Silver Bullet (1985)

The peaceful US small town of Tarker’s Mills is suddenly hit by a series of incredibly brutal murders. Curiously enough, the killings always take place on the night of the full moon. The local sheriff (Terry O’Quinn) isn’t terribly successful at finding the killer, and soon enough, the natives are growing restless enough to start on acts that will go on to influence some of the most idiotic bits of the pretty damn idiotic Halloween Kills; also, these acts will get some of them killed in unpleasant ways.

Paraplegic kid Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) figures out that the killer is a werewolf, and will eventually even find out the monster’s true identity, but he’s not exactly in a position to convince anyone to believe his wild tales. Eventually, he finds allies in his sister Jane (Megan Follows), who gives up some fine times of mutual sibling hate for it, and even an actual grown-up in form of his eccentric Uncle Red (Gary Busey). But then, Red is the kind of guy who turns a kid’s electric wheelchair into a motorcycle, so he’s not exactly firing on all cylinders, unlike the wheelchair.

After this, his only feature film, Silver Bullet’s director Daniel Attias would go on to a successful TV career that still continues today. From time to time, there’s a whiff of mediocre TV about this Stephen King adaptation, mostly when it comes to its treatment of the more emotional moments between the Coslaw kids. There’s something too treacly and pretty unconvincing about those scenes, which isn’t helped by a King script that feels stilted and uncomfortable in those moments in ways his books aren’t when treating comparable material.

Tonally, the film is somewhat inconsistent, at least on first thought. There’s the afterschool special feel of the sibling scenes, the love for the mild gore gag of the werewolf attacks, and, for most of the film’s running time, a love for broad and curiously artificial performances and writing that can suggest a live action cartoon. Or, going by King’s influences, pre-Code Horror comics read as a live action cartoon. Fortunately, this broadness is laid in the hands/on the shoulders of a cast of character actors (apart from those already mentioned also Everett McGill, Bill Smitrovich, Lawrence Tierney and a host of not quite as well known names) well capable of making an approach that could be annoying in lesser hands interesting and fun to watch, turning things from the cartoonish towards a dream-like feel that has never been typical of US horror filmmaking beyond the regional level.

In the context of a dream, even prime 80s silliness like the motorcycle wheelchair makes a degree of sense, or rather, fits into the curious world where this takes place, where a town can have a prolific serial killer, yet nobody from the outside, neither press nor law enforcement, shows any interest whatsoever in proceedings, thereby turning the dreaded plot hole into parts of the mood.

Once having accepted this about a movie I’ve never clicked with in earlier attempts at watching, I’ve suddenly grown enormously fond of the whole thing, its genuine willingness to go with dream instead of real world logic in telling its werewolf tale. When he’s not doing teen melodrama, Attias is a pretty effective director – not one visually inventive enough to reproduce the feeling of the Berni(e) Wrightson illustrations for the original book (which were my first conscious encounter with Wrightson’s work when I was a kid), but certainly willing and able to find a creepy, comics-like/dream-like (take your pick, I choose both) way to present any given scene.

Carlo Rambaldi’s effects fit into this perspective on the movie as well; while they are beautiful and lovely in the way of good practical effects, they also do tend to look broader and feel more performative than is typical of the work of his peers. In a film whose point clearly isn’t naturalism, this potential weakness turns into a strength, so much so that I can’t imagine a Rick Baker werewolf fitting into the surroundings of Silver Bullet as perfectly as Rambaldi’s creature does.