Imagining a film in which a disabled lad with a gas-powered wheelchair (called the "Silver Bullet") teams up with Gary Busey and Anne of Green Gables to battle a werewolf who can decapitate his victims with one sweep of his claws but chooses, more than once, to use a baseball bat on them instead will almost prepare you for Stephen King's Silver Bullet. A 1985 cheapie adapted by King from his Cycle of the Werewolf, a book so thin the opening credits term it a "novelette," Silver Bullet has a peculiar charm; as a rule, nothing starring Corey Haim should be this compulsively watchable.

Haim's wheelchair-bound Marty lives with his resentful sister (Megan Follows) in the sort of mudhole that has one businessman, one clergyman, one policeman, etc. A serial killer haunts this jerkwater town, and after the discovery of the third or fourth body, Marty--in what must be the worst-foreshadowed development in King's oeuvre--decides that the perpetrator is a werewolf. From that point forward, Silver Bullet becomes a game of guessing the lycanthropy's human identity (the film presents the revelation of such as a plot twist--twice) and self-preservation on the part of Marty, who has to prove his mad theory to his skeptical sibling and their alcoholic uncle, Red (Busey).

Though the film is set in 1976, its tasteless quotient is pure eighties: children are mutilated; a priest (Everett McGill, an underrated character actor) mows down Marty with his car; the one person slain on camera--more graphically than you could imagine--is a pregnant woman; Uncle Red encourages his nephew to break a police-ordained curfew to go light fireworks by himself in the woods; the list goes on. To what end, you ask? It all makes the TV-style Silver Bullet irresistable circa 2002. Current horror, while slicker-looking, toils to be inoffensive, the odd concession to a tradition of a fixation with breasts aside; to quote one of Silver Bullet's walking lunchmeat, that's "about as useful as a submarine with screen doors."

The genre saw a fruitful period between, approximately, 1970 and 1986 because censorship practices were at their most lenient and thus filmmakers could best explore our expectations of a lucid nightmare. If you think about your least pleasant dreams, there's an attendant depravity to them, a side-effect of a want to be shocked. This led to fewer masterpieces (The Exorcist) than stinkers (I Spit on Your Grave), but the ironically liberal spirit in which they were made elevates many a fright flick of the greed decades today. And if you think a return to the Silver Bullet days would be nonetheless regressive, consider that the period was also open to heroes of every stripe--as callously as King treats Marty, it's nice to see a disabled person--a youth, no less--portrayed on screen as a) proactive, and b) neither pitied nor self-pitying.

There's been nothing like that at the movies since (or I've missed it), and in fact, political correctness may have diminished what little respect the handicapped received in the first place from the media to nothing as they became the only minority unaided by a strong voice of support--a safe post-Reagan punchline, in other words; I'd take a bullet for last year's beautiful Ghost World, but there's no getting around that it ridicules the disabled with schoolyard glee.

Stephen King's Silver Bullet is kinda sorta good, definitely a howler.

Paramount preserves Silver Bullet's JDC-Scope aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on DVD in an anamorphic widescreen transfer that does not transcend Armando Nannuzzi's one-dimensional, low-contrast cinematography. To be fair, the elements are in good shape and the compression seems flawless. The shock notes sound flat in the 2.0 mono mix, alas--a jump scare just isn't a jump scare anymore without assistance from the subwoofer. (Otherwise, the track has acceptable dynamic range and clear vocals.) There are no supplements on this disc.-Bill Chambers