If I had to guess, the drive to make this into a movie was likely 'Let's get two good actors in the roles and let them have some fun.' In that case, the film is a resounding success Joan Allen and Anthony LaPaglia are as good as they've been in years, with LaPaglia in particular displaying a gift for King's folksy wordplay (his delivery of 'snoots', referring to a couple of bitchy girls, is pretty perfect). There's a mini-climax in which it seems she might get in trouble for what she did when a cop comes snooping around, but that blows over. It's a pretty simple tale of a woman finding out that her husband is a serial killer, and (spoilers ahead) after sort of dealing with it for a while, she decides to kill him and make it look like an accident. Maybe if there was another season of Nightmares & Dreamscapes it'd make for a good premiere episode (especially if King adapted again, to help promote it), but if I was in charge of deciding which of his stories get turned into movies, it wouldn't be one I'd focus on, or even consider at all. Still, I hope anyone who broke this rule wasn't too harshly punished.Īnyway, it's a pretty good little thriller, more or less overcoming a pretty big hurdle: the original short story doesn't exactly cry out for adaptation. Not sure why he's so possessive about this particular movie, but I assume it has something to do with the fact that it's the first time he's adapted one of his stories for a theatrical feature since Pet Sematary*, which is kind of a big deal. It HAD to have the 'Stephen King's' as part of the title, which is amusing because he didn't direct it and even Carpenter doesn't seem to mind if you refer to, say, John Carpenter's Vampires as Vampires (on the flipside, Wes Craven refers to New Nightmare as 'Wes Craven's New Nightmare' when discussing it). A couple months back I got a press release for Stephen King's A Good Marriage that included specific instructions not to refer to the movie as simply 'A Good Marriage'.

A good marriage king