Kingdom Hospital (2004)

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Screenplay: Stephen King, Tabitha King and Richard Dooling

Cast: Andrew McCarthy as Dr. Hook; Bruce Davison as Dr. Stegman; Meagen Fay as Dr. Brenda Abelson; Ed Begley Jr. as Dr. Jesse James; Sherry Miller as Dr. Lona Massingale; Allison Hossack as Dr. Christine Draper; Diane Ladd as Sally Druse; Jack Coleman as Peter Rickman; Jodelle Micah Ferland as Ghost Girl

Back in my childhood, when my parents were obsessed with watching Stephen King adaptations, Kingdom Hospital was just a very eccentric horror tale set at a hospital that just happened to involve a talking anteater. Revisiting the show is now stranger in knowledge that Stephen King, the legendary horror author in one of the few times directly working on a project, is remaking Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, a two series project between 1994 and 1997 that was itself strange, unpredictable and alien. For von Trier, they were just before his Dogma 95 phase of stripping his productions of all artifice, when he was originally a very stylish and artificial director for his first few films, The Kingdom's first season his most well regarded piece of genre filmmaking in his career. Kingdom Hospital, also about a haunted hospital but shipped to Maine in the United States, as a project, funding particularly by Disney as it's a Touchstone Television production, is significantly weirder as a concept in knowledge of this.

So King developed the series. It was first a mini-series until King had gotten to the point of a "Bible" for the second series only for it never to happen. Unlike The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital is built on an old dyeing factory, but the staff is still a disorganised lot. Heads more obsessed with blue-sky thinking whilst others steal actual heads off corpses in ill advised jokes, all before you even consider the building is haunted, a psychic older woman Sally Druse (Diane Ladd) finding ways to stay in the hospital to rectify this. Here the tone is softened from the Danish production, with more sympathetic characters and certain subplots excised, like the doctor in The Kingdom who wanting a cancerous liver in his own body for experimentation or the weird way Udo Kier stole the final shot of the first season, and did so in the second by way of grotesque puppet limbs.

More emphasis is placed on the supernatural tale, about a ghost girl (Jodelle Micah Ferland) who is also an ominous figure of death. Added as well is the plot of Peter Rickman, played by Dynasty star Jack Coleman, as an artist who is left stuck in a hospital bed in a semi-comatose state due to a hit and run incident, the anteater a mysterious figure known as Antibus who offers him help if he helps the anteater. How this continues throughout the show is not a mysterious one, very straightforward in that the goal is to help the ghost girl and prevent a major catastrophe, as between constant miniature earthquakes and a realm between the hospital and the dead, the Kingdom Hospital is on weak foundations.

The series is focused in the beginning on this progression. It is more eccentric then the dark humours of The Kingdom, more mainstream horror than the eeriness of Lars von Trier's take. Notably, in a really interesting detail, King worked on most of the scripts, with exceptions including co-writing with fellow author Richard Dooling and even his own wife Tabitha King, bringing a connected sense of progression. The series also had one director over all thirteen episodes, the latter a fascinating difference from most television where there are multiple directors and the producers/creators have more control. Said director Craig R. Baxley is also a former stunt man who helmed Stone Cold (1991), an action film with former American football star Brian Bosworth, which adds to the strange nature of this production.

The cast itself, a mix of Americans and a Canadian production, are as idiosyncratic: former Brat Pack star Andrew McCarthy as Dr. Hook, the cocky yet noble doctor who lives in the belly of the hospital; Bruce Davison as Dr. Stegman in probably the best role, probably one of the most iconic characters of The Kingdom finely transposed by Davison as a vain egotist from outside Maine who has a string of malpractice cases and a pitiful view of humanity; Diane Ladd, who has been in this territory before in David Lynch's Wild At Heart (1990), as the older psychic; and among the rest Ed Begley Jr. as Dr. Jesse James, who has an added humour to his casting as he had a role in the popular medical drama St. Elsewhere.

Whilst considerably toned down from The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital is strong in the first half. You cannot ignore the influence of Stephen King, a considerably different person in views of the world than Lars von Trier. Von Trier back at this stage was still considered a bit of joker, playfulness as he would always end the episodes of the first season with himself talking to the viewer, and always with a motif of making the sign of the cross followed by the devil horns to finish. Later in life, whilst the humour was there, it is arguable his view of humanity became significantly bleaker. Stephen King, in contrast, grew into an optimist who nonetheless has tackled incredibly dark (and dark humoured) work which can be nasty.

He does find details from The Kingdom which are fully taken over and have surprising symmetry to his own work, be it the character of Elmer Traff (Jamie Harrold), a goofball who is trying to woo an older female doctor including with the ill-advised theft of a head, to the two orderlies with Down's Syndrome who also act like a Greek chorus who know more than anyone else. The later is from The Kingdom, but it is surprisingly connected to King's trend of sympathising with disabled characters to the point they usually have unnatural gifts unnoticed by the outside world, causing one to wonder how he and von Trier reached these characters (notwithstanding the latter's fascinating film The Idiots (1998) which confronted views of disability) or if von Trier had one of King's paperbacks at one point in his life.

The production does feel like a mini-series as it was intended to in the first half, as Kingdom Hospital moves at a steady pace, helped considerably by the fact that a lot of the show is played broadly for humour but always drip feds important plot points. It wears its heart on its sleeve, as ultimately the villains of this story are corrupted ordinary people, be it exploitative factory owners or a deranged doctor who know skulks the ghost world in stereotypical mad doctor form. The best aspects of the show however are when it is at its weirdest and funniest. It was not able to be as strange as The Kingdom got, but enough is there in the first half that promises a lot, just in how the personification of death is an anteater of all things. One episode is entirely devoted to the doctors bursting into "Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye" to a patient, one that happens to be a convicted criminal, which could be entirely indulgent if it wasn't compelling.

There was almost a dangerous irony in Kingdom Hospital being released the same year as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), a British production by Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness for Channel 4, a piss take of authors like King as a bad hospital set horror show with weird touches. Controversially I find Darkplace off-putting because of how broad and over-the-top the "bad" aspects were than naturally blending in absurd touches. Kingdom Hospital in comparison is unintentionally ridiculous at points, especially whenever Diane Ladd gets into supernatural terminology, but Stephen King's greatest virtue for cinema and television beyond ideas was also his sincerity. Kingdom Hospital also juggles different tones and finds a way, when it is good, to balance characters on two different spectrums in the same world, from Dr. Hook who keeps a shrine every mistake that has lead to a patient's death including his own to Otto (Julian Richings) the all-purpose man with a German Shepherd dog the audience can hear talk, managing to make the pair and others blend together perfectly well.

Personally, the best episode is number 6 The Young and the Headless, which is arguably for me where the series peaks and the problems do creep in afterwards in later episodes, culminating into an excuse for Where's Your Head At by English electronic duo Basement Jaxx to have two literal meanings. One that this is the episode where Dr. Elmer makes the ill advised decision to steal a dead man's head, because it looks like himself for a sick joke, and that to deal with the earthquakes the hospital hire a seismologist, whose recovery from alcoholism by pure accident is broken and hits him like a ton of bricks. It is not a subtle use of music, but considering the music video has scientists trying to teach monkeys with human faces to play instruments, and that's not even the twist, the show for one episode fits the Basement Jaxx song perfectly as the head's owner wanders the ghost corridors of the old hospital in panic and our seismologist gets so blistered he sees ghost girls in the bottle. This does warrant mention of the good use of music; another example is that most people only know the band Foundtains of Wayne for Stacy's Mom, where this show has managed to get another Red Dragon Tattoo stuck in my head like an ear worm.

Production wise, the show is not as extreme as The Kingdom's, visibly a prelude to the Dogma 95 movement in its aesthetic for Lars von Trier; Kingdom Hospital does establish its own aesthetic, though the CGI effects have definitely aged. Where the show does stumble is near the end. Bookended by a feature length first and last episode, the show has two later episodes which stand out like sore thumbs. The first is egregious, about a disgraced baseball star that missed catching a ball at the World Series which really is not great and, introducing time travel and the ability to alter reality, many time continuity questions that are too complicated to consider, especially as this is important for the finale. The second episode I could have dealt with as, whilst King has been openly hostile about religious zealots in his work, here a priest is crucified only for miracles to take. That it is not revealed as a delusion or a trick by an evil force, but an actual miracle (even the cheesy reintroduction of the bread and fish story with tuna sandwiches), is probably the most surprising and interesting aspect as it literally leads to a major religious experience for the community as they gather in the streets. This is also the episode co-written with King's wife which suggests where the sudden change might have come from. The show however promptly forgets this episode and never considers how significant this would be to the world, making the episode ultimately pointless. That sucks as, whilst it might put people off, sudden unadulterated spirituality from a source who is not blinkered and sycophantic about the subject would have been welcome, only to be pointless because the production pretends none of it ever happened.

The show also is undone by pacing issues as, alongside those two episodes I have mentioned which benefit no one is story context¹, the show does rush into its denouement. It is neither helped, even if it is a big conclusion involving scenes set a century before the hospital existed, that the first half of the final episode has a lot of recycled clips clearly meant to refer back to, needing to explain detail but also felt like padding. This proves a bit of an anti-climax as a result. It leaves a conundrum that, whilst it was always going to live under the shadow of The Kingdom, Kingdom Hospital even without the spectre of nostalgia over it had much to admire. When the show is more earnest and silly at times, it developed its own personality, but those finale few episodes did a considerable bit to stain the show's quality continually.   

This adds a saddening notion that Stephen King, legend of horror literature, when he writes the text himself has failed. His own work adapts to the screen but always with an unpredictability, where something which is so drastically different in tone like The Shining (1980) works, where something which is faithful to him but has to work for cinema like Doctor Sleep (2019) works, choosing two films tied to each other deliberate for an example. This is a question to ask with each adaptation or work of King's in the future; here, just because he is an acclaimed author doesn't mean trying to write a TV series is going to be difficult, especially as it is Lars von Trier in an odd set of circumstances hanging over the project, who was probably baffled by the whole concept if anyone mentioned it to him.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) The baseball episode has a passage where the sports star in pinned in fear in the same room just because one of the main villains is there nearly merely ogling at him. In context it is ridiculous.