Streamin’ King: ‘Cell’ Is An Underrated Stephen King Adaptation

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Cell, the 2016 adaptation of King’s ’06 novel. Basically spoiler-free.

THE GIST: An unexplained incident called the Pulse brings initiates the end of the world by turning everyone using their phones into running, increasingly nontraditional zombies. (Oh how far we’ve come from The Stand and Captain Trips.) A small and plucky group makes its way from Boston to Maine in search of a man’s son. The Pulse’s psychic, network-like effects on the “phoners” deepen and broaden in strange ways. Explosion-fixated with a wild ending.

PEDIGREE: Directed by Tod Williams, whose prior outing came six years earlier with Paranormal Activity 2. Co-written by Adam Alleca (’09’s Last House on the Left remake) and King, one of his very few feature film self-adaptations. Stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, who together visited the Kingverse in 2007’s 1408, and features Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan) and Stacy Keach.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Our man’s novelistic batting average is astounding, but King’s whiffed hard a few times, Cell being one. Ignore Cell‘s Goodreads score, a characterless 3.65 out of 5—every Goodreads score is 3.65 out of 5. Disregard the 3.9 stars on Amazon, and politely ignore the actual flesh-and-blood reader who names Cell as a favorite. No. It lives with From a Buick 8 as one of King’s actual trash books, only slightly worse than Insomnia and Mr. Mercedes.

Which makes it all the more frazzling and delightful to say: the movie Cell is pretty good, people! Cell is not straight-to-VOD bad! Somehow it closely follows the novel while turning out a lot more interesting and palatable. Cell should’ve been an awesome 20-page short story called “The Pulse,” not a boring, puzzling, 350-page slog across New England; a 98-minute film wound up being exactly what it needed.

Cell‘s cliffhanger was a sharp sticking point for readers whose imaginations can’t emotionally support them past a book’s last page. King changed it here, supposedly as a direct response, and the result is so weird and different they’re barely even comparable. And quite like The Mist, it’s a father/son thing that’s the exact opposite of rainbows and sunshine.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Yes. John Cusack puts on an understated “dad separated from son in apocalypse” face, Samuel L. Jackson gives some vintage scripture-quoting and gets glowingly drunk in a “Ring My Bell” montage, and they’re never joined by more than a couple tagalongs, who are also doing good work. The journey’s consistently offbeat—they sleep on the counters of an abandoned drive-in’s snack shack, then find people traveling through the woods in an ice cream truck.

The unpredictable, running, weapon-wielding zombies are doing things zombies just don’t really do, and a lot of the time it’s to strong effect. One sits on a swingset, zoned out, patting his dog; there’s a zombie restroom fellatio dream. Their bodies jerk in odd ways, like someone being electrocuted while having a stroke. They bunch up and group-broadcast ugly static from their mouths. Something like opera comes out at night, when they lay down together and “reboot.” They work as a hive mind that can infiltrate the dreams of the unafflicted.

The logic isn’t the point, but it does get wacky enough to drag Cell down toward the end, especially as it really leans into expecting us to care deeply about the story. CGI is boldly, badly employed a few times. But it wins some of those points back by appreciating silence (like a true cell phone hater), and taking its time with some memorable end-of-the-world vistas.

15 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. This book has been referred to as The Cell so many times it’s not even funny.

2. An Eli Roth adaptation was announced right after the novel dropped in 2006. Three years later he said he’d discovered he only liked to do original material and dropped out. 1408 writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, also of Ed Wood and Man on the Moon, worked on an early draft.

3. John Cusack joined in late 2012, almost seven years after the film was announced. The movie shot in 25 days in January 2014 and didn’t get released until two and a half years later, on VOD, no U.S. theatrical release. It did make $1.3 million abroad; shout-out to the $51 worth of tickets sold in the U.K. Knowing all this makes the preposterously long string of six production company logos at the beginning look like a parade straight through Development Hell.

4. Cell is one of two novels King has adapted as a feature film, the other being Pet Sematary a quarter-century earlier. He’s only personally turned two others into films, the briefer works Cycle of the Werewolf and A Good Marriage.

5. The twitchy Ray was named as the result of an eBay auction for a role in the novel. “Buyer should be aware that CELL is a violent piece of work,” King wrote, “which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the brain.” A woman paid $25K and used it as a gift for her brother, whose full name went to an actual semi-important character and stuck for the film. The eBay runner-up was planning to take out a mortgage on his house to finance the purchase.

6. In 1408, Cusack was a writer of true-horror; here it’s graphic novels. He also appeared in 1986’s Stand by Me as big bro to Gordie “Also a Writer” Lachance. (Such a King power player, get this guy in Castle Rock, please.) Other multi-time Kingers here: Owen “Boarding School Kid” Teague (It‘s Patrick Hockstetter, the very next year), Stacy “Headmaster” Keach (Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return), and Wilbur “Guy in the Bar” Fitzgerald (Pet Sematary II, 11.22.63.)

7. Legitimately sweet easter eggs: Clay lands in Boston on flight 1408, then the Manchester flight he’s eyeing gets changed to gate A6, one of the names for The Stand‘s superflu. Much cooler, the ship painting from Room 1408 is definitely referenced in Clay’s son’s room.

8. Director Tod Williams was having a tough time figuring out how his phone-zombies should move without resembling the hordes from the already-uber-popular Walking Dead, also filming in Atlanta. “We went over to the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago and got a bunch of dancers to workshop with us and a bunch of improv actors,” he told a reporter. “They spent several days working on motions “more like flocking behavior, rather than zombie behavior.”

9. In the same interview, Williams embraced the ambiguity that chafes many of the novel’s fans and foes alike. “What Stephen King is more interested in isn’t a static set of rules. It’s a continually changing evolution of some future version of humanity. So, there’s a lot of mystery in what’s happening. King is comfortable with mystery remaining,” he said, and agree.

10. Every single King work leaves the reader, for life, with at least one gruesome detail or image. One of Cell‘s is the Pulsed-out teen sprinting into a lamppost face first, falling, then doing it again. “One of her eyes had gone crooked in its socket. She opened her mouth, exposing a ruin of what had probably been expensive orthodontic work, and laughed at him. He never forgot it.” The film recreates it with brutal accuracy, but with a wall.

11. Cusack hitches an ice cream truck in the woods (1: wtf, 2: love it) and ends up taking it all the way to the bitter end. A Mister Softee features prominently in the book’s opening Pulse sequence.

12. Yours truly began reading King in 1998 with Cujo; it took about eight years/15-20 books to realize, with Cell, this man is ridiculously obsessed with bombing and inferno-ing his climaxes and major plot points. Literally his first four novels did it, The Stand multiple times, shamelessly.

13. A few months before filming, Samuel L. Jackson said a reporter he had “no idea” his character was gay. He said he hadn’t read the book, but surely he’d read the script, where Tom mentions within minutes that his live-in boyfriend recently left him?

14. Cell‘s jacket copy: “Stephen King lives in Maine with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He does not own a cell phone.”

Today, he helplessly tweets pictures of his corgi, Molly, the Thing of Evil, to his 4.8 million followers.

While we’re here, since this may easily never come up again: Stephen King once went on the Nerdette podcast exclusively to rep his family’s love for corgis. There’s also a bus bench dedicated to his and Molly’s timeless relationship.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfri5_0lxQ4/

15. The Pulse plays for a few seconds at the very end of the credits. It’s horrible.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Very, very not good. Picture the archetypal crap project, the one film critics trip over themselves in a rush to savage. This is that, with a 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CELL (2006): Followed an unusual 2005 that yielded slim mystery novel The Colorado Kid and Faithful, an…’04 Red Sox email collection with Stewart O’Nan. Just prior, he’d done a Dark Tower completion blitz, three books/2,000 pages published in 11 months, threatened as a retirement gesture. (Fast-forward: he turned 70 this past September, co-authoring a 700-page novel that month and dropping a 550-pager of his own this month. C’mon, man.)

Nine months after Cell came Lisey’s Story, which was teased via handwritten preview at the back of Cell:

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of King’s ’77 novel. Heard of it?

Zach Dionne is sorry if you really like Cell the book and he understands if you hate the movie.

Where to stream Cell