April 1, 2009

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)

Sometimes They Come Back (1991)
Watched March 29, 2009



SYNOPSIS

Evil teens from Hell return to finish unfinished business with a teacher who has just moved back to his old town many years after his brother’s tragic death.


SHORT REVIEW

I enjoyed “Sometimes They Come Back”, but I’m not completely sure I understand what happened, and it was pretty stupid at times.


REVIEW

I think just about every Stephen King novel or short story has a film adaptation. It's ridiculous how many of them there are. On his IMDb page, King is credited as "Writer" for 108 films, and I'm guessing he was credited on the majority of those because he wrote whatever the film was based on. 108. That's amazing.


"Sometimes They Come Back" definitely isn't one of the most well-known adaptations of King's work, and it's definitely not the best, either. "The Shining", "Carrie", "It", "The Mist" and many more are all far superior to this film. But "Sometimes They Come Back" is still pretty good, just not to the level of those previously mentioned movies.


First off, the movie's actually kind of scary, especially for a movie that was made for TV. It's got its moments of scares. It's also pretty lame at times, but like I said, it has its moments. The movie's pretty dark, also, with the victims all being kids that didn't do anything wrong. All they really did was get along with their teacher. That'll teach them to get along with people. But, sometimes, it's pretty funny when I don't think it was supposed to be.


King seems to do a very good job of developing his characters, and making you care about them throughout the story, and "Sometimes They Come Back" is no exception. All the characters are pretty good and you care about their fate, which is rare in horror movies, to be honest. Mostly you're just cheering for them to die. Or maybe that's just me. Oh well.


SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

But, honestly, I really have no idea why the teens from Hell actually came back. I know "sometimes they come back", but why? I don't really know what kind of unfinished business they had, because it's their own fault that they were hit by a speeding train. It's not like the protagonist pushed them in front of said train and then covered it up as an accident. It was basically their own stupidity. So apparently, the moral of the story is that if you stupidly decide to head back to your car and get hit by a train when you easily could have just ran away and lived, you get to come back from the dead and blame your death on some school teacher that never really said or did anything. Interesting.

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Overall, it was kind of just an average movie that I actually recommend seeing, but I wouldn't go out of your way to see it or anything. It's not on Netflix for some reason, so you'd have to either rent it some other way, buy it or wait for it to be on TV (I saw it on MGM-HD), and unless you're in love with the short story or Stephen King in general, there's better movies for you to see. But, hey, it was well-acted, kind of scary and even kind of sad. So, I give "Sometimes They Come Back":

3 out of 5 chainsaws (IT'S ALRIGHT)

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