The Dead Zone ★★★½

EVEN the less successful Stephen King film adaptations are usually pretty good.

Take The Dead Zone, not one of King’s most popular novels nor a particularly successful film, financially or critically, when it was released back in 1983.

But, thanks to the strength of King’s storytelling and the combined talents of director David Cronenberg and star Christopher Walken, the film manages to intrigue and entertain throughout its running time.

It’s a terrific story. Walken plays Johnny Smith, a mild-mannered, unassuming teacher who is about to marry. At the start of the film, after dropping his girlfriend home, he is involved in a car accident that leaves him in a coma for five years.

He awakens to discover several things that will further impact his life. Firstly, he must learn to walk again and will always be physically impaired in some way; secondly, his wife has married somebody else and he must deal with this mental anguish; most importantly he has unexplainably developed a psychic ability to see into peoples’ pasts and futures.

This ability manifests itself in visions when he makes purposeful physical contact with a person, such as a firm handshake.

Initially the ability helps save one person and solve a series of murders, but the third act centres on the events following Smith’s interaction with a would-be politician.

Walken’s longetivity in the business is testimony to his ability to choose roles that are just right for him; few others can play a tortured soul as well. The support cast is strong with the stand-out being Martin Sheen as the political candidate.

The fact Hollywood hasn’t remade this one is due to the fact that many of its narrative elements have been copied in so many other films anyway.