8 Most Ridiculous Stephen King Adaptations Of All Time

4. The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Yes, this is the big-budget adaptation from which King had his name removed, claiming it had nothing to do with his short story. Even if co-writer/director Brett Leonard (Virtuosity, Man Thing) had been slavishly faithful, though, it€™s unlikely that King would have been cheered by the results. Years before Uwe Boll received mystifyingly large budgets to make tat videogame movies, Leonard received mystifyingly high sums to make bad adaptations such as this and Hideaway, a picture so awful that it was disowned by Dean Koontz (see the pattern?). Wearing glasses to distinguish his character from Remington Steele (Bond was three years away), Pierce 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€™s IQ increases phenomenally, causing him to develop psychic and telekinetic powers that, in a plot turn pilfered from King€™s novel Firestarter, bring a shadowy organization known as The Shop after them. This only angers our boy, 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.