31 Days of Halloween: Thinner (1996)

When it comes to adapting the works of Stephen King movies are either hit or a miss. For every great movie like The Shining, It (2017), there are crappy movies like the made-for-TV versions of The Shining and It. Still, even the most critically panned adaptation can become a cult classic. Pet Semetary, Cujo, Carrie, Christine.

One of my favorite of the bunch is 1996’s adaptation of Thinner. The book was originally written under the alias of Richard Bachman. For those of you that are too young to remember, there was a period in time when releasing more than one book a year carried a risk of over-saturation in the market. At the time, Stephen King’s work was New York Time’s Bestseller gold, so perhaps there was some concern there. At any rate, King developed the Richard Bachman pen-name in order to pump out more work. However, he wanted to make a game of it to see if his fame was because of luck or actual talent so these books were released with very little fanfare or promotion. Unlike your garden variety Stephen King, the Bachman books were mostly thrillers rather than outright horror and they were fucking bleak. The hero seldom won and usually died horribly. They existed in worlds that were governed by almost childish cruelty. Unfortunately, Stephen King’s great experiment was cut short when Steve Brown, a bookstore clerk from Washington, DC, uncovered the truth. Since then, King has used the Bauchman name to stories that are usually out of the King wheelhouse or as a gimmick.

For example, in 1996 when King was avoiding Dark Tower sequels he dabbled in the idea of parallel universes with the books Desperation and the Regulators. Both stories took place in parallel worlds and featured the same cast of characters but in vastly different situations. Desperation was written under the King name while the Regulators were written under Bachman. The last time King wrote as Bachman was in 2007 called Blaze, which was a story that King pulled out of his morgue file and finished.

At any rate, not many of Stephen King’s Bachman books have seen adaptation. There was the Running Man, which is a complete departure from King’s original story, which I think is probably for the best because the original story ends with the disemboweled hero crashing a plane into a building while screaming the n-word. The Long Walk is apparently being adapted into a film, with New Line Cinema naming a producer back in 2019. That brings us to Thinner.

Thinner was adapted into a film in 1996 and it stands as one of my favorite film adaptations of Stephen King’s work. It follows the story of Billy Halleck (played by Robert John Burke) an obese lawyer who gets off on a hit-and-run accident. His victim was a member of a Romany clan that is traveling through town. As things tend to go, the victim’s father curses Halleck making him waste away until he dies. Nothing Halleck does stop him from losing weight. What first appears to be a blessing quickly turns out to be a curse. Halleck employs his mob connections to try and get the Romany to remove the curse. It’s a thrilling war of the minds. Halleck is by no means a likable character and in classic Richard Bachman fashion, seeks to deflect the blame on his wife, who was giving him road cone at the time of the accident, particularly when he discovers that she has been unfaithful to him. The movie also has a delightful twist that comes right out of a Tales From the Crypt playbook. It’s a fun little movie that is entirely faithful to the book. The cheery on the top is that the movie also has some peak Kari Wuhrer, with her role as Gina Romani, the great-grandaughter of the Tadzu Lempke, the Romany who puts on the curse.

Thinner is one of those movies you can find just about anywhere. It’s had a regular stream of DVD and Blu-Ray releases and you can find it on Amazon Prime. If you’re really hard up, it usually on regular rotation on AMC.

Tomorrow….

A fun little movie people used to see until they built that highway a few years back…