The Langoliers (1995)

 

Director: Tom Holland

Screenplay: Tom Holland

Based on the novella by Stephen King

Cast: Patricia Wettig as Laurel Stevenson; Dean Stockwell as Bob Jenkins; David Morse as Captain Brian Engle; Mark Lindsay Chapman as Nick Hopewell; Frankie Faison as Don Gaffney; Kimber Riddle as Bethany Simms; Christopher Collet as Albert "Ace" Kaussner; Kate Maberly as Dinah Catherine Bellman; Bronson Pinchot as Craig Toomy; John Griesemer as Roger Toomy

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #32 / An Abstract List Candidate

It's like a bunch of coked-up termites in a balsa wood glider.

Watching The Langoliers, a pretty infamous Stephen King adaptation for ABC, I think I know where M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (2008) originates from, with the wonder that even for his acclaimed work like Signs (2002) whether the argument he was the new Steven Spielberg was widely off the mark, and that we should've been looking at the influence of Stephen King. And trust me, Stephen King had (and still has) a profound influence that I grew up with too, one that existed before my birth in the early eighties or even earlier and has not relented. Weirdly I barely read King's actual written work, but I have however seen through my childhood, through my parents, many of the adaptations when I was younger, even tangential ones like Kingdom Hospital (2004), an eccentric remake of Lars von Trier's The Kingdom (1994) mini-series which has King's name over it. That I haven't seen The Langoliers until now is just from the fact so many films, mini-series and other projects exist and are still growing. That early on, the special blind girl who is among the main cast is introduced saying "There's something strange in that man's head," with complete seriousness, alongside mid-nineties TV budget CGI for an airplane shows, is evidence that this two-part mini-series, which can be watched as a three hour TV movie film, is notorious for a reason.

Over three hours, split over two nights, a group of people aboard an air flight find themselves to be the only ones left from the entire plane, everyone else seemingly raptured as all their possessions, even internal medical objects, are all that are left behind. Inherently the story is strange and jars to what is a very conventionally shot TV mini-series on a minor budget, seeing shots of an almost empty airplane where everything from coins to bridge work for teeth left on seats and the carpeted floor. Only one detail, if shown rather than merely told of, showing the surgical pins and peacemakers laying around would have added a creepier edge to the film, one whose production context explains both its huge flaws but also how weirdly fascinating the mini-series is for me.

Finding themselves at an abandoned airport, what you experience is a lot of dazed character actors in a scenario whose form on a page in a book is very different onscreen, an esoteric story where characters shout aloud that they cannot "smell" anything, or that they cannot hear echoes even in rooms that would have not allowed for them anyway in the actual production. The result is strange, The Happening an apt inheritor of this mood as you have everyone with a sense of the disconnected also to be found here with the cast. Most of them are completely one note and non-existence. One character is a British assassin to redeem himself, another a pilot, but others include a man whose only trait is being hungry all the time and one character, a male music student Albert who looks like quasi-Brad Dourif, wishing Dourif (even if significantly older) was here.

Even Dean Stockwell, the most recognisable cult figure, playing the Stephen King stand-in mystery writer, is performing as if befuddled with everything and proclaiming himself able to solve the mystery because he is a mystery writer aloud. It's as if he's still in the midst of a David Lynch film whilst somewhere else, and the fact he was also in Quantum Leap (1989-1993) all the years before adds the sense he has teleported into the wrong place and is inquisitively confused by everything. If anything he at least gets one of the best parts in terms of dialogue, legitimately, where he considers a theory this is all a government psychological test, convincing in a heightened unreal reality, only to immediately dismiss it because the scenario is impractically weirder than even a government would coordinate.

Bronson Pinchot as Craig Toomy, as the obnoxious businessman, also decided to chew and devour everything even beyond the walls. At the beginning established as a yuppie banker in the midst of a psychological breakdown, he is a detestable arsehole but one developed with a reason (even sympathy) in his characterisation; from the beginning sabotaging his own company before the flight, he is taking revenge on the spectre of his abusive father who forcibly moulded him into the figure he is, the "Langoliers", in possibly the most credible aspect of the plot, named after the bogeymen he was threatened with and being attached by him to the figures we only just hear of in the distance for most of the mini-series' length. His story is the most fleshed out and elaborate but is a paradox that he is a figure of tragedy but also the villain. [Major Spoiler Warning] His death, when the blind girl keeps him alive to use him as bait to be eaten, adds to the tone of The Langoliers as being an erratic creation without conventional logic because it is as conflicting and tonally off as you could get. [Spoilers Ends]

In general a lot of the exposition at times in The Langoliers does evoke a specific David Lynch moment, whether I've misremembered it or made it up, in possibly Wild at Heart (1990) where someone approaches a bar about a missing duck only to walk off and never be seen again. This mini-series, if there was a budget and some courage, needed extensive post-production techniques for the story to have worked: a stock background image of the sky that never moves; no sound effects and only dialogue, even post-dubbed dialogue; a subliminal slowness to the film (literally slowed down subtly), even decolouration of the images. Instead, they have to make excuses for the wind being audible and try to make quiet heel sounds on tarmac seem quieter than they should be. The beer scene, which will be elaborated on later in this review, is actually the most effective in demonstrating what the world the story is set in, the past as a still entity which decays and slows down, because just a step from reversed footage you get a beer regain foam. This premise is actually an inspired one, suggesting that time travel is impossible because the past is a dead form which decays and vanishes, to be devoured by the titular Langoliers. In a world where there was some creative risk, this idea would have been startling and interest to witness, even in an entirely different story.

The story we got could have been told in less than three hours but, in mind that the production is still told in a linear narratively driven fashion, the length arguably is a pleasure in itself as the plot is deliberately stretched along in a slow pace. Maybe that might be just me, I will not deny it, nor can you get past some of the clichés having issues. Most of them are just clichés, though one of the biggest, the only ones and I feel uncomfortable bringing it up, is unfortunate that is yes, this does follow that problematic cliché in horror that the black character dies first, a concept even if accidental or by coincidence was sadly talked about even as a joke in horror with justifiable grievances. Most of the mini-series, arguably, is a true guilty pleasure for me baring the sense of guilt, where a great premise becomes something really peculiar. Where exposition becomes less its title and more the common language here, all whilst the exploration of the airport and the drama of divided figures becomes the fascinating anti-drama over the three hours, all whilst the Langoliers only appear near the end and, as can be attested to in screenshots, are early obsolete CGI.

Rather than Mick Garris, who has directed most of Stephen King's work for television, we have Tom Holland, famously of Fright Night (1985) and the first Child's Play (1988), helming the mini-series; his 1996 adaptation of Thinner, by King, is better put together but with an equally strange tone due to its plot, cursed pie and all, mixed with a very misanthropic morality tale of the pointlessness of revenge. Honestly, a lot of The Langoliers' entertainment for me in comparison is how utterly kitsch it is, even the end shot a freeze frame of characters jumping for joy as it out of a light hearted comedy conclusion. The experience itself, for me with low expectations, was actually enthralling especially as no review I have come across have ever described the utterly strange tone it possesses, The Langoliers hitting legitimate oddness in how characters puzzle themselves over scenarios. In a strange phantom realm outside time, they find even the discovery of beer redeveloping froth in the air plane surprising and that becomes a major plot development, a random beer drank viewed as the best ever drunk, spoken as if ingesting the sacred nectar of the Gods.

It is this type of work we bizarre miscreants who indulge in the bargain bins of "cult", to normal peoples' bafflement, find fascinating, legitimate UFOs from unexpected sources where they feel like they were produced accidentally, all with the sense of existing in their own "off" logic even in terms of performance. This is a much rarer thing than even a successful attempt to deliberately create this mood, and one's treasured UFO is not the same as another's, especially as you have films which develop micro-cults whether with some merit or notorious, and especially as ironic attempts exist from the 2010s onwards especially.

To accidentally create a mini-series, especially as a the script being full of exposition and one dimensional characters would be death to experience in another work, whose tone does literally feel like you've woken in a timeless state outside of reality itself, or is watch as if half-dreamt in front of a TV at night in the midst of insomnia, is something a project in this medium should hope to redeem themselves in accidentally becoming if they cannot be great. This cannot even begin to be held as a great Stephen King adaptation, but one of the strangest is as worthy a title to achieve than one which is forgettable or a waste of a production fee. I will also be brutal that, if I was to dive into more Stephen King series, I would not be surprised if there were mini-series I would argue were just dull or terrible, as King's prolificness is compounded by how much was adapted of his work, and whatever the films and television series (even from memories of youth) were all adapted well or not. This is at least interesting.

Abstract Spectrum: Anticlimactic/Hazy

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