Saved By The Hell: The Old Class.
The dead have lousy timing in Sometimes They Come Back. Just when high school teacher Jim Norman (Tim Matheson) is rebuilding his life in the town that nearly destroyed it, the past roars back into view in a thunderclap of greaser nostalgia as Hell’s dropouts rematriculate in school. It’s not King’s most elaborate or well-articulated premise, and the emotional engine is no Greased Lightning, but there’s still some mileage in its trauma left to fester and grief left unresolved.
Adapted from a short story in Night Shift, Sometimes They Come Back was briefly considered as a segment for Cat’s Eye until producer Dino De Laurentiis decided it had enough tread on its tyres to build the chassis of a feature film around. He was right and he was wrong; right to remove it from Cat’s Eye where its darkness wouldn’t have played well with the other segments but wrong, it turns out, in thinking there was enough gas in the tank to get to feature length, at least with this script.
While a good magician never reveals his secrets, good storytellers know that you need to give out enough information that everything else makes sense within the world of the story. Sometimes They Come Back struggles to do that effectively and it’s the “Sometimes” of the title that ends up doing the heavy lifting. Sure, it’s creepy that a phantom car manifests to mow down students so the ghostly greasers can take their place in the classroom and smirkingly disrupt lessons without their anachronistic appearances drawing the derision that would have been meted out in any other 1990s high school, but the cast seem to have a greater suspension of disbelief than the audience can muster because nobody seems remotely phased. Quite why Jim’s return to his childhood hometown is the catalyst for a bespoke haunting isn’t really explained beyond a reprise of the 1963 murder of his older brother Wayne during a gang attack in a train tunnel.
In the short story, the return of the gang is a malevolent mystery that culminates in a dark Faustian twist but the film inverts that into a more redemptive – if nonsensical – direction as the spirit of his dead brother appears like some kind of Teen Angel to urge these ugly school dropouts to go back to Hell. There are a couple of fun allusions to another King property though It’s never made explicit. Glenrock has an Officer Nell, who shares a name and occupation with a resident of Derry and it’s mentioned in passing that there’s been a 27-year gap between the death of the brother and the current hauntings, a period of time that’ll be more than familiar to fans of Stephen King’s It.
Director Tom McLoughlin, best known for Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, handles the material with hesitancy bordering on disinterest. There are few arresting visuals and most of the scenes feel underpowered and unengaging. It’s a King tale neutered for television and the production values wouldn’t look out of place in the original Goosebumps TV series.
What the film preserves best from King’s story is the emotional unease of returning to a place you hoped time had changed but other than that it’s an unremarkable and bloodless entry. As a standalone horror movie, it’s modestly effective, but as a Stephen King adaptation it gets only one thing on brand: the ending sucks – as much as if the car had flown off into the sky for no reason.
