TV REVIEW : ‘The Screw’ Turns Up on Showtime, Sans Subtlety

Henry James’ late-19th-Century chiller “The Turn of the Screw” was a classic suspense novel, save for a few little problems: It was too subtle. Its ghosts didn’t cackle enough. It had an ambiguous ending that left room for different interpretations--supernatural, psychosexual and otherwise. It didn’t have enough subplots or shocking resolutions. It left too much up to the imagination and let you think for yourself.

All these “problems” have been taken care of--wow, have they been taken care of!--by adapters who’ve made a new, hourlong, positively mortifying television version of James’ book. It turns up tonight at 10 as the premiere episode of Showtime’s “Nightmare Classics,” with repeat airings Wednesday and Aug. 21, 27 and 31.

The ghastly--er ghostly--proceedings could hardly have been rendered more literal-minded or less chilling; rarely has any literary adaptation shown so much utter contempt for its source.

Amy Irving plays the morally rigid, up-tight governess who begins to believe that a pair of libidinous evil spirits are taking possession of her two young charges. Audiences need no longer fret with frustration wondering whether the story’s hysterical heroine is seeing actual spooks or just imagining things: Director Graeme Clifford (“Frances,” “Gleaming the Cube”) and writers Robert Hutchison and James M. Miller, like Sister Mary Ignatius, will explain it all for us. Thanks, guys.

The performances are almost uniformly embarrassing: Irving, though game, is miscast and seems rather earthy for a sexually repressed Victorian. As young Master Miles, whose turns between innocence and devilishness should horrify, 14-year-old Paul Balthazar Getty (of that Getty family) proves a remarkably limp child actor and hardly even tries to manage an English accent. Worse yet is M. K. Harris as Quint, the murderous ex-servant who (in this version) has returned from the grave to leer and laugh maniacally and do everything but rattle chains.

The novel was adapted so beautifully in Jack Clayton’s subtle, haunting 1961 film “The Innocents,” that it’s doubly troubling here that every sudden appearance of Casper the Ghost’s evil pals is accompanied by sledgehammer musical stingers and zoom-in shots. But even the badness that is the bulk of this version can hardly begin to prepare one for the ludicrous double-whammy ending, which seems inspired less by James’ book than by the Jason movies. The only turning that’s going on around here, it would seem, is in Henry’s grave.