Week of Review - Thinner (1996)

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A week from today will mark the premiere of a new remake of the Stephen King classic Pet Sematary.  So far the new film has a lot of positive buzz, which makes sense given we’ve entered into a new Golden Age of Stephen King adaptations.  Seriously between The Mist, Gerald’s Game, Mr. Mercedes, IT, 1922, Dark Tower, 11/22/63, Under the Dome, and Castle Rock Stephen King is undergoing a shocking renaissance of TV and movie adaptations in the 2010s with even more films yet to come.  As such, I’ve decided to look to the past, specifically the ‘90s, as that was the last time Stephen King became the go-to thing to adapt in the horror genre.

However, I’m not planning to look at the big names of King adaptations that have always stuck in people’s memories like Shawshank Redemption, no I’m interested in the weird B and C list adaptations the past has to offer.  After all, there’s really not much left to say about a movie we’ve all agreed is good and should be remember but off-beat oddities that pop culture has collectively turned its back on can be so much more weirdly rewarding and it doesn’t get much more weirdly rewarding than 1996’s Thinner.

Adapting the 1985 novel of the same name, Thinner is the story of an allegedly obese lawyer (more on that in a bit) named Billy Halleck, played by Robert John Burke.  Billy is involved in a traffic accident where he carelessly runs own a woman and uses his connections to the local authorities of his Maine town (of course it’s in Maine) to get off without a charge.  

However, things take a turn for Billy when the woman’s father places a curse on him and the other men involved covering up the crime.  Now he’s losing weight at a medically terrifying rate and will soon waste away to nothing if he can’t find a way to reverse the curse. 

From the outset this movie probably sounds pretty basic, the curse set-up is a more or less common starting point for a whole subgenre of horror and the well-observed lesson of “murder is wrong” makes this in line with any given Tales from the Crypt episode.  However, this movie is brought to us by the legendary Tom Holland, most notable for directing Child’s Play and Fright Night and while those movies were classics of the ‘80s in the ‘90s he got…weird.  

I’m not really sure what happened to Tom Holland to make his ‘90s work the bizarre fever dream it morphed into but other offerings like The Langoliers and The Temp have become sort of legendarily bad and honestly with good reason, and I say that as someone who likes both films. 

As for Thinner, let’s start with the big awkward elephant in the room because things are only going to get worse from there- this is a movie about the horribly racist trope of the “G*psy Curse.”  This is one of those ideas I think we’ve started getting about consigning to the past as awareness that the G-word is a slur for Romani people has grown.  

Thinner, however and unfortunately, predates that greater social awareness so this is a movie where people throw that term around a lot along with its abbreviated version too, though to the movie’s credit it’s at least aware that several of its characters are racist against Romani people and we aren’t really meant to like them.  Like I said, this is one of those movies about an unlikable guy getting his comeuppance, to the point it actually starts with Billy getting a violent mafia don found innocent. 

Speaking of the violent mafia don, played by Joe Mantegna of ‘Fat Tony from The Simpsons’ fame, he actually isn’t a throwaway character in this like I thought he would be.  No, this is where the movie goes from dated and problematic to upsettingly bizarre.  By around the mid-point of the movie Billy manages to track down the Romani caravan that cursed him and begs for release to no avail.  

This having failed he puts the curse of the white man on them, I am not kidding or embellishing- that is a direct quote from the movie.  What’s more, it turns out the “curse of the white man” actually means getting his mafia buddy to wage a campaign of terror against the caravan- poisoning their dogs and shooting up their camp with an assault rifle.  I honestly have no idea how much of this baffling third act comes from the original source material or was just a nonsense decision thrown together for the movie but it’s all done in an incredible cartoonish and over the top manner. 

Overall this movie treats death and morality like foreign concepts, to the point I’d argue it’s a black comedy if it managed to be funnier instead of just shocking and bizarre.  Incidentally, one of the co-writers, Michael McDowell, is also a credited writer on Beetlejuice, which absolutely makes sense.  Thinner is basically what you’d get if Beetlejuice had actually been the main character of Beetlejuice rather than just a sort of quirky supporting element.  Our main character seems mostly fine with having murdered a woman with his car and largely unbothered by his friends, a judge and the chief of police, succumbing to their own terrifying curses- one of which was getting turned into a lizard man via very dodgy CGI. 

Even the ending hits this weird pitch-black comedy note.  Caving to the mafia’s intimidation, which includes a distressingly prescient acid attack I didn’t even mention before, the Romani leader removes the curse from Billy and transfers it to a pie, which has to be eaten by someone else, who will die and thus remove the curse.  Billy, seeing this pie as a way to get back at his wife who he blames for the initial accident and suspects of cheating on him, tricks her and her lover into eating it and we end on a really weird mean joke about that double-murder he just got away with. 

Circling back around to the dodgy CGI comment from earlier, the fat suit use in this movie is pretty subpar as well.  I understand why they actually needed one here, in that the amount of physical weight change the story demands would be supremely unhealthy and time-consuming to actually achieve.  However, the movie still ends up straining to portray Billy as a lot fatter than he actually is at the start and it’s really not very good at it, especially given they tell us his weight at one point and he would be at best kind of hefty for his height but in no way obese.  Honestly, I’m not even sure what possessed the grieving father to curse him to be thin in the first place other than I presume he knew the title of the movie. 

From everything, I’ve said here Thinner probably sounds a lot worse than it actually is.  I’m not saying its constant use of the G-word is at all forgivable, it’s definitely not even if you’re trying to play the “it was a different time” card, and if that combined with the really upsetting “curse of the white man” stuff turned you off I wouldn’t blame you at all.  At the same time, the existence of Drag Me to Hell as basically the better version of this movie makes any justification you could muster for it pretty thin.  

However, as a bad movie, it’s pretty enjoyable in its floundering weirdness.  It’s not as fun a watch as The Temp or Langoliers, which both showcase Tom Holland’s weird cartoon alien sensibilities a lot better, but if you go in with a mindset to make fun of it and are prepared for its uglier aspects there’s a lot of fun to be had at Thinner’s expense. 

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