Review: Misery (1990)

Misery

IMDB rate: 7,8

Genre: Thriller

This was actually the first time that I ever saw Misery. I own the movie for a long time already, but I never got around watching it. Also, I never read the book strangely enough. I own tons of Stephen King books, but for some reason I was never interested by reading Misery. I’ve seen the movie now and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, so I’m very curious about reading the book now. It’s always fun to compare the books and the movies, to see the differences between them. For example, The Shining book is very different from the movie. They are both excellent, but again, very different.

Best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon is on his way home from his Colorado hideaway after completing his latest book, when he crashes his car in a freak blizzard. Paul is critically injured, but is rescued by former nurse Annie Wilkes, Paul's "number one fan", who takes Paul back to her remote house in the mountains (without bothering to tell anybody). Unfortunately for Paul, Annie is also a headcase. When she discovers that Paul has killed off the heroine in her favorite novels, her reaction leaves Paul shattered...

Misery isn’t a real horror movie in my opinion, it is very tensive I’ll admit, but I didn’t find anything scary about it. Well, one scene was a bit sick, I'll admit but it wasn't really scary. The movie itself isn’t very surprising, it’s quite predictable but that didn’t made it a bad movie. Even though it was a bit predictable, it didn’t made it any less tensive. I knew what was going to happen, but jesus, I was still scared that the man would get caught by this lunatic woman. To me that was what made it such a great movie. It isn’t easy to make a movie like this, we all know what will happen so it’s kinda hard to still make it special. I must say, Rob Reiner did an excellent job with Misery.

Now, what really made this movie as good as it is, is of course Kathy Bates. She actually won an Oscar for her role in Misery and with that it was the first or one of the first horror movies that actually received an Oscar. I’ve seen Kathy Bates in plenty movies where she mostly plays a nice lady, but seeing Kathy Bates in a role like this one was very unreal to me, because I’m not used to seeing her like that, but boy, she did an amazing job playing a lunatic woman.

I always find it very interesting how movies can be made tensive, even though it's mostly only playing in one single room. Because there aren't scares like monsters or anything it's up to Kathy Bates' character to be the scariest thing in that room, and believe me, she was. One of the scariest villains I've ever seen, and not one that can be compared with Freddy Krueger or anything like that, she's the realest one out there. 

 I liked Misery a lot. It's a solid movie even though the concept is quite simple. What made this movie as good as it was is mainly the performance of Kathy Bates, who actually won an Oscar for her role in Misery. Not all credit goes to Kathy Bates, because James Caan's performance is just as good. Misery is a very interesting movie that's tensive until the very last moment.

My personal rate: 8,5/10