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The working version.
Stephen King has a long history with adaptations of his work. No small amount of it has been decent to good books being turned into movies that are best described as “free, please take”. Is this a problem with trying to cram a book big enough to beat a rhino into submission into ninety minutes? We attempt to find out by watching Mangler and Cat’s Eye.
The Mangler is, inexplicably, a movie based on the short story about a laundry machine that gets possessed. The story is quaint and functional considering that it was written in the seventies for a fiction magazine. The movie though is a pure mess with Robert Englund as the evil laundry owner and Ted Levine, who played Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, as a detective. There’s also a laundry machine which looks like it was designed to be in a whimsical children’s movie starring precocious British children who get to take a tour of the mysterious laundry factory.
Cat’s eye is an anthology, adapting two short stories and making up an entire third. The first two are grounded with nary a magic blue collar worker or supernatural to be found. The best is the first in Quitters Inc staring James Woods before he was an angry grandpa on Twitter. The very last is hilariously bad and about a wall goblin that steals souls from children. The best part about the whole movie is the kicky eighties song that belongs on any play list with the Ghostbusters theme.
