“I’m being erased!”

Justin’s rating: I was cursed to watch this!

Justin’s review: For the Stephen King fan, the ’90s was a wild ride of movie and miniseries adaptations. Some of his all-time bests came out that decade (Shawshank, Green Mile, The Stand, IT), as well as some of his absolute stinkers (Sleepwalkers, The Mangler, The Shining). So where does Thinner fit on this spectrum?

Based on the 1984 novel that King wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Thinner may be one of those books that should’ve been unfilmable. After all, it’s about a fat guy who’s cursed to continually lose weight until he dies. Before CGI, that sort of thing could only be attempted with a fat suit, a harsh diet, camera trickery, and maybe an animatronic. It wasn’t easy to make this premise believable, especially on a smaller budget.

Billy is our cursed lawyer, a 300-pound scumbag who gets off the hook for running down a Romani woman and killing her. He’s promptly cursed by one of the members of the family who caresses his cheek and utters a single word: “Thinner.”

After that, he starts to downgrade in fat suit sizes. It’s delightful at first — a diet that you don’t have to do anything to make work — but it starts getting scary as Billy realizes that this ain’t going to stop until he’s a living skeleton. And then a dead one. No matter how much he eats (and he does eat, constantly and profusely and disgustingly), he can’t seem to reverse the process, and that’s a ticking countdown that he cannot abide.

So the rest of the movie is Billy trying to figure a way out of the curse, if that’s even possible. The judge and police chief received a curse as well for their part in the cover-up, and they start showing some horrific physical effects. But the only potential path to survival might be too terrible to consider.

Thinner struggles to overcome the fact that it’s a relatively short and simple story stretched into a movie format. A Twilight Zone episode might have handled this better, especially with a bit of a twist ending. It also suffers from having racial stereotypes weighing it down, making it uncomfortable and distracting. It’s one of those movies that your mind thinks, “I know this is racist, but how racist is it? I’m not entirely sure.”

Stephen King movie overacting is in full force here, if you know what I’m saying. Lots of characters spitting out unnatural phrases and emoting a little too much. I get that the director was going for a horror-comic tone, but all that resulted in were a lot of scenes that are mock-worthy rather than funny or scary. You know, pretty typical for most King adaptations.

Thinner is such a weird bag of unlikable characters, absurd story developments, decent makeup, and just so, so much on-screen eating. Maybe that’s the point, for this film to put you off food so that you’ll lose some weight.

In any case, Thinner never really excelled nor did it flame out so spectacularly that it’s remembered as a so-bad-it’s-good entry. Thus, it’s mostly forgotten, and probably deservedly so.

Intermission!

• Nice Godfather impressions
• The old Doritos bag amused me
• Kari Wuhrer has supernatural hearing
• And Stephen King himself as the folksy pharmacist
• “283. Call Richard Simmons.”
• This tailor is WAY too excited to do his job
• People eat constantly in this film
• “Is there such a thing as male menopause?”
• “I have to eat like this. It’s a race, and I’m losing!”
• They obviously didn’t have the budget to show Lizard Man, so he gets a description
• He’s eating over 12,000 calories a day, dang
• “He always did want to be cremated.”
• Dream sequence exists for a big stunt, I guess
• “I never take it off, I die with it in my mouth.”
• Dang, ball bearing right through the hand