urrutiap

Is it just me or that most of the movies that are made based on Dean Koontz books always end up as crap? Except for Hideaway and Watchers a little bit

devilshalo

RichC2

To be fair a lot of book adaptations turn out poorly.

Koontz tends to be a bit bombastic with his supernatural/sci-fi leanings which is even less likely to be adapted well.

I did like Demon Seed as a kid though.

brainee

I've always wondered that too. Many of his stories have premises that seem tailor-made to a good movie. Most are pretty straight-forward stories with horror and action scenes that sound like they'd be easy to adapt. And his books are second only to King as far as taking up space on the horror shelves ... so there's a built-in audience that you'd think a movie production would want to take advantage of. But mediocre to bad movies always get made.

BTW, I recently rewatched the Koontz adaptation that has probably gotten the best critical response (mixed as it may be) ... Demon Seed. Oddly released before Koontz was any kind of name as an author (and then known mainly for sci-fi). A weird-ass and flawed movie to be sure, but a striking one nonetheless. And not coincidentally the only time an auteur filmmaker (Donald Cammell) tackled one of Koontz's books.

majorjoe23

Because his books are crap (I’ve read a lot of them).

Abob Teff

High Tension (Haute Tension) garnered quite a bit of acclaim.

Jay G.

That's not technically an adaptation though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Tension#Controversy

mhg83

Intensity was a great adaptation. I try to watch it every year.

Josh-da-man

This.

cultshock

Yeah, I've read a lot of his stuff and only really liked a handful of them. I think my favorite is "The Bad Place", I'd love to see a movie adaptation of that (there were a couple false starts that never came to fruition). It would be kinda like a mutant superhero movie except with a fucked up, incestuous family.

majorjoe23

Is that the one where the guy has four balls and can teleport because of it?

brainee

That's the one! I agree that could make for a kick-ass movie. And maybe now is a better time for it than closer to the book's publication, thanks to special effects that could handle the story and the popularity in superhero stories.

I stopped reading Koontz in the 90's, so maybe that's a sign that he wasn't particularly good. Or at least nowhere near as good as I thought he was when I read his stuff in my teens to mid twenties. Ticktock (in 1996) was the point that lost me as a fan of his writing.

Tom Banjo

Yep, Intensity was good. I thought Odd Thomas was pretty good, too.
Hideaway is on Amazon Prime. I’ve been planning to give it a rewatch. I remember liking it but haven’t seen it since it was in theaters and I was still a teenager.

urrutiap

I dont like the Odd Thomas movie. Ive seen it on the SyFy Channel and the cast isnt that great

Josh-da-man

There’s just something about Koontz... I’m not really sure how to put my finger in it... but his stories and characters just come off as perfunctory, soulless, and robotic.

He’s sort of like the Dollar Store Stephen King. They can both hack out books like clockwork, but King’s writing just has this X Factor that Koontz lacks. Even when King puts out a middling book there’s still something there.

Koontz has written a few decent books like Intensity, but I can’t imagine reading everything he writes.

rw2516

I read a few of his books around 1990. Haven't read any since. The only one I thought was really any good was Strangers. The one where random people from different parts of the country are on vacation and witness a UFO. I think they were in a desert diner. The government wipes their memory of it. They begin remembering and are drawn back to the diner.

Now it sounds like one of these network tv sci-fi mysteries that get cancelled after one season.

majorjoe23

I agree. I read them in them 90s to kill time until I got another King book. Koontz was basically the Cracked to King’s Mad.

Abob Teff

That’s the reaction I had hoped to garner ... read it and then tell me that with a straight face.

EDIT: Just read the link — that’s funny! Last I had heard (which was quite some time ago and I admittedly didn’t follow it) I thought the filmmakers were claiming they didn’t know anything about it. I like Koontz’s reaction though — and I agree with it 1000%.

dhmac

Cecil of Good Bad Flicks made a video lamenting the general low quality of Dean R. Koontz adaptations and lists ones that he thinks deserve a good remade




Although I was surprised that he seemed unaware that "Watchers II" was really a remake of the book and not an actual sequel to the first movie. I think the other sequels were also remakes of a sort too, but I never saw those.


And in a later recommendations video, Cecil recommended "Odd Thomas" (at 1:47 in) as finally a good Koontz adaptation:

cultshock

Close, the guy who can teleport is otherwise normal, it's his brother that had four balls (but no penis! ) and I think he had super strength too (oh hell, maybe he could teleport too, but his brother was more the focus of the story). I just thought it was a great story, at first you have no clue why things are happening until you finally find out that the guy is teleporting but has no memory of doing so afterwards.

Totally agree. His characters don't come to life on the pages like most of King's characters do IMO (which is one of his greatest strengths as a writer, making characters that seem real and that you care about). Koontz characters just act and talk like characters in a book in comparison, many times distractingly so.

Jon2

Maybe it's because his stuff is adapted by the same guys that do King's stuff.