I guess I am not much of a David Cronnenberg fan as I rate this, his only really mainstream movie (to date) as his best. It is restrained, elegant, and contains no sexual overtones and minimal blood and gore. It was the movie that made me really appreciate Christopher Walken. This came out the same time as another film featuring him as a sympathetic, tortured individual (Brainstorm). In that movie, he played a scientist; in Dead Zone, he's a school teacher, but they are more or less the same character. The film is not particularly scary, but it is extremely suspenseful, and seeing Martin Sheen as an evil Presidential candidate may be hard to take for his "West Wing" fans. The book was episodic, and the film has a tendency to be that way too (no surprise that the book was adapted again for a cable TV series a few years ago). But the performances--Walken, Sheen, Tom Skerrit, Brooke Adams, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe--make up for this minor fault. It's interesting to note that both Walken and Zerbe would play James Bond villains later in the decade, and Walken would play the Headless Horseman in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, which is the book he assigns to his class in "Dead Zone," before his tragic accident. A rare thriller worth repeated viewings.
Review of The Dead Zone
