SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK
Directed by Tom McLoughlin
Written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
Starring Tim Matheson and Brooke Adams
Released in 1991
Directed by Tom McLoughlin
Written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
Starring Tim Matheson and Brooke Adams
Released in 1991
I was there, brother. I saw all of them. Yep, that's right. Some of them I watched at the Keith Albee movie theater in Huntington, West Virginia. Others I took in here in Phoenix, either at one of the rundown drive-ins or at one of those putrid multiplex disperia factories. There was even a movie house in the town where I grew up, a burg called Circleville, and even though I watched a million movies there, not one of them was based on a book or a story written by the one, the only, you know him, you love him, you cannot live without him, king of the killer chills, Stephen King. That's because his work had not yet caught on back then, which is one of the things I most regret about my youth. Having Stephen King novels to read would have made those years of torpid adolescence a lot more tolerable.
I don't care if you were the suavest of jocks, the most kitten-like of coquettes, the young dude in black leather on a Suzuki, the main skirt at the embarrassingly maudlin Homecoming dance, the guy with the bottle and red pills in the backseat parked outside the stadium, or the girl whose first name never quite registered on people's memories. It doesn't matter what clique you imagine yourself to have been a part of--if any--the fact is that those so-called glory days were anything but that. There's a Reason for that illusion. The Reason doesn't actually care whether you were smart or stupid, average or exceptional, front row or barrel boy--the Reason just does not give a damn. The Reason doesn't have to care and that's because the Reason is that you spent your youth learning to grow up.
Maybe you spent your spare time holed up in your room, writing things in your spiral notebook, things that you went back to regularly because those things made you feel validated in some way. Maybe you blasted out your mind with whatever form of musical torture was popular in your day. Maybe you played a lot of baseball. There's even a good chance that you discovered your genitals substantially before anyone else discovered them for you. Whatever little secret thing you did to try to stave off the unrelenting and inexorable agony of growing up, somewhere in the back of your mind, in that part of your brain that you always tried to ignore and never quite could, there was a shrill and nagging voice reminding you that there was a Reason for all the torment that we put on one another back in those glory days. The Reason was preparation for all the senseless crap we have to go through as adults. God knows none of us would be ready for the adult level of incipient uselessness fresh out of the womb. No, we have to spend sixteen, eighteen years, maybe longer, learning to toughen ourselves up for the horrifying drag that is maturity on this here madly spinning orb of a planet.
So, yes, it would have been nice to have had some of those Stephen King novels and short story collections. They would have placed some imaginary exclamation points in our young lives.
Incidentally, I am in no way suggesting that everything about growing up is tedious and banal. True, ninety-nine percent of it is exactly that. However, the remaining one percent is often packed with just enough excitement to help us delude our presumably mature selves that all those years were something more than embryonic posturing while we waited to be turned loose on a society that met us with a shrug. The first kiss, the first grope, the first time getting drunk, maybe the first or second time of really connecting with friends, people you met on the academic team at school, or after the football game, or in marching band, or during the class play. Sure, that's real and it would be unfair to ignore those important times.
But that's not really what happened anyway. What really happened was that most of your good times were just a respite from the process of getting whipped into shape to become a good living zombie so you could later learn some trade or skill and hope to have someone under you that you could boss around--or slap around. And if that didn't work out, you could always aspire to be the company snitch, or the departmental bitch. Maybe you could even grow up to write some deceptively literate stories that always seemed to connect back to those days that you even now cannot decide if you loved or hated.
Stephen King was not there for me. As I say, it would have helped.
I feel a bit funny writing those preceding sentences because even though I have read everything the man ever published, the truth is that for at least twenty years now most of his books have lacked the visceral connection that the ones he wrote from, say, Carrie throughNeedful Things did have.
Carrie I watched before I read it. But that was the last time things happened in that order. That was his first novel and it was also the first movie someone made based on one of his writings. I was sure that my life would never be the same.
Of course, it was very much the same. But I was taken in. I was very much taken in, just as you were taken in and that is the best argument I can make for the quality of King's work. For just a while you could believe with every fiber of your being that, despite coming of age like a person who grew up through a rotted floor of woodworm, there was at least one other person who got the details right. The shower scene? It was exactly correct, every last detail, from the exploding self-awareness to the giggling insensitivity, from the awkward principal to the emotionally repressed gym teacher, from the hellbent neighbors to the domineering matriarch--every last goddamned detail in that book-movie was perfect. You recognized yourself somewhere in that novel and while that recognition scared you shitless, at least there was the comfort of knowing that you were not nearly as alone as you may have thought.
Then it was time to go back to class and we all kept repeating the same idiotic behavior, having learned nothing from the story because we were too busy learning how to be numbed-out grown-ups.
Sometimes I can still taste the smell of that woodworm.
I feel like Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, drawn back to his childhood, not because it was a specifically happy time but rather because there were things that even today feel as if they need to be worked out, brought to some form of resolution. A lot of times those memories help me hold things together and other times they torture me. One day I remember myself stripped to the waist, drum sticks clinched in each hand, wailing away on my trap set in the early summer mornings, making more noise than music, and even once in a while breaking through to the future as a pent-up energy exploded across my walls and the voices of people I would later meet clapped their hands in time to the roar.
Sometimes I feel like Jack Torrance from The Shining. Struggling to hold things together, fooling myself that I'm in charge of my own destiny. Other times I remind myself of Bill Denbrough from It, always coming up against a Henry Bowers-style sociopath.
I must admit, with some reluctance, that I have never felt much like Jim Norman, the protagonist in the movie Sometimes They Come Back. That's probably in part because I was an only child. King has written a couple of stories that have been turned into movies about a kid whose brother died. The first of these stories was the outstanding novella The Body. As you probably recall, that one was made by Rob Reiner into the excellent Stand By Me. Sometimes They Come Backis not Stand By Me. It does have a bit of overlap, however, mostly at the hands of director Tom McLoughlin via the production company of Dino DeLaurintiis, a man whose knack for the contrived storyline has carried mediocrity into the realm of Low Art. In this story, we have the painfully sincere Tim Matheson as Jim Norman, a teacher who was kicked out of his job back in Chicago and who now has brought his wife and son with him to some small town which is the only place where he can get a teaching job. The small town just happens to be the place where he grew up. And the place where he grew up just happens to be the place where the pivotal downturn of his life began with the brutal murder of his older brother Wayne. So far we have managed to cross elements of The Shining with Stand By Me. But wait. Here comes Salem's Lot. The teenage hoodlums who murder Wayne are smashed and killed by a train that overtakes them in a tunnel. (Tunnel? Now I'm recalling Silver Bullet.) Years later, in the present time, three of the four bullies come back from the grave to inhabit seats in Jim Norman's high school classroom. If you remember "Welcome Back, Kotter," you sort of get the idea, except these are not lovable sweathogs. These are vicious greasers. Switchblades. Rotten teeth. Black jackets. So bad they even scare the janitor.
As family-friendly as this made-for-tv slop is, it does have the redeeming value of getting certain vital details exactly right. Chip, the spoiled leader of the jocks, hassles the teacher from day one, but even he doesn't have any interest in killing the guy. Granted, the only reason the director gave him a bit of humanity was to make him less two-dimensional within the framework of a lot of very one-dimensional characters, most especially wife Sally, played with customary stick figure passion by Brooke Adams. But at least the Chip character tries. None of the other good guys in the film do anything except collide off one another's lines, leaving plenty of room for the three ghost hoodlums to stretch out and they do put on quite a show. Had there been even a little bit of subtle musical undertow, these three would have been in the pantheon of King's nastiest villains.
The ending of the film is a complete cheat, one which is worsened by the fact that someone apparently forgot that Matheson's character was supposed to be narrating the story, a facet that goes by the wayside about ten minutes in.
Despite all these overly harsh barbs I'm swinging against this movie, I still have to recommend it to you because of the classroom scenes. They are so close to being the way I remember things that I'm inclined to suspect that I may be remembering someone else's adolescence by mistake. Here's a for instance. Even though the movie makes a big deal out of the fact that Jim Norman is a teacher with a bubbling-under temper, we never once get so much as a clue as to what subject the man teaches. This is probably just an accident in the writing, but at first I thought it might have been the most clever use of verisimilitude ever filmed. Why? Well, simply because when I was a high school senior, every class was exactly the same as every other class. You couldn't tell chemistry from physical education or English from trig. Each and every one of those classes existed in our young lives for absolutely no other reason than to prepare us for the heavy monotony and stupid predictability of our adult lives. In that one respect, those identically anemic classes were most successful.
So, yes, please watch Sometimes They Come Back. It will help convince you that nothing that happened in high school really mattered at all, not even then. It will also confirm in you that your same high school was just a stage production of your later life. Unless, of course, you happen to have been very lucky.
I don't care if you were the suavest of jocks, the most kitten-like of coquettes, the young dude in black leather on a Suzuki, the main skirt at the embarrassingly maudlin Homecoming dance, the guy with the bottle and red pills in the backseat parked outside the stadium, or the girl whose first name never quite registered on people's memories. It doesn't matter what clique you imagine yourself to have been a part of--if any--the fact is that those so-called glory days were anything but that. There's a Reason for that illusion. The Reason doesn't actually care whether you were smart or stupid, average or exceptional, front row or barrel boy--the Reason just does not give a damn. The Reason doesn't have to care and that's because the Reason is that you spent your youth learning to grow up.
Maybe you spent your spare time holed up in your room, writing things in your spiral notebook, things that you went back to regularly because those things made you feel validated in some way. Maybe you blasted out your mind with whatever form of musical torture was popular in your day. Maybe you played a lot of baseball. There's even a good chance that you discovered your genitals substantially before anyone else discovered them for you. Whatever little secret thing you did to try to stave off the unrelenting and inexorable agony of growing up, somewhere in the back of your mind, in that part of your brain that you always tried to ignore and never quite could, there was a shrill and nagging voice reminding you that there was a Reason for all the torment that we put on one another back in those glory days. The Reason was preparation for all the senseless crap we have to go through as adults. God knows none of us would be ready for the adult level of incipient uselessness fresh out of the womb. No, we have to spend sixteen, eighteen years, maybe longer, learning to toughen ourselves up for the horrifying drag that is maturity on this here madly spinning orb of a planet.
So, yes, it would have been nice to have had some of those Stephen King novels and short story collections. They would have placed some imaginary exclamation points in our young lives.
Incidentally, I am in no way suggesting that everything about growing up is tedious and banal. True, ninety-nine percent of it is exactly that. However, the remaining one percent is often packed with just enough excitement to help us delude our presumably mature selves that all those years were something more than embryonic posturing while we waited to be turned loose on a society that met us with a shrug. The first kiss, the first grope, the first time getting drunk, maybe the first or second time of really connecting with friends, people you met on the academic team at school, or after the football game, or in marching band, or during the class play. Sure, that's real and it would be unfair to ignore those important times.
But that's not really what happened anyway. What really happened was that most of your good times were just a respite from the process of getting whipped into shape to become a good living zombie so you could later learn some trade or skill and hope to have someone under you that you could boss around--or slap around. And if that didn't work out, you could always aspire to be the company snitch, or the departmental bitch. Maybe you could even grow up to write some deceptively literate stories that always seemed to connect back to those days that you even now cannot decide if you loved or hated.
Stephen King was not there for me. As I say, it would have helped.
I feel a bit funny writing those preceding sentences because even though I have read everything the man ever published, the truth is that for at least twenty years now most of his books have lacked the visceral connection that the ones he wrote from, say, Carrie throughNeedful Things did have.
Carrie I watched before I read it. But that was the last time things happened in that order. That was his first novel and it was also the first movie someone made based on one of his writings. I was sure that my life would never be the same.
Of course, it was very much the same. But I was taken in. I was very much taken in, just as you were taken in and that is the best argument I can make for the quality of King's work. For just a while you could believe with every fiber of your being that, despite coming of age like a person who grew up through a rotted floor of woodworm, there was at least one other person who got the details right. The shower scene? It was exactly correct, every last detail, from the exploding self-awareness to the giggling insensitivity, from the awkward principal to the emotionally repressed gym teacher, from the hellbent neighbors to the domineering matriarch--every last goddamned detail in that book-movie was perfect. You recognized yourself somewhere in that novel and while that recognition scared you shitless, at least there was the comfort of knowing that you were not nearly as alone as you may have thought.
Then it was time to go back to class and we all kept repeating the same idiotic behavior, having learned nothing from the story because we were too busy learning how to be numbed-out grown-ups.
Sometimes I can still taste the smell of that woodworm.
I feel like Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, drawn back to his childhood, not because it was a specifically happy time but rather because there were things that even today feel as if they need to be worked out, brought to some form of resolution. A lot of times those memories help me hold things together and other times they torture me. One day I remember myself stripped to the waist, drum sticks clinched in each hand, wailing away on my trap set in the early summer mornings, making more noise than music, and even once in a while breaking through to the future as a pent-up energy exploded across my walls and the voices of people I would later meet clapped their hands in time to the roar.
Sometimes I feel like Jack Torrance from The Shining. Struggling to hold things together, fooling myself that I'm in charge of my own destiny. Other times I remind myself of Bill Denbrough from It, always coming up against a Henry Bowers-style sociopath.
I must admit, with some reluctance, that I have never felt much like Jim Norman, the protagonist in the movie Sometimes They Come Back. That's probably in part because I was an only child. King has written a couple of stories that have been turned into movies about a kid whose brother died. The first of these stories was the outstanding novella The Body. As you probably recall, that one was made by Rob Reiner into the excellent Stand By Me. Sometimes They Come Backis not Stand By Me. It does have a bit of overlap, however, mostly at the hands of director Tom McLoughlin via the production company of Dino DeLaurintiis, a man whose knack for the contrived storyline has carried mediocrity into the realm of Low Art. In this story, we have the painfully sincere Tim Matheson as Jim Norman, a teacher who was kicked out of his job back in Chicago and who now has brought his wife and son with him to some small town which is the only place where he can get a teaching job. The small town just happens to be the place where he grew up. And the place where he grew up just happens to be the place where the pivotal downturn of his life began with the brutal murder of his older brother Wayne. So far we have managed to cross elements of The Shining with Stand By Me. But wait. Here comes Salem's Lot. The teenage hoodlums who murder Wayne are smashed and killed by a train that overtakes them in a tunnel. (Tunnel? Now I'm recalling Silver Bullet.) Years later, in the present time, three of the four bullies come back from the grave to inhabit seats in Jim Norman's high school classroom. If you remember "Welcome Back, Kotter," you sort of get the idea, except these are not lovable sweathogs. These are vicious greasers. Switchblades. Rotten teeth. Black jackets. So bad they even scare the janitor.
As family-friendly as this made-for-tv slop is, it does have the redeeming value of getting certain vital details exactly right. Chip, the spoiled leader of the jocks, hassles the teacher from day one, but even he doesn't have any interest in killing the guy. Granted, the only reason the director gave him a bit of humanity was to make him less two-dimensional within the framework of a lot of very one-dimensional characters, most especially wife Sally, played with customary stick figure passion by Brooke Adams. But at least the Chip character tries. None of the other good guys in the film do anything except collide off one another's lines, leaving plenty of room for the three ghost hoodlums to stretch out and they do put on quite a show. Had there been even a little bit of subtle musical undertow, these three would have been in the pantheon of King's nastiest villains.
The ending of the film is a complete cheat, one which is worsened by the fact that someone apparently forgot that Matheson's character was supposed to be narrating the story, a facet that goes by the wayside about ten minutes in.
Despite all these overly harsh barbs I'm swinging against this movie, I still have to recommend it to you because of the classroom scenes. They are so close to being the way I remember things that I'm inclined to suspect that I may be remembering someone else's adolescence by mistake. Here's a for instance. Even though the movie makes a big deal out of the fact that Jim Norman is a teacher with a bubbling-under temper, we never once get so much as a clue as to what subject the man teaches. This is probably just an accident in the writing, but at first I thought it might have been the most clever use of verisimilitude ever filmed. Why? Well, simply because when I was a high school senior, every class was exactly the same as every other class. You couldn't tell chemistry from physical education or English from trig. Each and every one of those classes existed in our young lives for absolutely no other reason than to prepare us for the heavy monotony and stupid predictability of our adult lives. In that one respect, those identically anemic classes were most successful.
So, yes, please watch Sometimes They Come Back. It will help convince you that nothing that happened in high school really mattered at all, not even then. It will also confirm in you that your same high school was just a stage production of your later life. Unless, of course, you happen to have been very lucky.
