The Francis Ford Coppola movie Stephen King calls “incoherent and boring”
Few contemporary authors have achieved the levels of success attributed to Stephen King, who has seen over 60 of his stories adapted for the big screen. Beginning with his iconic supernatural coming-of-age horror Carrie, brought to life by Brian De Palma, many of King’s works are now considered cinematic classics, such as The Shining, Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption.
King is notoriously opinionated about movies, writing in a piece for Entertainment Weekly, “I’ve loved the cinema my whole life.” Over the years, King has delivered a series of damning verdicts on specific films, such as Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, referring to it as a “crapfest”. His opinion of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is also ruthless, describing it as a “pretty blah”, “tepid”, and “narcissistic” movie.
Evidently, King hasn’t shied away from criticising well-respected directors, after all, he was famously dissatisfied with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, explaining that “the movie has no heart; there’s no centre to the picture”. In his EW article, King used two Francis Ford Coppola movies to demonstrate the difference between movies “that matter” and those that don’t.
According to King, a Coppola movie that matters is Dementia 13, his debut film. He wrote: “When Francis Ford Coppola was but a lad, he found himself working on one of Roger Corman’s pictures. According to legend, Coppola convinced Corman, a low-budget junkie, to let him make his own film on the side using Corman’s equipment and crew”. In nine days, the director created Dementia 13, which, King believes, “makes Psycho and Night of the Living Dead look tame”.
However, the author compared Coppola’s debut film with The Godfather Part III, referring to the latter as “a movie that doesn’t matter”. He explained in more detail: “Many years later, Coppola spent at least a thousand times what he spent on Dementia 13 to make the last of the Godfather movies. The film is opulent, incoherent, and boring.”
King continued: “The difference? One has heart, soul, and the crazy enthusiasm of youth. The other is the work of a talented man who has either used all his talent up or is saving what’s left for another day.”
Released in 1990, the third instalment in the series was a massive letdown for many fans of the first two movies, which are considered some of the greatest pieces of filmmaking of all time. Sofia Coppola’s performance as Mary Corleone was a big talking point, with the future director taking home two Golden Raspberry Awards for ‘Worst New Star’ and ‘Worst Supporting Actress’.
Although The Godfather Part III is easily the weakest movie in the trilogy, it still garnered seven Academy Award nominations. In 2020, Coppola released a director’s cut of the film, telling CBS This Morning, “It was like pulling on the thread of a sweater that annoyed you, and you end up re-knitting the whole sweater.” Still, even the re-cut version failed to touch the heights of The Godfather or its sequel.
