‘CUGA’S CUTS >> Bullet Time

Comics scribe Joshua Jabcuga delves into horror, where every Friday is Friday the 13th!

Stephen King’s RIDING THE BULLET novella was originally published online in 1999. It was the first thing the author wrote after the horrific accident that nearly ended his life. It also presented King with his closest glimpse of the Grim Reaper yet. All of us have dealt with death and dying to some extent, but how many of us were on our own deathbed? And how many of us can put that experience into words like King?

Enter Mick Garris. As a director, his name is synonymous with made-for-TV King adaptations. Garris gets a bad rap from time to time with those. Personally, I think his non-King projects are (severed) heads and shoulders above his King offerings. His script for the MASTERS OF HORROR episode “Haeckel’s Tale,” itself an adaptation of a Clive Barker short story, was a series’ high point that didn’t seem to get its just due.

That’s probably because fright fans were more amped to catch higher-profile eps like Takashi Miike’s “Imprint” or the masterful collaboration between PHANTASM‘s Don Coscarelli and Stephen Romano, “Incident on and Off a Mountain Road,” based on a Joe R. Lansdale story (and the benchmark that Showtime used to kick things off, setting expectations a little too high for the anthology series).

All of the above lead me to believe that Garris was a better writer than he was a director. Don’t believe me? Read his DEVELOPMENT HELL or A LIFE IN THE CINEMA. They’re superb. “Chocolate,” from the latter, was bizarre, touching and even arguably transgressive. Yet when he adapted it himself for an episode of MASTERS … well, it didn’t work. It made for better reading than viewing.

Lonely Road Books’ new RIDING THE BULLET: THE DELUXE SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE by King and Garris, will give readers new insight and a deeper sense of respect for Garris, the writer and the director. His talent as a filmmaker shouldn’t be called into question. If anything, he may be too ambitious for his own good, tackling epic King projects like THE SHINING or THE STAND, with budgets, shooting schedules and casts that don’t always come close to matching the scope of the picture.

RIDING THE BULLET is a novella that Garris felt compelled to turn into a feature film, so much so that it was the first script he ever wrote on spec. Both took cajones. Although Garris would be working on a shoestring budget, he worked wonders with the story. He didn’t pad things to get a 98-minute running time. In fact, he enhanced the characters, without bloating plot elements. He also made some major revisions, and when you’re working with a King story, that takes major balls.

The novella is very internal, while the film is very external. Garris set the story in 1969, as opposed to 1999. In the process, the writer/director created something completely and uniquely his own. To paraphrase Garris, society in ’69 was making a life-and-death choice, just as the main character, Alan Parker, is forced to make a choice of his own: a reversed SOPHIE’S CHOICE between his own life and death, and that of his mother’s. Think of Richard Matheson’s “The Box,” but not as clinical or cynical, and with more subtleties and nuances.

The film is worth tracking down on DVD. King described it as “The best of the independent films made from my work since STAND BY ME.” I was skeptical at first, especially since my first viewing was the much-maligned, arbitrarily truncated version on the USA Network. If you caught it when it premiered, forget everything you know. Garris had nothing to do with that, which was impossible to follow, with approximately 15 random minutes cut (this from a movie with a weird structure to begin with).

The full-length theatrical version was worthy of King’s praise. Thematically, it’s a coming-of-age ghost story, and just one of the reasons it was DOA before it even had a chance at a multiplex run. That would require too much thought for the bean-counters to market it. Garris chose wisely to take the show-and-not-tell route. The film has nice flourishes, such as a wacky but effective film-within-a-film, flashbacks, jump-cut tricks, psychedelic scenes and a ’60s soundtrack evocative of the era. It stands on its own and manages to complement King’s work. In perhaps the ultimate coup, Garris’ adaptation should make fans see King’s story in a new light. All this with a $5 million budget.

Garris attempted to reach for potentially more than he could grasp, and that is the essence of RIDING THE BULLET: reaching for more than you can grasp, and making the most of each day. Don’t fear the reaper, don’t fear the roller coaster, but just understand that someday, that ride is gonna end. Like Alan’s Ma was fond of saying, “Fun is fun and done is done!”

Garris gives good DVD commentary. Always has. And this one is no exception. Here, the always candid and engaging Garris takes the good with the bad, but one gets the sense that he’s proud of his work here. And he should be. After watching the film twice, and looking at this book — replete with the screenplay for comparison, exclusive storyboards, photos from the set, production notes, hand-corrected script pages, Bernie Wrightson sketches and glimpses at the “Director’s Notebook” — I hope that someday, Garris gets the budget to build the ride he sees in his mind, whether it’s an adaptation, a hybrid such as RIDING THE BULLET, or something he concocted from start to finish.

This book is presented in the tradition of the old Ace Doubles. It’s also a limited edition, featuring beautiful cover artwork by Alan M. Clark. There are subtle differences to the front and back covers; essentially, it’s two front covers. Just flip it.

If you’re looking for a unique King experience, read this book, and then have a midnight screening of the film. My only gripe is that the book isn’t packaged with an “I RODE THE BULLET AT THRILL VILLAGE, LACONIA” pin. It’s the “Rosebud” of RIDING THE BULLET. And in Garris’ case, with the magical feat he pulled off, perhaps it would have been more accurate if this release had been called CATCHING THE BULLET. —Joshua Jabcuga

Buy it at Amazon.

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5. BOOKS 2 FILM >> The H.P. Lovecraft Collection: Volume 4 – Pickman’s Model

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