Another week, another Sundays with Stephen, this time featuring the generally well-received The Dead Zone, starring Christopher Walken and directed by David Cronenberg.

The Dead Zone was the 5th novel published by King (not counting the novels and novellas he wrote as Richard Bachman), and coincidentally, the 5th King movie to be released as well. Ironically, however, Cujo, which takes place in Castle Rock, a town featured prominently in The Dead Zone, and shares a character with The Dead Zone, was made into a movie immediately prior; as a result, you can see Sheriff Bannerman die in Cujo, then watch him, very much alive, hunting a serial killer in The Dead Zone.

Weird, huh? Cujo the book was published two years after The Dead Zone, but the movies were released in the same year, 1983, along with Christine, which was released as both book and film in the same year.

I’m thinking that might constitute overexposure for a writer.

At any rate, The Dead Zone: this movie concerns one Johnny Smith, a New England schoolteacher (dare we say, a MAINE schoolteacher?) who suffers a rather unlikely car accident and slips into a five year coma. When he finally awakens, he finds his life has passed him by, and his would-be-wife has married another man. Along with this trauma, however, he has acquired a remarkable talent – the ability to see the future of a given person, based on close physical contact (usually, by taking their hand). More precisely, he can see death – the death of a person, or someone close to that person, or perhaps, a death caused by that person.

Johnny somewhat involuntarily uses his power to help a few people, becomes known as a psychic, and is recruited into helping the Sheriff of a Maine town called Castle Rock find a serial killer who, in the modern age, would have likely be found inside of a week, since he left DNA evidence everywhere. But this was the early 80s, so psychics had to be used instead; such is life.

This constitutes the first half of the film; the second half deals with Johnny taking a job tutoring a young (doomed?) boy, and running into an up and coming politician, Greg Stillson (played with gusto by Martin Sheen).

I can’t talk about the plot in more detail than that without spoilers, so I’ll go on for a moment to discuss the movie as a whole. First… it’s a lot less *weird* than I was expecting. I mean, a King movie, starring Christopher Walken, directed by Cronenberg? Considering the pedigree, this movie is firmly rooted in everyday reality.

Walken plays it pretty straight, though his inherent Walken-brand weirdness comes through a few times (I recorded his recitation of a few lines from The Raven at the start of the movie, I’m thinking of making it a ringtone on my phone).

This grounding helps to make the visions Johnny receives more jarring. When Johnny sees a death, he’s usually there, physically, in the same time and place as the victim, though this is usually impossible. So, for example, the first vision he has is of the young daughter of a nurse at his hospital dying in a house fire.. in the vision, Walken is lying, not in his hospital bed, but in that of the little girl, which is currently on fire. Here you have a full grown man in a tiny bed, aflame, without suffering any pain from the fire, talking to the girl’s mother back in his room while the house burns down around him; it’s really well done. Another sequence I won’t go into detail about here involves Johnny being in the same physical space as a murder, only a few hours apart, simultaneously living in the past and present of the crime, night and day, watching a murder that has already occurred and losing his grip on which timeline he’s actually inside.

So the movie goes between a grim, melancholy everyday life and these visions of horror, and Johnny the character has to navigate between them. Cinematically, it works. It feels a bit drab, but it works… and for once, NO CHEAP CAMERA tricks. No spinny camera, like Carrie or Cujo! (I mean, you get a lot of wacky camera work in Creepshow, but it’s an homage there, you’re not supposed to take the Dutch angles seriously).

The music is really, really good in The Dead Zone. I had it stuck in my head for days afterword… I noticed during the credits that it was done by Michael Kamen, who as I recall also did The Iron Giant. So no big shocker there, but it really does put you in a wintry sort of mood, that long, sucky, grey part of winter drifting into spring, or the part of autumn drifting into winter. Not the clean, crisp, white part of winter; one of the parts that’s faintly rotten and damp. A very somber and moody time of year.

Ok, now, below here I’ll talk spoilers. Don’t look if you don’t want them (but come on, you want to read about how great Martin Sheen is here. If not, let me just say: unbelievably awesome.)

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All right!

Spoiler wise, I couldn’t talk much about Sheen and his character, Stillson, without talking plot surprises. Sheen does a remarkable job with Stillson here, an extremely outsized self-promoting thug rapidly on his way to the Senate and then the Presidency. Stillson is also completely barking mad, and Johnny’s power gives him his worst vision of all: Stillson, as President, will start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and thereby kill… well, everybody.

A cynic might wonder why he couldn’t get this vision from just about anyone on the street who’d still be alive when Stillson got the nuclear football, but hey. Psychic powers work in mysterious ways.

Sheen is just AMAZING. He perfectly captures the sort of apocalyptic madman that, and let’s face it here, could be the next Republican nominee for President. Oh sure, in the movie he’s a third party candidate…. but in real life? He’s a Republican. Think about it: a self-aggrandizing madman with a violent temper and suicidal religious delusions? Stillson is just the worst traits of three or four Republican primary contenders from 2008, all rolled into one. (Say, McCain’s temper plus Huckabee’s religion, stirred in with a touch of Ron Paul, just to add that nutjob spice).

Which is actually something that, as a graduate with a four year degree in political science, and a somewhat obsessive relationship with the news, I found slightly odd about the movie. New England Republicans, or politicians in general, don’t usually go in for this psychotic End Times nonsense. They’re tools, Dems and Republicans alike, of big business. Corporate types, old money, you name it, from the Rockefellers to the Kennedys to your Giulianis or your Bloombergs… the Armageddon fervor isn’t really in their streak. I was talking to my roomie after the film, and I said that I would have guessed Stillson was a Republican, from a Midwestern state, by his demeanor and particular lunacy. (My first guess was Missouri.) In the movie, it’s an unspecified New England state… (according to Wikipedia, Stillson was running for office in New Hampshire)

So imagine my delight when, in fact, Stillson is from the Midwest! Specifically, before moving to New Hampshire, he was a bible salesman in… Iowa.

I win at political stereotyping!

Or perhaps King wins at realism.

At any rate, Smith learns about Stillson’s ‘destiny’, and forms a plan to stop him. (The vision where he sees the end of the world is so great that Netflix quotes some of Sheen’s dialogue on the disc sleeve for the movie.. ‘The missiles are flying. Hallelujah!) Smith tries to assassinate Stillson at a rally, Stillson makes a rather poor choice of a human shield, and Smith’s last vision is perhaps the single greatest distillation of schaedenfreude in the history of cinema, as Stillson/Sheen, utterly shattered, takes the coward’s way out with a glock to the chin. Magnificent. I had to watch it twice!

I wonder what that says about me, though.

So, to wrap up: The Dead Zone? Good. Less creepy than expected. Walken? Good. Solid. Cronenberg? Keeps it down to earth. Kamen? Great music.

Sheen? Masterful.

Next Week: A possessed car? Could it be… Christine?
Last Week: A rabid dog and a movie more painful than rabies? Cujo!