Acting Helps Add Heft To ‘Thinner’
How’s this for a diet?
Eat all you want, 12,000 calories a day and more, if you like. Devour haunches of turkey, mounds of corn and wash the whole thing down with dollops of whipped cream. Snack between meals out of giant bags of chips. Just don’t say no.
If you do, you might die, because you’re wasting away from a Gypsy curse.
That’s the premise of “Stephen King’s Thinner,” based on one of the prolific author’s novels published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.
A tale of negligent homicide, class warfare, vengeance, jealousy and murder, “Stephen King’s Thinner” has the outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack-o’lantern.
But as such ventures go, this Halloween handout is more treat than trick, if your tastes run to dripping blood and repellent skin ailments. The production is slick, the Maine scenery is bracing, the characters are well-acted and, in a mumbo-jumbo movie with a few loose ends, the makeup central to the plot and applied by Greg Cannom and Bob Laden to Robert John Burke in the leading role is most admirable.
Burke plays Billy Halleck, a 300-pound lawyer with a pretty wife concerned for his health and a pleasantly Mephistophelean Mafioso, Richie Ginelli (Joe Mantegna), as a client.
At the outset of the film, directed by Tom Holland, who wrote the screenplay with Michael McDowell, Billy’s wife, Heidi (Lucinda Jenney), has Billy on a liquid diet at home while Billy is busy outside their home gorging himself and defending Richie, who is on trial for arranging a murder.
Billy quickly wins an acquittal for the grateful Richie. En route home from a celebratory dinner at the local country club, while Heidi is demonstrating that life’s pleasures consist of more than food, Billy runs down an aged woman who is the daughter of the king of an itinerant Gypsy tribe.
The town judge, who detests the Gypsies, and the police chief, who is part of the establishment, see to it that Billy is exonerated at a coroner’s inquest. But the old Gypsy king, Tadzu Lempke (Michael Constantine), seeks his own justice. He touches Billy Halleck’s cheek and whispers, “Thinner.”
Soon Billy can eat all he wants while losing weight, and the judge and police chief are no longer fit to be seen in public. To make matters worse, Heidi seems to Billy to be spending too much time with the dashing Dr. Mike Houston (Sam Freed).
Short of girth but still long on brains, Billy realizes that he has been cursed and spends the rest of the film, eventually with Richie Ginelli’s help, trying to persuade old Lempke to take back his malediction.
The price is high, but it includes dessert.
xxxx “Stephen King’s Thinner” Locations: North Division, Lincoln Heights and Coeur d’Alene cinemas Credits: Directed by Tom Holland; starring Robert John Burke, Joe Mantegna, Lucinda Jenney, Joy Lenz, Kari Wuhrer and Michael Constantine Running time: 1:33 Rating: R