Yet another Stephen King short story is coming to the big screen. Mercy – based off the short story ‘Gramma’ from the Skeleton Crew anthology – follows two a woman and her two sons as they move to Maine to care for their titular elderly grandmother. It’s a horror film and while it’s a decent story that will translate well, it is a bit predictable. If you don’t want to read it yourself or don’t want to wait, you can hop over to the Wikipedia article and spoil yourselves silly.
The recent news is that Dylan McDermott will be joining the cast fresh from his American Horror Story gig. You’d think all the horror was starting to rub off on him if not for his recent appearances in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the Campaign. He will be joining the Walking Dead’s Chandler Riggs who will be playing the lead character, George, and Joel Courtney from Super 8 who will play his brother. It will be pretty traditional horror fanfare in the end but at least it will have a pretty decent cast.
Honestly, I like a good Stephen King flick but my issue is that not all Stephen King books can be condensed into a single movie. They are massive. There is a reason so many opt for the miniseries treatment. Which is also why I’m pretty annoyed that they keep talking about trying to make the Stand one movie. If Peter Jackson can make three movies out of the Hobbit (the Hobbit!) then we can have a couple Stand movies just fine.
This is a growing trend in Hollywood whether you like it or not and if people are going to do Stephen King right they need to accept that some of the stories are just too big for one movie.
‘Gramma,’ though, will do quite nicely as a 100 minute or so adaptation and I suspect it will deliver on the easy thrills that King’s works are known for. We probably won’t get the vague Cthulhu mythos connections that Wikipedia mentions, though. Honestly, I don’t remember them but I was also probably ten when I stole my Dad’s paperback of Skeleton Crew. I wouldn’t have appreciated the Cthulhu props either. Nor, sadly, will most of today’s modern movie goers.
Still, if we’re lucky, the film makers might just throw us a few easter eggs.
Either way, this one’s made my list of movies to watch.
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