An airless, stuffy, oppressive world where you can barely light a match, where the wind either doesn't blow (according to the book), or else blows on the ground level but doesn't move the clouds (according to the movie, because they couldn't stop the wind blowing on location!). In a way, the slightly wooden, stilted acting suits the wooden, stilted world in which the characters find themselves. The atmosphere and plot are totally faithful to the original book.

As such, it doesn't matter so much that the acting and special effects aren't amazing.

Like all good 'Twilight Zone' episodes, which this reminds me of, such a great underlying premise leaves a really strong, unnerving impression. Either way, it's a strange word used to describe a very strange (but somehow not totally unfeasible) type of creature. But no, the emphasis is on the 'i' - langol-Iers, to rhyme with chandeliers. Incidentally, while reading the book I assumed the emphasis in the word was on the 'o' - langOliers, to rhyme with magnolias. I like the idea of the past still existing physically, until it eventually becomes swallowed up by the Langoliers, the so-called Housekeepers of Eternity who hoover up the past to make way for the present. The quality is mainly in the basic concept rather than the sometimes-clunky dialogue. Something about this story, like many of King's, really touches a nerve. I have just finished reading this story and immediately checked out the movie version. I am currently reading 'Four Past Midnight', the book of four Stephen King novellas which opens with 'The Langoliers'. Generally speaking, horror movies these days tend to rely on shocks and scares, but the Langoliers is a slow-paced mystery thriller, kind of like a really creepy Twilight Zone episode, where our heroes spend much of their time trying to piece together the clues in order to solve the mystery of their predicament, all while an ominous feeling of oncoming danger just grows and grows. However, I thought the Langoliers succeeded in doing something that you rarely see in horror films in that it successfully took that slow-building feeling of fear and dread that you get when you read a scary novel and transferred it to the screen.

The acting is about what you'd expect from a TV movie, the dialogue is slightly corny at times, and the special effects aren't great, to say the least. This made-for-TV movie was based on a Stephen King novella and was originally shown as a two-part miniseries on network television back in the mid 90s. A passenger plane takes off from Los Angeles and flies into disaster as a group of sleeping passengers awaken to discover that the other passengers have mysteriously vanished.

Stephen king langoliers book