Fly by Night> New Stephen King thriller satisfies craving for gore, suspense

There’s a great moment in the new film “Stephen King’s The Night Flier,” which opens today in Bangor. A cop is recounting the scene of a crime where a man has been raucously murdered. As the cop tells the gruesome tale of finding the man, the camera does a flashback, scanning across the room and up the ripped body of the victim. “Something else was missing, too,” the cop says ominously. “What?” the reporter asks. “His head,” the cop answers.

All right, so maybe great is too strong a word to describe this cinematographic moment. But this is definitely a Stephen King moment. Gory, suspenseful, funny. If you like that sort of thing, then you should go to “Night Flier.” But you should also consider therapy.

Based on King’s 1988 short story of the same title, “Night Flier” is about a hotshot tabloid reporter drawn to rumors of a mysterious pilot who commits serial murders in small, isolated airports. The pilot flies a black Cessna Skymaster, makes large puncture wounds in the necks of his victims, and occasionally leaves behind piles of maggot-ridden dirt on runways.

When he first hears about the Night Flier, ace reporter Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) turns down the story. But when the opportunistic editor, Merton Morrison (Dan Monahan), hands the story to upstart Katherine Blair (Julie Entwisle) and another murder is committed, Dees changes his mind. He’s a pilot, too, so he has some basic understanding of a murderer whose getaway car has wings. But Dees also has a cold appetite for blood — just not of the red kind. Soon he is rabidly on the trail of a monster that makes Jack the Ripper look like the boy next door.

The film has been a few years in the making. Producer Richard Rubenstein is a friend of King’s and producer of the feature films “Creepshow” and “Pet Sematary,” as well as the TV miniseries “The Langoliers” and “The Stand.” The two had been waiting for the right filmmaker to step up for the “Night Flier” project when film-school graduate Mark Pavia sent them unsolicited copies of a short film he had written and directed for school. King thought the film had a “raw intensity.”

So Pavia got the job and with “Night Flier” makes his Hollywood debut. To his credit, Pavia makes all the right horror moves that a more experienced horror director would make. There’s a cheesy kind of intrigue, gobs of blood and other body fluids, spooky camera work and a whole lot of four-letter words.

“I love it,” King said in a recent phone conversation. “There’s an inner 14-year-old in me that still says rip ’em up and really gross people out.”

Pavia certainly does that. The film’s denouement, which takes place in an airport lounge, leaves no neck unpunctured — and very few body parts connected. But in that moment, we actually get a look at the butchering Dwight Renfield (Michael Moss), whose name is an amalgam of Dracula film references. Renfield’s mug is some kind of ugly, and his retractable fangs are an orthodontist’s worst nightmare.

Pavia also takes a stab at bringing a moral underscore to the film. We are supposed to see how much Dees and Renfield have in common, and then, presumably, draw conclusions about the bloodletting tactics of reporters — even new ones. Fair enough. But sometimes Pavia is clunky in his delivery.

In fact, “Night Flier” is 99 minutes of pretty hokey storytelling — complete with fakey looking blood and camera flashes that resound like cannons. Plus it’s hard to take the premise seriously. Who really cares about competition among tabloid reporters? Do they really have aspirations for fame by covering stories about Martians, three-headed babies and vampires — especially ones who travel in batmobile planes?

The best part of the film is the glorious overacting done by a gin-head mechanic with a Maine accent. If you get really bored, see if you can make some of the imagery into allusions to other Stephen King films, such as “Christine,” “Cujo” and “The Shining.” And what about that final scene: Is it a rip-off of Michael Jackson’s music video to “Thriller” or what?

To get stuck on the logistics of this film is to miss the point completely, however. This is pure horror — although to some it may seem just purely horrible. The horror master himself put it this way:

“It’s a horror film,” King said. “If you like that sort of thing, you’re going to get what you want. If you don’t like that sort of thing, stay away.”