Riding the Bullet (2004)/2007 Review
I found this on Tubi while looking for something King-related to go with my watching-in-parts revisit of Tobe Hooper's mini-series adaptation of 'Salem's Lot' from 1979. Mick Garris seems so synonymous with Stephen King, with a career dedicated to King content.
From my IMDb user comments from December 2007:
During Halloween night of 1969, a college student Alan Parker(Jonathan Jackson), a possible future artist obsessed with death, takes to the road on a surreal nightmarish odyssey hitchhiking to his home town in Maine to visit his mother in the hospital after she suffered a stroke. Along the way Alan experiences near-death encounters with troubled drivers such as a farmer(Cliff Robertson)whose suffering with prostrate problems and the loss of his wife appropriately to a stroke, a returning Vietnam soldier as a wannabe-hippie in disguise, and a Grim-Reaper like Ferryman, George Staub(David Arquette, going way off the deep end, camping it up with all his might)who gives him a difficult choice to make. Alan's father committed suicide, but his mother Jean(Barbara Hershey)had claimed it as a car accident for her son's sake. A memory that haunts Alan was his not riding a roller-coaster called The Bullet. Alan has a love-interest back at the university, Jessica(Erika Christensen)who has tried to shake him from this whole death obsession that has plagued their relationship..he shuts himself off from others due to a troubled past where his boozing mother and missing father created a void for living..
For most of the film's duration we follow Alan on desolate, wet, misty roads surrounded by forests as he encounters troubling, often hallucinatory images of his mother and past memories. Director Mich Garris likes to toy with the audience by showing something that occurs to Alan, only to show that it didn't really happen, but was merely conjured up by him..it's as if Garris is showing a rash of possible situations created in the mind of a very tormented soul, snuffed out one by one as the ultimate obstacle awaits Alan, his meeting with the Grim Reaper. When Alan starts his journey, and we follow him, Garris doesn't allow the comfort of following the narrative without some sort of jarring jolt within the plot..such as two hunters who chase after Alan, a rabid dog that eats a rabbit before getting hit by a diesel, or a crow eating dead possum on the side of the road asking him what the "youknowwhat" was he looking at before becoming mush into a car grill. I felt the film is ultimately about embracing what time you have on this earth and Alan has that chance, but will he sacrifice his mother for that opportunity? The way Garris directs this film, often tossing wild ideas at the viewer such as a "guiding voice", which looks exactly like Alan, often trying to tell him what to say, or the constant flashbacks of Alan as a child/teenager with his mother, might add fuel to growing haters of his work. He can not help himself in this film..it's an odd duck for sure, this movie. I felt he was trying to toy with the idea of "is anything Alan actually sees real?" and for most I guess Garris doesn't succeed. You be the judge. My favorite scene has the Grim Reaper coming to visit him as he lays in his bathtub contemplating suicide by a razor-blade, rooting for Alan to slice his wrists
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