When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, SILVER BULLET, recently re-released as part of a sweet, affordable DVD box set containing new special editions of PET SEMATARY, THE DEAD ZONE and, um, GRAVEYARD SHIFT.
Not exactly a novel, CYCLE depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.
That’s not a criticism of CYCLE, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for SILVER BULLET. There’s the attack on the lonely fat woman, there’s the mauling of the cop in his car, there’s the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.
Corey Haim stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. But it’s Haim before his testicles descended, so it’s all good. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two legs, it’s the disabled kid stuck in the wheelchair who outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey.
Busey is incredible in this flick, and by “incredible,” I mean semi-retarded. And this was a few years before his head-injury-causing motorcycle accident. There’s this amazing reaction shot at the end where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and goes through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.
TWIN PEAKS‘ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who tries to plead with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) LOST’s Terry O’Quinn has a small role as the sheriff, and RESERVOIR DOGS‘ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.
As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from producer Dino DeLaurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy, because it’s enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and has its share of good scenes of horror. In these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.
Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster – as well as the entire film – but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I think I even liked it more today than the several times I saw it two decades ago. CYCLE is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella – but SILVER BULLET brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott
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Someone gave you CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF when you were thirteen? *Gave* it to you?
Shit, Chris Sharpe and I shoveled snow all winter to save up for that leather-bound sombitch, which was previously only visible to us from behind New World’s impregnable glass display case.
Well, I think we shoveled snow for part of an afternoon and then — for me at least — the folks finally gave in to my incessant begging.
Still have mine. Might be worth something if I hadn’t written my own name on the first page like it was a science textbook, or something.
I completely remember that. It came out first in a limited edition hardcover and we were sure that it would never be released in a mass market edition. So we busted our asses shovelling snow from driveways in an attempt to get the $50 bucks it cost. I think it was $50 anyway.
If I remember correctly, wasn’t CYCLE going to literally be a calendar with Wrightson illustrations and very short pieces from King? And then King got carried away and it became an actual book?
For what it’s worth, I really liked the movie when it came out. I haven’t seen it in years, but this review has renewed my interest.
Yes, King writes in the MM edition that it was going to be a calendar at first, but he realized he couldn’t limit himself to that.
I should clarify: Gave it to me for my birthday.
I have to admit that based solely on my youthful memories of the film, I included it as one of my picks for five worst werewolf movies in Scary Movies (what can I say, I wrote the book in 2004, when I was a young and feckless lad). Based solely on your defence of it, I am willing to give it another look. Unfortunately, my relationship with my former publisher being what it is, any conversion on my part won’t lead to any changes in future reprints.
And Megan Follows wasn’t homely! (Sorry, it’s a Canadian thing. I had to say it, even if I don’t actually believe it myself)