NEW Riding The Bullet (DVD)

King does it again. He takes an everyday occurence and turns it into a frightening mind game. Imagine having to choose between dying or losing your mother. A must see for all die-hard King fans!

Every once in a while they manage to film a really good Ghost Story and they have done it with this movie. The viewer is introduced to Allan, a College kids back in the 1970's who is hitchiking to Lewiston in Maine to visit his ill mother. Allan is confronted by the ghosts of his past and present during his long lonely walk to the hospital. This movie is dark, eerie and very atmospheric and this is one film which I would have liked to have watched on the big screen. The extra feature included in this DVD is Allan's sketch book which is alone makes this movie worth watching. Bravo to all concerned with the making of this film.

Stephen King's flair for good storytelling is absolutely missing in 'Riding the Bullet' directed by Mick Garris, who fared far better in TV's 'Shining' or 'Stand.' King's original novella has potential for sure, which includes serious matters, life and death. And King must have known the topic first-hand, for the story was written after he suffered a serious injury after a traffic accident.

But Mick Garris takes things too literarily in this film. The premises are intriguing. The time is during the years of Vietnam War. The place, Maine (you can hear the name of Castlerock). One college student, obsessed with the idea of throwing his life away, realizes something important while hitchiking to his hometown, where his mother fell suddenly ill. This is a fine idea for making a road movie, and hitchiking on the two-lane road could be pretty scary.

The college student Alan Parker is played by Jonathan Jackson, who, leaving his kind-hearted friend Jessica (Erika Christensen) at college, encounters several strange drivers on the road (including one old driver played by Chiff Robertson). The most unnerving one turns out creepy guy George Staub (David Aqquette), who offers Allan a ride at night, and seems to know many things about Alan's life in the past, including the death of his father. But why?

This story could be a vintage urban legend-like weird tale, but Mick Garris fails to make good use of it, by showing things without any visual imagination. Think of this; if some 'inner self' talks to Alan, another image of Alan (played by Jackson himself) appears right next or behind him, and starts to talk to him. If Alan sees 'visions' perhaps because of hullcination or smoking weed, Alan exactly sees, say, his mother croaking like a bird. Or in another place Alan even sees a bird, picking the dead meat of some animal, and it really talks to him. They are not scary; they are downright embarrassing.

The film has good supports -- Barbara Hershey as Alan's mother, plus Matt Frewer and Nicky Katt. None of them, however, show what they can really do, for the film is too intent on showing the visions of Alan, or his gloomy outlook on life. In fact, Alan is kind of a student who draws a picture of a naked model with the Grim Reaper behind her, and does not notice the presence of Erika Christensen while she is always looking at him. Why should we care about this guy in the first place?

The film is not scary -- that's is not a problem -- but also, the film is awfully self-indlugent and doesn't know what it wants to do, like the protagonist it shows. Horror? Not exactly. Nostalgic drama, like 'Stand By Me'? Far from it. This is after all just another wasted opportunity for making a decent film out of Stephen King.

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