the audience applauded

Please don't spend money on this.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

When you decide watching a Stephen King based on and you haven't been told any spoiler of it, you know you will get surprised. "Riding the Bullet" isn't an exception. In this story, we have a man who possibly suffers from a severe psychiatric disorder; that being said, it's not difficult to imagine the hallucinations he has all the time. The acting in this movie is just great, with highlights to David Arquette, who proved to be able to play something other than a dumb cop. To be honest, his character is interesting-- and quite scary. In fact, every character in this story is scary in its own way, and sometimes it feels difficult to distinguish what is real is what is not. Directing and editing are creative, sometimes utilizing slow-motion in order to intensify the atmosphere of the scene. The plot, albeit being a little too crazy for some moments, proves to be intelligent when mentioning Freud and the Freudian slip thing. However, the best thing about this picture is the ending, in which we have a beautiful reflection about life, past and future, which can be thought about after the film is over. You just have to be a little patient and darting to understand and enjoy it!

Riding the Bullet is set during 1969 & starts as college art student Jessica Hadley (Erika Christensen) tells her fellow art student boyfriend Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson) that she is splitting up with him, it's his birthday as well. That night Jessica reveals that it was just a ploy to set-up a surprise party but Alan gets some bad news as he learns that his mother Jean (Barbara Hershey) has had a stroke & is in hospital, Alan decides to hike all the way to Lewiston & be with his sick mother. Alan manages to get several rides as he gets closer to Lewiston but finally ends up in the red Plymouth Fury of George Staub (David Arquette) whom Alan becomes to believe is dead, George offers him a deal in which he has to make a choice whether his mother or himself dies that very night...This American, German & Canadian co-production was written, co-produced & directed by Mick Garris & was based on the internet publish story Riding the Bullet by Stephen King, any horror film fan worth anything will know that generally speaking Stephen King books don't make particularly good films although it seems his name sells so I guess people will continue to make make crappy films based on his usually great work. I have not read Riding the Bullet nor had I even heard of it before seeing this adaptation so I cannot compare the two but I get the impression that the novel might have worked better. I am not really sure what Riding the Bullet is meant to be, is it a horror? Is it a drama? Is it a sentimental coming of age story? Is it just an oddball curiosity with no real deep meaning or ambition? Riding the Bullet is certainly a hard film to categorise & I am not quite sure who it is meant to appeal to, surely it's too tame & sedate for the horror crowd yet a little too out there & extreme for the low key melodrama fans. The script seems to handing out mixed messages all over the place, it never has central focus & the constant flashbacks, dreams, & fantasies that go through Alan's mind become annoying & are only there to add a bit of gore & a bit of dark humour. At 100 minutes long Riding the Bullet is watchable & if you can get into the sloppy narrative & like the character's then you may enjoy it, I didn't think it was terrible as it had a few moments here & there but overall the film feels shallow, unfocused & almost unfinished. A strange sort of road trip, dark comedy horror thriller that I didn't hate but didn't love either.Mick Garris seems to have a thing about Stephen King adaptations having worked on as either writer or director on the likes of Sleepwalkers (1992) & Quicksilver Highway (1997) as well as the television series The Stand (1994), The Shining (1997), Desperation (2006) & the recent Bag of Bones (2011). Riding the Bullet has a few gory moments, a Dog killing a cute Rabbit, a Crow eating some roadkill & then being pulped by an ambulance, a talking severed head, a ripped-off hand & a bit of blood splatter but nothing that scary or extreme. This is well made for what it is but the soap opera happy ending sentiment didn't do anything for me & left me feeling rather cold. There's an obvious nod to King's killer car novel Christine as the red Plymouth Fury turns up as the preferred car choice of the dead.With a supposed budget of about $5,000,000 this has good production values & looks the part, the special effects are pretty good too. Filmed in Canada. The acting is alright, the actor's bring a certain warmth & likability to the character's & that's the main reason I stuck with it.Riding the Bullet isn't typical Stephen King material, those used to top notch horror will be disappointed here & while I didn't hate Riding the Bullet I can't think of much to recommend it other than it's unusual & is watchable. Not awful but not particularly good either a film like this comes down to personal taste really.

I don't really understand what I saw while watching this film. I'm not sure whether it was intended as a character study, incredibly surreal or whatever.I'm not really sure whether the protagonist's paranoia was really supposed to be important, if so, the suspicions were justified when spooky things started happening, so... I repeat: I really don't understand.The antagonistic spirit tries to force on the protagonist a sadistic decision. Perhaps if, instead of watching weird stuff happen to the protagonist, we had been given more emotional investment in him, this might have been more effective.So the roller coaster shares its name with a metaphor for mortality. Right. But then what effect did literally riding the coaster have? Any? Very weird...The method of presents the protagonist's thoughts to the audience was inventive, but besides that I don't know what I could recommend about it. But then its probably among those films where reading about it simply can't substitute the experience of watching it.

Every time I watch this adaptation of a Stephen King story about a college student hitchhiking home to see his ill mother, my mind starts to wander and I either doze off or change the channel and then switch back occasionally to see if anything has happened. Nothing ever does, and I have watched this flick several times. The only remotely interesting character is the delectable Erika Christensen as the young guy's gal pal, but she is outta there before the halfway mark. I wish she had been the one going home to see mom. Unfortunately, it is a bland male actor named Jonathan Jackson, and while he's OK, he does not exactly set the world on fire here. David Arquette wildly overacts as one of the people who picks up the hitchhiking Jackson. Cliff Robertson is another, and he is only marginally better than Arquette. Barbara Hershey is the mom. The title refers to an old wooden roller coaster, for those who don't know. Set back in time, there are some badly executed moments involving the period in question.