Reluctant psychic enters 'The Dead Zone'

The Dead Zone (1983)
Starring: Christopher Walken, Tom Skerritt, Brooke Adams, and Martin Sheen
Director: David Cronenberg
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Johnny Smith (Walken) awakens from a five-year coma to discover he has psychic abilities, which he gets visions of the past, present and a terribly deadly future. He uses his new powers to help a sheriff (Skerritt) to solve a murder and to save a life, but his visions tell him that nothing he does will matter unless he manages to stop Greg Stillson (Sheen) from gaining the US presidency--because Stillson will bring about a nucular holocaust.


"The Dead Zone" is one of the very best Stephen King adaptations (and the novel upon which it is based happens to be one of his very best books). The director does a spectacular job, especially in the area of using visuals and sound effects to pull the viewer into Johnny's psychic visions. The cast is also perfect, with Walken really shining as the tragic psychic who wants nothing than to just have his old life back, but who has to face a destiny that is being thrust upon him.





(An amusing side note is that Martin Sheen did become president on the TV series "The West Wing".)

The mindblowing power of 'Scanners'

Scanners (aka "Telepathy 2000") (1981)
Starring: Steven Lack, Patrick McGoohan, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill and Lawrence Dane
Director: David Cronenberg
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

When a private security company's program to develop psychics/psionicists as a company resource (referred to as "scanners") comes under attack from the secret organiation of scanners led by crazed megalomaniac Darryl Revok (Ironside), Dr. Ruth (McGoohan) recruits powerful scanner Cameron Vale (Lack) to locate and perhaps even capture him. But as Vale investigates, he uncovers a tangled conspiracy that is even more frightening and deadly than the powers of the scanners themselves.


"Scanners" is a fast-paced, exciting movie that exists on the ground where sci-fi and horror meets the spy thriller. It's a John Grisham or Robert Ludlum novel with psionicists instead of lawyers and/or spies. The movie oozes atmosphere and tension in every scene... and the exploding head in the film's first five minutes really is a sign of things to come: The plot twists and the ethical issues raised in this film will blow your mind as you watch it unfold.

If you're looking for an intelligent, well-written and well-acted sci-fi flick with horror overtones, you can't go wrong with "Scanners". It's a film that was so good it not only spawned its own sequels ("Scanners II", "Scanners III" and "Scanners: The Showdown") but also two installments of the "Scanner Cop" series. None of these films come close to the original, however. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough.

(BTW, a dim memory of this film was one of the inspirations for my "Mind Over Matter" d20 Modern RPG supplement from a few years ago. I was gratified to see that this was one of those rare cases where my memory of the film held up to watching it again.)