“Dolan’s Cadillac” Can Drive off a Cliff
So my wife found this at the Half-Priced Books’ video section. Both of us have always been immense fans of the original story as it appeared in King’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and if anything we’re bigger fans of Rob Lowe’s spoken adaptation of it in the audiobook version. So of course a film adaptation was something we were really looking forward to seeing. We paid seven bucks for this DVD.
I want more than the seven bucks back, frankly.
Oddly enough, my first alarm bells about this not being the best or most faithful adaptation of the original story were way back when we were still living in Las Vegas, back in 2007 when a local paper reported the problem with how local Las Vegas government wasn’t giving any incentives to film production companies to actually film Vegas-based stories here. Apparently Las Vegas thinks itself just too unique and special (this for a town where virtually every single major structure is a copy off some other world landmark) to bother giving tax breaks or permit help to production companies.
Consequently, Dolan’s Cadillac wasn’t filmed in Nevada or near Las Vegas like in the original story…it was primarily filmed in Vancouver. Go figure. Four years in Nevada, I don’t remember any lengths of highway being covered with high, sere grasses and dotted trees that look…well, like Vancouver scrubland.
So here we are and the film was so great, it drove directly past theatres and went straight to home video. Okay, another alarm bell.
And the principal villain of the story is played not by the sort of Paul Sorvino type I always imagined in the reading, but rather by a well-preserved Christian Slater. Okay.
And the dark vengeful protagonist of this King-cum-Poe revenge story isn’t played by Rob Lowe (who I always thought could pull it off, his vocal version alone being fantastic), but rather Wes “Why Did I Agree to ‘Ghost Rider’” Bentley, but okay again.
Let’s at least see if they do something right here.
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Originally published at The Midnighters Club. Please leave any comments there.