The 16 Worst Stephen King Movies Ever Made (76 -61)

Every Stephen King movie, miniseries and sequel nobody asked for, ranked. Seventy-six of them. This is part one, and we’re starting at the very bottom — numbers 76 down to 61. Stephen King raised me. The books, the movies, all of it. I’ve read IT and The Stand more times than I can count, I wore out Night Shift and Skeleton Crew on cassette, and The Dark Tower is my favorite book series ever written. That’s why I’m doing this. The ranking runs on two things: how much I loved watching it, and how close it stayed to the book. Anything that brushes up against the Dark Tower gets flagged, because all things serve the Beam. And the ones that aren’t really King at all go straight to the bottom, which is exactly where we are right now. A little history first. A broke English teacher in a Maine trailer threw the opening pages of a novel in the trash and his wife fished them back out. That book was Carrie. Two years later it was a movie, and Hollywood has not left him alone since. Five of the sixteen films in this section are Children of the Corn movies, which tells you most of what you need to know about what happens when one short story about a Nebraska cornfield meets a studio with an expiring option. Runaway was shot back to back with a Hellraiser sequel largely to hold the rights, and the rights reverted to King anyway in September 2018. Genesis is set in the desert with no Gatlin, no cornfield and no He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Urban Harvest moves the corn to Chicago, ends with a tentacled rubber worm, and features Charlize Theron’s uncredited first appearance on screen — King reportedly liked that one. The Final Sacrifice has a house dropped on an old woman and a remote-hijacked wheelchair launched through a bingo hall window, and it is tremendous. The 2020 version finally shows you the monster, and it’s a CGI grizzly made of cornstalks. Then the disowned ones. King sued to get his name off The Lawnmower Man and won, because a federal judge worked out that roughly two minutes of a virtual-reality movie came from his short story; the studio kept his name on the VHS boxes anyway and got held in contempt. He told Fangoria plainly that he didn’t approve of Pet Sematary Two and didn’t want it made. A Return to Salem’s Lot has nothing from the book and nobody from the 1979 miniseries, and it walks straight past One for the Road — King’s actual sequel, sitting right there in Night Shift. And the real lesson of this section comes from the 2009 Children of the Corn, which Syfy built out of King’s own discarded 1984 screenplay. It’s faithful. Burt’s a Vietnam vet, nobody gets out of Gatlin, the monster never shows its face. It’s also not very good, while the unfaithful 1984 version is a great time and will be sitting way up this list. Faithful isn’t the same as good. Next time: sixty through forty-one. The cocaine years, the day a van nearly took King away from us, and the one that hurt me the most. 🎬 PART 1 — THE BOTTOM SIXTEEN 00:00 Intro — how this ranking works 02:20 76. The Mangler 2 (2002) 04:39 75. Children of the Corn: Runaway (2018) 06:30 74. Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011) 08:25 73. Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995) 10:32 72. Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992) 12:54 71. The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) 14:43 70. A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987) 17:01 69. The Lawnmower Man (1992) 19:15 68. Pet Sematary Two (1992) 21:24 67. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023) 23:10 66. Children of the Corn (2020) 25:33 65. Trucks (1997) 27:51 64. Dolan’s Cadillac (2009) 29:48 63. Carrie (2002) 32:22 62. Children of the Corn (2009) 34:10 61. Cell (2016)