Season 8 Episode 6: The Tommyknockers/The Langoliers

As a seasoned horror fan who grew up reading Stephen King books, I've always tried to watch every single film adaptation ever made from his stories.  Over the years the violence and gore quotient of the average horror movie increases relative to the tolerance of the viewer's stomach.  Before this turns into a math and biology lesson, I just mean to say it takes a lot to scare or shock us these days, right?  After all, once you run out of vampires, vengeful prom queens and rabid dogs, even the imagination of King gets stretched a little thin coming up with new frights to unleash upon us.  The terrors in the two stories I talk about here are a bit far-out, leaning more toward science fiction than horror, and it doesn't help that they were both made for television in the early  1990s, where visual effects were barely learning to crawl and the screen was still a square!  Now I'm getting into geometry, and that's not the topic here!  The Tommyknockers and the Langoliers, whatever the heck those are, were not Stephen King's finest hour.  They were, in fact,  8 hours of sitting in front of the idiot box (remember, television = commercial breaks every 15 minutes, get your calculators out...).  You'd have to be a fairly hardcore King fanatic to have sat through these two miniseries, so let me dilute them down for everyone else.  And, for those of you who don't like horror, don't worry.  The only reason you should be afraid to watch these movies is because they kinda suck.