IN "The Reel Stuff," Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg have gathered an eclectic collection of fantasy and horror stories gone Hollywood that offers an opportunity to examine how these speculative tales were adapted for the screen.
The results are not always pretty. In many cases, the originals supersede their celluloid successors. It is also a great pity that the editors have failed to cough up the names of the screenwriters who savaged some of these gems. But this is, after all, what the Internet Movie Database is for.
Seminal stories like Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel" and Harry Bates' "Farewell to the Master" are mysteriously absent. The inclusion of George R.R. Martin's excellent novella "Sandkings" is something of a cheat; it kicked off the 1995 incarnation of TV's "The Outer Limits."
But on the whole, this book -- which was originally published in 1998 and has now been reissued in an expanded edition -- provides a reliable litmus test for those wondering whether a story or a motion picture is more convincing.
Some of the pieces here -- John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (which inspired two versions of "The Thing" and an obscure Christopher Lee flick named "Horror Express"), Donald A. Wollheim's "Mimic," Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report" and H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West -- Reanimator" -- suggest a relationship between fiction and film that is little more than conceptual.
In most cases, this is just as well. Campbell's talky 1938 novella, with its quaint fixations on anti-gravity and its needless pulp bravado, hasn't aged particularly well. Lovecraft's serial, while striking in places, was disowned by the author himself.
But other stories raise a different set of questions. Why did anybody think William Gibson's giddy but incomprehensible "Johnny Mnemonic" could be turned into a movie? A story with a swastika embedded into the text and sentences like "The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension" don't exactly scream quality film material, and the infamously awful result is an unintentional laugh riot. (It's disheartening to know that Gibson wrote the screenplay.)
Then there are the true catastrophes: great stories that were transformed into execrable movies. Edward Khmara and Wolfgang Petersen should be confined to a barren planet for cheapening the moral complexity of Barry Longyear's Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella, "Enemy Mine."
