Movie Review # 5

Thinner

Shock Value: 10 of 33
Queasiness: 25 of 33
Suspense: 30 of 34
Total Scare: 65 of 100

(Stephen King's) Thinner: This is one of the few books by Richard Bachman (S.K.) that I have yet to read. It was almost half-way through the film that I remembered it was a R.B. book, his stories are usually even darker and the characters are more twisted and less merciful than S.K.'s...the protagonists usually aren't very good guys. Right away I remembered one of the negative sides of this movie – the acting really isn't all that great. It's obvious that the main character is wearing a body suit and has loads (and LOADS) of make-up on to make him look fat. While that is forgivable, what I can't stand is that he ACTS like he's trying to be fat, all the jolly chuckles and over-the-top gestures just make him look fake, not fat. Even when he does get skinny his acting never really improves. The plot is pretty straight forward for the first half of the movie, and there isn't a lot of great lines. The plot actually gets interesting once he's so thin that he decides to do something about it and tracks down the gypsies... then he puts a curse on them, and in order to make this curse happen he needs a little help from his criminal friend...ok, so it's a little hard to believe...in the beginning he seemed like a family man who had good values and all of a sudden the criminal guy is his best buddy... anyway, believable or not, that's when things get interesting. Since he's just a “white man from town” he has to give them a curse the old fashioned way, with threats, killing their animals, and guns. I wish they would have played out this part even more... once the curse is lifted the main character doesn't stop with the gypsies but goes back home and kills his wife and his doctor (who she was having an affair with...again, here's another plot element that was played down that needed to be played up...). I really like the Bachman style of protagonist and twist ending...but I think the movie should have been more consistent...and had better acting...and better dialogue...there were several “scary parts” where you saw the results of all the gypsy curses, but they seemed to mean very little in the grand scheme of things – he was just interested in healing himself.

I would really like to see a remake of this one (let's call it “Richard Bachman's Thinner”) and have it give the other victims more character (so you care when they die), play out the affair (so you sympathize with his “vengeful personality”, and focus more on “the white-man's curse”. These are good ways to make it a deeper story with more emotional impact on the audience.