Stephen King's version of the Danish Miniseries "The Kingdom", about a hospital filled with oddballs and ghosts, manages to render what had been a funny, thoughtful, and eerie story into a boring piece of dog poop. Skip it and make the effort to find the original by Lars von Trier, you'll be glad you did.<br /><br />In his other works, King is good at occasionally creating scary moments, some even filled with prolonged dread; yet what makes his novels readable and other television projects such as "Rose Red" watchable when wading through the banal characters, plot points and scenes, is here lacking, which is strange. It may be explained by his inability to create the subtle forms of eeriness on display in his source material, which used quiet and stillness, not as the preface to a suddenly scream, but a soft murmur. King doesn't have the patience, and instead fills up the spooky quiet with incessant yammering.<br /><br />Gone as well are the often comic and/or obsessive, yet believably human characters which were the backbone of the original series by Lars Von Trier. King instead treats us to boring clichés reminiscent of one dimensional characters from his other works.<br /><br />The charmingly arrogant, scheming and blustering doctor Stig Helmer, one of the original series' many treasures, is robbed of his intelligence and turned into Dr. Stegman, a craven moron whose own arrogance, bluster and scheming ways would have seemed too broad on M.A.S.H. King can't stand to create mere A-holes, they must be inhumanly evil and stupid. Yosemite Sam was more nuanced and received less cloyingly saccharine comeuppance from his adversaries, although Yosemite's comeuppance was distinguished by being funny: no such luck with Stegman, and the Kingdom Hospital is plagued by King's inability to write intentionally funny lines. (Unfortunately the hilariously awful similes which turn up in his prose works have not appeared to have made it into his scripts, but there are laughs to be found here in the dialogue.) We are also treated to elements familiar to readers of King: tedious interior monologues; annoying singing by various characters; inhuman, snarling bad guys; a wise-cracking, delightlessly sassy god-character (here, a giant anteater); and writing which leaves nothing to be spelled out by the audience. This last quality is perhaps the most annoying of King's as writer, his inability to allow for ambiguities, to let something remain less than obvious.