This review contains SPOILERS if you have not seen this movie!!

Stand By Me (1986)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092005/



This movie based on a Stephen King's novella was released in 1986 and I have never seen it.

But for the last 31+ years, I have constantly heard about how it's one of the best Stephen King's movies ever.

Seems like each time there is a new movie based on a Stephen King's novel, the reviews will always find ways to compare it to Stand By Me.

Now that I have seen it, I have to disagree.

What is so good about it?

It's about 4 kids in a small town whom on the last day of Summer, [in the USA that day is always] Labor Day weekend in 1959, decide to walk 30 or so miles, following the railroad tracks that lead out of town, to go see the dead body of a kid that went missing.

Along the way they talk about stuff that kids talk about: cartoons, comics, food, school, teachers, parents, girls, etc.

The movie is 1 hour and 29 minutes long including credits. For over an hour they walk and walk while they talk and bicker and argue and fight: the usual things 12 years old kids do together back in the days before electronic entertainment devices kept kids indoors and they get into some shenanigans like climbing the chain link fence to enter a junkyard where they just sit around and throw rocks at an aluminum can.

When they finally arrive at their destination and find the missing kid's dead body that has been decomposing in the woods for days, that part was pretty tame as in "oh so that's what a dead body looks like!"

I am not trying to be morbid but being this is a Stephen King's movie, that scene should not have been so tame. If it was just any movie not based on any Stephen King's novel, sure let it be tame and boring.

There is a subplot involving the town bully (played by a very young Kiefer Sutherland) and his gang of hooligans, one of them just so happen to be the brother of one of the 4 kids and they also have some sort of a connection to the missing kid's dead body.

The 4 kids are played by River Phoenix (R.I.P.), Corey Feldman (probably best knowns for The Goonies, Gremlins and The Lost Boys), Wil Wheaton (Will Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation) and Jerry O'Connell (who has been in just about every TV series and movies imaginable in the past 31 years and who grew up to marry hottie blue Rebecca Romijn. Lucky Bastard!!)

They do a very good job in their roles being such young and inexperienced actors at the time and I give them kudos for their performances but not only does the movie pretty much doesn't go anywhere and furthermore it leaves an issue that arises from the final dramatic scene unresolved.

I did some research. Since 1976, starting with Carrie, there has been 68 movies, TV series, TV mini-series and short based on works by Stephen King plus 2 more that are currently in the works.

Sure some of them were pretty bad and not even worth watching if you haven't seen them or worth a second viewing if you'd already seen them.

But even if you took the worst Stephen King's movies like Thinner, Sleepwalkers, Riding the Bullet, The Mangler and Children of the Corn, their stories are still more interesting and eventful than the one in Stand By Me.

2/5