 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. Today we are talking about the new Stephen King adaptation, Mr. Harrigan's Phone. Now I was a fan of the original novella that was in, I believe it's the very first story in If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas. I liked it a lot. I tend to gravitate more toward Stephen King's, you know, kid, when there's a young person and an old person. I really, even so much as going back to Pet Cemetery with Lewis Creed and Judd Crandall, I've always enjoyed when he has a younger person with an older person, and it's a friendship. I really enjoy that aspect. He's used it multiple times in App Pupil, most recently in Fairy Tale. He's used it in Low Men in Yellow Coats. He uses it again in Mr. Harrigan's Phone, to some extent even Joyland. There's a bunch of these in the Stephen King lexicon, or bibliography, I'm not sure if lexicon's the right word, but it's almost as prevalent as Dean Koontz with books about Labrador, super smart Labrador retrievers. But I like it here because there's always a different theme going along, and what I enjoyed about Mr. Harrigan's Phone the most was the back and forth considering Mr. Harrigan is a capitalist. He's a huge fan of money, almost to the point of, well, he's definitely conservative, and him and the boy get along well despite the fact that maybe the boy doesn't have the same beliefs. Whereas with App Pupil, you have this young man being not altered, but this old man teaching this young man to be evil kind of thing. Low Men in Yellow Coats, that one, it travels down the same road here as does Fairy Tale, about the friendships between a young boy and an older man. Anyways, I said all that just to say that I really love this idea, and I love the novella, and I love the movie. There's a lot of people out there complaining that this isn't a horror novel, this isn't a horror story, it wasn't scary. That wasn't the point. I'm sorry if you went looking for a horror story thinking Stephen King wrote it, it's got to be scary. But Stephen King hasn't written much horror in the past, I'd say nearly two decades. All of his stuff has been literary with slight horror elements. The darkest he's gone recently is probably Revival or The Outsider, as far as, you know, horror dark. He has very heavy themes in all of his books. But with this one, I really enjoyed this one. A lot of people didn't. In fact, I saw a lot of complaints on Twitter about, and even in my comments, about why, why adapt this one? It's a nothing burger, so on and so forth, you know, there's no reason to adapt it. This story, this movie is full of amazing Oscar worthy performances by Donald Sutherland. I can never remember the kid's name who played Bill and it, but he's in this fantastic performances throughout the entire movie. It does have one spooky scene, I guess, with the whole standby of your man playing in the background. I did expect them to use it to have your effect in the movie because it's pretty, it's pretty creepy to me anyways. Getting, you know, the ringtone. If you've seen the film, I don't want to spoil it for you, but it wasn't as scary as even I thought it might be. But that doesn't mean that this is a bad movie. It doesn't mean that it's also not horror. It just doesn't have the jump scares. It doesn't have the, it has a sense of dread. But it's mostly about this young man coming to grips with what he has done. Once Harrigan, once the stuff happening, starts happening with Harrigan's phone. I'm giving this five out of five. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, I wish it would be up for some kind of award as far as the performances we've got. It's beautifully shot, also beautifully written. It's really, really good. Mr. Harrigan is a little more wishy-washy about his politics in this one. Instead of being hard right, he's more centrist in this one. He starts complaining about, you know, fake news coming and all that stuff. But he says it from a point that starts to make him sound more on the liberal side of things, which I thought was odd concerning the earlier capitalistic qualities of him. It just, it felt, it felt weird. But anyways, and of course there were, there were a lot of things in here that were definitely targeted at a modern audience, modern politics, that kind of thing. And that kind of took me out of the story a little bit. But I mean, I loved it. I really cannot criticize it other than, you know, certain subjective things where, like I said, Sutherland is a little bit uncharacteristic. The second time he starts talking politics and starts talking about, you know, what's coming. He's very prescient in this way. He's prescient in the book too. But it makes you wonder, there's a lot left open to like, you know, did Harrigan do all the horrible things that people thought he did? But then when you get to the actual phone, I'm trying not to spoil anything. When you get to the actual phone conversations, it's like, Harrigan is trying to tell Craig to stop. So if it wasn't Harrigan who was, who had done all the stuff previously, then that's the only confusion that I have there. And like I said, it doesn't fit into the character as well as I would like it to. So either he did or he didn't, either he's regretful or he's not. But was that, was that the point now that I'm talking about it and talking about it? Because I don't write these reviews down? It was the point to show how much the boy had changed Harrigan? I don't know, could be. But anyways, loved the story, loved the adaptation, five out of five for me. If you're looking for something spooky to watch this season, probably don't watch this. This is definitely a drama piece, a character piece, heavy on the drama. And that's more the point it's a character study, more than it is just a horror story. But at the same time, Stephen King isn't really doing that anymore. And honestly, he never really did. It's always been about the characters, and the situation always came second to the characters. But anyways, that's my point of view. That's what I felt about it. If you've watched Mr. Harrigan's phone on Netflix, please let me know what you thought about it down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!