Salem's Lot

(2004) ***1/2

Alright, I think that's it for me and three hour movies. That might even be it for me and remakes. I had trouble fully getting into this one and I can't tell if that's just me being burned out on watching movies called Salem's Lot or if I'm fine and this movie was just not as engaging as the first one. I'm watching Lost Boys next and if I find myself thinking that's lame, I might have to take a few days off and sit in a sauna somewhere. Clear my head, y'know?

What's confusing me is that I can point to a number of things I thought the 2004 version did better than the original. For one thing, this version makes much more effective use of fleshing out the secondary characters. I pointed out in the earlier review that its sidebar stories had problems, not because they were poorly written, but because there didn't seem to be any point to most of the sidebar stories. We saw a woman having an affair and a guy getting drunk and holding them up at gunpoint, and the only pay off was when the lover left the house and was immediately killed by the vampire. The guy could have been killed anywhere -- there was no official reason we needed to spend a half hour of screen time watching these characters.


The 2004 version also features an extramarital affair, between a local physician and one of his patients. And like the original, we spend a noticeable portion of the screen time watching the affair and its ramifications unfold. It's a complicated subplot -- the husband catches the pair in the act and blackmails the doctor, the doctor goes through a crisis about how he's going to pay off...

And this is just one subplot. there are others, like the town dullard who's got a crush on the daughter of the richest guy in town and who also is friends with the guy who used to date the girl that's now into the main character...Now take a breath -- all of this, believe it or not, is done rather cleanly. The plot threads are deftly woven and at no point did I feel like I was losing touch with any of the characters.

But let's go back and examine just a part of this: the part about the guy (Floyd Tibbets) who used to date the girl (Susan Norton) who blahblahblah (Ben Mears). Floyd gets outted for spying on Susan's e-mail account and then later he attacks Ben -- they both wind up spending the night in jail. Now, Floyd seems like a real creep here, right? But he's also pals with Dud, the dullard, and treats him very decently which is more than can be said for quite a lot of the other characters. And just about everyone is like this -- mostly decent, but pair them up with someone they don't like and you see their bad side.

It works the other way as well -- the people who are expected to behave well have their own skeletons in the closet. The town sheriff's got a temper problem and has a moment of angst when the town is coming apart about whether he'd be better off moving to Florida to be with his daughter. Even the town priest is looking at porno when nobody's looking. Late in the film, he falls to his knees in front of Barlow, the supreme vampire (Rutger Hauer) and asks, "Did I do the right thing with my life? Is there a God?" Barlow gamely replies, "Whoever feeds you is your god."


Even the vampires display this duality. There's a beautiful side story about Eve, the 60-something year old who runs the boarding house where Ben's staying. She's had a long, uninitiated romance with a guy named Ed. They've known each other for years and have loved each other the whole time, but never did anything about it. Ed gets turned into a vampire on the day they're finally supposed to marry. He stands in the foyer of the church where Eve is sitting alone in her wedding gown. Ed can't go into the church because he'll disintegrate. "Things are different," he tells her. She asks if he's different. "Yes and No. I love you more than ever now." And he means it. She goes willingly with him to the cemetary and, as newly born vampires crawl out from the graves around them, she lets him turn her too.

So yeah, it's polished and detailed in ways that the 1979 version wasn't. And the more I write about it the more impressed I am (here I am going back to the 3 star rating I initially entered and tacking on another 1/2). But it didn't grab me right away and that's a problem. I didn't need to ponder the 1979 version to be drawn in by it. I thought it was spooky right away. I never once felt drawn into the 2004 version, I just think it's interesting.

I can't explain it -- it's got nothing to do with the look (the night shots are really crisp and the sky over Jerusalem's Lot looks amazing in every shot), or the acting (Lowe, Hauer, Donald Sutherland, James Cromwell...all fine actors and not one of them turns in a half-ass performance), or the script (see above). It's just missing that X-factor, that "why I should care" factor. The '79 version had it and if the '04 version had found it, I'd have given it 5 stars for sure.