So much average

Great Film overall

Good concept, poorly executed.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I love bad movies. Therefore, I love this movie. This is a bad movie. I love it. Don't let the positive reviews fool you, this is a delightfully terrible piece of movie-making. It ranks up there with the worst Stephen King adaptations, with overwrought acting and terrible special effects. It would be best served by MST3K. Marg Helgenberger and Jimmy Smits turn in some of their worst work to date.Traci Lords isn't even sexy.The "Tommyknockers" are funny, and not even startling, never mind scary. And then there's the patented ham-handed Stephen King kid dialogue. It's just crap.I love it.

Not having read the book, I assume this TV movie veered away from its source material, at least in part, and probably due to a minuscule budget. At least that's the impression I get from reading some of the posts here. A long-buried spaceship begins to have an alarming effect on the residents of a small town in Maine. Basically, it turns them into zombies, although they think they are evolving onto a higher plane of existence. There are some creepy moments involving the newly unearthed ship, but the movie is done in by incredibly cheap effects and some awful casting, among the worst being Jimmy Smits as an alcoholic poet and Traci Lords as a perpetually horny postal worker (had her frequent love scenes been handled more realistically, instead of childishly, this movie might have been a lot more interesting). I have watched this lengthy adaptation several times over the years, and I sometimes wonder if it was intended as a comedy. Probably not, but it definitely has its share of laugh-out-loud moments.

Why on Earth does this only have a 5.1? In my opinion, this was much better than Storm of the Century, which has a 7.1 (all ratings as of 5/30/08).The plot is very well written. A buried alien craft slowly turns the citizens of a small town into mind-reading, odd-gizmo-inventing slaves.The acting was excellent. Great performances by Jimmy Smits, Marg Helgenberger, John Ashton, Robert Carrdine, Joanna Cassidy, and Allyce Beasley.The music was very creepy, and very fitting.The CGI was very good also, especially for a 1993 TV movie/series.There were some very shocking scenes, and a lot of interesting little plots here and there. All of these together make a King Classic, but it doesn't seem to get the recognition it deserves. 8/10.

this movie was so bad compared to the book. There was so many things that happened in the book that didn't happen in the movie. Ev Hillman gave Hilly the magic set on his birthday, the movie he had it before his birthday. In the movie he did his trick at his party, in the book it was at a friends party. In the book it was described to me anyway that the ship was flat and silver. But in the movie it was boxier and square. In the Book Ruth blew up the clock tower, movie her dolls killed her and she went missing. Movie Butch Dugan got killed by a coke machine instead of shooting himself in the head in the book. There was no mention of the Bangor Daily News guy. BUT those things were just little things compared to the end of the movie. When him and Bobbi went into the ship and the tommy knockers were alive (book they were dead) and then they found the missing brown boy in the ship and freed him then Bobbi and the boy got out while Gard flew the ship in the sky and blew it up but in the BOOK Gard killed Bobbi tried to help save the little boy with the transmitter but he thought he failed but the kid ended up in the hospital room with his brother. And then Gard got into the ship and fire was everywhere and all the people who became were after him got into the ship and it took off to where he didn't know and then the book ended.The movie was nothing like that. It was disappointing and the book was pretty good.