We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
King, Zemeckis, The Asylum, and Savage Steve.
THE DARK TOWER (2017)
For more than fifty years, filmmakers have turned to the works of Stephen King for some of Hollywood's most memorable adaptations. They have repeatedly found ways to bring King’s worlds to life, but there was always one story that seemed almost impossible to adapt: The Dark Tower. King’s epic eight-book saga is unlike anything else in his bibliography; a blend of horror with fantasy, science fiction, and western elements. A strange mythology built around Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, as he crosses a dying world in search of the mysterious Tower that holds reality itself together.
For years, Hollywood tried to figure out how to bring that story to the big screen. But the project struggled to move forward because The Dark Tower wasn’t just a story; it was an entire universe. The saga is connected – in various ways, and to various degrees – to many of King's other books. The Stand, The Talisman, Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia, Salem’s Lot, Hearts in Atlantis, all of those and more are connected to the Dark Tower.
In 2017, director Nikolaj Arcel finally brought Roland’s journey to theatres, with Idris Elba stepping into the role of the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey playing his mysterious enemy, the Man in Black. It seemed like a great combination. Elba had the intensity and presence needed for a legendary gunslinger, while McConaughey brought a smooth evil to a character that's basically a version of Randall Flagg from The Stand. If only the movie had given them better material to work with.
In the books, the world inhabited by gunslinger Roland Deschain is reminiscent of the American Old West, but it’s clearly not the Old West. There are strange creatures and magical beings. Areas have been poisoned by nuclear radiation. There are remnants from a technologically advanced society that was destroyed by war long ago. There are robots, monorails, and demonic spirits. And there are songs that, in our world, were recorded by the likes of ZZ Top and The Beatles. King makes it clear that this isn’t meant to be some twisted, post-apocalyptic future for our world when he reveals that our reality can be accessed through special doorways. Portals to other dimensions. As the story goes on, Roland draws three travelling companions into his quest through these doorways. Three people who come from 20th century New York City. One of them is a young boy named Jake Chambers.
Arcel and his collaborators decided to make their movie the story of Jake joining Roland’s quest, but in not quite the same way that King wrote it. They chose not to make the movie a direct adaptation of any of the books. They cobbled together a story by cherry-picking elements from the overall saga. A little from book one, some from book three, a little more from books six and seven… Yet they found a way to say that their film was canon to the saga, despite changing things around. In the final book, Roland reaches the Dark Tower only discover that he had been there many times before. He’s caught in a loop; every time he gets to the Tower, he’s sent back to the start of his quest. The final book ends with Roland back at the beginning – and the filmmakers decided that the movie would be a follow-up to that moment. The story of Roland’s next quest, after the books. It isn’t an adaptation, it’s a sequel. The filmmakers weren’t replacing King’s story, they were continuing it. This was an idea King fully supported.
The Man in Black has been abducting children with psychic abilities, or the shine, and using their mental energy to launch assaults on the Tower. He’s trying to make it crumble because when it falls, the demons that live in the darkness outside the universe will be able to come in and rule everything. This leads him to Jake Chambers, an 11-year-old living in our world, in New York City. Jake is said to have a “pure shine,” and he’s been plagued by nightmares – actually, psychic visions – of the Man in Black and the world Roland lives in, Mid-World. The Man in Black believes that Jake’s shine is powerful enough to bring the Tower down. Problem is, Jake finds a portal to Mid-World and is taken under the wing of Roland. Tom Taylor was cast to play Jake, an important character in the saga.
Despite his psychic abilities, Jake is the audience surrogate character. We’re introduced to this strange world through his eyes. He is a newcomer, just like the audience, and we learn about Mid-World as he does. The supporting cast includes Katheryn Winnick as Jake’s mother, Dennis Haysbert as Roland’s father, Claudia Kim as a seer, and Jackie Earle Haley, Fran Kranz, and Abbey Lee as some of the Man in Black’s lackeys.
Casting is not a problem here. The script is. The movie was too different and simplified for longtime fans, yet too rushed for newcomers. The dramatic scenes aren't effective, the villain's lair sequences have the style and atmosphere of a low-rent TV movie, and while Roland's gunfights are entertaining, the film should have been much more than the straightforward PG-13 action adventure it ended up being.
Made on a budget of $66 million, The Dark Tower earned only $113 million worldwide and received negative reviews from critics and disappointment from fans. Even producer Ron Howard later admitted the filmmakers focused too much on what they thought the marketplace wanted instead of the essence of King's story, while King himself felt the PG-13 rating stripped away the toughness that made the material unique. The negative response to the film is why it took me nearly a decade to get around to watching it. If something dropped the Dark Tower ball as badly as this did, I was hesitant to witness it.
The movie turned out to be exactly what I figured it was: not very good. It had potential, but it didn't live up to that potential, and is rather empty and forgettable.
An Amazon television series was later developed before being abandoned, but there's hope for the future. Filmmaker / King super-fan Mike Flanagan acquired the Dark Tower adaptation rights in 2022 and is planning to adapt the saga across multiple television seasons and feature films. Hopefully, his version will finally capture the epic scope and emotional weight that the books have.
For now, though, the 2017 film stands as an ambitious but compromised adaptation, undone by budgetary limitations, marketplace concerns, an overly soft rating, and a screenplay that scrambled together pieces of a much larger story without ever doing it justice.
MOCKBUSTER (2025)
We’ve been hearing a lot of internet-to-Hollywood success stories lately. Aspiring filmmakers build large followings through YouTube channels, Reddit stories, podcasts, or viral short films, then use that momentum to land feature directorial debuts. That’s the path that led to projects like Talk to Me, Backrooms, Obsession, and several others.
Still, those success stories are the exception rather than the rule. For every filmmaker who breaks through, countless others have the skills and ambition but never manage to gain a foothold on social media. They make fun videos that never reach an audience beyond friends and family. They pitch ideas to producers, only to be met with rejection after rejection. Anthony Frith was one of those filmmakers.
After film school, Frith found himself with little choice but to direct corporate videos. Desperate to make a feature, he reached out to The Asylum, the independent production and distribution company best known for low-budget mockbusters like Transmorphers, Triassic World, Master of the Universe… the list goes on and on. Most filmmakers who reach out to a production company this way can expect either a polite rejection or no response at all. Frith, however, got a meeting, and The Asylum agreed to give him a shot at directing its latest production, a new adaptation of the public domain Edgar Rice Burroughs novel The Land That Time Forgot. It’s the sort of opportunity most aspiring filmmakers dream about but one that almost never comes from a cold email.
The catch: Frith would have to make this movie, which would feature an extensive list of locations, naval vessels, a submarine, and attacks by CGI dinosaurs, on a production schedule of just six days. The documentary Mockbuster follows that six-day production from beginning to end, providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how The Asylum operates.
The executives at The Asylum have no illusions of grandeur about what they do. During their on-camera interviews, they openly describe their output as “shitty movies for people with bad taste, and alcoholics,” movies that are “barely above porn.” But they have perfected a formula that ensures they rarely lose money on a movie – they make things for the right price and the right length (90 minutes, which is “as long as any movie should be.”) Frith is told that if he follows their process, he’ll have the chance to make a fun movie. If he fights the process, if he tries to get artsy and creative, it will all fall apart. But Frith has the mindset that any filmmaker in his place should have: that you have to start somewhere, and there’s no shame in starting at the bottom. Making a bad movie is better than making no movie at all.
Of course, making something this ambitious in just six days soon has him worrying that he’s not a good enough director to make something fun within the Asylum process, and not even bad enough to make something that’s “so bad, it’s good.” It’s said that if you blow it on an Asylum movie, you’ve basically crippled your career, and that’s what Frith begins to fear is going to happen to him.
You don’t have to be a fan of The Asylum to enjoy Mockbuster. If you have any interest in the filmmaking process or curiosity about how things work on the lower rungs of the ladder, this documentary is well worth checking out. It’s an engaging study of cinematic wish fulfillment that also pulls back the curtain on how an Asylum production actually comes together, and how Frith struggles to work within those budget limitations and time constraints. (Circling back to those success stories mentioned earlier, there are also a couple of appearances by Talk to Me co-director Danny Philippou, with him and his brother Michael even visiting the set of The Land That Time Forgot!)
Bonus: The Asylum executives would be very pleased to see that Frith’s documentary comes out at a running time of 1:29:57. It’s a 90 minute movie, just how they like it.
The review of Mockbuster originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
HOW I GOT INTO COLLEGE (1989)
Savage Steve Holland has done a lot of television work over the last few decades, working on a long list of TV shows and taking the helm of many TV movies – but he got his start making theatrically-released features in the 1980s, delivering back-to-back comedy cult classics with Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer. His last theatrically-released feature came along in 1989... but I never saw How I Got into College until 2026, which is odd, since Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer were both watched many, many times in my household during the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. This one, like Holland’s earlier two films, does have a cult following, but the cult seems to be smaller in this case.
Unlike his first two movies, Holland didn’t write How I Got into College. Here, he was working from a script by Terrel Seltzer – and Holland wasn’t even the first choice to direct the film. Theatre and television director Jan Eliasberg was hired to make her feature directorial debut with How I Got into College, but ended up getting fired after just five days of filming. Apparently, in just five days, it had become clear to the studio that she was aiming to make a movie that would be more sophisticated and less broadly funny than they wanted. So Holland was brought in to make things goofy, and he succeeded. It’s really surprising to hear that Holland was a week-into-production replacement and was working with a script that he didn’t at least guide on the way to production, because How I Got into College is fully imbued with the same quirky weirdness that he brought to his earlier movies, even if it didn’t turn out to be as funny as they are.
The story centers on two Michigan high schoolers: popular and smart Jessica Kailo (Lara Flynn Boyle) and underachiever Marlon Browne (Corey Parker). Although they haven’t really interacted, Marlon has such an intense crush on Jessica that he plans to go to college wherever she ends up going... which is exceptionally creepy, but since this is a comedy, we’re supposed to just see him as a nice, funny guy. Jessica’s family is deeply devoted to the University of Michigan, so she’s hoping to shake things up and attend Ramsey College in Pennsylvania. And since that’s where Jessica is planning to go, Marlon puts himself on track to attend Ramsey as well.
This now-shared goal brings Jessica and Marlon into each other’s lives, and gives Marlon an opportunity to build a relationship with his crush like a normal person instead of a stalker creep. While we follow their journey, the movie also branches out into subplots - Anthony Edwards, Finn Carter, and Charles Rocket are among the characters working on the Ramsey Admissions board; Phil Hartman and Nora Dunn play SAT tutor fraudsters; and there’s even Duane Davis and Tichina Arnold as Ramsey contenders from Detroit. How I Got into College is unusually scattered in that way; it probably would have benefited from focusing on Jessica and Marlon instead of bouncing away from them to tell the stories of other characters.
How I Got into College is an oddball movie that’s not as amusing or entertaining as I hoped it would be, but it’s worth checking out if you’re a fan of ‘80s comedy – especially if you liked Holland’s previous movies.
THE WALK (2015)
I didn’t know the story of Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who walked between the roofs of the World Trade Center towers in 1974, before watching the biopic The Walk, but I was interested when I got the gist of what Petit had done, and was sold on giving the movie a chance by the fact that it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, a filmmaker who has made some of my favorite movies: Back to the Future, Used Cars, Forrest Gump, etc. The movie still had to win me over, though – and at first, I thought it was going to lose me instead. Watching a French dude get into high-wire walking is not particularly interesting subject matter as far as I’m concerned, even if he does learn some things from a character amusingly played by Ben Kingsley, and I was uncertain about the casting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit. The actor may be a Francophile who learned French, but should he be starring in a movie as a Frenchman, putting on a fake accent and all? And should Zemeckis really have included moments where Petit breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly into the camera while telling his story to the audience and standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty?
Those “directly addressing the audience” moments could have been cut, but The Walk quickly gets interesting when Petit learns about the construction of the World Trade Center and begins daydreaming about walking between the towers. Of course, he doesn’t ask permission to do this. He, along with his girlfriend Annie (Charlotte Le Bon) and friends Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony) and Jeff (César Domboy), goes to New York City and starts planning to carry out the walk in the middle of the night / early morning of August 6, 1974.
Once this group gets to New York and pulls other accomplices – J.P. (James Badge Dale), Barry (Steve Valentine), Albert (Ben Schwartz), and David (Benedict Samuel) – into their plan, the movie gets full-on fascinating – and to my surprise, it largely plays like a heist film, since Petit and his pals have to infiltrate the towers, set up the cables, and get the walk started without anyone noticing.
Overall, The Walk is a really good time and another strong entry in the Zemeckis filmography. It passed me by when it was released in 2015, and that seems to be the case for most people: made on a budget in the 35 to 45 million range, it only earned $61 million at the box office, despite getting good reviews. It’s a shame that The Walk hasn’t caught more attention, because it deserves to be seen. It’s a good Zemeckis movie. Hopefully it will continue to be found by other viewers, just like I found it and watched it the day it was going to be removed from Netflix Brazil.
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