Silver Bullet (1985)

Gary Busey as a drunk uncle is the best casting I’ve ever heard of in my entire life.

I didn’t even know he was in this. I put Silver Bullet on for Halloween to get ready for Robert Eggers’ Werwulf at Christmas, expecting some werewolf dread, and got one of the funniest movies I’ve seen all year. Busey plays Uncle Red, drinking his way through another divorce, and he’s the only adult his nephew Marty (Corey Haim), who uses a wheelchair, can go to. A lot of Busey’s ad-libs stayed in the movie. Absolutely incredible.

Seeing a reverend, a man of the cloth, try to run over a disabled kid in a wheelchair is so fucking funny, and Everett McGill plays Reverend Lowe completely straight, which makes it funnier. Marty’s sister Jane (Megan Follows) asks, “Well, what are we gonna do?” Marty says, “I think I know,” and it cuts to him writing the reverend telling him to “kill himself.”

I think coked-out schlock King is my favorite version of King. He wrote this the year before Maximum Overdrive, the one he’s said he was coked out of his mind for.

The effects looked terrible. I loved them. King wanted a werewolf you could barely see, and the suit they ended up with looks like a black bear having a bad night. People call it the werebear.

Eggers is going to give me a werewolf accurate down to the mud, and I can’t wait, But I still kind of hope he puts a gas-powered wheelchair in his version.

Also on Letterboxd