10 Stephen King Film Remakes Needed To Erase The Terrible Originals

3. The Tommyknockers

It's almost unfair to tear apart The Tommyknockers. It was a T.V. movie in the gilded age of made-for-T.V. movies being hotly anticipated events. It's picking low-hanging fruit, really. Nevertheless, it stands as an example of deeper plot and character elements from the original being sacrificed for the sake of the screen version. The usually reliable Jimmy Smits sleepwalks his way through a lame sci-fi flick about a poet and recovering alcoholic who stumbles across a spaceship that emits an odorless gas turning the towns inhabitants psychotic, bald, toothless and miraculously inventive. Except Smits' character is immune to the gas because he has a metal plate in his head, you see. There's more than a passing similarity with the inanimate-object-come-alive subplot with Maximum Overdrive. It was a bit of a head-scratcher on the page (and a bit bloated, even by King's usually lengthy standards), but at least the novel punched above its weight, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say about the T.V. movie. To that end, it's even harder to make a case for a remake of this film than the others here given the novel being considered a weaker King work. There's no indication that another adaptation would yield a better result. There is, however, a subplot regarding the struggles of writing that lead me to believe that if it were put in the hands of Charlie Kaufman and they told him to just go completely nuts with it, the results would be nothing short of wildly entertaining. And that's not even pointing out the overall metaphor for King's own transformation at the hands of drugs and alcohol, which is always ripe dramatic territory. This is probably the least likely option on this list to actually get a green light, but it's fun to dream, isn't it?