To the sleepy community of Castle Rock, Maine, comes Leland Gaunt (Von Sydow), a sardonic small businessman whose curio shop offers an interesting deal on oddments. Gaunt asks a ridiculously low price for these needful things but insists the purchaser do him a favour by playing a prank on another resident.
Eventually, deep-down decent Sheriff Pangborn (Harris) figures out that Leland is an incarnation of the Devil and that his bad-humoured pranks are designed to turn the townsfolk into murderous psychotics who will rip each other to bloody shreds. Stephen King's book has a witty central conceit (many horror novels are about possession, this one's about possessions), but padded to a merciless 780 pages it deserves a place on the shelf next to his other overstuffed losers rather than with his best work.
However, much slimmed down in a canny script by W. D. Richter, it has become a value-for-money horror movie with a streak of welcome black comedy. The performances are uniformly on the nose: Von Sydow shows again the relish for villainy that made his Ming The Merciless such a delight and Harris tackles the responsibility of standing up for wholesome human values.
Among the great supporting psychos, Amanda Plummer is notable as a mousy waitress manipulated into a cleaver-and-knife cat fight with a wicked turkey farmer, and the always-reliable J. T. Walsh is a corrupt politico who hates his nickname so much he kills people who use it. A refreshingly loony movie, this is silly if you think about it, but consistently entertaining if you don't.