjoyed all of the movies that lead up to it to varying degrees. Even Iron Man 2, which I thought was pretty mediocre, was still enjoyable for the most part. But, for me, the idea of trying to juggle all of those personalities and stories and big name actors seemed like too intense a task for any writer or director to handle. Much less a writer/director that I’m not particularly fond off. When you’re reading a comic book, you’ve got the entire history of each of these characters in your head, established over many years… decades even. The movies don’t have that foundation. They have to explain everything to the audience, and they have do it in only a couple of hours, while still trying to tell a dynamic and interesting story. Or at least they used to.

But goddamn if they didn’t pull it off. A huge chunk of the credit goes to Joss Whedon, for writing an incredibly tight script, while keeping it moving and entertaining and easily digestible. All of the charm of these characters comes through while packing a ton of information and story into a comfortable two and half hours. Even characters like Black Widow and Hawkeye who didn’t have their own movies and were essentially new to the story felt fully realized and organic in the story.

Another major dose of credit has to go to Marvel, for having the balls to trust that the audience would get on board with watching all of these other movies that led up to The Avengers. That’s a lot to ask of an audience, and it clearly it paid off (The Avengers has broken a number of box-office records already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t kick Avatar’s butt and become the most successful movie of all time). It’s an odd way to go about setting up a movie. It’s very much how most comic books work. When you pick up a comic book, they trust that you already know what’s going on. That you’ve read previous issues and you know who these characters are and what the setting is and who they’re up against.

The Avengers movie was the same way. I can’t imagine watching that movie without having seen the five movies that established these characters. I remember thinking that if you hadn’t seen Captain America, you would have absolutely no idea who this guy was and why he was wearing that silly costume. It was a seriously risky move. There were a lot of components (very expensive components) that had to work together before the movie was produced in order for The Avengers to work. I can’t remember that ever happening. Even sequels tend to take a moment to catch the audience up on what’s happened so far. The Avengers didn’t have time for that. They just assumed you knew everything and went with it.

More than anything, what really impressed me was how they were able to manage all of these characters effectively. I never felt like any one character was dominating or chewing up scenery. That was a concern of mine going it. It’s hard to imagine anyone sharing the spotlight with Robert Downy Jr as Tony Stark, but it worked. My favorite scenes in the movie were the scenes in the SHIELD laboratory where Tony Stark and Bruce Banner (played masterfully by Mark Ruffalo) are hashing out their plans and debating how much or how little they should trust SHIELD.

Another thing I really appreciated was that they didn’t need to make every character likable. Tony Stark IS the egotistical, loud mouth asshole that the other characters accuse him of being. They don’t hide that. Captain America is kind of a dick. He’s self-righteous and condescending, just like he is in the comic books. Bruce Banner is completely wrapped up in his own internal drama, which makes him stand offish and difficult to read. Because all these personalities are so conflicted and dynamic, it makes the energy of the team combustive and agitated. At one point, Bruce Banner says “We’re not a team, we’re a time-bomb.” and I think that’s really the core of the movie. These are people who, under any other circumstances, would be at each other’s throats and fighting, but because they’re all heroes in their own way, and because the chips are down and everyone has to step up, they’re able to work together and get the job done. That’s what The Avengers do, and it was illustrated perfectly in this film.

There were a few surprises as far as actors went as well. Notably Mark Ruffelo and Scarlett Johansson. A couple of months ago, when the trailer for The Avengers was on TV, my wife (who didn’t read the comics… or any comics that I’m aware of) asked me what exactly are Black Widow’s powers? I had to think about it for a second and said “Well, she has big tits and she jumps around kicking things.” and that was about all I could come up with. Based on her brief appearance in Iron Man 2, I wasn’t expecting much from Scarlett Johansson. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of hers and she seemed out of place in the Marvel movie universe, just based on what I knew about her otherwise. Black Widow in Iron Man 2 was a pretty boring, generic character. She indeed had big tits and jumped around kicking things. That was about it. Luckily, they (Joss Whedon I’m assuming) managed to make all of that mysterious and intriguing. We got these drops of information about her history as a spy for the Soviet Union and these deadly missions she’d been on and all this covert, sneaky shit she’s done. She suddenly became a strong but damaged character that I was desperate to know more about. Before The Avengers, the idea of a Black Widow solo movie seemed pointless as best, but after seeing the way she was handled in that movie, I’d want to see her movie more than any of the other characters. Scarlet played her perfectly. She was clearly fully on board with the character and completely organic in that world. I was worried that she would come across as somehow too good for the genre, but quite the opposite. I feel like she actually elevated her character in ways that another actress might not have done. I never felt like she was lowering herself to the level of the genre, but that she raised the genre up.

Another aspect of the movie I was uneasy about going in was Mark Ruffelo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. Not because I disliked Ruffelo, but because in the development stage, there was a fair bit of drama surrounding that role. Previously, Banner was played by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk. Apparently, there was a lot of butting heads between Norton and the creative team, which ultimately lead to his not being asked to reprise the role in The Avengers. Before all of that, Ang Lee’s Hulk movie disappointed a lot of fans (I personally kind of liked it) and caused them to reboot the character almost immediately. The Hulk has been a difficult character to bring to the screen. Luckily, two things came together in The Avengers. The first is that Mark Ruffelo was fantastic as Bruce Banner. In nearly ever iteration of the character on screen (including Bill Bixby’s TV portrayal) Banner has been played as a scared, beaten down man, constantly on the run and terrified of the monster inside him. That’s a perfectly acceptable interpretation, but it was getting a little tired. It’s hard to root for someone who is cowering. What Mark Ruffelo did was take all that fear and worry and turn it into hardened bitterness. This Bruce Banner isn’t cowering, he’s just being responsible. He isn’t hiding from himself, he’s hiding himself from everyone else. This Bruce Banner isn’t a craven, weak man… he’s a boiling pot of anger and resentment. Not mean or outwardly hostile, but he’s an angry man. They turn the classic “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” line from the TV show into “I’m always angry”. It’s a new take on the character that is far more interesting and fun to watch than anything we’ve seen yet.

The other thing they did was finally nail down the perfect look for The Hulk. Before The Avengers, The Hulk always looked slightly off. In Ang Lee’s movie, he looked too much like a big green baby with a body builder’s body. In the Edward Norton movie, The Hulk was a little too blocky and chiseled. He looked like he was carved out of stone. The Hulk in The Avengers was absolutely perfect. I think part of the reason it worked so well is that Mark Ruffelo performed the motion capture himself, and the look of The Hulk’s face was based on Mark’s face. Also they didn’t give him a perfectly sculpted Mr. Universe body. He had the build of a lumberjack, not Charles Atlas. All through the movie I wanted more Hulk. It made me want a Mark Ruffalo solo Hulk movie.

I also loved the way The Avengers worked as a team. Every character served a vital function and filled a specific role. They made a point to show exactly how Captain America leads, and inspired others to listen to him. There was a great scene where Cap is standing on the roof of a car and talking to some NYPD Officers who have no idea who he is, and he starts telling them what to do, and they say something like “We don’t take orders from you!” and then Cap beats the shit out of a couple of alien invaders and the cops suddenly realize that he’s a guy worth listening to did what he said.

People have been calling it the best comic book movie ever made. I’m inclined to agree with them. Not because it’s the best movie ever made based on a comic book (I’d probably still give that to The Dark Knight) but it’s the movie that best conveys the feeling of reading a superhero comic book. It perfectly captures everything that is great about comic books, and especially Marvel comic books. Marvel Comics have their own, specific flavor, and this movie tasted exactly like a Marvel comic. The idea of literally translating a comic book to the screen is typically a bad idea. Things that work in comic books, aren’t necessarily going to work in a movie. It takes a particularly skilled filmmaker to recognize what can be directly translated and what has to be adapted.

Robert Rodriguez directly translated Sin City for the screen, and while Sin City was a decent movie, and certainly captured the feeling of the comic books, it was also incredibly strange and awkward and not for everyone. The things that were typical hardboiled noir comic material in the books translated into surreal, cartoony weirdness on screen. Luckily, that in and of itself was entertaining. But that’s only going to go so far, and I wouldn’t call it an example of a successful translation, just because what was appealing about the movie wasn’t the same thing that was appealing about the comics.

I only bring Sin City up because it’s the only other example I can think of where a movie has so faithfully translated a comic book for the screen and retained so much of the comics. Most comic book movies feel like movie versions of that story. Superman: The Motion Picture felt like a movie. X-Men felt like a movie. Even Iron Man and Thor and all those felt like movies based on comics. The Avengers felt like an particularly spectacular comic book.

For instance, movies have to justify things in ways the comic books don’t. I remember leaving the theater after seeing Thor, and how they made a point to tell us about how it was impossible for Thor to ever return to earth. I was thinking “I wonder how they’re going to explain that when he comes back for The Avengers.”

How they explained it was not really explaining it. Not in a lazy way, but just because it didn’t really matter. They sort of tossed out a vague “I guess your dad sent you back, huh?” sort of explanation, but that was about it. It was great. All of a sudden all this lightning and rain and thunder started up and it was “Oh, I guess Thor’s here!” And it worked! Because they managed to put your mind in that place where that’s okay.

I have to admit that there was at least one point where the silliness of it all became a bit too much for me. Specifically, there’s a scene where Loki (the villain, played by Tom Hiddleston) and Captain America are fighting in Germany where I became painfully aware of the fact that I was watching two grown men in silly costumes jumping around pretending to fight. I imagine it’s pretty difficult to keep people on board with such silliness for an entire two and a half hours, so I don’t count that as any kind of major fault. But at that point (it wasn’t far from the beginning of the movie) I wasn’t fully on board with the movie yet either. It took a little while for me to recalibrate my sensibilities from movie viewer to comic book fan. Judging by the numbers (The Avengers seems to be on its way to contention for the most successful movie of all time) the rest of the people watching this movie were able to make that same transition.

They just announced a slew of sequels and follow-ups (not surprisingly) and I’m already excited. Going into this movie, I expected it to burn me out on comic book movies… it just seemed like too much. The exact opposite happened though. Finally I feel like I’ve seen a movie that captures the joy of comic books perfectly and I want more and more and more.

That SNL Digital Short this week was amazing.
Though I just read someone speculating that it was likely the last one ever, because Andy Sandberg is supposedly leaving the cast.
That makes me sad :(

Here’s what I’ve done lately, in chronological order (oldest first).

One of the things that makes these interesting for me is that when I was doing graphite portraits, I pretty frequently used the grid system. Which is where you print a grid on the photo you’re using a reference, and then draw a corresponding grid on your paper, and it helps to keep everything proportional and in the right place. It’s a little bit of a cheat, but it works. I’m not doing that for any of these in drawings though, and it’s weird to fly without that safety net. Especially considering that it’s ink, so I can’t even erase. Generally I quickly sketch out the picture lightly in pencil and then ink over that and erase the pencil when I’m done, but that’s very rough and the ink is the dangerous part.

(my scanner crapped out on me, so these are all from cell phone pictures)

This was based on the cover of this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. I think the model was Kate Upton.

This one was my first attempt to really do something serious. The other two zombie chicks were more experiments than anything else.

This one I almost didn’t upload, just because I don’t really like how it turned out. And because I kind of crapped out toward the end when I was doing his hat. I don’t know that I’d call it a total failure (which is why I’m uploading it) but I’m not very happy with it either.

The Blues Brothers (1980) – Directed by John Landis

Louis CK and Mark Maron, 1989

Just an FYI for all you cosplaying ladies at conventions, this white robe outfit is a million times sexier than the gold bikini.

When I was three or four, I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz and was terrified of the flying monkeys. Even more so, there was one scene where Dorothy is in the Wicked Witch of the West’s tower prison and the image of her Aunt Em appears in a crystal ball. Dorothy calls out to the image and it transforms into the Witch’s mocking, cackling face as she barks “AUNTIE EM! AUNTIE EM!” at a sobbing Dorothy.

That image was burned into my brain and kept me awake at nights. A couple of years later my dad sat me down on the couch to watch a Beta tape of the movie Poltergeist, knowing full well that I was absolutely no where near capable of tolerating that level of horror. That movie was chockablock with horrifying, disturbing images that a child of five or so is not at all ready to process. The clown was scary, the tree was really scary, the swimming pool full of rotting corpses was really really scary and the guy pulling his own face off in the bathroom mirror fucked me up for life.

(the fact that those are Steven Spielberg’s hands in that scene is one of the many reasons that, as an adult, my heart swells with love when I see his smiling, bearded face)

Around the time I was in the third grade I started to view horror movies and things that scared me as a challenge. I’m not sure why, but I started to view it as a weakness. Something I was embarrassed of. I was still scared of movies and painfully aware of the fact that I was simply incapable of watching some things. There were TV shows that scared me. SONGS that scared me. I was a very timid, scared child in some ways. But I desperately wanted not to be.

So I started forcing myself to try and take this stuff in. Luckily for me, I found a window. My mom brought home the movie Stand By Me. I was skeptical at first, because when I read the box it sounded boring to me (I was perhaps eight or nine at the time) but then she told me it was based on a story by Stephen King.

Now, I knew who Stephen King was. My mom was a huge fan. I was scared of the book jacket for IT. It had a creepy looking monster hand reaching out of a storm drain.

I wanted nothing to do with that. No sir. To me, Stephen King was an ominous, scary name that appeared in giant, imposing bold letters over images of women covered in blood and the slobbery, gnashing jaws of rabid dogs, and let’s not overlook that one of those horrifying images that so disturbed me as a very young child was of the master vampire Barlow in the TV movie Salem’s Lot.

So The idea of a Stephen King movie that was, perhaps, not THAT scary (or, as my mom correctly claimed, not at all scary) appealed to me. I saw it at as movie that could, perhaps, facilitate a transition into a stage in my life when I could cope with terrifying and disturbing images. That made sense to me at the time.

And it sort of worked. I absolutely loved Stand By Me. I loved it because it was a story about kids told with respect and dignity and not an ounce of condescension. Most of all, I loved the tone of the movie. That somewhat nasal, but undeniably beloved Richard Dreyfuss voice. I already loved Dreyfuss for Jaws (a movie that never particularly scared me but I loved with a passion) and Close Encounters, but his narration in Stand By Me was the voice that I most associated with an adult that I wanted to BE one day. A guy who could look back on a difficult and complicated childhood and be OKAY. It was the first time I felt comforted by the idea of growing up, and I tied that association to Stephen King words and Richard Dreyfuss’s voice. That first line “I was twelve going on thirteen the first time I saw a dead human being” still brings chills up my back when I think about it.

Stand By Me succeeded in getting me past my fear of the name Stephen King (in fact, it made me quite fond of King). I immediately read the story that Stand By Me was based on, The Body and loved it. It was a lot of work (again, I was about eight or nine) and I’m sure a fair bit of it went over my head, but I loved the parts I could tie to the movie, which was most of it. Stand By Me is a pretty faithful adaptation of The Body. I was quite proud of myself. Not only had I watched a Stephen King movie, I had now read a Stephen King book (novella. whatever) and I was absolutely hooked on his voice. The way he told the story. It was so conversational. It didn’t feel like he was trying to impress me or make me work for it. It felt like I was laying in bed while this kindly man from New England was telling me a fascinating story about a group of kids in the sixties going to find a dead body. All in the voice of Matt Hooper from Jaws.

Unfortunately, none of that addressed my original concern, which was getting over my fear of monsters and scary movies. Sure, I was no longer intimidated by the name associated with so many horrifying images on my mom’s bookshelf, but those images still scared me.

Having surmounted The Body, I thought I’d try my hand at something else that looked a little less daunting than one of those behemoth novels. Cycle of the Werewolf. I had seen the movie Silver Bullet (based on Cycle of the Werewolf) a couple of years earlier, and while it was a little scary, it was also fun enough that it didn’t leave much of an impression. Perhaps the werewolf wasn’t scary enough, or maybe I found Gary Busey endearing (don’t we all?) but either way, I just saw it as kind of a fun movie. It wasn’t any scarier to me than The Goonies had been (which, honestly, was a little scary to me. They put the kid’s hand in a blender for christ’s sake) or Gremlins (also scary when you’re five) which is to say that I recognized that it was scary, but not enough to keep me up at night. Also, again, like Stand By Me, it was a movie mostly about kids.

I powered through the relatively short Cycle of the Werewolf (much shorter than The Body, and fully illustrated by comic book legend Bernie Wrightson) and proceeded to have nightmares for weeks on end.

Failure. Scared the ever loving shit out of me. That voice that I had found so comforting and pleasant made the horror that much worse, because King had found a way into my heart, and could drop the monsters directly in.

I believe that’s why Stephen King is as successful as he is, and why I’m such a fan. His style of writing is so conversational, and so intimate and friendly, that when he starts telling you horrible, disturbing things, he’s already in your house. He’s already cozied up next to you in bed under the covers with a flashlight and a bowl of chips. That safe, intimate Richard Dreyfuss flavored narration puts you at ease while Pennywise the Dancing Clown climbs up out of the shower drain. People can debate whether or not King’s a good literary writer backwards and forwards, but I’d say he’s undeniably a master storyteller.

I didn’t give up. I was determined to get over my fear of horror movies. Now, on top of just a need to defeat my own weakness, I now also had this desire to read more Stephen King stories and I wanted to be able to do that without fear of sleepless nights with my knees pulled up to my chest, eyeballing the closet door. I was a Stephen King fan too scared to read Stephen King books. Or watch movies based on his books. Or look at the covers of his books.

When I was in the fourth grade I read The Shining and ended up not understanding what I was reading well enough to really be scared by it or particularly entertained by it. That was perhaps too mature a book for a ten year old Joe. I do know that I watched just enough of the movie to know that I wasn’t going to be sitting all the way through that one.

We lived on an air force base in Southern California called George AFB. My mother worked at the base library and I spent a lot of time at there, often after school waiting around, looking at art books or reading Encyclopedia Brown while my mom worked. One day I found that a new book that had been released in the form of a massive brick of cassette tapes. It was called The Drawing of The Three by Stephen King. It was the sequel to another book I had considered reading called The Gunslinger. I never read that one because I wasn’t interested in westerns and it looked boring to me at the time. The Drawing of the Three, on the other hand, dealt with time travel and interdimensional gateways and a bunch of other things that sounded right up my ally. Even better, it wasn’t a horror story. BEST of all, it was read by Stephen King himself.

I listened to that book at least three times. I was obsessed with it. Every night as I went to sleep I would listen to King’s nasally Maine accent (which was not entirely unlike Richard Dreyfuss’s nasally narration from Stand By Me) telling the tale of Roland, the last Gunslinger, as he wandered through some post-apocalyptic desert, dying of blood poisoning and jumping in and out of our world. It was amazing.

I went from being curious about Stephen King to becoming a devoted Stephen King disciple. A nine year old King fanatic who was too scared of his books to read them. It plagued me. I was ashamed and depressed about it.

One day I was walking home from school and I decided to go to the video store. The library had a second story that was where all the typewriters were (in 1989 people still used typewriters) and a little A/V room, mostly used for presentations and such. It had a pretty big TV and a VCR. So occasionally I would rent a movie or bring one from home and watch while I waited for my mom to finish work. By this time I was about eleven and still hadn’t gotten over my fear of horror movies, and of Stephen King stories that weren’t about interdimensional gun fighters.

So I’m at the video store and I see that the movie Pet Sematary has just come out for rent. I had seen the commercials and that was enough to know that this movie was far too scary for me. Hell, the cover of the book was enough to tell me that, what with the creepy looking zombie cat and the word cemetery right in the title. The worst part about it though was that the little boy that played Gage in the movie (a kid named Miko Hughes) was from the town adjacent to the base, Apple Valley. His being in the movie was a big deal at the time and he was something of a local celebrity. Because of that, a lot of the kids I knew had already seen the movie. They were talking about it constantly and I felt terrible because I knew I was too afraid to watch this movie that all these other kids apparently had no problem with.

I stood there looking at the box for the movie and something inside me said “Cowboy up, kid!”. I decided right then and there that I was going to take this movie (that looked like the scariest movie ever made) and I was going to sit down and watch the whole thing. I wasn’t going to cover my eyes. I wasn’t going to turn it off. I was going to force myself to watch it. Jump into the deep end of the pool so to speak.

And that’s what I did. I took it back to the library. I didn’t tell my mom I was going to watch it. I just went up stairs, closed the door and put the tape in.

And that movie scared the ever loving shit out of me. It was absolutely horrific. The scenes where Denise Crosby is remembering her sister Zelda are still, to this day, some of the scariest moments I’ve ever seen in any movie.

But on top of that, it was also funny. And it was charming, and it was a well told story. Yes, it scared the bajesus out of me. Yes I had nightmares and when I closed my eyes at night, I saw that palsied, twisted woman cackling insanely. But I could see the value in the story. I could hear Stephen King’s voice, that same voice from Stand by Me and The Drawing of the Three, in the dialog and the storytelling. Fred Gwynne as Jud was funny, and sweet, and haunted and he was a purely Stephen King kind of character. Pascow, that poor doomed bike riding bastard was funny. Yes, he was scary, but he was also a benevolent spirit in the story. He was a force of good and he was funny.

Stephen King is a funny guy, and he injects a lot of humor into his characters. It came through in Pet Sematary (probably more so because he actually wrote the screenplay) and I connected with the movie because of it. That combination of funny and scary. Not a slapstick kind of funny, but in a realistic sort of way. Because life is funny and even when horrible, terrifying things are happening, life doesn’t stop being funny. Stephen King recognizes that and it’s a common thread through most everything he writes.

Because of that, I was able to connect to Pet Sematary in a way I had never connected to a horror movie before. It bridged the gap between the Stephen King voice that read my Gunslinger story, and that spoke through Richard Dreyfuss in Stand By Me, with those horrific images that had plagued me all my life. The wires were crossed and the whole works shorted out.

It wasn’t that I was suddenly not afraid of these images. It was that now I enjoyed being afraid of those images. I understood why people (or, at least, I) relished the sensation of being scared at the movies or reading scary books. I understood that a good story is a good story, and the enjoyment of taking in a good story supersedes the discomfort of fear.

A lot of people over the years had tried the approach of explaining that the things in movies weren’t real and there was no reason to be afraid of them. That wasn’t the problem for me though. I understood that. I mean, I wasn’t stupid. It’s just that I tend to experience a well told story very viscerally. I don’t know if it’s because of an overactive imagination or some sort of flaw (or gift) in my brain, but when I take in a story, I really take it in. If it’s a scary story, and it’s told well, I get scared. I’m a perfect rube for manipulative storytellers, and I’m not ashamed of that. The same was true when I was a kid. The difference is that when I was a kid, I couldn’t intellectualize it the way I can now. I was just open channel, taking in everything at full force.

What Pet Sematary did for me was teach me how to appreciate the experience rather than just letting the worst of it impose on my dreams. It gave me context for the experience. I was able to associate that feeling of being told a comforting, exciting story with fear in a way that made the fear digestible and even enjoyable.

Everything changed for me after that. I felt like I had missed all of these great stories and I began taking it all in. I started reading all the Stephen King books and watching all the movies.

By the time I hit fifth grade, I was a full fledged horror geek. Along with Stephen King, my particular obsession was Freddy Krueger. From that point on, all the way to today, I was deeply invested in horror. I love it. I love all of it. Because I love good storytelling, and when a movie can combine good storytelling with a visceral, horror experience, I’m just about as happy as I can be.

All because of that moment in the library, watching that movie, scared out of my mind and loving it. Hallelujah, praise the King.

On a side note, since we’re talking about Stephen King and movies.

To this day I’m a die-hard Stephen King defender. His books aren’t always good (and can be, at times, downright terrible) but I respect the shit out of the man and will nearly always step up to his defense in an argument. Especially when it comes to discussions about movies based on his books. Which is to say that, the vast majority of the time, I will defend the fact that King himself doesn’t actually make these movies. It bothers me when people will call a movie a “Stephen King movie” when it’s not actually a Stephen King movie. A lot of really terrible movies have been made based on Stephen King books, usually without any actual involvement from King himself. It drives me up the wall when people blame King for a shitty movie based on his material. So often, people make these movies without any real understanding of what made the story work in the novel. So a really great Stephen King book (Christine for instance) is made into a really shitty movie (Christine for instance) and people blame Steve rather than the people who actually made the movie.

Now, on the rare occasion that King IS involved in the making of a movie, then I have no problem placing the blame directly at his feet. I love the man and I’m a fan to the end, but Stephen King should not be allowed anywhere near a movie set (except perhaps to film the occasional cameo). Pet Sematary was a rare fluke when King managed to write a script for a movie and it worked out mostly alright. And let’s be honest, as scary as it is in parts, Pet Sematary isn’t really that great of a movie. It’s effective in a lot of ways, and there are really great aspects of it (Fred Gwynne was so great) in it, but it’s also got a few pretty glaring flaws. That said, it’s leagues beyond some of the stuff King has done with his partner in cinematic crime Mick Garris. So it’s a mixed bag. Creepshow was a fun movie and I think it succeeded in what it was trying to do, but beyond that, I think Stephen King needs to leave movie making to the professionals.