Yeah, err. Had to skip a week last week; Netflix screwups. They kept sending me the movies AFTER The Night Flier, which I guess is getting pretty rare.. big surprise.

Still, we got it eventually.

Surprisingly watchable too.

The Night Flier would seem to have a bunch of strikes against it from the start. It’s based on a short story, which means that a lot of padding is necessary to make it into a full length movie. It wasn’t a big movie, and didn’t make much of a splash.. I’d never heard of it until I started to assemble the SWS list from IMDB.

Then there’s the fact that it’s not available new on Amazon, and after that, Netflix kept bumping it back from the top of my queue, which they do sometimes when they don’t want to admit that a movie is out of stock. (Happens a lot with anime discs, but that’s a topic for another time)

It gets worse once you have the actual dvd; it doesn’t look like much in your hand, cheap and silver without the fancier decoration a lot of dvds get; it has some printing on it that looks like the professional version of Lightscribe. Then you put it in your player and the lamest animated dvd menu in years comes up. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve seen dvd menus made in iMovie that blow this away.

So after I hit play here at the old dvd watching lair, I was fully prepared for another Mangler. Instead.. The Night Flier is a pleasant surprise. Moderately interesting, nicely paced, and up until the end, devoid of cheap tricks and sillyness.

The Night Flier admittedly only goes as far as it does thanks to the work of Miguel Ferrer. He carries this movie, which makes sense as he’s far and away the most important character. In the original story, really the only character. Ferrer plays Richard Dees, a sleazy photojournalist working at a sleazy tabloid that, shockingly enough, does a lot of original reporting. He comes into the picture irate that the photo he scored of a dead two-year old toddler was cut from the last edition of the tabloid.

Classy guy.

Dees is offered a new assignment by his editor: to track down an apparent serial killer who’s making his way down the Eastern Seaboard in a single-engine plane, hitting up small private airfields and killing people who work there.

A serial killer who apparently fancies himself a vampire.

As a side note, King has once again hit upon a unique, and yet very real, setting for his story. Invisible to the public, and supported by a fairly massive federal bailout program, America maintains a huge network of private airfields around the country. The money to do so comes from, believe it or not, a tax on every commercial plane ticket sold, of up to 15%. This money goes into a slush fund, some of which is used to build and refurbish these tiny airfields, which are mostly used by the ultra wealthy and their Lear Jets, along with Congresspeople and of course the occasional hobbyist with a small plane.

Your tax dollars at work. Literally!

So there’s an entire shadow transportation infrastructure out there in this country, but very few people know it’s there or take note of its existence. What if a murderer did?

Dees doesn’t think much of this assignment at first and turns it down. He figures that, with the FAA on the trail of a suspicious plane and pilot, including their plane’s ID number, it’s only a matter of time before the killer is caught. His editor disagrees, figuring that Dees is the best man for the job, being a dedicated sleazemonger, good at his craft, and owning a private plane himself. But after Dees’ intransigence he hands the case off to a new hire and that’s that.. until another killing comes up, the pilot again gets away, and Dees’ interest is piqued.

I won’t go any further than that storywise, for those who haven’t read it, because it is quite good and mostly faithful to the original despite the expansion. The junior cub reporter and the tensions at the tabloid rag are inventions but harmless enough. The movie, carried by Ferrer’s acting, is quite good up until a somewhat doofy ending that goes off the rails. Black and white plus fog machine does NOT equal spooky.

Still. Far better than I was expecting, perfectly suitable for a slow night. Recommended.

Next Week: Apt Pupil
Last Week: Dieting made simple with Gypsy curses, it’s Thinner