In 1975, a young writer named Stephen King wrote a short story called The Lawnmower Man, which was subsequently published in the men’s magazine Cavalier. It was later collected in his 1978 anthology Night Shift and then most probably forgotten by its author. For a while, it was one of several King short stories owned by Milton Subotsky, who planned to make one- or maybe two – of his portmanteau movies based on them before the failure of The Monster Club put paid to that. Somewhere along the way, the rights passed to New Line Cinema at a time when anything and everything that had King’s name attached to it was being bought by film producers, no matter how thin the material might be in terms of feature film potential. Few of his stories were thinner in that regard than The Lawnmower Man. So New Line did something that was… well, it was a little bit cheeky, to say the least.
A pair of screenwriters, Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett, had written a script called Cyber God and some bright spark at New Line thought, hey, wouldn’t it be good if we crow-barred something about a Lawnmower Man into this screenplay about a mysterious organisation experimenting with virtual reality and then we can sell it as a Stephen King film. Which is either genius or insanity, depending on how you care to look at it.
King’s story tells the tale of suburban slob Harold Parkette, who hires The Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services Inc. to cut his lawn. A serviceman arrives at his door armed with his lawnmower and proceeds to get the job done. Only, the lawnmower mows on its own, while the guy crawls behind the machine, naked, eating the cut grass. It transpires that the serviceman is actually a Satyr who worships the great god Pan. Of course, all doesn’t end well for poor old Harold; he gets sacrificed to Pan by the mower. It’s a nicely weird tale that was hardly the stuff of commercial cinema, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that nothing of this ends up in the movie, which was released in 1992 and starred a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey.
Fahey plays Jobe Smith, a lawnmowing simpleton who makes Lennie from Of Mice and Men look like a criminal genius. You know he’s a simpleton because he’s wearing dungarees. All movie simpletons have to wear dungarees, it’s like a rule or something, and one that King himself seems to adhere to, so perhaps this is a nod to his work. Or perhaps not. Anyway, the film opens with a super-intelligent chimpanzee wearing a Robocop helmet who escapes from a shadowy organisation by overthrowing a guard and taking his gun. He then goes on a rampage. This chimp has a very good aim.
No, I’m not making any of this up.
On the run, the Robochimp comes upon the local Lawnmower Man (crow-bar!) Jobe, who takes in him. Unfortunately, the shadowy organisation that is headed by Brosnan surrounds the house and kills Robochimp. It’s all very dramatic but that’s your lot for action for quite a while.
We then get around half an hour of exposition that doesn’t make much sense – it just seems like lots of shots of Brosnan waking from nightmares with his shirt off and Fahey lumbering around mowing lawns, because the film has to justify that title one way or another, lest we think that this is all just opportunism. Having lost his chimp, Brosnan takes Fahey, the next best thing, under his wing as part of an experiment with increasing intelligence by way of virtual reality. Virtual reality was very fashionable at the time, the AI of its day and crowbarring it into a story guaranteed that your movie would be seen as cutting-edge for about a year before becoming staggeringly dated. Brosnan and Fahey spend most of their time in a virtual world and here the film unitises early CGI. These sequences were the main marketing pull of the film and now look hilariously primitive. Nothing ages more quickly than yesterday’s tech.
It’s not long before Fahey loses his dungarees and also starts to strut about with his top off. He continues to mow lawns (because, you know…), but now he’s a man about town, begins an affair with a local honey, and stops taking shit from all those that laughed at him before. Because everyone, especially jocks, respects intelligence, right.
Before long, hungry for more and more of the smarts, Fahey soon becomes uncontrollable. He also begins to gain super-human powers and sees himself as a ‘Cyber Christ’, going on a rampage and murdering all those who ever gave him a hard time. He even burns to death the local vicar; this man is pissed. Remember kids, intelligence makes you evil.
The two leads make the best of the material, particularly Fahey whose rise from dope to super-being is quite effective. Brosnan… well he holds his own with the chewy dialogue, but he must have been really happy when he got the call for Bond a year later and could put this sort of thing behind him for a few years.
For all its faults, there are odd moments where The Lawnmower Man threatens to come together. It does its best to make the King story title seem at least as though it belongs – though of course, it doesn’t – and for all its datedness, there are some nice ideas and imagery hidden within the mess. The trouble is, for the most part, it all just feels so laboured and contrived, the originality of both the original screenplay and King’s short story lost in hopeless compromise.
In 1992, New Line released the film as Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man. It didn’t take long for the lawyers to call. King, understandably, wanted his name removed from the film. Yet after two court rulings in King’s favour, New Line still didn’t drop his name from the trailer, the posters, and ultimately, the film. It took a final ruling that awarded King $10,000 per day and all profit derived from sales until his name was finally removed.
For all its shortcomings, The Lawnmower Man was a big deal at the time and a box office success, enough to warrant a sequel in 1996. The Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace starred Patrick Bergin, with Matt Frewer now in the role of Jobe but still riffing on Max Headroom. It is not a memorable film.
A.D. BARKER
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He wasn’t actually part man part lawnmower 1/10