cult film freak: JAMES CAAN AND KATHY BATES IN ROB REINER'S CLASSIC 'MISERY'

James Caan reluctantly book-burning in MISERY Year: 1990 Rating: *****

Within fifteen-minutes of MISERY (starting fifteen-minutes in before ending at the thirty-minute mark), Kathy Bates' Annie Wilkes goes from giddily eccentric to outright insane, underlining the brilliance of the relative cinematic newcomer's Oscar Winning performance...

As the equally impressive/important reactions of screen legend James Caan, and director Rob Reiner's ability to channel the works of Stephen King through a deliberately-subtle homage to his favorite director Alfred Hitchcock, providing the tightest and most uniquely satisfying King adaptation...

From Rob Reiner's MISERY

Small-screen actor turned big-screen auteur Reiner had perfected the road/trek sub-genre beginning with THE SURE THING followed by STAND BY ME... the latter taking the iconic author's works from horror into a youthful-adventure that's both darkly-contained and jovially free-spirited, flowing from one location to another without a dull moment in-between...

As MISERY actually/ironically begins a kind of upbeat road picture that becomes the ultimate end-of-the-road movie as Caan's bestselling romance author Paul Sheldon leaves his regular dusting-off-another-novel motel in rural Colorado, until a snowstorm (and something else) knocks him off the road: winding-up where most of this terrorizing psychological-thriller takes place...

Kathy Bates in MISERY

That's really an absorbing captor-and-captured/cat-and-mouse game between Caan and Bates, liken to a stage-play with edgy-to-darkly-comedic moments alongside Reiner's use of close-ups and strategically-timed editing, punctuating the escalating terror... while sporadically opening up into a surrounding exterior b-story...

Making MISERY not nearly as claustrophobic as it could have easily been, involving affable small-town veteran sheriff Richard Farmsworth's investigation outside those dire bedroom walls...

Director Rob Reiner cameo with Richard Farnsworth in MISERY

Whose spunky wife's often cringy one-liners (a Mayberry version of THREE'S COMPANY Mrs. Roper) seem part of a contrasting lighthearted recess... until a shocking death sequence makes everything perfectly clear...

And from the darkly-humorous to the terrifying-offbeat to the completely-insane, MISERY exists on Kathy Bates' quirky-to-psychotic playing field (never has an actress deserved a leading Oscar more, simultaneously inventing both a new kind of character and actress) while James Caan remains the perfect victimized-avatar in what's the greatest cinematic nightmare rollercoaster ever literally-captured and torturously-experienced.