Film Review: Stephen King's Desperation

It’s hard to believe that the duo behind the television version of The Stand and The Shining were responsible for this mess of a film Desperation. Based on the original novel by Stephen King (who also wrote the teleplay) Desperation tells the story of a group of wayward travelers who are abused and jailed by the sadistic police officer of the town of Desperation Collie Entragian (Ron Perlman). Slowly they begin to understand that Entragian has been taken over by a centuries old pagan god by the name of Tak who body hops from one person to the next for no particular reason. By the time the travelers have all come together (which includes Tom Skerritt, Steven Weber, Annabeth Gish, Charles Durning, and Matt Frewer, to name a few) Entragian/Tak has killed everyone in town.
What follows is a by the numbers King television movie with little imagination and even less excitement or action as the travelers first find themselves trapped in the police station then in an abandoned theatre and then off to battle Tak at the dig site where he was inadvertently awakened. The plays like dirty seconds to everything from It to Rose Red to The Tommyknockers to The Langoliers with little more imagination then any of those films had. Having directed several of Stephen King’s most beloved novels you’d think that Mick Garris would’ve brought the same drive to this project as he did to The Stand or Riding The Bullet, but instead this film is filled with nothing but stuff we’ve already seen and experienced before.
The greatest disservice goes to Perlman who disappears halfway through the film when Tak is done with his body and has to move on to another (although for some reason Tak keeps Perlman’s voice). Perlman is the only person given anything to play with in the film as the rest of the cast are just window dressing with little purpose in the overall scheme of the film.