Editorials
Stephen King’s ‘Cell’ – Finding the Good in a Missed Opportunity [The Silver Lining]
In this edition of The Silver Lining, we’ll be covering Tod Williams’ 2016 Stephen King adaptation, Cell.
Stephen King is no stranger to the apocalypse. From the fallen worlds of his The Dark Tower series to his viral opus The Stand (which remains one of my all-time favorite literary works), the writer has an undeniable knack for depicting savage characters with nothing left to lose. Back in 2006, the author tried his hand at a different kind of apocalyptic yarn with Cell, a chilling homage to the zombie genre wrapped up in a bit of technological satire.
Unsurprisingly, the book became yet another hit for the King of horror, so it’s only natural that its rights were soon scooped up by eager film studios. However, Cell’s journey to the big screen was a tumultuous one, with the project shifting from one creative team to the next over a period of several years. At one point, even Hostel’s Eli Roth was set to direct the flick, though he ultimately departed from the picture due to creative differences with the Weinsteins.
After a number of false starts, Cell finally began production in 2014 with Paranormal Activity 2’s Tod Williams directing a screenplay written by Stephen King himself. John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson were brought on board as our leading men, which pleased fans of the surprisingly successful 1408 adaptation. The duo was also joined by the always-charming Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan), further adding to the hype as this long-awaited project finally got off the ground.
Like the novel, the film follows artist Clay Riddell (Cusack) as he attempts to survive the aftermath of a mysterious pulse that transforms cellphone users into zombie-like murderers. Joining forces with train conductor Tom McCourt (Jackson) and a teenage neighbor named Alice Maxwell (Fuhrman), Clay embarks on a perilous quest to reunite with his estranged family in New England as the group learns to face the dangers of this brave new world.
Promising a star-studded cast boosted by a script penned by the original author, Cell was shaping up to be a high-profile Stephen King adaptation akin to the aforementioned 1408 or even Frank Darabont’s The Mist.
SO WHAT WENT WRONG?
While the movie was completed in early 2014, Cell would only see the light of day two years later, being unceremoniously dumped onto streaming platforms after an extremely limited theatrical release (resulting in an abysmal $1 million box office return). This unusual delay implies that the studio knew something was wrong with the film even before it earned its disappointing 11% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Once they finally got to see it, most critics agreed that the movie was a rather bland entry in the zombie genre, suffering from heavy-handed allegories and cookie-cutter characters. There were also numerous complaints about the film’s low production value, with reviewers almost unanimously lamenting the picture’s made-for-TV aesthetics, bizarre editing choices and laughable special effects.
In fact, I’d argue that most of the film’s general lack of tension and style can be chalked up to the wildly inappropriate budget. While it’s not necessarily a blockbuster action story, Cell clearly needed to be a larger production in order to properly adapt the apocalyptic scale of King’s novel. Couple that with the inherent difficulties of translating the author’s idiosyncrasies and lengthy inner monologues to a visual medium and you get a literal yet confused adaptation that doesn’t really do the book justice.
There’s also the issue of the film simply taking too long to get made, with the cellphone zombie idea seeming a lot fresher back in 2006 than when the movie eventually came out. By 2016, much of the story’s social commentary seemed silly and outdated, especially when you consider that most people were already using cellphones as texting devices rather than actual phones.
At the end of the day, Cell was a missed opportunity, containing all the right ingredients for a great Stephen King adaptation but fumbling the execution.
THE SILVER LINING
As I mentioned in a previous Silver Lining piece on Riding the Bullet, I’ve always been a fan of made-for-TV King adaptations. These low budget movies and miniseries may have been overly literal translations of the author’s work, but I think that their schlocky ambitions often outshined their limitations. I mention this because I see some of that same late-night TV charm in Tod William’s Cell, which contains quite a few entertaining moments despite its obvious flaws.
While it would have been fun to see a proper big-budget adaptation of the book’s opening moments, I honestly believe that the film faithfully captures the initial chaos and confusion of a sudden apocalyptic event. Most zombie media tends to overlook the genesis of the undead uprising, usually skipping ahead to the dystopic thrills of a post-zombie society, so I appreciate how Cell lets us witness these events in almost real time.
The film’s ending might still be a little too on-the-nose, but it’s a marked improvement over the novel’s excessively vague finale while still managing to keep the story’s nihilistic elements front and center. In fact, most of the original plot made it onscreen intact, courtesy of King’s effective screenplay. The cast is also surprisingly likable despite the admittedly thin characterization, and I especially like Cusack and Fuhrman’s budding friendship, which provides some of the film’s most tender moments.
It’s definitely no Shawshank Redemption, but I think Cell is an enjoyable B-movie if you can stomach some shoddy effects work and sub-par production value. The technophobic thrills that carry the story might not please everyone, but I’d recommend this peculiar zombie flick to die-hard fans of both Stephen King and the late great George Romero. Just try not to play around with your phone while you watch it.
Watching a bad movie doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad experience. Even the worst films can boast a good idea or two, and that’s why we’re trying to look on the bright side with The Silver Lining, where we shine a light on the best parts of traditionally maligned horror flicks.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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