7 Stephen King Adaptations That Are Unintentionally Hilarious

4. The Lawnmower Man

You know a movie€™s going to stink when it opens with an armed chimp going on a rampage, but what€™s this? The chimp was a test subject in trials being carried out by loose-in-his-shoes scientist Pierce Brosnan, you say? Who thinks Virtual Reality holds the key to understanding the human mind? Wearing glasses to distinguish his character from Remington Steele (Bond was three years away), Brosnan does what he can with the b-movie scientist role, and he certainly does better than Jeff Fahey who, clad in denim dungarees and wearing a bad blond wig, looks (and acts) like Trey Parker playing Forrest Gump. Used as a guinea pig by Dr Brosnan, Fahey develops psychic and telekinetic powers that, in a plot turn pilfered from King€™s novel Firestarter, bring a shadowy organization known as The Shop after him and Brosnan. This only angers Fahey, who takes on all-comers (most hilariously with a flying lawnmower) before entering cyberspace, where he manifests himself as a cross between Max Headroom and Freddy Krueger. Throw in Geoffrey Lewis with a hysterically unconvincing Oirish accent, a sinister cabal of bald men who plot World Domination from inside a windowless bunker plus enough cheesy effects for at least three SyFy movies and you can see why King took the film€™s producers to court.