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RIDING THE BULLET
Stephen King calls this “the best of the independent films made from my work since STAND BY ME”, and he’s probably right. RIDING THE BULLET is certainly the best-ever film directed by Mick Garris, and everything horror fans claim to desire: unique, thoughtful and featuring a respectful ratio of heartfelt drama and cold-blooded shocks. Odd, then, that so few turned out to see it.
The Package
To be fair, RIDING THE BULLET suffered a severely under publicized release
in late 2004. Its distributor MPCA had little experience in the theatrical
distribution arena, and the film further suffered when it played shortly
thereafter on the USA Network, who cut it to shreds (the reason the DVD cover
art makes a point of touting the “Full-Length Theatrical Version”).
The film’s writer/producer/director Mick Garris is a thirty year Hollywood
veteran who’s become pigeonholed into the horror genre (he’s the creator and
producer of Showtime’s popular MASTERS OF HORROR anthology series), and, more
specifically, Stephen King adaptations. He directed the sanitized network TV
adaptations of THE SHINING and THE STAND, as well as the feature film of King’s
original screenplay SLEEPWALKERS. I dislike all three intensely (particularly
THE SHINING, a thoroughly routine horror miniseries that trashes Stanley
Kubrick’s masterful 1980 filming of the same material). RIDING THE BULLET was
once again adapted from the writing of Stephen King; in this case a 30-page
E-text written in 1999, but the film, made on an extremely tight budget, is a
unique concoction in every sense. Unfortunately its financial failure seems to
have put Garris back in his place: his latest project is DESPERATION, yet
another watered-down King adaptation made for network television.
The Story
Alan Parker is a young man coming of age in the drug-fuelled chaos of the
late sixties. He’s an unrepentant pothead obsessed with death, having lost his
father at a young age. One day he tries to kill himself in his bathtub, but is
thwarted by his girlfriend, who rushes him to a hospital. The next day Alan
learns his mother has suffered a stroke and so decides to hitchhike over 100
miles across Maine, back to the town where he grew up, to see her.
The journey is a nightmarish one, with Alan experiencing a plethora of
hallucinations and childhood flashbacks. Most notable among the latter is a
painful memory of a time his mother took him to an amusement park for a ride on
a rollercoaster called the Bullet, only to have him chicken out. Alan also
meets several apathetic strangers: a shell-shocked Nam vet, a senile old man,
some violent rednecks and, most disturbingly, a reckless hot rodder named George
Staub. It’s quickly established that Staub is a ghost--having been killed in a
car crash years earlier, he now cruises the material plane collecting souls.
After a chilling cruise in Staub’s fifties-era hot rod and an even more chilling
ride on the Bullet (another hallucination?), Alan is presented with a choice:
Staub can take Alan’s soul back with him, ending his life, or let Alan live and
take his mother’s life. Alan, in a moment of weakness, chooses his mother as
Staub’s victim.
Shortly thereafter Alan arrives at the hospital where his mom is
convalescing. She’s still alive, and doing reasonably well, but passes away a
few years later, leaving Alan motherless...and spending the remainder of his
days regretting the choice he made.
The Direction
What distinguishes RIDING THE BULLET from Mick Garris’s other Stephen King
adaptations is that Garris clearly put a lot of himself into the project,
whereas in the other films he appeared to be following the dictates of the King,
whose literary mastery is unassailable but who, as the saying goes, couldn’t
write a script to save his soul. For the first time in his post Stephen
King-dominated career Garris wrote the screenplay himself, transposing King’s
modern day-set tale to the late sixties, a change that works surprisingly well.
Garris also added a somewhat rambling but effective prologue to the
protagonist’s nightmare journey that nicely sets up the character’s disturbed
mindset.
Admittedly, Garris might have imparted his protagonist’s skewed view of the
world a bit too well, with a riot of flashbacks, fantasies and hallucinations in
which the character of Alan carries on lengthy conversations with himself and
sees things occur that aren’t really happening--we know this because Garris
frequently repeats actions, first to show what Alan thinks happened and
then to make clear what really occurred, a device that quickly grows tiresome.
At his best, though, Garris imparts a feeling similar to first person fiction
(appropriate in a narrative that takes place largely within the mind of its
central character) without resorting to clichéd devices like POV shots or
narration.
The casting is spot-on throughout. Particularly shrewd was the choice of
Barbara Hershey, a real-life late-sixties counterculture icon (check out her
work in products of the time like LAST SUMMER and BOXCAR BERTHA), as Alan’s
mother. In the main role the little-known Jonathan Jackson is fine, if
unspectacular, and TRAFFIC’S Erika Christensen makes a considerable impression
in the rather thankless role of Alan’s girlfriend.
All in all a solid, deeply felt, one-of-a-kind piece of work. It’s now
readily available on DVD, so if you were one of the many who ignored RIDING THE
BULLET during its theatrical bow then please, do yourself a favor and see it
now!
Vital Statistics
RIDING THE BULLET
Motion Picture Association of America
Director: Mick Garris
Producers: Vicki Southeran, Greg Malcolm, Joel L. Smith, Brad Krevoy, David
Lancaster, Mick Garris
Screenplay: Mick Garris
Cinematography: Robert New
Editing: Marshall Harvey
Cast: Jonathan Jackson, Erika Christensen, David Arquette, Cliff Robertson,
Nicky Katt, Barbara Hershey, Matt Frewer, Mick Garris, Barry Levy, Peter LaCroix,
Jackson Harris, Jeff Ballard, Chris Gauthier, Robin Nielson, Simon Webb, Nicky
Katt, Cynthia Garris