Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series: #2 Salem's Lot

 Before Netflix abandoned its DVD service, to which I have been a loyal subscriber for a long, long time, I managed to get a couple of older horror flicks, which are hard-to-impossible to find streaming, including this iconic television movie from 1979.  That vampire boy floating outside the second story window has traumatized all of Gen X - kids who shouldn't have been watching Salem's Lot when it was on.  The cast includes David Soul (from the OG Starsky & Hutch and miscast, if you ask me), Bonnie Bedelia and Fred Willard, plus a whole bunch of "who's that guy?!" actors.

If you aren't familiar with it, this 1979 t.v. movie is based on a 1975 Stephen King novel of the same name.  Go read the novel.  It's long but I'll wait.  It's terrific.  Writer Ben Mears returns to the Maine town he grew up in to write about an old mansion, the Marsden House.  But two newcomers, Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow, purported antiques dealers, have bought the house.  Barlow is, of course, a vampire and Straker is his main minion.  Townspeople start getting killed for food or turned into baby vamps.  Ben amasses a small team to fight the vampires -  girlfriend Susan, an older high school teacher, a local doctor, a Catholic priest and a soon-to-be-orphaned teenaged boy, Mark.  It doesn't go well for the team and only Ben and Mark live to fight another day.

Look, I'll grant you that the vampire kid at the window holds up, and the Barlow monster design is fantastic (except why did they make him blue?), but otherwise this is a fairly underwhelming horror offering for the 70s, even keeping television standards under consideration.  It was directed by Tobe Hooper, for crying out loud!  Davis Soul is not as charming as Ben should be; Bonnie Bedelia plays Susan as a lot dumber than the book version; Barlow and Straker are very different from the book as well.  The "Maine" accents are predictably shitty.  The acting is pretty painful, to be honest, and the narrative seems disjointed and hard to follow.  Maybe if I didn't know the book so well I would have appreciated this more?