hongkong666 Stephen King, baby! For many years I re-watched this movie, even owned the DVD at some point and still The Dark Half is a personal classic to me. The fact alone that Timothy Hutton plays both, Thad and George, and displays both of these characters so differently, shows how good he is as an actor. If you haven't seen this one yet, you definetely should check it out, for it is one of the better Stephen King adaptations with a brilliant atmosphere, at times hilarious over the top acting and a storyline that keeps you engaged in what is going on at the screen.

classicsoncall There was more than once while watching the film that I thought Alfred Hitchcock could have used George Romero when he was filming "The Birds". With at least a half dozen scenes of sparrows massing in the sky or threatening the Beaumont home, they appeared a lot more threatening than Hitchcock's birds. But that was an earlier time and George Romero was just getting started in the Sixties and wouldn't have been a name to contend with yet.One thing that bothered me about this story was the premise set for the existence of George Stark, the evil alter-ego identity of Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton). The foreign tissue removed from the young Thad was described as an 'absorbed fetus', formed of a rare tumor manifesting a tooth and other grisly organic remains. Then later, Thad's university friend Reggie proclaims George a conjuration, created by the force of Thad's will. I haven't read the King novel, so it seems to me the film's story line was going in too many different directions with these arguments. Personally, going with just the latter idea would have worked well enough for me.Fred Clawson's blackmail scheme didn't hold much water with me either. Obviously Beaumont's publisher knew he was using a pseudonym, and to my thinking, what was the big deal anyway? Stephen King uses at least a couple I'm aware of - Richard Bachman and Peter Straub - and it never hurt his career. So that was a little muddled in the execution too.But you know what, the evil guise of George Stark was really cool, wasn't it? Looking like a deranged Elvis impersonator, I thought Hutton's transformation into the warped madman was pretty impressive. I had to wonder though about the Mississippi plates on his Toronado, where did that idea come from? Tennessee (Graceland) would have made more sense and I wouldn't even have questioned it. Oh, well.Anyway, old George came to a ghastly finale there at the end of the picture, but even then I had to contain a chuckle among all the gruesome imagery. For the very first time ever I saw it dramatically illustrated what it means to be a pencil necked geek.

SnoopyStyle In 1968, young Thad Beaumont has a brain tumor removed. It turns out to be an undeveloped twin. The sparrows swarm supernaturally. 23 years later, Thad (Timothy Hutton) is a college professor and a successful writer under the pen name George Stark. He's married to Liz (Amy Madigan) with young twins. Fred Clawson discovers that he's the secret pulp novel writer and blackmails him. His publishers accept killing off George Stark even with a fake tombstone. They try to publicize transitioning to the safer Thad Beaumont writing. Then the people involved start getting killed off by a mysterious figure and Thad is the prime suspect for Sheriff Alan Pangborn.I like the basic idea and I think the movie is well made. However, a couple things keep bothering me. First, the whole idea of 'killing' off Stark doesn't make sense. Clawson's blackmail is based on the fact that it would hurt business. Yet they close up the Stark business themselves. A better reason has to be written to explain killing off Stark. It may be as simple as Thad being tired of the violent imagery.The second is that I don't understand why the sheriff doesn't arrest Thad on that first night. It seems like he has enough evidence. It would be more compelling if he had less evidence. It would be more tense if the killer's face isn't revealed so early. They should stretch out the questions until the third act. The overall work is good. Timothy Hutton is a compelling lead. If only the movie could fix my concerns, this could be great.

GL84 Deciding to move on in his career, a writer's decision to put an end to a vile alter-ego sets off a series of vicious deaths around him and must find out how to stop him before his family is targeted.This is a pretty decent and overall exciting effort. One of the better elements in here is the rater ingenious way it builds up the alter-ego's identity and through this adds a rather haunting touch by keeping the mystery of it being alive rather well. The first half plays the murder mystery of it pretty well as they set up whether-or-not he's crazy or really did those murders before, and that leaves a pretty big impression here. His actions, from the stalking to the way he's committed to the idea of how he came to exist in reality all makes for quite an enthralling mystery. Once it's all revealed and the body count begins to grow this does kick into a higher gear as the race to stop the rampage as well as trying to clear his name amongst the slew of brilliantly-orchestrated scenes that really hold this one quite nicely into the finale. This is quite fun as there's a lot to like about the finale and how it goes about finding a resolution to their battle as it deals quite nicely with the gore brought in along with the action for the scene which really helps this quite well by providing an ecstatically fun ending. That does help to even out the few flaws here, from the fact that the killer here is a complete joke who's never in the slightest bit scary since he appears as a lame greaser-type with a straight-razor for a killing tool which is quite lame all around so it's really hard to get any fear from him. This really has a toll on the beginning as it wanders around in so many extraneous scenes of him ending the ruse that it loses all meaning and drags this out probably about ten minutes too long. It's got a few too many story lines than it needs to have, and it at times can be a little confusing. It also seems just a little bit repetitive in the middle, which is no doubt due to the too long length. The same three general sequences of events play out several times over, and it gets a little tiresome. It's not all bad but does make up for enough to be watchable.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and children-in-jeopardy.