Movies that were better than the book: Part 1

I have a blog? Since when?

The Shining

The story: Master of horror Stephen King shocks the world with his most original plotline yet: a guy goes crazy and tries to kill everybody.

Why the movie did it better: King’s novel seemed more intent on giving a thorough history of the haunted Overlook Hotel than it did on shocking his audience. Stephen, we’re not going to tell you how to do your job, but we really don’t need a chapter explaining exactly why men in dog suits performing sexual favors for each other is creepy. We get it. Just scare us, and move on. You know that you have trouble with pacing, when you make a Stanley Kubrick movie seem positively fast paced.
Also, we can’t talk about The Shining without mentioning the acting talent. Jack Nicholson’s door-busting, catchphrase-spouting portrayal of Torrence is infused with a manic glee that King’s novel lacks. Isn’t there an old saying about how “All work and no play makes Jack something something”?

Jurassic Park

The story: A team of researchers uses Magical Science to clone massive extinct carnivores and invite guests to stand within a few feet of them with nothing but a thin layer of fence to defend them. Amazingly something goes horribly wrong. (Though it still makes a better vacation spot than Disney’s California Adventure.)

Why the movie did it better: The massive commercial success of this film means that the free market has confirmed what we’ve been saying for years: Dinosaurs are some seriously scary mothers.


This movie is solely responsible for the Great Cracked Dinosaur Purge of 1993. We encouraged our children to fail their science classes to ensure that they wouldn’t go on to grow Tyrannosauruses from stem cells. We killed every bird we could find just in case those dinosaur genes weren’t as repressive as everybody thought. We petitioned NASA to see if there was some way to crash another asteroid into Earth just in case there were any raptors left over from the last meteor strike.

Also, the effects were good.

Jaws

The story: GAH! HOLY CRAP!! SHAAARRKKK!!!!


Well, that’s what we got out of it anyway.

Why the movie did it better: Despite what the totally rad subject matter would indicate, the book is depressingly low on actual sharkage. Instead, the author seems more focused on, how can we put this delicately, detailed descriptions of a man sticking his “dorsal fin” into a woman’s “blowhole” while they’re “screwing”.

Our writing staff is made up entirely of eighteen to twenty-four year old males, so when we’re bored reading about sex, something’s gone horribly wrong. We want to read about blood in the water, not blood on the sheets!

Sadly, the actual shark scenes are also underwhelming. A staggering number of characters meet their demise simply by falling into the water and drowning, making the climax slightly scarier than your average bathtub. When we read a book about a GIANT KILLER SHARK, we want a way of seeing people getting ripped apart by a shark that won’t get us banned from Marine World.