Truly Dreadful Film

Admirable film.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Robert John Burke plays obese lawyer Billy Halleck, who accidentally runs down and kills an old gypsy woman with his car while he is receiving an on-the-move blow job from his wife. Successfully avoiding prosecution (thanks to his colluding pals, the local judge and police chief), Billy thinks his troubles are over, but they are only just beginning: Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine), father of the dead woman, uses gypsy magic to seek revenge, causing Billy to lose weight at an alarming rate.Fright Night director Tom Holland is the man behind this mid-'90s Stephen King adaptation, but having come straight from helming TV mini-series The Langoliers (also based on a King book), he gives his film the look and feel of a made-for-TV movie rather than a cinematic release, the director clearly struggling to make the transition back to the big-screen.It's not all bad news, though: the film breezes along at a reasonable pace, boasts decent make-up effects (courtesy of Greg Cannom), a little bit of gore (best being a neat 'hand with a hole' effect), and some welcome eye-candy in the form of sexy Kari Wuhrer as a gypsy temptress. While the film doesn't exactly rewrite the rules, there's never a boring moment and, much like Sam Raimi's similarly themed Drag Me To Hell, the film packs a neat twist at the end.

"Thinner" (1996) was a fun enough outing; I'd give it an 8 out of 10. You can easily tell that this story originated with Stephen King. Only he can take an antiquated plot device like a gypsy curse and actually make it frightening.I do get the sense that screenwriters Michael McDowell and Tom Holland stuck closely to the original novel (which I have not read). It seems like a character-focused story; I'll bet the original prose really explored the incongruous friendship between Robert John Burke's mild-mannered attorney and Joe Mantegna's apparently psychotic mobster. I'll bet that King's unique style would have perfectly rendered certain plot points in the movie, such as one key conversation being overheard early on.I feel like an idiot ... For the life of me, I thought that actress Kari Wuhrer was Marissa Tomei. Her resemblance in this movie is striking. I can't be the only one who made that mistake, can I? Anyway, I really panned Wuhrer's performance in 2005's disappointing "Hellraiser: Deader." But she is damn terrific here in her role as the beautiful banshee adversary -- she damn near steals the movie. Also outstanding is Michael Constantine as her haggard, curse- casting gypsy father.

I have never read the Stephen King story upon which this movie is based, so how true the movie is to the book I can only speculate about. I have, however, seen this movie three times by now, not because it is my favorite movie or anything, just because I have had the chance.The story is about a guy who kills a gypsy woman in a car accident, an accident he walks free from because of his legal connections. As he walks out from the courtroom and old gypsy comes up and puts a curse on him. Being seriously overweight and on a diet, the weight starts to quickly come off, but at an alarming rate, and soon becomes a physical danger to his very life.I will say that the story is interesting enough, although it isn't particularly scary, so not really a typical movie version of a Stephen King story from the mid 1990's.The effects were actually quite good and still hold up by today's standards. The whole weight-loss process was quite good, as were the prosthetics of the corpses. Just bear in mind that the movie is not heavy-laden with special effects though.As for the cast and the acting, then people were doing good jobs with their given roles and characters.All in all, then "Thinner" is an adequate movie, although not the best of concepts to have sprung from the creative mind of Stephen King.

Managing to get off on a murder charge, a lawyer suddenly learns his weight-loss is the result of a curse placed on him by the gypsy he helped to screw over and tries to find a way of ending it before it consumes his world.This here really wasn't all that great and had a lot wrong with it. The main thing against this is in fact the central premise, as this one takes up the idea that what's going on here is scary when it really isn't as the concept of a curse causing an obsess person to drop off weight no matter what he does. This is simply not a scary proposition at all, and to make this be the root cause of fear in a ninety-minute movie is simply ridiculous by forcing this one to become completely dependent on such lame scenes as the arguing with the family over first losing weight and then how much he's lost as quickly as he is, the different tests and methods being done to try and figure out what's going on and the behavioral change in going from loving his new look to from all the compliments to being terrified of how much he's going to shrink next, and none of this makes the film any better at what's going on here as this one manages to become deadly boring here with this one concentrating on these issues for such a large majority of time here that it's not so interesting as the main point of the story here. Even the supposed adultery subplot here is just excruciatingly dull with absolutely nothing of any interest happening here and just making this one feel like forever before it really gets to anything decent or interesting and this manages to fulfill the fact that doing this makes for an enjoyable time here. The far more interesting and creative scenes apply to his cronies which actually feature the opportunity for scares and other chilling moments as they're damaging to the body which would've been a lot more fun rather than watching him run around the countryside chasing after the group. These here really bring this one down while it does have a few decent moments along the way. The biggest factor going here is the rather enjoyable final half, which not only gets the really enjoyable but also has some solid action within the mafia assaults on the gypsy camp set-off by the early ambushes before the decent shootout to be found here that certainly sets this going rather well. The only other part that comes off nicely is the whole concept of the curse and what it does, as the method for this one coming into fruition is nice enough and all the different rules and rituals for this are rather nicely explored. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot that works.Rated R: Adult Language and Violence.