When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, Silver Bullet.

Not exactly a novel, Cycle depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.

That’s not a criticism of Cycle, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for Silver Bullet. We get the attack on the lonely fat woman, the mauling of the cop in his car, the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.

A tween Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two working legs, the kid in the wheelchair outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows, The Nutcracker Prince) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey (Surviving the Game).

Busey is incredible in this flick, and by that I mean semi-lucid — and this was a few years before the motorcycle accident that caused his head injury and what we now know as the acronym-spouting “Gary Busey.” At the end is an amazing reaction shot where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and going through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.

Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who pleads with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) has a small role as the sheriff, and Reservoir Dogs’ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.

As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from King Kong ’76 producer Dino De Laurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy — enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and with its share of solid horror moments well-timed by first-time feature director Daniel Attias (who went directly to series TV and never looked back). Plus, in these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.

Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster — as well as the entire film — but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I appreciate it more today than the several times I saw it several decades ago. Cycle of the Werewolf is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella — but Silver Bullet brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott

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That a good chunk of A Night to Dismember’s climax takes place in daylight should surprise nobody fluent in the slasher film’s director, Doris Wishman.

Years ago, Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox — the porn one, not the music/model one) axed a couple of neighborhood boys to death. The act earned her a lengthy stay at a sanitarium. As she’s released into the real world — or as real as living with one’s parents can be — Vicki attempts readjustment to “normal” life. However, her brother (South Bronx Heroes director William Szarka) would rather she not be free to murder again, so he attempts to scare her back into hospitalization by going to the store to buy “a hideous mask.”

Also, the crudely depicted killings begin anew, which private detective Tim O’Malley (William Longo Jr.) investigates and narrates … and narrates … and narrates. The events constituting Dismember — including one death by car rollover — are told to us this way because Wishman didn’t film with live sound; even if she hadn’t dubbed everything in post, viewers still would require narration for a base level of comprehension, especially with an untold number of family tree branches thrown at us in the opening minutes. God bless her, Wishman held a unique approach to filmmaking — one in which the written word was never secondary, because it was always tertiary.

Further throwing your grasp on lucidity are shots that look to come from different stock, if not entire decades. With the occasional photograph or negative image spliced in, A Night to Dismember resembles the result of a particularly tricky filmmaking challenge — one in which Wishman either compiled the entire movie from existing footage to fit Judith J. Kushner’s script, or edited an entire movie and then asked Kushner to fashion a script around that. Honestly, the movie is so disorienting, disorganized and discombobulated, neither is out of the realm of possibility. It could use a couple of Deadly Weapons. —Rod Lott

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Thirteen years after his Satan-worshipping grandfather (Hy Pyke, Hollywood High) secretly slipped him a satanic necklace on Halloween, Tommy Drindle (Gregory Scott Cummins, Blood Games) is all grown up and ready to commit his soul to the devil — or something like that — in Hack-O-Lantern.

Three things are certain:
1) Tommy’s room has a bitchin’ poster for Levi’s Cords.
2) Tommy’s mother (Katina Garner, Cannibal Hookers) hates — and I mean hates — her father for his obsessive hold on Tommy. And also for having her husband murdered 13 years ago. And also for molesting her on her wedding day before that. (I’m told those things tend to stick in the craw.)
3) So many people in Tommy’s circle are going to die today, many even before the town’s Halloween party gets started.

Open House director Jag Mundhra was kinda asking for it by titling his second horror film Hack-O-Lantern, as a name like that invites viewers to prepare for a subpar experience. Then again, Mundhra’s satanic-panic shocker is a subpar experience; his gifts were in erotic thrillers, not slashers.

The only thing more out of place than the MTV video in Hack-O-Lantern’s first half is the impromptu Thanksgiving-themed stand-up routine in its second. The latter — built upon turkey and stripper impersonations — comes courtesy of “Party Comedian” Bill Tucker. Today, the Vegas performer bills himself as “Wild Bill Tucker” and, based upon the unedited promo copy at his website, might not have survived filming unscathed:

“Wild Bill’s arsenal of urban sounds effects blended into his punch lines is rare. The sounds he makes are amazingly funny & at the same time accurately fascinating. It seems, when God was creating Wild Bill he splurged with the odd ball talents that are placed so perfectly throughout his act. Now the sign language Unique? Tucker Tap Dances to his Cell Phone Ring. Warning: Wild Bill leaves pictures in your head.”

The movie leaves pictures in your head, too, including an ass cheek tattooed with a pentagram and more 30-something-looking teens the screen has ever seen, but no image more memorable than Pyke’s ugly mug. Organically creepy even before the incest angle is introduced, Pyke sounds just like you would expect, with a gravel-gargled voice that suggests he graduated summa cum laude from the Sling Blade School of Diction. Mundhra establishes the Grandpa character as the lead, only to play musical chairs throughout, with Tommy, Tommy’s mommy and Tommy’s virgin-but-not-for-long sister (Carla Baron, Terror Night) all vying for the spot willy-nilly. Not coincidentally, your attention span may do the same. —Rod Lott

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