Pierce Brosnan has made some great movies over the last four decades, but one shocking 90s movie based on a Stephen King short story – or at least stole the title of it – has just become available to watch for free on YouTube. Thanks to Shout! Studios, the 1992 abomination that is The Lawnmower Man is now streaming for free, and everyone can relive the bizarre world of early 90s virtual reality all over again.
For many fans of King, The Lawnmower Man is a 1975 short story that was collected in “Night Shift,” which told a classic schlocky story of a man who hires a lawnmower man to cut his grass. Things go awry when the lawnmower man first strips naked and eats the grass his supernaturally powered lawnmower cuts, and eventually kills the homeowner when he tries to call the police. The movie version did include a sequence where the film’s antagonist uses a telepathically controlled lawnmower to kill a man with the same name as the homeowner in King’s story, but that was the only similarity.
The movie instead focuses on Brosnan’s Dr. Angelo, who experiments on an intellectually disabled gardener, Jobe (Jeff Fahey), stimulates his brain with experimental drugs and VR computer simulations. Jobe gains superhuman powers from the experiments, and becomes obsessed with becoming a fully digital being. As is clear, this story is not the one King wrote, but the movie went ahead and marketed itself as “Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man.” That led to King taking legal action against the filmmakers, suing them for using his name to push ticket sales. King’s case was successful, and he won a second similar victory after the home release also attempted to cash in on his name.
How Bad Is ‘The Lawnmower Man’?
Even though King has been associated with some bad movies, at least those were his actual stories. The Lawnmower Man, with a very unique and recognizable title to fans of the horror author, went into development with the rights to King’s story secured. However, the filmmakers struggled to develop a feature-length movie from a thin plot that was much more suited to an episode of The Twilight Zone. For this reason, they decided instead to incorporate a different unfilmed script called Cyber God into the movie, using that as the main premise and taking on the lawnmower death at the start to keep a tenuous link to King.
The film did become a box office hit, turning a $10 million budget into a $32 million box office haul. While King secured a $2.5 million initial settlement, that still meant the movie ended up well in the black despite some lackluster reviews. The movie scored 35% with critics and 31% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and while it did use some quite nifty special effects of the time, they have not aged well, leaving the film as one of those guilty pleasures that fans can’t help but watch from time to time.
Now, with the movie available for free on YouTube, as well as rotating on usual streamers such as Pluto TV and The Roku Channel, fans of Brosnan can relive his pre-James Bond era role all over again. King may not have wanted his name attached to a movie that did not actually adapt his story, but it seems that his name continues to be associated with it all the same.
- Release Date
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March 6, 1992
- Runtime
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108 minutes
- Director
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Brett Leonard
- Writers
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Gimel Everett, Brett Leonard