His is one of the movies based on a Stephen King (short) story that I deliberately skipped when it first came out, and never bothered to seek out in the following 30 years. This for the plain and simple reason there was a massive oversupply of King adaptations in the mid-80s to mid-90s period (still today, in fact) and - honestly - they all feel quite similar.
Can't help thinking Stephen King must have had a difficult teenager trajectory and was the victim of many high-school bullies and painful pranks. If you compare films like "It", "Stand by Me", "Sleepwalkers", "Silver Bullet", and "Sometimes they come back", they all feature wimpy kids as protagonists and mean jocks bullying them somewhere in a sleepy town in the wider New England region.
Being a) the adaptation of an unremarkable short story that never would have been filmed if it hadn't the author's name attached to it, and b) a tame made-for-television production, "Sometimes they come back" is an unoriginal and thoroughly forgettable film. Every next move or scene is predictable, every situation is clichéd, every character is a stereotype, and - worst of all - the script makes the terrible mistake of mixing supernatural with super-sentimental. Some of the make-up effects are cool, and occasionally you can see that Tom McLoughlin used to be a reasonably gifted horror director in the previous decade (with "Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives" and "One Dark Night") on his repertoire, but overall it's a waste of time.
Can't help thinking Stephen King must have had a difficult teenager trajectory and was the victim of many high-school bullies and painful pranks. If you compare films like "It", "Stand by Me", "Sleepwalkers", "Silver Bullet", and "Sometimes they come back", they all feature wimpy kids as protagonists and mean jocks bullying them somewhere in a sleepy town in the wider New England region.
Being a) the adaptation of an unremarkable short story that never would have been filmed if it hadn't the author's name attached to it, and b) a tame made-for-television production, "Sometimes they come back" is an unoriginal and thoroughly forgettable film. Every next move or scene is predictable, every situation is clichéd, every character is a stereotype, and - worst of all - the script makes the terrible mistake of mixing supernatural with super-sentimental. Some of the make-up effects are cool, and occasionally you can see that Tom McLoughlin used to be a reasonably gifted horror director in the previous decade (with "Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives" and "One Dark Night") on his repertoire, but overall it's a waste of time.
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