SILVER BULLET is more of a bronze
The Stephen King werewolf adaptation is a fine, if forgettable, creature feature.
I didn’t plan for this many of my Stephen King watches this year to include movies written by the novelist, but this is the third consecutive one, after Maximum Overdrive and The Dark Half (next week’s isn’t written by King, but I have one more planned for Halloween day). It’s fascinating to see which scripts capture his vibe and which flounder (that Maximum Overdrive has very little of King’s voice despite being directed by him is baffling, but cocaine is a hell of a drug).
Silver Bullet, the 1985 werewolf flick directed by Dan Attias, is not a great movie. It’s never brought up when people talk about the best adaptations of Stephen King’s work – and that’s probably fair. But the film, based on King’s “novelette” Cycle of the Werewolf, is more than passable Halloween fare and, in terms of adaptation, one of the better at capturing King’s voice and obsessions than many other movies.
The movie takes place in the small Maine town of Tarker’s Mill in the late 1970s. There’s a vicious inhuman threat on the loss that, in the opening, knocks the head off the town drunk (it’s ruled an accident). The police search for the killer and, as death tolls mount, the townies decide to take up a mob and execute some “private justice,” but young Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) believes that there’s more to the threat than a deranged lunatic. He believes it’s a werewolf, and because we’ve seen the title, we know he’s right.
Cycle of the Werewolf had its roots in a calendar King agreed to write for, in which each month would have a gory werewolf illustration and a story to go along with it. I don’t believe the calendar was ever finished, but King turned the story into a novella in which each chapter covered a month. The movie doesn’t quite follow that rhythm – whether it’s a truncated script or bad editing, it’s kind of hard to tell how much time passes in between killings, although we know that the movie starts the month before school lets out and ends on Halloween night. There’s probably a better-paced movie in the original concept – and I’m honestly shocked no one’s considered resurrecting this as a 12-part miniseries – but this works just fine.
The fun of a werewolf movie comes not just from the monster moments, but from the idea of either watching a guilty soul try to avoid turning into the beast every full moon or from trying to figure out which of the characters is secretly a monster. I wish Silver Bullet had a bit more of that. There’s some attempt at misdirection by having Marty’s uncle, Red (Gary Busey), show up in town when the slayings occur and conveniently disappear around the time of every werewolf attack, but the film never really plants that seed of doubt in anyone’s mind and Red is too lovable to be taken seriously as a suspect. And a dream sequence early on telegraphs the werewolf as the local reverend (Everett McGill), but by the time the movie explicitly pegs him as the wolfman, he’s already too sinister for there to be any hint of regret or guilt (although the film does suggest an interesting motive in that he murders one woman to keep her from suicide – and, thus, going to hell – but that seems to be the only kill with such a motive).
So, yeah, the traditional tropes of the werewolf movie aren’t really engaged too much – and the actual werewolf costume is laughable (critic Vincent Camby compared it to a drunk Smokey the Bear) – so lame, in fact, that original director Don Coscarelli quit mid-production. But when Attias keeps the monster to the shadows, there are some effective sequences, including the opening beheading, a scene where the werewolf lurks below the floorboards of a greenhouse and an attack where it’s obscured in mist. The sequence in which the reverend dreams of his congregation transforming into werewolves is a great bit of surreal freakiness, but whenever we get our glimpse of the main monster – which looks like an amusement park costume and moves like a jerky animatronic (even though there’s a dancer inside) – it’s pretty silly.
King’s known as the “master of horror,” of course, but only the church nightmare feels like something ripped from his pages; the other werewolf attacks feel perfunctory and could come from any sub-Wolfman rip-off (the one transformation sequence we see is fine, but nowhere near the heights of something like An American Werewolf in London or The Haunting). Attias is competent – and he went straight from features into a television career that’s had him direct at least one episode of nearly every noteworthy drama of the last 40 years – but you can feel him struggling to make the silly monster (which King preferred to keep in the shadows) scary.
Where the movie feels like a true Stephen King story, ironically enough, is in its non-horror moments. The dialogue has the folksy charm he’s known for, from the drunk victim singing a beer jingle in the first scene to a woman asking her husband “did you make lemonade in your pants” when he’s spooked by a noise in the woods. King captures small-town mob mentality better than anyone, and the scenes where the local sheriff (Lost’s Terry O’ Quinn) tries to calm the townsfolk down feel pulled right from King’s novel. He understands how evil can be scariest when cloaked in the familiar, and there’s a level of detail (the baseball bat labeled “peacemaker,” the bad boyfriend telling a girlfriend “it’s your oven, but not my bun”) that feels apiece with King’s work (it may all be in the novella, which I have not read).
The threesome at the film’s center – Marty, Jane and Red – also gives it a heart and charm I didn’t expect. When you hear that Gary Busey is in a horror movie, you have certain expectations, but the actor plays against type as a warm, goofy screw-up of an uncle, an alcoholic who’s tanked two marriages but loves his nephew unconditionally. He’s funny and has good chemistry with the kids, which goes a long way. Haim is charming and handles the scenes where Marty, who’s paralyzed, has to scoot around outside his wheelchair really well. It could be corny to give the lead character a motorized wheelchair called Silver Bullet, but the chair – made by Red – helps sell the emotional bond between the two. Likewise, I like how Jane’s annoyance with her brother feels like true sibling conflict but can also morph easily into concern and friendship. The film’s final voiceover seems to want to have a bit more emotional resonance than the film can provide – it feels like King is aiming for the wallop of the final passages of Stand By Me, but there’s no reason given for why her adult recollections of her brother feel so melancholy — there’s no hint that he’s dead or they’re estranged. The movie just ends with a “and that’s why I love my brother” moment that lands with a whiff.
When I reviewed Creepshow a few years back – which, let’s be clear, is the far superior film – I said that it might make a good first R-rated horror flick for my son one day. There’s an argument to be made that Silver Bullet, despite its own R rating, is probably a better fit with kids than with adults. Yes, it’s gory, but it’s tamer than most horror flicks. And its child protagonists probably appeal more to the teen and preteen set – there’s probably a version of this that pulls back on the gore and releases with a PG-13 that would have been a bigger hit. But who wants a Stephen King werewolf movie without gore?
Silver Bullet won’t be part of the essential King canon in the way that The Shining, Misery or Carrie are, but it’s probably unfair to lump it with Thinner, Children of the Corn or Maximum Overdrive. It’s a flawed but perfectly enjoyable entry, and it at least feels more like Stephen King than some of the others – even the one he directed.