TVSquad

(S01E02) Nightmares are an interesting phenomenon. What can seem terrifying while it's playing out in your subconscious loses much of its power once you wake up and try to explain it to someone. In that regard, Nightmares and Dreamscapes was a perfectly apt title for Stephen King's 1993 short story collection. When King is at his best, he's able to make even the most absurd situations seem real and horrific. When those same ideas are fleshed out into a visual medium, however, they become diluted without King etching the images into your mind himself.

This is why so many of King's works suffer when they're translated to the movie or television screen, and why "Crouch End" the second offering of the new series Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (click here for Keith's review of the premiere episode "Battleground," based on a short story from the Night Shift collection) was more tiresome than terrifying. Also, out of all the short stories the man has written, this wasn't his best one.

A young couple traveling in London are told to meet a friend in Crouch End, an ostensibly quaint little village on the outskirts of the city. The first taxi driver they meet refuses to take them, and warns them not to go there at all. The next driver, however, kindly obliges, though he seems wary of going himself. Once they arrive, Lonnie steps out to call his friend, and the cab driver explains to Doris that Crouch End is a "thin spot" between dimensions, a village built on a Druid towen, a place of ritual sacrifice. King's infatuation with other worlds and dimensions is a common theme that runs throughout a majority of his work, but here the idea just seems silly. Even after the demons and monsters begin to break through and attack the terrified couple, you couldn't really care less what happens to them. The special effects are anything but, and when the tentacles of some malevolent leviathan bursts through the cobblestone street and swallows Lonnie, they look like something out of a video game, and Lonnie's demise has about as much emotional resonance as watching the hero in a game of "Dig Dug" spin around and "bloop" out of existence.

Keith compared the series to The Twilight Zone in his earlier review, and that's not a bad comparison. Like the short stories they're based on, some episodes of this series are going to be better than others. Yesterday I went back and read "Crouch End" again, and wondered why they chose this particular "monsters from other dimensions" story when there were so many better ones to choose from. I can't answer that question, but I think "Crouch End" is just another half-hearted attempt at bringing King's vision to the screen, and another example as to why, out of the myriad adaptations of his work, so few truly rise above the fold.