Tag Archives: Stephen King

Nov 12 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “The Running Man”

Glen Powell has a blast running in the long shadow of Arnold Schwarzenegger in this bang-bang, boom-boom remake of the ’80s cult classic

The Running Man
Starring Glen Powell, Josh Brolin & Colman Domingo
Directed by Edgar Wright
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Oct. 14

Glen Powell is running for his life in this slam-bang dystopian drama about a futuristic TV game show in which contestants are hunted down for the thrill of the kill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s a remake of the 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role, based on a story by Stephen King. (Watch closely for a nod to Ahh-nold in the early minutes of the new film.)

Powell stars as Ben Richards, a distraught dad who auditions for a spot on The Running Man, TV’s hottest property—and its riskiest. Almost no one survives. But if they do, they’ll win a whopping billion dollars. And even if they don’t, they can still make some serious jack just by hanging on for as long as possible (and killing a hunter or two along the way). Richards desperately needs the cash to get his family out of the slums and buy medicine for his ailing daughter.

But he’ll have to dodge a lot of bullets and bombs first. And rappel down the outside of a hotel, outrun a fireball, leap off a bridge and fight for his life inside a high-tech V-plane (with six toilets, we learn). Meanwhile, ordinary citizens—and TV watchers—are encouraged to report him. He dons disguises and takes on fake names. Drones track him. It’s a high-stakes, life-or-death game of hide and seek.

As in the original movie, woven through the gauntlet of boom-boom and bang-bang, there are overtones and undercurrents about our escalating appetite for extreme entertainment, and how media can manipulate and mislead us. It even addresses the growing use of AI, with videos that look real, but aren’t. As Ben becomes a reality-TV superstar, his righteous anger pumps up the show’s ratings. At one point, he fatefully crosses paths with another reality TV show, a spoofy sendup of The Kardashians called The Americanos. The movie suggests that TV can be toxic to our health, in more ways than one.

Josh Brolin (above) plays the smarmy exec behind the show. Dominic Colman hams it up as the host (the role originally played by Richard Dawson). Micheal Cera is a rebel leader who becomes Ben’s ally. William H. Macy is an underground arms dealer. Katy O’Brien plays another contestant.

British director Edgar Wright (whose previous films include Last Night in Soho, Baby Driver and The World’s End) throws a lot into the story, and onto the screen. Some of it sticks, but some of it doesn’t. This is his “biggest” movie, by far, with dozens of characters and wide-ranging sequences shot in Bulgaria and Scotland. But its high-octane mix of satire, drama, cautionary-tale messaging and expensive, explosive action doesn’t always mesh. It sometimes feels like Blade Runner crossed with Mission: Impossible and Survivor, with a razzle-dazzle-y dab of America’s Got Talent.

And Powell, who made females in the audience swoon last year in Twisters, is clearly the star of the show. Come for the action, stay to see him lounging around a hotel room wearing only a towel. He’s a marquee name now, for sure, no matter what he’s wearing. In this movie, that includes a priest’s robe and a nerdy pair of glasses.

“You want a show?” Richards asks his rabid TV audience at one point, in a live video. “I’ll give you a show.” And in this stylish new spin on an ‘80s cult classic, Powell certainly does just that.

—Neil Pond

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Feb 19 2025
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Movie Reviews

Monkey See, Monkey Kill

The deep horror roots of the sinister simian wind-up toy in “The Monkey”

The Monkey
Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien & Christian Convery
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Feb. 21

As a horror flick, The Monkey certainly has its bona fides. It’s based on a 1980 short story by horror maestro Steven King, inspired by a much older classic creepy tale, The Monkey’s Paw, by British author W.W. Jacobs. One of the producers is James Wan, the creator of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises. The director, Osgood Perkins, made last year’s Longlegs, a wild ride of freakish serial-killer disturbia with Nicolas Cage and a demonic doll. And the director is the son of Anthony Perkins, forever enshrined in the halls of horror as the cray-cray, cross-dressing Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho.

Here, murder and mayhem swirl around a wind-up monkey “toy” that unleashes all kinds of hellzapoppin’ when someone turns the “key” on its back, making its mechanical arms start to bang on a drum. As a drummer myself, hey, I get it—some people don’t think much of drum solos. But at least no one’s ever died, as far as I know, because I dig into a roll or a few paradiddles.

Theo James (from the dystopian Divergent films, and season two of The White Lotus) plays double roles as the adult versions of twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who’ve grown up loathing each other. As kids (both effectively played by Christian Convery, from Netflix’s Sweet Tooth) rummaging through their dad’s collection of souvenir curios, they discover a box containing the monkey. “Turn the key and see what happens” is the instruction on a label on the monkey’s back.

What happens when the key gets turned is spectacularly bad news. People start to die, in twistedly inventive, Rube Goldberg-ian ways—decapitated by a flying knife at a Japanese steakhouse, trampled to death in a sleeping bag by wild horses, mangled by a lawnmower, beheaded by a cannonball, eviscerated with a speargun in a pawn shop. No one is safe when this monkey gets cranked.

Unlike some other evil “objects” or playthings (like the dolls in Chuckie, Anabelle, M3GAN or The Boy), the monkey doesn’t participate or engage in the mayhem. It doesn’t come alive and pick up a kitchen knife, like the South America voodoo doll in Trilogy of Terror, chasing Karen Black in the made-for-TV shocker back in 1975, or directly menace Telly Savalas like Talking Tina, the “Living Doll” on that 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone. This sinister simian is more a silent summoner of evil, an inscrutable avatar for the deep, dark pit of existential unknowable-ness, staring us down with a relentless, unsettling grin and a drumbeat heralding doom…for someone.

Elijah Wood (Frodo from The Hobbit-verse) has a scene as a gonzo parenting guru, and the director himself slips into the role of Hal and Bill’s swinger uncle.  

The movie, which often feels like a smart-ass comedic spoof and send-up of horror cliches, runs on gleeful, ghoulish humor and an embrace of its own wild, wooly weirdness—like the school cheerleaders who show up to rah-rah-sis-boom-bah at murder scenes. It’s also got a subtext about fathers and sons, deadbeat dads, the various toxicities that families “pass down” through generations, and the infallible truth that we’ll all inevitably meet our expiration date someday. The movie even literalizes a line from the Book or Revelation: “And I looked and beheld a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death.” Giddy-up!

“Everybody dies,” the boy’s mother (Tatiana Maslany) tells them, after the funeral of their babysitter. “That’s life.”

That’s certainly life with The Monkey, where a twist of its key always brings an insanely over-the-top, spectacularly splattery encounter with the grim reaper. Who’ll be next? How many more people will die? Is the Monkey the devil? Can it be stopped?

And can you ever hear the retro grooves of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” again without thinking of a grinning keyed-up monkey, lopped-off heads, killer bees, and how a cobra can leap out of a golf course hole and clamp down on your jugular?

—Neil Pond

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