Mercy (Peter Cornwell, 2014, USA)

Mercy is a curious Stephen King adaptation, only one of two feature films adapted from stories in King's 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew (the other being The Mist, though next year Oz Perkin's The Monkey will also join the pantheon). Interestingly, so few stories from Skeleton Crew have been adapted relative to Night Shift, though Night Shift is in most respects a stronger collection of stories. Mercy takes its bones from King's short story "Gramma," which calls on Lovecraftian mythos to examine a boy's first encounter with death.

Mercy, while the first feature film based on this story, is not the first adaptation - that distinction belongs to Harlan Ellison's adaptation of the Twilight Zone TV series in the 1980s. This adaptation was brought to us by powerhouse horror studio Blumhouse (in the era before Blumhouse truly became a household name). Though backed by Universal, Mercy was released with little fanfare and promptly dumped on Amazon, without even a Blu-ray release. There are some good ideas in the film, and while it is not scary, it captures some of the things that made the original story creepy. Something went wrong during the production (perhaps they ran out of money?), because some plot elements become incoherent.

Still, the film should have been better than it is. Peter Cornwell had recently come off of the box office success of The Haunting in Connecticut, while the film features a cast of some recognizability including Shirley Knight, Dylan McDermott, and Mark Duplass. Mercy has some interesting ideas and visual elements, but it ultimately doesn't pay off. Nevertheless, it probably ranks in the mid-tier of King adaptations considering how low the quality can get on some of these. Mercy is worth checking out for King completists and fans of the story and Lovecraft.

5/10