Review of Riding the Bullet (2004) by Roger V — 16 May 2010

Let's just hope that King never writes a book entitled ALL WASHED UP, because, with his name above the title, you'd end up with.

[center][size=4]"STEPHEN KING'S [u]ALL WASHED UP[/u]".

[/size] [left]Which is, of course, a perfectly accurate statement. In fact, the last good thing he wrote was probably The Stand... and even that was about 500 pages too long, give or take. (Does this guy actually have an editor?) So how do we account for his incredible success as a writer? Well, that's just it. It IS incredible... so there's only one logical explanation: He made a deal with the devil back in 1976. No matter how hackneyed the writing, the books were bound to sell. No matter how derivative the plot, the more credit he would receive for originality. Above all else, his dialogue is really, really bad. How bad? Ed Wood bad. If you thought the IT script was an unintentional laugh riot, wait'll you see this. (On second thought, don't. It's pretty much an unwatchable film, although I managed to endure the last 20 minutes just so I could warn an unsuspecting public of the potential danger.).

This pathetic exercise in cinematic ineptitude was "directed" with wild abandon by King veteran Mick Garris, although a coked-up high-school film student would've flunked the course, had he presented this for grading. But there is a parlor game to be played here: Find the anachronisms. There are plenty of them, and you can't miss them - they are so obvious. (This is what happens when you try to make a film that's set in 1969 and you don't bother to do your research.) In fact, one of the "hippies" actually says "radical," which, as every film buff knows, wasn't coined until the coming on Jeff Spicole in Fast Times At Ridgmont High... and later popularized by fans of TMNT. Any way you slice [u]THIS[/u] mess, it comes up bogus. (Or, as they might have said back in '69, "Bad trip, man.").

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