Needful Things (1993) – Review

While a lot of Stephen King titles are now on their second or third go round on the adaption roundabout, there’s the odd one that stays steadfastly on a single one. Usually, the reason for this is they’ve attempted to adapt one of the Maine Man’s more denser tomes that have been accused of carrying one of King’s more criticised crimes – the charge that he overwrites. Of course, such a complaint is ridiculous, after all every book that’s ever been written is as long as it needs to be, but just because King’s work is lovingly layered and detailed on the page, it doesn’t mean you can cram it all onto celluloid without some major cuts.
Some of the author’s more girthier works have either found its way onto TV in the form of a miniseries (The Tommyknockers, The Stand, the 90s adaption of It) or full blown seasons (Under The Dome), but that didn’t stop Fraiser Clarke Heston (son of Charlton) from spitting on his hands and attempting to wrestle Needful Things into a feature format whether it would fit or not.

The town of Castle Rock, Maine has been host to some strange happenings in the past, but rabid Saint Bernards and murderous pseudonyms soon pale into insignificance when Leland Gaunt breezes into the neighbourhood. He’s here to open an antique store right in the centre of town and the typically curious townsfolk have been abuzz about how such a business could possibly stay afloat when it’s clientele would surely be quite limited. However, shortly before it’s official opening day, Needful Things makes its first sale in the form of a rare Mickey Mantel baseball card that Gaunt sells to a young sports enthusiast named Brian Rusk.
Things start to take a strange turn when Gaunt claims that he doesn’t actually want a cash payment for the item, but instead demands that the young boy perform some kind of prank on a particular member of the local community. However, while this seems rather harmless, soon Leland has more people secretly doing various little tricks and practical jokes on their neighbours in order to claim their own, personal, needful thing. This proves to be something of an issue as the good people of Castle Rock all have their little grudges and dislikes and once little Brian starts the ball rolling, the animosity that’s been lurking under the surface soon bubbles to the surface.
Be it the long standing issues that exist between bullish turkey farmer Wilma Jerzyck and shy Nettie Cobb; the bitter yearning for his glory days that lurks within drunken local Hugh Priest; the hostile attitude held by the local Catholics and Baptists; or the fact that big shot embezzler, Danforth “Buster” Keaton is as paranoid as all get out; soon Gaunt has them all at each other’s throats. But can upstanding sheriff Alan Pangborn manage to figure out what the hell is going on before Gaunt’s devilish influence manages to envelop him too?

I’ve always been a little fond of Fraiser Clarke Heston’s Needful Things, but I’ll be the first to admit that the film is overstuffed as hell. Essentially one of King’s fables that takes an invading, outside force that strips away the civil facade of small-town folk, part of the novel’s power came from the fact that the author takes his sweet time introducing and detailing a sizable cast of characters who all have weaknesses and flaws that Gaunt is able to take advantage of, allowing the sheer amount of them to allow the story to slowly gain terrible momentum as they all soon start to lose control. However, trying to attempt this with only a 2 hour running time could be described as foolhardy at best and downright hopeless at worst as the pairing down of the novel only succeeds in removing a lot of the epic nature of King’s “last” Castle Rock story. It also doesn’t help that Heston seems a little unsure of the tone he should be using, bouncing from the sort of melodrama you’d expect from the Lifetime channel to leaning heavily on some truly impressive explosions for the finale. However, from time to time the director nails the darkly numerous atmosphere from the book as numerous, “upstanding” citizens suddenly see their lives practically undone overnight. The meltdown of the self important Danforth almost veers into deranged farce as his paranoid beliefs of the government watching him soon spill over into a full blown psychotic break that involves murder, sniper rifles and explosive vests. Elsewhere, Heston plays up the chilling, yet ludicrous nature of the film by staging the brutal cleaver vs. kitchen knife face off between Wilma and Nettie to Schubert’s Ave Maria and certainly isn’t afraid to fling around the red stuff when he needs to, but not only is his approach frustratingly inconsistent, the runtime simply isn’t enough to pull off the book’s sneakiest trick – making you spend so much time with each denizen of the town that you care about what happens to them.

However, while Heston struggles with his material, he is greatly aided by a legitimately impressive cast of character actors who all are willing to do the heavy lifting in order to try and flesh their characters as much as they can in the time alloted. Taking point is the always dependable Ed Harris, but while the movie mostly has his small town cop playing catch up to weirdness going on (he jumps to the conclusion of “devil” bizarrely quickly), he gets to go full Ed Harris during the climax when he delivers an enormously pissed-off speech where he passionately asks every one to stop being pricks. Elsewhere its a veritable smorgasbord of “Oh hey, it’s that guy” actors as such faces as Bonnie Bedelia, Amanda Plummer, William Morgan Sheppard and Don S. Davis are each seduced and corrupted by Leland Gaunt and his cursed items, but taking the prize for going above and beyond is J.T. Walsh who plays one of King’s typically bullish pillars of the community who usually turn out to be angry lunatics with the gusto of a man finding a dream role.
However, presiding over it all is Max Von Sydow’s Gaunt who seems to legitimately relish his role as the devilish shop proprietor who loves nothing more than bring out the psychotic asshole within us all. In fact, the actor is digging it so much, the film doesn’t even try to hide his biblical roots and pretty much gives his game away from the very moment he steps out of his sleek, black car. Usually, this would be something of major writing faux par, but Sydow seems to be getting such a giggle out of dropping a metric ton of loaded lines like “I’m afriad I have a tendency to turn up the heat.” or “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.”, it’s virtually impossible to fault him.

However, living now as we do in the age of prestige television, if any book of King’s would benefit a lavish, six episode miniseries on a streaming site with money to burn, then surely Needful Things is it. Cast it smartly and bring in a director with a similar feel for the author as a Flanagan or Darabont and you’ve got a potentially cracking black comedy where feuding locals go from spilling the tea to spilling blood. Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like the movie, but it only scratches the surface of the true bulk of the novel. Always keep the receipt, I guess…
🌟🌟🌟