“You have the right to remain silent,” the big cop said in his robot’s voice. “If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I’m going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”
It’s been almost twenty years since I read Desperation and its parallel-universe “sequel,” The Regulators, yet I remember a lot about them. Why ABC didn’t make the obvious decision—simultaneously producing two television adaptations with the same cast—is beyond me. According to Wikipedia, the network practically sabotaged the movie by airing it at the same time as American Idol.
I try to look past the limitations of a medium, I really do, but made-for-TV movies are so quickly produced you’d have to be blind not to see flaws. What ends up on the screen often feels like a first rehearsal. Desperation is no exception. At one point you can plainly see the squib jacket on an actor’s back after his character’s shot in rapid succession. I can forgive the camera operators for not noticing it and I’ll assume the editors were under similar time constraints. What really hurts is that shot could have been easily trimmed to hide the flub.
What Desperation gets right is the casting of Ron Perlman and Tom Skerrit. Although Perlman looks nothing like the villain I imagined (wasn’t he, like, way bigger in the book?), he organically slips the “Tak!” catchphrase into his dialog with uncanny timing. Meanwhile, Skerrit looks exactly what I imagined Marinville would look like, which makes him the least distracting fixture of the cast. The best acting is when Perlman and Skerrit share screen time.
The film is chilling at times, but that has more to do with King’s involvement than anything else. There’s just something inherently scary about a psychotic cop framing unsuspecting travelers on a desert road. The helplessness comes through despite Standards’ best efforts to censor the hell out of it.
I’m a big fan of the director and I obviously admire the writer (King also wrote the teleplay), but I don’t have much more to say about this one. The end result is so mediocre, there’s no point dwelling on it.
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