Listen to the Cessnas of the Night - THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)

The universe of Stephen King adaptations is widely varied, from the terrifying (The Shining) to the dramatically excellent (The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, The Dead Zone) to the entertainingly mediocre (Needful Things, Maximum Overdrive) to the bottom of the barrel (Bag of Bones, The Langoliers).  While I'm loathe to stick too many feathers in the author's cap I'll admit that Kingland ain't a bad place to be and I find myself continuing to inch my way through the 'verse when the mood strikes.  With so many to choose from it's easy to overlook a sizable percentage of them, but the more I watch them the more I can stand to let the poorest in appearance slip by.  Today, though, I'd like to talk about one of the better ones that still remains without a proper fanbase, and it has a particular significance to me as the origin of one of my favorite Halloween memories.

Ever have one of those times when you tune in to a show or movie most of the way through without really knowing what it is, only to have your haunting memory filled in years later?  I've got two of those moments, both horror flicks that turned out to be worth waiting for the full experience.  The first was when I caught the last 10 minutes of Night of the Creeps at a friend's house when I was probably 11 or 12; it was immediately memorable and pretty crazy, and as I didn't catch the name I almost leaped out of my seat when I watched it some 10-12 years later and the recognition slapped me in the face.  The second time I caught the name but still only saw the last act, The Night Flier, and this time it was after I had gotten back from one of my last times trick-'r-treating.  I had moved to a neighborhood with houses too far apart and not enough children, so my candy bucket wasn't particularly full and I felt the spirit of the night was passing me by.  Lo and behold, the film hooked me with a blood-soaked climax involving airplanes and vampires, and I knew I had to track down the flick.  I certainly wasn't disappointed, and after a couple more viewings I can safely say it's in the upper drawers of SK horror cinema and undeserving of its obscurity.

Late one night at a small-town airfield, the night attendant walks out to a Cessna he can't communicate with, only to get brutally killed by the pilot, one with massive claws.  The incident gets the attention of the editor (Dan Monahan) of Inside View, a sleazy WWN-style tabloid, and he tries handing it to his fallen-star reporter Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) who scoffs at the assignment.  He suggests handing it to a new recruit, Katherine Blair (Julie Entwistle), who joined the paper partially due to the reputation of Dees.  The advice is taken, but when another airfield controller gets slaughtered Dees steals it back from Blair, aided by the fact that he has his own Cessna and can easily fly to the crime scenes.  As he investigates the killings more and more evidence piles up that suggests the killer is more vampire than man, not only because of his nighttime murders and black plane but also the animalistic wounds, anachronistic dress and plane decorations and seeming ability to hypnotize people.  As he goes by the name of Dwight Renfield, the Dracula connections become to hard to ignore and he's soon labeled "the Night Flier".  Blair is soon offered to step in on the story by the editor after he sees her writing about it during her off hours, and when she meets Dees he admits that his trail has run cold despite Renfield nearly revealing himself in an effort to scare Dees off.  They work together for a bit before Dees locks her in a hotel closet so he can go after the only remaining lead by himself, and Dees finds himself hurtling closer to Renfield in more ways than one.

For those who read my review of Philip Cook's Invader you'll know that there aren't nearly enough movies starring exploitative tabloid reporters, and for the life of me I can't think of any other movie centered around local airstrips, a probably fascinating subculture that I'd love to see more of (I'll freely admit that I've always wanted to have a little prop plane or at least an ultralight...make that especially an ultralight).  King uses these cultures to frame one of his cleverest ideas, a recursive logline that is fleshed out well beyond mere pastichery.  You can't swing  a dead cat in the score recording studio without hitting several Casios, composer Brian Keane does manage to squeeze some fine musical ideas out of his limited means.  The gore effects are excellent and unflinching, the most remarkable of which is a man whose whole neck was ripped out, leaving the head lying back on the thin hinge of the small amount of neck skin remaining.  While the movie looks and sounds much like the many TV King adaptations that littered the networks in the 90's, one-time writer/director Mark Pavia keeps the pace sure and steady and has a good eye for camera placement.  The screenplay features a lot of flavorful rural dialogue and knows to include small fright moments without letting the proceedings go over the top, a risk that King adaptations often find themselves way too far on either side of, such as this scene in Sleepwalkers where a woman stabs a guy in the back with a corncob:

*

Miguell Ferrer as Richard Dees is a phenomenally cynical reporter, and in a better world it would be known as his signature role.  There's never a moment when he isn't bitter and scowling, showing absolutely no regard for other people in his search of the story.  His introduction is when he storms into his editor's office after a photo he took of a dead infant was kept out of the paper.  He goes out of his way to photograph dead bodies, such as a car accident he stumbles across, and laughs at his own quips while dictating into a tape recorder in between analyses of horrifying crime scenes.  A particularly weird moment comes when Dees goes to the grave of the second controller and decides to "jazz up" his photo of the gravestone; he swaps the fresh flowers out for some old ones on another grave, kicks the stone to dislodge it, and even cuts open his hand to smear blood on the stone's face.  The comparison between reporting and predation is an old one but the writing and Ferrer's performance are good enough to keep it from growing stale (even if it is a bit too on-the-nose near the end).  Ferrer was previously in the miniseries of The Stand, playing a washed up hard rocker who gets roped into Randall Flagg's demonic plans; it was King's favorite character from the book and ended up being one of the only saving graces in an extremely overlong, boring and frustrating series.  Julie Entwistle is fine as the chipper, yet increasingly jaded, Blair (who quickly gets labeled "Jimmy Olsen" by Dees), and Dan Monahan channels newspaper editors of classic comics to great effect, especially considering the shocking incongruity between his enthusiasm and the grisly subject matter of his stories ("God, I hope he kills more people!").  His character is left the most weirdly ambiguous, such as the unnerving presence of paintings of a muscle-bound, nude minotaur on the wall of his office**.  Renfield himself takes most of the movie to be fully revealed (as it should be), and the performance by Michael H. Moss and the exemplary makeup and design are well worth the wait, as is the ghastly final act at a large airport filled with corpses of Renfield's biggest attack.

While The Night Flier did get a theatrical release it was delayed heavily and actually premiered on HBO a few months before, giving people the impression that it was a TV movie and most likely inferior product, and even though some elements smack of made-for-TV-isms The Night Flier has bite where it counts and is a juicy Halloween flick to boot, just silly enough to fit in with the spirit of of the season.  While the HBO DVD is out-of-print and expensive three separate people have uploaded it to YouTube, making it a heck of a lot easier to see Miguel Ferrer's finest hour than before.  Drink it all in and you just might regain a bit of faith in Stephen King movies***.

~PNK

*I know that has nothing to with The Night Flier, but how in God's name do you not include that?!

**I'd say it's a Rose Madder reference, but that'd put too little faith in the belief that some people just like hanging anthropomorphic porn on their walls.


***But not too much, lest you try watching Bag of Bones.  Seriously, that's one of the most boring and pointless miniseries I've ever tried watching.