It’s not like Stephen King has been gypped out of TV time for his horror stories.
The master of creep-show lit, who’s blessed with a prodigious, best-selling flair for tingling spines and creating spooky thrills, has supplied primetime with frequent and often successful adaptations of such signature King things as “It,” “The Stand,” “The Shining” and “Salem’s Lot.”
Just this May, ABC rolled out another paranormal barrel of King’s boogeyman entertainment with the so-so evil demons thriller “Desperation.”
But none of these previous, sometimes cheesily enjoyable adaptations – not one of them – possessed the classy, sophisticated sheen of “Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King,” a wicked cool new summertime anthology series that premieres Wednesday night on TNT.
Taken from various King short-story anthologies, and produced by Bill Haber (“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”) with care and enthusiasm, “Nightmares & Dreamscapes” presents an eclectic, stylishly crafted sampling of eight different unsettling, absorbing fables of Kingly weirdness and wonder.
Plus, the various actors populating these slyly twisted tales are top notch, a lineup that includes William Hurt, Marsha Mason, William H. Macy, Kim Delaney and Tom Berenger.
Along the way, “Nightmares & Dreamscapes” manages to be refreshingly old fashioned and sleekly contemporary – echoing the suspenseful and sometimes surreal tales of such classic anthology series “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” while never feeling like a musty piece of nostalgia.
But instead of simplistic horror and gore, sharp-witted psychological suspense is the mind game motif in many of the stories. No cheap thrills permitted. But, yes, wonderful weirdness abounds as a pair of hour-long stories are told each Wednesday night through Aug. 2.
And the series gets off to a dazzling, no-commercial-interruptions start with Hurt in “Battleground,” the darkly wigged odyssey of a professional hit man.
We meet Hurt’s contract killer as he carries out a stealthy, precise hit on an internationally renowned toymaker. Then the real bizarre fun begins after Hurt returns to his deluxe San Francisco apartment aerie only to be besieged by a heavily armed company of toy soldiers on a mission of vengeance.
The look on Hurt’s face as he begins to realize his mind-boggling predicament is priceless. And “Battleground,” which features some extremely nifty, state-of-the-art special effects, is a total dialogue-free delight that offers nutty little echoes of everything from “Gulliver’s Travels” to “King Kong.”
“Crouch End,” the opening night’s second surreal adventure – in which a newlywed couple (Eion Bailey, Claire Forlani) honeymooning in London becomes trapped in another scary dimension of time – is a letdown by comparison.
But things kick into high gear again next week with a pair of compelling flights of King’s crazed imagination, including “Umney’s Last Case,” where Macy has a dual-role acting party. He plays a hard-boiled, Philip Marlowe-style private eye in 1930s Los Angeles and the tormented best-selling author who created the jaunty sleuth.
“Nightmares & Dreamscapes,” fueled by strong acting, solid writing and superb, visually arresting production values, delivers high-quality summertime entertainment.
from the rich twilight zone of Stephen King’s mind.
Nothing scary about that.
–
www.freep.com.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-07-11-06 1837EDT
Comments are no longer available on this story