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The Appropriate Tune - "The Future Freaks Me Out" by Motion City Soundtrack
If you’ve ever needed a visual aid to distinguish between strong and weak directors, look no further than Stephen King. Just about everything that man has put down on a page and put on a screen, from good to the coke-fueled, whiskey-soaked worst, and so the real challenge for the filmmaker is in how well he manages to adapt the material. Christine is literally a movie about an evil car, and yet John Carpenter managed to make it into one of the better films of his career and the decade. Stand By Me is about a bunch of weirdo kids who want to look at a corpse, but Rob Reiner managed to make it the coming-of-age movie that all future coming-of-age movies aspire to be. Conversely, Cujo is about a mother and her kid being menaced by a rabid dog, which seems like a good foundation for a thriller, but you never hear anyone speak about it or its director Lewis Teague in the same way they talk about Kubrick and The Shining. You can point to differing levels of budget or studio interference for these films and that is reasonable to an extent, but at the end of the day it comes down to how well you use the tools you have available.
Conveniently our unofficial rule of one Stephen King adaptation a year coincides with our annual appearance by Mr. Body Horror himself, David Cronenberg. Over the years I’ve found myself increasingly unable to place Cronenberg on the Bell curve of directors; He’s certainly has a mind for the grotesque and the ability to project that in his films in a way that not many directors are willing to do, and if they are not as successfully at the box office. Despite that, I’ve often found myself mixed on the films as films rather than just special effects showcases. Scanners was cool but the protagonist was a walking plank of wood, Crash was interesting but often like a porno on Ambien, and for a movie that involves performing oral sex with an open wound it felt like eXistenZ was constantly dragging its feet as it shuffled through the plot. I’m conflicted, so I’ve decided to take my own advice and see how one of one of the big names of 80s horror films tackles the material of one of the big names of 80’s horror literature. No, not Clive Barker, even though that seems like the obvious pairing, the other one.
Released in 1983 (the same year as Videodrome), The Dead Zone was written by Jeffrey Boam, directed by David Cronenberg and produced by Debra Hill through the Dino De Laurentiis Company, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. Christopher Walken plays Johnny Smith, a respected English teacher and beloved boyfriend who one night collides into the side of a runaway milk truck. Five years later he awakes to find that the life he once knew is gone. Not only has he lost his teaching position but his girlfriend Sara (Brooke Adams) as well, who is now married to some guy who isn’t Christopher Walken and even has a kid. Coupled with this great loss however Johnny has somehow been granted an interesting gift: he is now psychic, able to see into a person’s past, present, and future with only a touch of their hand. Of course when you just woke up to find your entire life in pieces the idea of playing Miss Cleo to every Tom, Dick and Harry off the street is the furthest thing, but as Johnny’s powers grow they cry out to be used, and no matter what he seems to do he keeps getting dragged into action. Which is the sort of behaviour that can get you in a lot of hot water, especially when Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen) enters the picture, a man with his eyes on the Senate and more than a few skeletons in his closet.
As a story, The Dead Zone has a clear through-line of influence that traces back to the speculative fiction of Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling and the like. It presents us with a simple question: if you had the power to effect change, and you were the only one who could do it, would you do it in spite of the consequences? Does great power indeed come with great responsibility? For Stephen King, the answer is yes. After the accident ruins his life Johnny has little incentive to use his powers to help anyone; Indeed, Johnny is outright punished for using his powers throughout the course of the film beyond just being a social pariah, and yet each time he is confronted with the choice he chooses to help because he is fundamentally a good person. King’s choice to name his character ‘John Smith’, one of the most generic names in the book, was no accident; It was him saying that everyone had the potential to do what was right. Not too bad for the guy who wrote a story about an evil car.
As an adaptation of the story though, I found The Dead Zone to be...simple I guess is close enough. It says what it needs to say to get the point across, sure, although perhaps in the truncated way that some adaptations do where it constantly feels like you’re missing half the book, but that’s where it stops. Were it not for the cast and the run time this feels more like an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater or the 90s Outer Limits than a multi-million dollar film. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake isn’t all that appealing, but we’re talking about David Cronenberg here. This is a filmmaker whose interests lie in the grotesque; Psychological extremes, sexual extremes, visual extremes in the case of his body horror, and yet everything about The Dead Zone feels by-the-books. Even when we get to the part of the film dealing with the Castle Rock Killer, something that sounds right up Cronenberg’s alley, it feels incredibly tame by his standards. Perhaps after the one-two punch of Scanners and Videodrome this was meant to be his big break movie, and he decided or was told to soften his tone to make it more accessible, but if that was the case I don’t think it was as successful as when the push was given to David Lynch or Paul Verhoeven. Or maybe I’ve just seen the big Cronenberg movies and I expect all of them to be weird as shit, who can say?
I’m also not sure that the choice to cast Christopher Walken in the lead role was the best one. While Walken is a fine actor, even when he is a parody of himself, he lacks that quiet, everyman quality that the role calls for. He’s too intense; Every time he interacts with another human being it feels like he’s three seconds away from caving their skull in with a hammer, and setting him against the beautiful Brooke Adams doesn’t help assuage that feeling. On the other hand Martin Sheen is perfect as the boisterous, egomaniacal Greg Stillson, and the contrast between the apple pie eating, flag-waving patriot and this lumbering vampire is great visual storytelling.
While The Dead Zone is definitely not the flashiest movie of Cronenberg’s career (although the acting alone puts this over Scanners), he still put together an enjoyable film, and in terms of King adaptations that actually places it close to the top. The Dead Zone gets the recommendation; Perhaps not your first choice when you’re looking for genre films, but nevertheless a solid. And yes, there was a Dead Zone TV show a while back that made Johnny into a psychic detective playing around with the local cops solving crime, even though that cheapens everything about Johnny’s decision to help catch the Castle Rock Killer and the toll using his powers cost him physically and spiritually. Might as well just watch Psych instead.
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