Christine

Christine Movie Poster

"How do you kill something that couldn't possibly be alive?  She was born bad.  Plain and simple.  Somewhere deep on a darkened assembly line.  Christine.  A '58 Plymouth Fury possessed by hell.  She's taken control of her teenage owner, Arnie.  Her previous owner is not alive to warn him.  And now she's steering straight for the one person in her way.  Arnie's girlfriend, Leigh.  The other woman".

That is the question to be answered in Christine, another Stephen King book adaptation released in 1983.  The movie was not a runaway success, and reviews were mixed.  However, it did double its money at the box office.

In this movie, Arnie Cunningham (played by Keith Gordon), a regular high school nerd, falls in love with, and restores, an old Plymouth Fury.  The car, named Christine, has a questionable history.  Because he did not inform his parents about purchasing the car, they make him park it at a local garage, where Arnie makes take up a job as a mechanic to help pay the storage fees.  While Arnie painstakingly begins restoring the car, friends and family notice a change in his personality, from quiet and reserved to aggressive and arrogant.  The car is, for all intents and purposes, alive, and it is influencing Arnie’s behavior.

Christine has a checkered past, with people committing suicide in it and dyeing of carbon-monoxide poisoning.  When school bullies destroy Christine, Arnie is not surprised when the car fully restores itself before his eyes.  The vandalism incident really makes the car mad, and it goes about the business of killing the bullies, Arnie’s boss, and even tries to kill Arnie’s girlfriend in a jealous rage.  In the end, Arnie is killed by mistake, and Arnie’s friend, Dennis, stops Christine using a bulldozer, and she is smashed down into a cube of metal.  But, as the movie ends, it appears Christine might still be alive.