The Dead Zone (1983)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Dead Zone (1983) – D. Cronenberg

Put any other actor in the lead role and this becomes just another failed Stephen King adaptation – but Christopher Walken takes it to another level.  Partly, it’s his weird inflections but he also lets us feel the character’s sorrow and pain when his life gets irreparably damaged by, first, a five-year coma, and second, the manifestation of psychic premonitions that allow him to see a person’s future when he holds his or her hand.  I’ve never read the novel, but this is a great set-up for spooky horror.  However, in the hands of David Cronenberg, the film veers straight into mainstream territory, quite unlike the sick strangeness of his earlier films.  So, it’s a mixed bag but somehow I keep coming back to it.  Perhaps that early ‘80’s New England setting creates some subterranean compulsion?  Or quite possibly it’s all due to Walken, not yet a caricature of himself, but naturalistically unusual…and ready to kill Hitler for us, if it comes to that.