Tonight: The Tommyknockers (1993)
Oh dear, this is gonna be a hard one to review.
I haven’t read the book, and now I really want to. Not because the story is really good, but I want to know what the hell actually happened!
I swear to god, I was 30 minutes into this thing and had to stop the video saying, “I have no idea what is happening.”
Basically, a local writer digs up an alien space ship and a green light starts spreading through the town. It makes everyone hyper intelligent inventors, but everyone starts looking pale and sickly and their teeth start falling out.
The only one immune to this is Senator Bail Organa from Alderaan. He apparently crashed into a tree when he was younger and has a metal plate in his skull.
Jimmy Smits (really? One character reference and then immediately switch to the actor’s name? Lame) ends up entering the buried alien ship. He finds out that the aliens are all dead, but the green light is stealing the life force of the residents of the town in order to bring the aliens back to life. Killing the aliens appears to reverse the process, so Jimmy Smits takes mental control of the ship and flies it into space before blowing it up. WITH HIS MIND!
So now we have the basic plot out of the way, lets address many of the sub plots and wacky nonsense.
The Paulsons. So one of the town deputies, Becka Paulson, is married to . . . HOLY S***! That’s Cliff De Young! Not sure if anyone else is excited but he plays Brad Majors/Farley Flavors in the lesser known sequel to Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment!
Yeah, I didn’t quite recognize him until he got that shit eating grin right before he died. Yeah, he plays more the Farley Flavors a**hole here than the Brad Majors a**hole. Farley keeps sneaking off to sleep with his boss. It is bad enough to cheat, but his wife is nice enough to make him sandwiches for his “fishing trip” and then he just tosses them out the window. Then when a young boy goes missing, he skips out on the search party to once again sleep with his boss. When the TV starts talking to his wife telling her to kill him, we’re on the other side of the TV agreeing with them.
Farley comes home and b****es at Becka to turn off the crap she is watching and Becka tells him to turn off the Cocka Doody TV HIMSELF! Mainly because she rigged the TV To kill whoever turns it off. Cliff De Young gets this shit eating grin before turning it off, like he won somehow, and then dies in a pulse of green light. Becka is put into Brad’s straight jacket at is committed to Dentonvale (another Shock Treatment reference) where she keeps repeating, “Tommyknockers Tommyknockers, knocking at your door!”
*She
Next we have the Lizzie McGuire’s dad who is trying to run a restaurant. Honestly, I kind of want to see him in something where I DON’T see him as Lizzie McGuire’s dad. In this one, he has a wife and two sons. One son gets into magic due to his grandfather. However, the green light convinces him to make a teleportation device and he uses it in his act.
Careful, Tesla and Hugh Jackman might come after you.
He uses the device to make some household objects disappear and return, but then he uses it on his brother. Everyone is terribly impressed with the disappearance, but decide to go inside before he makes the brother reappear. Which is just rude. Let the kid finish the act! The machine also considers this rude and decides not to bring the brother back. That will teach you not to wait until the credits are over!
The brother keeps trying to bring him back, but can’t. In fact, this upsets him so much he becomes hospitalized. The doctors say he should be dead based on the size of the brain tumor inside his head.
The disappeared brother is eventually found in the alien spaceship and is returned to his mother. Meanwhile, Lizzie McGuire’s dad is one of the brainwashed townsmen and attempts to shoot the entrance of the alien spaceship to stop Jimmie Smits. Howeverthe laser beam Lizzie McGuire’s dad uses just bounces off and kills him. Oh well. No word on what happens to the kid in the hospital. Probably eaten by a clown considering the Hospital is in Derry.
The Post Office Manager that Cliff De Young was boinking apparently becomes the the human villain. She designs a lipstick raygun after Becka kills Farley. She kills the state troopers who are investigating the various disappearances. She also keeps falling for married men, considering she moves on from Brad Majors to Lizzie McGuire’s Dad (she seems to grieve for them equally). She tries to kill the local writer who started this whole mess. She goes into the she-shed where the writer has apparently been kidnapping and draining the lifeforce of the grandfather of the missing boy and her dog. The Post office manager is about to kill the writer with an ax, but the grandfather was playing possum and grabs the Post office manager by the throat and chokes her to death.
Now we get to the Sheriff and the State Trooper. The Sheriff is Ruth Merrill and she has a room full of creepy dolls. The State Trooper apparently doesn’t mind her creepy collection, but his vice is drinking bottles of coke. The Sheriff ends up getting killed by all her dolls when they come to life and knock a bust onto her head. The State Trooper gets killed when one of the townspeople rigged the soda machine to latch onto his hand and then explode.
Must have been rigged with mentos.
I think that covers most of the madness.
This is one of Stephen King’s weirder series. It unfortunately just has that presentation where you can watch the full thing and not really follow what is happening. It could just be that I am getting overwhelmed with all the weird that is being thrown at me each day.
So lets see how far this rabbit hole goes.
Tomorrow: Lets keep this Alien train rolling with another Miniseries.
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