Your Daily Dracula –Jerusalem’s Lot week #3, Rutger Hauer as Kurt Barlow, ‘Salem’s Lot (2004)

Your Daily Dracula –Jerusalem’s Lot week #3, Rutger Hauer as Kurt Barlow, ‘Salem’s Lot (2004)

[my notes on the miniseries]

This new version of the Stephen King novel – which restores the apostrophe to the title – obviously owes a great deal to Tobe Hooper’s 1979 take on the material, not least because this is also a two-part miniseries with the usual mini-climaxes before every ad-break (and, on first broadcast, those infuriating tiny teaser trailers for the next between-ads bit of plot and the running plugs for TNT’s next big production blotted over every space – including the end credits which would otherwise seem to be running over an apt cover of ‘Paint It Black’) and general structure.  Like the old version, this redo – directed by Mikael Salomon (Hard Rain) and scripted by Peter Filardi (The Craft) – frames the bulk of the story with top-and-tail bits that show Ben Mears (Rob Lowe) and kid vampire-hunter Mark Petrie (Dan Byrd) still mopping up the evil, which is out in the wider world.

It opens with a new-made scene that derives from an interview quote King once gave about how he’d begin a ‘Salem’s sequel – Ben tracks down Father Callahan (James Cromwell) to a soup kitchen, then attacks him so they both wind up in hospital, where the evidently-dying writer tells an orderly about what went down on the lot.  No one has yet hit on the idea of doing one of these ‘70s Kings as a period piece, so everything gets a makeover to slot into the new century – instead of Aurora Universal monsters, Mark works at Cenobite hobby kits (purely to justify the bit where he grabs a crucifix from a monster diorama to fend off his floating dead friend – Mark’s status as monster fan kid is otherwise played down, perhaps because everyone knows all about vampires from Buffy these days and so his FM-derived wisdom is less useful); Straker and Barlow do most of their antique-dealing on the net; Susan’s ex is jealous because he has snooped on her computer and discovered e-mails to other men; the secrets of the Lot now include baby-battering and father-daughter incest (which would seem more of a radical change if it hadn’t been in Peyton Place – one of King’s obvious models – before the Lot was even invented); and the high school teacher (Andre Braugher – still waiting for the huge career he deserved after Homicide) is gay.

Shot in Australia, with some generic Yank accents and little feel for Maine, it has a different small-town look – all dirty snow, ugly landfill dump, trailer park trash and CGI haunted house up on the hill, as opposed to the pretty-pretty tourist vision with a sinister edge found in Hooper’s film and everything from Peyton Place to Twin Peaks.   This extends to the interior of the Marsten House, which is credibly disgusting, and an assortment of nasty, bitter, ugly redneck characters who are horrid enough even before they get turned into vampires – King’s tendency to demonise the underprivileged and the rich, while valorising the middle-class (doctor, teacher, writer, even aspirant artist waitress) is at its most-pronounced in the early books, and we get a more extreme version here, where villains are cacklingly fiendish (Donald Sutherland’s evil Santa Claus – abruptly killed for no apparent reason halfway through the second night as if his contracted shooting days were used up – is the biggest ham-slice) and all the heroes earnestly soul-searching.

Some of Filardi’s changes streamline the plot – making the bad business at the Marsten House Ben’s childhood trauma (with a Robert McKee-style personal problem to be overcome – Ben thinks he let a child die by his cowardice and has been trying to make up for it ever since) and tying in the evil of Hubie Marsten with the eternal nastiness of the vampire Barlow (Rutger Hauer), stressing that the town has had to invite the monster and has been calling for a long time.  Father Callahan, just a drunk coward in the novel, is here converted to evil by being force-fed vampire blood and becomes Barlow’s replacement Renfield, though the usually excellent Cromwell also reverts to scenery-chewing.

It works best in snippets – a vampire crushing itself to crawl through a small vent to taunt Ben, a moment of geriatric romance that does survive death, the first time a vampire disintegrates against the ceiling, the schoolbus full of vengeful vampire kids attacking the nasty driver, the sheriff (Steven Vidler) quietly leaving for Florida where he has a newborn grandchild because he doesn’t see the town’s worth saving, the vampire Susan (Samantha Mathis) giving Ben closure on his old trauma and hinting that some personality does survive transformation.  But it can’t get all the material in even the long running time – the book’s sense of a whole town turning vampire is missing, and the worst lapse is Barlow, who pops up in the first night for a token scene as a semi-sinister old guy with glasses before showing himself as a standard, not-terribly-threatening mastermind in the second part.  This king vampire, lazily played as just another Rutger Hauer villain, seems to get killed rather too easily, and leaves behind him an untidy tangle of plot, not to mention a whole bunch of vampire characters we’ve lost track of – including some built-up as major villains (the white trash blackmailing couple – and what happens to their baby?) or semi-tragic figures (the straightened-out cripple and his rich slutty girlfriend).

Perhaps, as with The Dead Zone or the Carrie remake, a continuing series is considered – the expensive stars have died, but lesser names can carry on (though this was mooted for David Soul in the 1980s and didn’t happen).  In one aside, the doctor (Robert Mammone) muses that vampires are extreme anemics and could probably be cured by weeks on a dialysis machine – a lump of pseudoscience in the middle of a story that otherwise goes with vampirism as a spiritual-supernatural phenomenon (oddly, Bram Stoker does this too, with a paragraph about Carpathian radium deposits).  Overcast, grim and depressing rather than scary, and hobbled with elementary or done-too-often elements, this still isn’t the film of the book we’d really like – but it covers so much material that there are valuable stretches in here somewhere, between plugs for The Grid and the nearly 2-to-1 content-to-ad ratio that would be illegal in the UK and is irritating even on fast-forward.