A vintage Stephen King concept unfolds in Riding
the Bullet: a college kid, circa 1970, must
hitchhike a very long (and very dark) hundred
miles to visit his hospitalized mother. The
ghosts waiting for him along the way are either
real or of his own mind (which seems to be a
dark place itself). As a King short story, this
might have been a usefully frightening premise,
but it's almost entirely literary; on screen, it
boils down to a guy walking down a road at
night. Jonathan Jackson is suitably tortured in
the lead role (or roles--he frequently appears
double on screen, arguing with himself), but the
movie is stolen by David Arquette, rocking it up
as a '50s greaser who died in a car crash years
earlier. Barbara Hershey and Erika Christensen
are wasted in support. There's a strain to make
the Woodstock-era setting relevant, but this
doesn't seem to have a great deal to do with the
private demons of the protagonist. (And if
you're going to set it in 1970, how hard is it
to catch dialogue anachronisms?) Director Mick
Garris is a longtime King conduit (The Stand),
but this one is misconceived from the start
