Wow, ten whole weeks, huh? Amazing!

More as always below the cut.

Ahh, Silver Bullet. Here for once I was pleasantly surprised.

I mean, I’d picked up a bit about Silver Bullet through osmosis, just that it was one of the Lesser King films, that it was an 80s thing, and of course that it was based on the King… I don’t know what you’d call it.. novelette? Novella?… Cycle of the Werewolf.

I grabbed this one on Amazon, actually, as it was very cheap and I had to go ahead and get a couple of other King movies that Netflix doesn’t carry, namely Maximum Overdrive and Needful Things; in the same order I grabbed Cat’s Eye, last week’s slow torture, for about five bucks.

They were such nice dollars too. Upstanding green lads. *sniff*

Anyway… Silver Bullet. Did I say 80s movie? This is SUCH an 80s movie. For one thing, it stars Gary Busey AND Corey Haim. Haim had yet to hit, ahem, fame, for his part in The Lost Boys, which wouldn’t come out for another couple of years. Busey….

Is Busey actually famous FOR anything? I kid, I kid. I’ve seen him… in stuff. I just tend to forget about it until imdb reminds me, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (He was the highway patrolman.)

In all seriousness, this movie just reeks of the 80s. It has that whole ‘kids confronting horror with parents conveniently absentee’ vibe, ala, well, Lost Boys, Monster Squad, Gremlins and so forth. In this case, we have Haim playing Marty Coslaw (I kept hearing, and thinking, Cole Slaw), an 11 year old boy who’s confined to a wheelchair. (I’d say paralyzed but it’s never entirely clear how paralyzed he is. He can’t walk, but he moves his legs some, and at one point climbs a tree that would have been impossible to do with just his arms, I’m sorry)

Despite starring Marty, the movie is narrated by the adult version of his older sister, and concerns the summer of 1976 in a small town in what could very well be Maine. Apparently this summer there was a series of gruesome killings.. by a werewolf.

First the werewolf kills a drunken railroad worker by the train tracks, and everyone just sort of ignores it, because the coroner can’t tell the difference between ‘decapitated by a train’ and ‘head ripped off by a lycanthrope hours before the train goes through the area’.

Here’s a hint, Dr. Moron, MD: if there’s no blood on the train, anywhere, it probably didn’t cut a man’s head off.

Yeesh.

Next, the werewolf kills a suicidal woman in her home, and the town is suddenly in an uproar. Something has to be done!

A side note here. Cycle of the Werewolf concerns the monthly pattern of, well, a werewolf, how the killings wax and wane with the pattern of the full moon. Basically, a killing, or spree of them, a month. Silver Bullet follows the same pattern but you don’t realize this for a while, because the movie has a very shakey grasp of time. One killing is followed up by another a few minutes later, but in the movie’s world a month has passed, and no one comments on this. It’s stated that these events happen in the Summer, which must be at least four months long in Maine, and the climax happens in October, and… yeah.

Abruptly toward the end everyone starts wearing fall coats and jackets, so by then you might guess. For me the real clue came when Marty’s best friend buys it from werewolf attack, and the next killings happen after his funeral. It takes a few days to bury someone, but the next slayings happen right after his funeral, so either they put him on ice for weeks, or sometimes the wolf kills twice in a month, and…

This is what establishing shots of calendars are for, folks. In a werewolf movie I shouldn’t be thinking more about the dates than the claws and teeth and blood.

Back on track. Ok, after the woman, there are more killings, including Marty’s best friend, who dies in a Gazebo (King movies + gazebos = death) for some reason. Marty’s wacky Uncle, meantime, crafts him a custom wheelchair-cum-motorcycle called, are you ready for this, The Silver Bullet (har har), and Marty figures out who amongst the good townsfolk is in fact a shapeshifting serial killer.

If you don’t figure it out before he does, then you might be beyond hope; it’s really obvious.

This leads to a showdown with the two kids and crazy Uncle Busey, the werewolf and, of course, yet another Silver Bullet.

Overall it’s not an awful movie by any means. There are some amusing bits and pieces. Haim’s pretty good, though he doesn’t manage the whole ‘not using your legs’ thing terribly well. Busey.. I dunno. He’s wacky. That’s the point, I guess. After Cat’s Eye, a basically watchable 80s horror flick (I have no clue why it got an R except some mild cursing) was a breath of fresh air and a palate cleanser.

(Plus you do get to see a werewolf rip a man’s head off and beat another guy to death with a baseball bat, which is pretty sweet in a low brow way.)

Spoilers, plus a brief discussion of religion in King works:
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Ok, the werewolf is the SCARY PRIEST. Yeah. I guessed it in the very first scene he appears, when they make a big deal of introducing him, and it becomes very apparent he’s a Checkov’s Gunman character for the film.

In fact, I stopped looking for another suspect before they even started dropping hints. My eagle-eyed roommate noticed that there’s no silver in the town church, all gold candlesticks and ornaments and so forth. It’s never a big mystery though, with the off kilter camera angles and looming he manages to wedge in his scant screen time before he’s officially unmasked.

The priest is a potentially quite an interesting character. He knows that he’s a werewolf, and that he’s a killer, but he can’t just off himself because suicide is such a terrible sin for Catholics. As the film goes on he totally and somewhat unconvincingly flips out, now believing himself to be an instrument of God bringing death to… people who deserve it, plus Those Meddling Kids.

Still, the core concept of a Catholic priest with deep personal demons can be seen elsewhere in the King ouevre. Particularly noteworthy is the town priest in Salem’s Lot, whose name escapes my memory, and whose demon is more fermented than furry. My esteemed roomie tells me he’s later somewhat important in the Dark Tower books as well.

Does the occasional Catholic priest signify any deeper significance with King, or just recognize the Catholic influence over New England, where so many of his stories are set? This is a very loose adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf so I’m not sure you can read much into King from it, but the movie taken by itself is very critical, one might say oversimplistically so, of the Catholic position on suicide. (Seen from a much more modern viewpoint the movie almost feels like an allegory for the long dark history of child abuse in the Church, but this topic was not likely on the filmmakers’ minds in 1985.)

We already saw a deeply skeptical view of religion in Carrie, albeit a more Protestant variety. Salem’s Lot as perviously mentioned also featured a flawed priest, and The Stand is just ripe with religious themes, overripe in fact (uggh that ending… just… uggh). It might constitute a theme in these Early King works.

I’ll have to keep a closer eye for religious messages, both from the original materials and their cinematic versions, as we go forward in Sundays With Stephen.

Well, that’s about it for this week I’m afraid. See you next time!

Next Week: Uggh… my time has come at last. Maximum Overdrive.
Last Week: Cat’s Eye, here kitty kitty…