Riding the Bullet (Widescreen Edition)
A vintage Stephen King concept unfolds inRiding 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.--Robert Horton