#The dead zone movie#
#The dead zone serial#

Did they think the story needed a lot of trick work? It's bad enough anyone would want to lard this story with unnecessary special effects. It comes off like a comic book superpower, rather than an unmanageable affliction. This video-movie kills it by making it a matter of course.

#The dead zone movie#

So you're saying he has psychic abilities, right? Did they think the story needed less suspense? The movie generates a lot of tension because we never know when the touch of a hand will trigger a new vision. And because of a prologue where Johnny as a little boy correctly predicts that a hockey teammate is about to fall through the ice. And because he gets a bad vibe from his mother's new sweetheart. And because he always knows where his mother left her glasses. In this video-movie we know Johnny is latently psychic because he repeatedly anticipates an old carnival huckster's game of chance. In the movie Johnny has a weird headache on a roller coaster, which may or may not be a premonition of the car accident he's about to have. What did the writers think when they watched the original? That all the deft, subtle touches needed to be replaced with sledgehammer blows? Take the way these two versions handle Johnny's latent psychic abilities. Cronenberg made it look easy, while these filmmakers make it seem like an insurmountable feat. This version's bumbling efforts show you how difficult it is to make this essentially silly material credible and affecting.

#The dead zone serial#

And this puts him in the path of a serial killer. He now has visions that reveal things from both the past and the future. When he awakens, Sarah has married another man, while his once-latent psychic powers come to flower. But Johnny is smashed up in a horrendous car accident and slips into a coma that lasts for six years. Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) is a high school teacher in love with Sarah Bracknell (Nicole de Boer), a music teacher at the same school.

All this did was poison my memory of the original, which I watched immediately afterwards as an antidote.

And I was looking forward to an updated version with fresh ideas. I've never read the book, but I love the movie. They cover roughly the first half of the 1983 David Cronenberg film 'The Dead Zone,' based on Stephen King's novel. This made-for-video movie is actually the first two episodes of the TV series stitched together.