Dead Zone Movie Review

With the exception of a few sequences, this one at first seems like director David Cronenberg selling out in order to make a movie for a big studio. But who cares? This is a great adaptation of the Stephen King thriller. Christopher Walken is given the gift of psychic powers following a near-fatal (and quite spectacular) accident and subsequent five-year-long coma. Regaining consciousness, he finds that he has lost his bride-to-be (the now-married Brooke Adams) and acquired the ability to see the personal future of anyone he touches, and a damned scary thing it is. Good performances all around, particularly Walken and Martin Sheen as a psychotic, let-me-push-the-button politician. Plenty of tension, philosophical dilemmas, a patently Cronenberg use of scissors…the “mainstream” finally got to see what Cronenberg could do.

1983 (R) 104m/C Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst; D: David Cronenberg; W: Jeffrey Boam; M: Michael Kamen. VHS, Beta, LV PAR