a review of 魔女嘉莉

HOOPTOBER NINE! NIGHT TWENTY! + 2022 PODCAST MACABRE HORROR CHALLENGE CATEGORY 16: FROM 2002 I have to give Bryan Fuller some credit for kicking off his run as a TV fantasy-horror showrunner with this attempt at a TV-movie/back-door pilot adaptation of Stephen King's first novel. The script has some of the Buffy-hangover dialogue that one might expect from an early '00s teen-centric property, but Fuller also leavens that with some fairly smart additions (like pointing out that teens would be aware of the plot of "She's All That") that help ground this in the post-Y2K era. Angela Bettis does a fantastic job embodying the fragility of the main character, but sadly the same cannot be said for the rest of the cast, including a pre-LOST Emilie de Ravin who barely registers as the school's head mean girl. The effects work is definitely not everything it could have been on an NBC TV-movie budget of the time, but at the same time I think the filmmakers might have been a touch too ambitious trying to adapt details like the meteor shower sequence and some of the rampage-related carnage. Ultimately I think the thing that sank this one for me was NBC trying to make this fill a three-hour slot (running time without commercials: 2h15m) in prime time instead of cutting it down to a tight 90-100 min. There really is no reason for this to run so much longer than the De Palma version, and it really hurts the momentum of the story to have it take so long to get to the finale.