Castle Rock opens with a juvenile delinquent daughter. She is so rude, self-centred and obnoxious, you find yourself hoping she gets eaten by a bear in the first reel. Her mother is a harpy and her grandfather is a bully. The carping goes on and on. I could barely stand the movie. Was this rudeness supposed to be amusing? Then finally some relief, there developed an unrelated back-story about a handsome illegal Guatemalan teen on the lam.
The basic story requires the girl to walk home 12 miles through the desert, gradually coming meet, then trust, rely on and even help the Guatemalan boy.
Though you hear rabid coyotes, you never see them. The perils are getting lost, medical, gangrene, snake bite, lack of food and water. There is no sudden adrenal rush, just slow feeling of increasing distress and doom. The boy limps, screams, yelps and suffers and suffers and suffers. It is quite distressing watching him and studying and attempting to treat his infected wound.
The ordeal gradually transforms the girl, beating the selfishness out of her. Oddly there is no romantic attachment. By the end she became a completely reasonable and kind person.
This is not a movie for small children. There are two tear-jerker deaths and protracted suffering.
In one scene, a German shepherd runs off then comes back wounded. The pair presume the dog has rabies. To my eyes, the dog just wanted to be patted, but the pair were terrified and scrambled to get away. Everyone seems to assume the dog is rabid, even though it looks perfectly normal and behaves normally. The movie makers could have done something to at least make the dog growl, froth, or stagger. Even with the technology available back in the day of "To Kill A Mockingbird", they produced a completely convincing rabid dog.
The end of the movie has two out-of-the-blue surprise happy endings. One of them caps the transform of the girl's dropping selfishness. It gives you a very happy buzz.
