I should have known I was in trouble the moment I saw the title.

It has been recent practice, especially in the world of made-for-TV movies, to take a Stephen ("Maximum Overdrive") King-related production that the network knows is a stinker and add King's name to the title. The idea is that King has gained enough gravitas that people will watch anything with his name on it. Hence, we get "Stephen King's The Stand", "Stephen King's Horror Hospital", and now, "Stephen King's Desperation". I assume "Stephen King's Pile of Steaming Turds" is in production.

Not that King was involved with "Desperation" in name only. On the contrary, he wrote the teleplay, which is a big part of the problem. King thinks at a novelist's pace and doesn't develop the plot at the more rapid rate a film requires. The result is long passages where a group of people talk about God, not the stuff that horror is made of. Those people are stuck in a town called Desperation, Nevada, which is populated by scores of corpses, hundreds of vultures, and one psychotic cop (Ron Perlman), who is possessed by an evil spirit named Tak. (Which is "Kat" spelled backwards, just like "God" is "Dog" backwards. Clever, eh?) When he's not shipping people to the hoosegow over a suspiciously-placed bag of weed, he's gradually turning into either 1) a hideous, undead creature, or 2) Gary Busey. You make the call.

One of the people who's stuck in the pokey is a 12-year-old boy named David (Shane Haboucha), who is first seen praying for a miracle. He obviously does that a lot, because he's wearing a Cleveland Indians T-shirt. To be fair, it's clear that some sort of spirit is speaking through him, because he sure doesn't sound like any 12-year-old boy in this universe. In the proud tradition of Gary Coleman, David's lines have been copped from a script writer (in this case, you-know-who), and he comes off as the brightest person in a room full of stupid adults.

David manages to spring the whole gang, and they run around Desperation in...well, desperation. When they're not trying to find a phone that hasn't become a scorpion's nest, they hole up in an abandoned theater and discuss The Big Guy. Just the first thing I'd do if a zombie cop was looking for me. If you stumbled across this film at the wrong time while channel surfing, you might think it was "The 700 Club". In order to remind people that this is a horror film, the preaching is broken off occasionally for a few minutes of icky special effects. There are dead people, snakes, scorpions, a severed arm, and a slot machine that pays off in blood, in short, as much gruesomeness that you can get away with in a made-for-TV movie. Not that these scenes are especially scary. Most 10-year-old boys would describe them as "neat".

"Stephen King's Desperation" is as predictable as it is not scary. You will guess well in advance, for instance, which character will die in order to save those remaining. (And if you said Jesus Boy, you should sue your parents for malpractice.) It's hard to say just who the target audience was for this film. Nobody watches a horror film to see people discuss the power of prayer. In horror, "God" is a word that should be screamed, not spoken, preferably preceded by "Oh, my"!

--Otm_Shank