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A curious alchemy is at work in this filming of Stephen King's worst novel. The story here involves a novelist who retires his famous pseudonym only to have it come to life and torment him. This, of course, fictionalizes King's own experience with his "Richard Bachman" pseudonym, but even with the real life background, it doesn't ring true. It's just too dippy of an idea to work very well as a horror novel. But something strange happens on the way to the big screen.The reader's disbelief, which wrecks the novel, is suspended here by virtue of it being on film. I mean, of course it's real--there it is in front of my eyes. Timothy Hutton is fine as novelist Thad Beaumont and as his pseudonym/alter-ego/evil twin George Stark and the rest of the cast is pretty good, too, especially Amy Madigan as Beaumont's wife. There are some pretty cool scenes with birds that harken back to Hitchcock and gives the film an apocalyptic feel that it doesn't really deserve.

This is also George Romero's best movie in a while. Given intractable source material, he does a pretty good job of making a movie of it. It still doesn't work, but this is eminently watchable in a way that some of the movies made from Big Steve's better novels are not. One only wishes that Romero would quit dicking around with dumb projects like this and get back to the type of movies that made him an essential filmmaker to begin with.