“No shitter ever came between me and Christine!”Before Keith Gordon became a fiercely independent filmmaker (who hasn’t made a feature since the failure of his messy 2003 The Singing Detective), he was one of Hollywood’s go-to actors for the likable, slightly nerdy character who just might get the girl.
Here, he gets to step up and really sink his teeth into a flawed, almost-great Stephen King yarn directed by a true horror legend.
What hinders this tale of a demon car and the boy who loved her is the pervasive feeling that despite the great dialogue by scripter Bill Phillips, certain story beats appear to be missing. Sometimes a filmmaker intentionally leaves out info so an audience can make up their own minds (don’t forget this is the same director who made The Thing, remember that ambiguous ending?), but here it’s obviously just material that was cut for time.
The supporting cast is great, fine character actors all around, although Alexandra Paul’s part feels underwritten, and those effects, especially the car reconstruction, are still mind-blowing. Still, the ending feels anticlimactic, there are a few too many logic leaps (Dennis never gets concrete evidence that the car is doing all of the killing but decides to stage a showdown anyway), and the first half is superior to the second. It’s a “good” movie, but maybe with a longer cut, it could’ve been a classic.
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