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How's this for a diet? Eat all you want, 12,000 calories a day and more, if you like. Devour haunches of turkey, mounds of corn and wash the whole thing down with gobs of whipped cream. Snack between meals out of giant bags of chips. Just don't say no.

If you do, you might die, because you're wasting away from a Gypsy curse.

That's the premise of ''Stephen King's Thinner,'' based on one of the prolific author's novels published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym.

A tale of negligent homicide, class warfare, vengeance, jealousy and murder, ''Stephen King's Thinner'' has the outlines of Shakespearean tragedy and the intellectual content of a jack o'lantern.

There are two kinds of movies based on Stephen King stories -- the dramas (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption) and the horrors (Pet Sematary, The Mangler). In general, the former are quite good while the latter are terrible. So, since Thinner falls somewhere between genres, it's fitting that the film's quality is also somewhere in the middle. Thinner is a rather shallow and unsatisfactory examination of some potentially-worthwhile themes and ideas. Equally unfortunately, it's not at all scary.

The film opens in Fairview, Connecticut, where attorney Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke) is the toast of his law firm, having just won the acquittal of mobster Richie Ginelli (Joe Mantegna, sporting a chic beard). On the personal front, however, Billy is having far less success in his war against weight. He's tipping the scales at 300 pounds, and his habit of sneaking snacks is defeating his latest diet. His wife, Heidi (Lucinda Jenny), and daughter, Linda (Joy Lenz), despair of him ever losing the undesirable mass, and they're seriously concerned about his health.

Gary Tooze

August 14th, 2012