Jamie
I am an unabashed Stephen King super fan. I have read, by my count, twenty-six of what is listed as novels in his bibliography (some are pretty borderline, but they count!). I’ve read a few of his collections as well. So when you get a chance to read lucky number twenty-slevin AND get to have that be a beautiful media tie-in version with the stunning poster on the cover… well… you do it. My conclusion? The book is weird. I kind of like it in the Cujo or Pet Semetary kind of way. The difference with those really dark books is that this also has The Shining style main character who is a giant piece of shit and gets driven crazy by his circumstances. So that’s a bit unusual for a book and you can dig into that. But it’s also all about a gypsy curse… and no one really bats an eye at the idea that this group of Romani are winding their way around New England. Was this a thing that happened in the 70’s that no one talks about? This is Stephen King before he kicked the habit kind of stuff.
To recap, Billy Halleck is a kind of scuzzy small town lawyer. He occasionally gets mobsters off. He occasionally ogles the Romani gals that pass through his Connecticut town (naturally). He very very occasionally eats. And his family loves him for it. One night his wife decides to get a little handsy in the automobile (if you know what I mean) and our boy Billy, being distracted, totally smashes into an old Romani woman. Despite manslaughtering this old lady, Billy gets off due to his connections to the judge and police chief. While leaving court, an even older Romani man who leads the group touches him and curses him with the word “Thinner.” And boy howdy, does he. He starts dropping weight like crazy. At first he’s like “dope.” Then it starts to feel less and less dope as the weight keeps coming off and he has to eat and eat just to slow the decline (and he looks crazy doing it). Eventually the local doctor and his wife insist he go to a clinic for treatment. Knowing it’s a gypsy curse, he declines. He goes and sees the judge and lawyer and they are also being totally owned by curses. So he goes in search of the Romani. He tracks them down and confronts them but they not-so-politely decline to remove the curse. Billy then recruits his mobster friend to help and after terrorizing them for a while they agree to remove the curse. This is done by putting the curse in a pie (not joking) and feeding the pie to someone who will take on the curse. Now, you have to understand that Billy at this point has become unreasonably focused on the culpability of his wife in the whole affair. He is absolutely convinced that she should have gotten cursed because she got up in his business in the car. So that’s why ultimately he feeds the pie to his wife, but is shocked and horrified to find that his daughter ate it too and he done fudged up bad because he’s a huge piece of shit. THE END.
There are aspects of Thinner that I enjoyed. Some of the makeup and effects, particularly one dream sequence involving the cursed judge driving a car into a semi, are pretty good. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the film that has the production quality of a TV movie. Which kind of makes sense given the director also directed a TV movie adaptation of a Stephen King short story, The Langoliers. The really glaring issue with the film is the performance by the main actor Robert John Burke. You always want an actor willing to go for it… but maybe not this much. His performance is unintentionally quite funny as he makes crazy silly faces in his fat suit. Most of the actors are willing to treat the material in a soapy fun way, which is good, but his performance falls just over the line and really messes with the tone. As for the adaptation, my only quibble is an extraneous addition to the film where Billy imagines that his wife is having an affair with their doctor. Which I don’t think is needed. Works better if he’s just a bad person and slowly driven insane.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me admiring my super thin body as an old man looks on confused. He mouths “thinner?” and I look at him and mouth “don’t mind if I do” much to his horror* Let’s go!
The Book? One of the rare ones I read prior to watching the film. The book is about twice as long as it needs to be, but that is par for the course for King. I love King, but his best books are the ones that use their length well. It. The Shining. To some extent ‘salem’s Lot. This felt more like a short story that had an extra 100 pages stuck into the middle of it. The middle really really sags. But beyond the fact that the storyline would now be consider very very racist, the idea I kind of dug, and the “twist” ending is fun. Again, though, I like the books of his which go for the happy-ish ending more than the “ooo the good guy kind of sucked the whole time!” endings he sometimes pulls out. Anyways, mid-tier King for me as far as the book goes.
The Good? Hmmm, the only good stuff in the movie is the good stuff they pulled from the book I think. The fact that it kind of ends up looking more like a revenge tale, the fact that the main character haaaaaaates his wife by the end of it, the off-the-beaten-track New England of it all. The good stuff is the story which is why they adapt King books in the first place.
The Bad? It looks like a TV Movie. The acting is abominable. The middle of the movie also sags. Did I mention the acting is terrible? The main character, I don’t know … he probably had gone insane from the application of all the fat make-up during the course of filming, but he looks absurd 95% of the time. The whole thing now looks like amateur hour, but that is maybe what happens when you try and do a full body fat suit movie five years before you could even do a bad version like Big Momma’s House. Honestly, what it really needed was commitment from a crazy actor willing to gain and lose a crazy amount of weight. The guy never actually looks as thin as the book suggests he is. He is supposed to be a walking skeleton. With CGI I bet they could do a real creepy version of this film now.
The BMT? I mean you have to collect them all. And by “all” I mean all Stephen King adaptations. This is just a shade above the truly dire of his though, but it has cred to make it worthwhile to watch.
Rewatchable? For what’s aged the worst, it is obviously the gypsy storyline. You actually genuinely couldn’t get away with it these days. The “that guy” award goes to Michael Constantine, who you might remember from the My Big Fat Greek Wedding series, he plays the king gypsy in this and he’s the father in that. And finally obviously Joe Mantegna gets the overacting award, but that can be forgiven since the character is written that way in the book too.
A good Setting as a Character (Where?) for Maine as the ultimate setting of the climax of the film. I’ve been to the lighthouse where the final confrontation happens. And Worst Twist (How?) for the ultimate conclusion that he kills himself and his entire family with the curse in the end because he sucks. The film is Bad, merely by not being bad enough to be a fun Stephen King adaptation.
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 