REVIEW: Salem's Lot (1979)

"Salem's Lot" was one of those Sunday afternoon movies that I used to love when I was growing up -- in fact, it was the king of Sunday afternoon movies because it literally took all Sunday afternoon to watch the whole thing. It's a long one even without commercials, but when TBS interrupted the thing every ten minutes to plug the latest rerun of "Matlock," it just stretched and stretched. Actually getting through the whole movie in one sitting was like a marathon to a ten-year-old, and was treated like a rite of passage when I finally accomplished it. I remember trying to plan a day around it when I first discovered the listing in TV Guide -- church, Sunday school, lunch, action figures, cartoons, "Salem's Lot," and when it was finally over I had turned 19 and had a paper to write.

Actually, it's not all that long for a movie. The uncut running time is 183 minutes, which is a dash over three hours for those of you who are bad at math or deviants of the metric system. Three hours isn't a fatally long running time for a movie, but if you're a twelve-year-old who was raised on 84-minute slashfests like "Friday the 13th," it's fooooreeeeever. On top of that, it's really, really slow. It was originally aired as a mini-series, as most of Stephen King adaptations are, and the pace made sense in that respect; unfortunately, by the time it was playing on channels that I was tuning in to, it was usually aired as a big chunk and I wouldn't be surprised if I spent a good portion of my first viewing trying to defend a Lego Gotham City from the Lego Joker.

Seeing the new DVD release a number of weeks ago (in anticipation of seeing the Rob Lowe version of the material), I was happily surprised that the slow and steady pacing of the movie really worked in its favor. You're introduced to each of the many characters in the small town of Salem's Lot, and really get to spend some quality time with them and their nuances before they become undead. You see, something is amiss in the sleepy little town, with the arrival of writer Ben Mears, and the opening of the creepy new antique shop by the mysterious Mr. Straker and the absent Mr. Barlow. Soon enough, townsfolk are coming down with a strange, slow illness; children are missing from their homes, and dead people seem to be rising from the grave and seeking blood. In the most famous (and most parodied) scene, one of the missing Glick boys floats amidst a blanket of fog outside his brother's window, and ghoulishly asks his brother to let him in. It's kind of silly-looking now, especially since it's so recognizable, but it works fine in context.

Mr. Mears, played by "Starsky and Hutch" star David Soul, returns to his boyhood home of Salem's Lot to research the Marsden House -- the creepy old run-down house on top of the hill that every small town and every horror film has. Mears thinks that there's an evil associated with that house, and has some kind of theory that evil can be tied to a physical place. Unfortunately, he's not in grad school anymore, and he has more pressing problems with vampires eating his friends and all. It was nice to give the main character a kind of philosophical lense to look at the villains through, but in the end it didn't make much sense -- I'm not really sure what he was saying. Did he think the house caused vampires to come to Salem's Lot? Or was the house evil because of the vampires tended to like it there? Or was the point that it had no bearing on the evil? I don't know. The idea is more or less discarded, since the vampires chase him waaaay out of the house's zip code by the end of the movie. Hmm...unless...unless all of Guatemala is evil!

Like the slow pace, the other thing that really works well in the movie is that it's not funny. As a horror drama, it sticks with being a horror drama, and there's not a tinge of ironic humor in the script. It plays as a straight horror film, and treats the subject matter seriously even under the silliest circumstances; it's a better film for not asking the audience to laugh, instead asking to play along with the story. It's exactly that kind of mistake that many, many, many modern films make: reminding the audience that what they're watching is stupid. It's one thing for a movie to be playful and fun, but it's another to try to simultaneously be the material and be above the material. At the very least, "Salem's Lot" has the courage to be what it is, even if what it is turns out to be is Hutch beating up James Mason and a bald antique dealer.

"Salem's Lot" does have its shortcomings. For instance, the vampire Barlow and his keeper Straker (James Mason) -- what was their plan, again? Apparently, they move from sleepy little hamlet to sleepy little hamlet, setting up their antique shop, eating the town, and then moving on. Perhaps I'm being a little overly analytical about this, but isn't that a tad inefficient? I mean, do you know just how many forms you have to fill out when you set up a new business? Contrast that with the amount of time that it would take Barlow to suck Salem's Lot dry, and you'll see the flaw. That's not even including the people that get turned into vampires, who also need to feed, which would only suck through the town faster. What does Straker do when his boss is done, and the whole town is either dead or full of vampires? What happens when Barlow Antiques is reported to the Better Business Bureau? Answer me, movie!

Despite the dated look, and the occasionally foot-dragging pace, "Salem's Lot" is a pleasant-enough diversion for those weekend afternoons when you'd rather be sharing scary tales by a campfire, but are instead stuck with a DVD player and microwaveable s'mores.

ARE YOU ASTONISHED?

• If you've also seen "Fright Night," you know what happens to the James Mason character on the staircase.
  
• Note the very well done creepy shot towards the end of the film, when Mark is sitting on the floor in front of the coffin room -- and the bodies slowly start to shift over the course of a few seconds. Good background corpse acting.
  
• The theme music has about two hundred times the amount of energy as the rest of the movie. Sometimes, in its slowest moments, you can help the film by humming the music quietly to yourself.
  
• It's so commonplace in horror movies that it's hard to hold it against them: stupid people, and the dark, scary places that they shouldn't go into but they do.
  
• I'd like to talk a moment about Geoffrey Lewis, that beloved character actor that gives me the kind of heebie-jeebies that Christopher Walken gives to other people. This is a man that you'd recognize in some vague way, not in a what-movie-did-I-see-him-in way, but rather a isn't-he-the-janitor-at-my-high-school way. He's been in over 110 movies, seven of them with Clint Eastwood, and still looks like he's having trouble getting the trail-dust off of him. To see him as a vampire chanting "Look at me! Loooooook at meeee!" over and over again helped me fill the void in my subconscious mind that had prevented me from having truly terrifying nightmares.