The Tommyknockers TV adaptation seemed “kind of cheap” to Stephen King. Published in 1987, The Tommyknockers offered up a Lovecraftian tale of a small Maine town taken over by a bizarre form of alien mind control. The follow up to King’s massive 1986 tome IT, the novel was another best seller for the writer but was later disavowed by King who called it “an awful book.”

Despite the lack of love for Tommyknockers from its own author, the book was popular enough to be adapted into a 1993 miniseries starring Jimmy Smits. But like the book, the miniseries was savaged by critics and currently holds a 29% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Like so many of the King adaptations that hit network TV in the 1990s, Tommyknockers suffers from poor production values and feels very much like a quick and easy attempt to cash in on King’s name.

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Never one to shy away from ripping his own books or adaptations of his books, King himself has weighed in on the Tommyknockers miniseries, and his assessment of it is in line with the general consensus. Speaking to the New York Times, King slammed Tommyknockers saying, “I didn’t like it; I didn’t care for it at all.” He added, “It felt kind of cheap and thrown together. I felt like they missed the sense of the book.” King did have praise for star Smits, calling him a “fine actor,” but hated the dialog given to Smits’ poet character Jim Gardener, saying “he had to give a bunch of pretentious, portentous lines.”

Tommyknockers the miniseries indeed joins a long list of adaptations of his own works that King has publicly ripped. The most famous movie on that list is of course Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Jack Nicholson’s unhinged portrayal of Jack Torrance coming in for particular criticism from King. The author also has disdain for the widely-liked adaptation of The Running Man, ripping the film for turning the story’s everyman protagonist into a muscle-bound superhero. King’s hatred for the bizarre Pierce Brosnan version of The Lawnmower Man was so strong he actually sued the studio to have his name removed from it. But just to prove he’s capable of ripping himself too, King slammed his own work directing Maximum Overdrive, infamously calling the film “a moron movie.”

Indeed it’s hard to argue with King’s assessment of Tommyknockers the miniseries, an attempt at visualizing a bad book that unsurprisingly turned out bad itself. But perhaps Tommyknockers will get another chance to be good, as James Wan reportedly is developing a movie adaptation of the novel (the status of that particular project has not been updated recently). In fact, it seemingly should be possible to condense Tommyknockers into a solid 2-hour Lovecraftian horror movie, and perhaps Wan is the man to make that happen. Then again, it’s possible The Tommyknockers is just a terrible idea that no one can possibly adapt into a good movie.

Source: New York Times

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Dan Zinski
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Dan Zinski is a freelance writer currently contributing to Screen Rant on a regular basis. His previous endeavors include writing on sports, general pop culture, celebrity gossip and various other forms of mindless distraction. To date he has left approximately 100 unfinished screenplays in his wake, the majority of which have thankfully been deleted entirely from our plane of existence. He currently resides wherever his head happens to lie. His hobbies include eating Doritos, playing Atari games, avoiding eye contact and drinking excessive amounts of coffee. His favorite actors include Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Cate Blanchett, Groucho Marx and Richard Burton. His all-time favorite movie critics are Pauline Kael, Manny Farber and of course himself. He regards Rogue One as one of history’s great travesties.

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