Riding the Bullet (2004)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) If it wasn’t for writer-director Mick Garris, we would have far fewer Stephen King film adaptations since the 1990s. I have a fondness for the cat-craziness of his Sleepwalkers, and thought that his take on Desperation punched above its weight as a made-for-TV movie adaptation, but I hadn’t seen Riding the Bullet until now. Nominally the story of a road trip in which a young man goes back home to visit his sick mother, the film ends up being a hallucinatory succession of episodes as he hitch-hikes his way across Maine, experiencing mental health issues and supernatural occurrences along the way. Broadly faithful to King’s original novella, the film does run into the unfortunate issue of often feeling like a string of disconnected episodes, all trying to spook even when it doesn’t make sense. Still, Riding the Bullet is more than a succession of jump-scares, especially when it goes for ambitious flashbacks and sentimental themes. The limit of that approach, unfortunately, is that the focus of the story is often lost – it may be about a young aimless man’s self-harm tendencies, or it may be about a pact with the devil (an aspect more pronounced in the novella), or about taking care of aging parents, or something else – it feels like a few disconnected things stitched together. The result is still fun (and it’s a great deal more interesting than a monster-of-the-week horror movie), but Riding the Bullet remains the least interesting King adaptation from Garris.