By the mid-‘80s the Stephen King movie industry was in full swing, and after a generally classy first wave of adaptations – offered by names like De Palma, Romero, Hooper, Kubrick, Carpenter and Cronenberg – the era in which in any old crap the writer turned out would get transmuted into questionable cinema commenced in earnest. Silver Bullet was based in one of his more peculiar projects, the illustrated novella “Cycle of the Werewolf” (there’s a pun in the title). More interesting was the fact that this was only the second time King (after Creepshow) had actually adapted his own work for the screen, under the directorial aegis of debut director Daniel Attias. That name doesn’t exactly stir the same associations as the ones listed above, and for very good reason. Silver Bullet is sloppily assembled and essayed with hardly any imagination or skill beyond the most purely, blandly efficient.
Nonetheless, it provides a nice time capsule for Corey Haim, who died far too early. He’s persuasive and energetic in playing hero Marty Coslaw, a wheelchair-bound but canny and life-loving 11-year-old. Marty has a volatile relationship with his older, resentful sister, Jane (Megan Follows), and hero-worships his unstable, booze-loving, but good natured uncle, Red (Gary Busey), who builds him a new souped-up motorcycle-wheelchair called “Silver Bullet”. In the summer of 1976, their small town of Tarker’s Mills begins to suffer under the thrall of incredibly vicious, random attacks by what police and vigilantes assume is some rampant lunatic, but which are, of course, the work of a werewolf, killing such disparate citizens as a drunken railway worker, a suicidal young woman, and Marty’s best friend Brady (Joe Wright).
The local sheriff, Joe Haller (Terry O’Quinn) is at a loss, and local hotheads are encouraged when Brady’s father Herb Kincaid (Norm Broadhurst), powerfully grief-stricken and enraged, gives them sanction to pursue a little mob justice. Searching the woods for the killer, however, leads to the death of three of the vigilantes, including baseball bat-wielding bar owner Owen Knopfler (Lawrence Tierney). Late one night, when Marty rides out into the woods to let off some fireworks, the werewolf comes for him, and is only warded off when Marty shoots a rocket into its eye. Shaken up, he tells Jane what he saw, and she begins searching the town for any likely lycanthrope who might be missing an eye, quickly finding one in the local minister, Reverend Lowe (Everett McGill), and she also finds he has a chunk of Knopfler’s bat hidden in his garage. Jane and Marty appeal then to Red to aid them in flushing out the hidden beast.
“I’m a little too old to be playing ‘Hardy Boys meet Reverend Werewolf’” Busey declares at one point, a line that describes with self-conscious validity the oddness of Silver Bullet as a project (although that suggests a more entertaining film than this really is). The sequences revolving around Marty, his home life and his venturesome nature, seem to spring directly out of some youth-oriented film of the same period, a kind of supernatural-themed variation on The Goonies perhaps, or indeed the King-derived Stand By Me, particularly emphasised by a lamely explanatory voice-over by Tovah Feldshuh, in character as a grown Jane speaking of these events in retrospect. King’s work of course quite often sported very young protagonists, especially nerdy alienated boys, going up against monsters of all descriptions, providing reading fodder for a great number of adolescents secreted under their bed-sheets. “This is a relationship movie,” Attias is quoted as saying about this movie (in the Hardy’s Encyclopedia of the Horror Film): “Filled with people who find themselves in situations both interesting and real.”
Just how real battling off the average werewolf can be regarded is moot to me, and this pretension highlights a significant problem with Silver Bullet: the tone and style of most of it suggests a middling telemovie about a plucky young cripple lad’s coming of age, abutting some crudely gory horror scenes that definitely weren’t intended for the kiddie crowd, but aren’t exactly bloodcurdling to an adult. That schism wouldn’t matter so much if the direction wasn’t so awful, and the production so cheesy, in a specifically ‘80s fashion. Attempts to make the werewolf’s attacks surprising by having them come from unexpected directions – bursting through floorboards, through a door behind the heroes, or sneaking about under waist-high dry-ice fog – are mechanical and occasionally foolish. The cheapo synthesiser-riddled score by Jay Chattaway is more gruesome than the on-screen violence, and Carlo Rambaldi’s werewolf is barely glimpsed, which is a good thing, because what we see of it looks like something belonging in a school pageant production of “Peter and the Wolf”, oversized fake-looking snout-sporting head teetering unsteadily above a poorly proportioned hairy suit.
King’s script strings along some intriguing ideas and contains some fair dialogue, but it isn’t particularly good either, full of jumps in chronology and incompetently structured story progression, with random character entrances and exits, and sloppy sentimentality to leaven the horror with some presumed variety of integrity. The small-town setting and humdrum familiarity that is disrupted by the werewolf, usually a strong dramatic basis especially in a King adaptation, is illustrated in the flattest fashion, with odd scenes describing arguments in the tavern over police inefficiency and a glimpse of communal togetherness at the outset failing to persuasively depict an assailed populace. Curiously, after the attack on the vigilante mob, this sub-plot of the film is discontinued. The cast of characters is filled with caricatures of abusive, contemptuous rednecks and beer-supping boors who want to wipe out welfare recipients and watch wrestling, to fill out the portrait of backwoods Americana, in spite of the sentimental voice-over describing the town as the a place “where people cared about each-other as much as they cared about themselves.”
On the other hand, King’s fascination for untrustworthy and morally assailed authority figures is in evidence, and this provides the film’s mildly interesting subtext. That Mark and Jane attempt to convince others that the local man of God is a secretly marauding predator had a potential potency as a metaphor for certain much-publicised problems besetting the priesthood: Lowe even expounds a certainty that his curse, and his victims, are part of a divine plan. McGill’s weird, overly-intense performance is bracing, even if I’m not sure if it’s in just the right key of stylisation or is just bad: the cadence with which he pronounces “You meddling little shit!” is surely worth canonical quote status. Tierney is utterly wasted, but Busey is his usual cheerfully energetic self, and O’Quinn and Broadhurst offer class and believability in their minor roles. A few striking moments aid them in keeping the film watchable, particularly a nightmare in which Lowe dreams of his grieving congregation contorted by rage and turning en masse into werewolves, an explosion of stygian perversity that’s unfortunately lonely. Otherwise it’s another prime example of the shoddiness of so much Dino De Laurentiis-produced Horror.
