Stephen King's 'Silver Bullet' Reviews

Short of his grocery lists, horror writer Stephen King seems to publish everything he's ever written. His enormous output undoubtedly staggers the imagination of any would-be writer. However, quantity does not equal quality, and STEPHEN KING'S SILVER BULLET, which King adapted himself from his own novelette, is a dismal and woefully inept werewolf picture. Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) is a disabled youngster who rides around in a rocket-powered wheelchair dubbed "The Silver Bullet," which, as we all know, is also the only kind of ammunition that can knock off a werewolf. When a crazed murderer starts a bloody reign of terror in little Marty's hometown, his parents do the only sensible thing: take off on a vacation and leave their handicapped son with his drunken Uncle Red (Gary Busey). King's smug style permeates the picture like a rank odor as the story lurches from one poorly created sequence to another. The werewolf effects, in keeping with the movie's other standards, are just awful; any resemblance between a scary, hairy beast and the creature that lurches on-screen here (designed by Carlo Rambaldi) is wholly in the filmmakers' imagination. A real waste of time, to put it mildly. King would further massacre his own words on film in MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (1986).