This might not be the best movie for people that are obsessed with losing weight, especially since the effects get kind of gruesome even if they’re a little simple. But as a story and as a movie, it does feel that Stephen King’s tale, Thinner, doesn’t get nearly as much respect as it might warrant. It’s a very simple story to be fair since compared to many of King’s other offerings it’s something that doesn’t have a lot of intricate moving parts and is a little more ham-fisted than it needed to be when it comes to a tale of revenge sprinkled liberally with a dose of folk magic. The movie wasn’t exactly well-liked by critics, but as a member of the audience that made it known that they enjoyed this fanciful tale, I can say that the story does have some merit. One of the best parts of the story is that it is very personal, meaning that it doesn’t stretch into a matter that’s bound to include an entire town, and it’s not a massive conspiracy that’s being used to fool those that might have something to say about it.
Nope, this story is personal, between a small group of people and the gypsies that make their living traveling from place to place as they set up shop and make their living through a variety of ways that are essentially harmless. What this movie does show however is the social divide that separates people in a big way, as Billy Halleck, the main character, is shown a great deal of favor after accidentally striking and killing an elderly Romani woman who is the daughter of the tribe’s elder, Tadzu Lempke, played by Michael Constantine. As the gypsies are considered to be scoundrels and a general plague on society by the judge, who is Billy’s friend no less, Lempke decides to take it upon himself to gain justice for his daughter as he goes to the three men responsible for the act, the judge, Billy, and a police officer that covered everything up.
After touching Billy’s cheek and uttering the single word ‘Thinner’, Lempke disappears along with his tribe, leaving Billy, the judge, and the cop to suffer from the curse laid upon them, as Lempke touched the latter two as well. When Billy begins to lose weight at a rapid pace, far quicker than is healthy, he finds that even consuming three and four times as much as he used to can’t help him. The thing about his curse is that as bad as it gets, it’s not the worst since the judge becomes a lizard-like creature, while the cop develops a massive series of ulcers that cause deformities all over his body. When both the judge and the cop commit suicide, Billy asks for the help of a mafia boss that he’s seen defending earlier in the movie, and given that he managed to win the case, the boss feels indebted to him and eagerly goes after the Romani tribe. When the tribe is found, Billy pleads with Lempke to take the curse off, but in return, Lempke refuses, and his great-granddaughter, Gina, puts a ball bearing through Billy’s hand with a slingshot after he threatens to curse the tribe with ‘the curse of the white man from town’. That’s when things get worse if you couldn’t have guessed already.
The mafia boss then kills the tribe’s dogs with poisoned meat and abduct’s Gina’s husband before shooting up their campsite and sending the husband, bound and gagged, to flail toward the gypsies, who return fire. Gina’s husband is killed, and things continue to escalate until Gina is tricked by the mafia boss and told to relay a message to her great-grandfather to take the curse off. To make his point, the boss leaves her lying on the floor with a jar of acid resting on her forehead so that he and Billy can make their getaway. There are definite variations between the book and the movie, but in the end, the same thing occurs, as Lempke, who sees the cost that the curse has brought to his tribe, finally relents and takes it off, bleeding the curse out of a nearly dead Billy, and into a strawberry pie with an unsettling pulse, I kid you not. The only trick is that the curse has to be passed off to someone else, who will experience everything Billy has, only quicker and with far more pain involved.
The thing about this is that Billy does have someone in mind, as he’s been worried throughout the whole movie that his wife Heidi has been cheating on him with a good friend of theirs. This makes Heidi the prime target, but there’s one issue. Their teenage daughter, Linda, stays up with her mother the night that Billy returns, and has a helping of the pie. In other words, Billy has just passed the curse to his wife, and his daughter and no longer has a reason to live since he’s destroyed his family. Just as he’s about to eat his own pie, however, his wife’s lover shows up, having believed that Billy was out of the picture, and Billy invites him in for a piece of the pie. It’s a movie that might not have resonated with a lot of people since there’s no grand sweeping arc to it and the world, or even a town, isn’t in danger of being consumed or torn apart, but it’s still one of King’s more whimsical tales and one that people should give a bit of attention to.
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