Streamin’ King: ‘Christine’ Finally Revs Onto Netflix On Its 35th Anniversary

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 Christine, the 1983 adaptation of the novel published the same year.

STREAMIN’ KING: CHRISTINE

THE GIST: Arnie, a sexually frustrated high school reject with a football player BFF, buys the titular 1958 Plymouth Fury, a red fixer-upper. He gets into a relationship with a lovely classmate but falls harder for—and is driven mad by—his self-repairing car: an autonomous, vindictive murder machine.

PEDIGREE: Directed straight-facedly and scored synth-tastically by John Carpenter at the end of streak including Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing. Adapted by first-time feature screenwriter Bill Phillips. Stars Keith Gordon (Arnie), who did some small roles but has really hit his stride directing shows like Fargo, The Leftovers, and Dexter. Also features Alexandra Paul, who was Stephanie on Baywatch and has since played two women named Christine, and John Stockwell, who played Cougar in Top Gun and not much else of note. If you’re wondering if he directed 2002’s Blue Crush, you’re dead on. (What’s that? Yes he directed Into the Blue three years later.)

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Certainly, with the reminder that the novel’s an overstuffed 526 pages and this joyride lasts 110 minutes and still feels a little long. You won’t get the same explanation for Christine’s wicked ways, but the film rationalizes the silliness right away: she’s just b-b-b-b-bad to the bone, has been since she killed an employee at the plant in Detroit when her odometer still sat at 000,000. (George Thorogood growls her theme for the sleek, fun opening…and again for the end credits, which is a bit much.)

King’s essence and Carpenter’s style blend well without overpowering each other, but the product’s dumber without any real relationships to ground it—except Arnie and Christine’s, which stays fascinating in the face of corniness—and there’s a lot less of Dennis and Leigh, who are crucial to this concept being longer than a short story or a Hot Wheels commercial. But seeing the actual hulking, glistening Plymouth Fury that inspired King to write all those pages brought to life, in its dangerous, clearly invincible glory? It was cool then, and it’s cool 35 years later. Watch this one before they inevitably remake it, you’ll need the space between the capable original and the CGI trash en route.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? More so than some SK mainstays with bigger cult followings. It’s not the most recognizably Carpenterian film from the man who made Michael Myers, but his synths and shots hit their stride in the middle, often during fantastic night-driving POV sequences that make you feel like you are the car. Completely worthwhile set pieces include bloodthirsty Christine mauling herself to chase a man into a too-narrow alley, then completely restoring herself with pleasing practical effects, and the part where she peels out of an exploding gas station fully aflame in the night. That’s a special one.

Carpenter & Co. were up to the task of showing how many ways a pissed-off car could kill someone, with one guy getting squashed against the steering wheel when the seat just adjusts itself forward and forward and forward. The squarely-in-the-early-’80s performances don’t ask for too many facepalms, but the grating toxic masculinity is off the charts; a girl’s referred to as a “walking sperm bank” in the first five minutes, while another “looks smart but has the body of a slut.” You’ve also got “queer” as a pejorative and some terribly abusive boyfriending.

13 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Movie-Christine is evil because she rolled out of the plant that way. In the book she’s haunted by Roland D. LeBay, who sells Arnie the car, dies, then worms his spirit into both Arnie and the car.
2. SK’s other car-oriented stories include the 2002 novel From a Buick 8 (Ch. 44 in Christine opens with Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6”) and the 2011 novella Mile 81; both are about predatory extradimensional whips (latter is a brand-less station wagon) happy to fuck up anyone who touches them. There’s also King’s one directorial outing Maximum Overdrive and its inspiration, the pre-Carrie short “Trucks,” and the novella Riding the Bullet, the world’s first mass-market e-book back in 2000. Detective novel Mr. Mercedes (2014) starts with a mass murderer wearing a clown mask plowing a luxury sedan into a crowd. (There’s a show now.) King’s author son Joe Hill has an epic novel called NOS4A2, named after the license plate on a supernatural/lethal 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith belonging to a vampire.
3. The sledgehammering of Christine is what King hoped to do to the van that struck and nearly killed him in 1999, when he was penning Buick 8. Sadly it got crushed at a junkyard.

4. In It‘s 11th hour, adult Henry Bowers takes a five-page ride in a red 1958 Plymouth Fury being driven by a dead friend. “I sent you a ride,” says Pennywise’s voice in his head. “Sort of a taxi, if you can dig that.” He enters and the door swings itself shut. The glovebox yields liquor, then “A Memo From Pennywise!” Henry gives the car “a wide berth” when he leaves.
5. The sickly green light of Christine’s radio and dials is reminiscent of The Tommyknockers and Maximum Overdrive, where the same light signifies an alien presence infesting our technology.
6. A few SK x JC things: A) 1980 brought both Carpenter’s The Fog and King’s The Mist. B) Directing The Thing in ’82, a pre-Christine Carpenter was hired to adapt SK’s Firestarter; he commissioned drafts from Thing screenwriter Bill Lancaster and Christine‘s Bill Phillips. Universal fired Carpenter after Thing underperformed. C) Early in 2007’s Mist flick, there’s a poster for Carpenter’s The Thing.
7. Christine was in development before the book arrived. After producing the first King miniseries, Salem’s Lot, in 1979, Richard Kobritz got early manuscripts for Cujo and Christine. He passed on the dog one; arriving four months apart, both adaptations earned $21 million.
8. Over a decade after Harry Dean Stanton (Alien) played Det. Junkins, King went on to give his three names to characters in The Green Mile (Dean Stanton, Harry Terwilliger). Then Stanton acted in the movie.

9. Rock lyrics open nearly all Christine‘s 53 chapters. They all reference cars and driving, and half the song titles are directly named for the same pursuits. Bruce Springsteen, the Beach Boys, and Chuck Berry get six chapters apiece; zero of Carpenter’s 15 soundtrack choices overlap with King’s, even artist-wise, and none are so directly about cars or fast times. “Bad to the Bone” and “Beast of Burden” are great choices though.
10. The book is set in Pittsburgh and dedicated to native son/multi-time SK collaborator George A. Romero and his wife, Christine Forrest. They didn’t gain anything by relocating the story to California, and they definitely lost some stuff.
11. King’s Christine was a four-door, but every ’58 Fury was a two-door, so that’s what Carpenter gave us.
12. Asked in ’84 if he’d do a sequel, Uncle Stevie was quoted (with two exclamation points, I don’t know) as saying, “All I can think of would be if the parts are recycled, you’d end up with this sort of homicidal Cuisinart, or something like that! That would be kind of nice!”
13. Cinematographer Donald M. Morgan also did The Rage: Carrie 2 in 1999. The more you know!

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Thoroughly medium, a lot of casual dismissals that paused to mention the hard-to-ignore standout aspects, like Variety calling it “pretty shop-worn” and a “retread” but noting that “technically, the film is outstanding, and Carpenter’s choice of lenses and widescreen work is as astute as ever.” Cinefantastique chided the 35-year-old Carpenter’s “obliviousness to the need for empathetic characters,” while the Washington Post conceded that “between the smartest effects and [Keith] Gordon’s canny performance, it’s more diverting than the material probably deserves.” Funniest, TV Guide called it “another average adaptation of one of the increasingly weak Stephen King novels that hit Hollywood like a bad rash in 1983.” (Cujo and The Dead Zone movies preceded Xtine; within six months Children of the Corn and Firestarter would arrive.)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CHRISTINE (1983): King’s fifth release in less than a year, following a monster ’82 comprised, chronologically, of the Richard Bachman book The Running Man, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Different Seasons, and the Creepshow movie and comic. Seven months after Christine came Pet Sematary and The Cycle of the Werewolf. (In a nine-year stretch in the ’80s, King published 19 books and saw five screenplays filmed, directing one of them. Many of those days he was wasted on coke, alcohol, and more.)

Zach Dionne is a North Carolina writer who recommends the recent Onion opus “Nation Admits Being So Coked-Out in ’80s They Have No Memory of Reading Cujo.”

Watch Christine on Netflix