Worth Mentioning - The Most Devastating Experience

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

John Candy comedy and more Stephen King vampires.

SUMMER RENTAL (1985)

I have been a fan of John Candy ever since I was a really young kid – after all, there was a time when I considered Armed and Dangerous to be my favorite movie. So of course I watched Summer Rental during some of its many cable airings in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s... but did I ever watch the whole movie? I’m not quite sure, because when I revisited Summer Rental recently I was surprised to find that it’s sort of two movies in one. It’s the movie I remember, and then the second half of the film’s 87 minute running time involves a story I didn’t recall at all.

Here’s what I remembered: Candy plays harried air traffic controller Jack Chester, who gets five weeks paid vacation after a close call at work and takes his family – wife Sandy (Karen Austin), their kids Jennifer (Kerri Green), Bobby (Joey Lawrence), and Laurie (Aubrey Jene), and their dog Archie – on a trip to Citrus Grove, Florida. On this vacation, they run into one problem after another. Jack gets a horrific sunburn, the wealthy Al Pellet (Richard Crenna) takes a table at a restaurant out from under them and consumes the last of the lobsters, they go to another restaurant where they’re served microwaved frozen fish, they move into the wrong property and get run out by the people who live there, they ended up staying in a noisy, fly-infested place right next to the path to a crowded public beach. Jack worries about Jennifer’s interactions with the hunky lifeguards, people raid their rental while they’re out, Jack meets a woman who wants everyone to give their opinion on her new breast implants, he suffers a leg injury that keeps him shut away inside. It’s an awkward, miserable, exhausting vacation.

As far as my memory was concerned, that was the whole story, although I couldn’t remember how Al Pellet was going to get his much deserved comeuppance. Well, as it turns out, that’s only the first 45 minutes of the movie. The remaining stretch deals with Jack getting boating lessons from the crusty old seaman Richard Scully (Rip Torn) so he can have a climactic race with Pellet. I don’t know if I ever saw that section of the movie before. If I did, I can understand why I forgot it, because the first half of Summer Rental is much more entertaining and amusing than the second half. 

For me, the movie kind of sputters out during the boating section of the story. But I do like the first half of the film, which I remember fondly from my childhood.

CHAPELWAITE: SEASON ONE (2021)

About twenty years ago, Peter Filardi wrote the second mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel Salem’s Lot, about an outbreak of vampirism in a small Maine town... and I wasn’t really a fan of the result. But now Filardi, along with his brother Jason Filardi, has returned to the material in a way – and this time around it turned out much better, as far as I’m concerned.

The TV series Chapelwaite isn’t directly based on Salem’s Lot. Instead, it’s inspired by a short story that King wrote called Jerusalem's Lot, which was included in the Night Shift collection. It’s a prequel to Salem’s Lot, set in the 1800s and written in the epistolary style, just like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which inspired King to write Salem’s Lot in the first place. It’s not a story that I’ve ever been particularly fond of, and I didn’t really think the TV series adaptation was going to be for me. Even when I started seeing images and footage from the show, I suspected it was going to be too visually dark and would move at too slow of a pace. So when I finally got around to watch it, I was pleasantly surprised. The show is quite visually dark, part of the modern trend where movies and shows are sometimes so dark it’s hard to make anything out on screen, but the story was so interesting to me that I didn’t feel that it moved too slowly. I was enjoying watching everything play out.

Set in 1850, the ten episode first season of Chapelwaite stars Adrien Brody as widower whaler captain Charles Boone, who inherits a home called Chapelwaite in the Maine town of Preacher’s Corners from a cousin who committed suicide after killing his daughter with scissors. Moving into the house with his children and taking over the family sawmill, Charles discovers that the locals are not fond of his family and not happy to have more Boones around. They blame the Boones for a strange plague that is sweeping through the community... and the more time he spends in Preacher’s Corners, the more Charles understands why they came to dislike his cousin and his cousin’s father. And he starts to suspect that they’re right about his late family members being responsible for the plague.

While Charles digs up family secrets (and empty family graves), someone else is lurking around Chapelwaite, knocking off people who are antagonistic toward the Boones. Soon enough, it becomes clear that there are vampires in Preacher’s Corners and the neighboring town of Jerusalem’s Lot. This plague of vampirism has something to do with an ancient book called De Vermis Mysteriis, which might as well be an edition of the Necronomicon, and the vampires worship The Worm, something that they feel is “the original god”. They want to resurrect The Worm and plunge the world into eternal night. The undead will walk the earth freely and humans will be their meat. It’s a pretty cool concept and Charles, aided by some townspeople – including Emily Hampshire as writer/governess Rebecca Morgan – has to figure out how to thwart the vampires. Which are led by Boones.

Chapelwaite is a good show that I enjoyed way more than I expected to, especially after not enjoying what Peter Filardi did with Salem’s Lot. If you’re into stories about vampires and evil gods, I recommend checking it out.

Although the ten episodes of the first season cover pretty much anything you could lift from the Jerusalem’s Lot story, it has been announced that there’s going to be a second season. I look forward to seeing where the story is going to go from here.