Review of Dead Zone, The

Introduction

This film is based upon the 1979 bestseller by Stephen King. Christopher Walken plays small town teacher John Smith who has a car accident and remains in a coma for five years. His life changes in that time with the woman he loves married to someone else and he`s lost his job. In exchange he has this extraordinary `gift` which is awakened within following the car accident.

He`s plagued by headaches which increase in intensity and has visions of the past, present and the future of those that he comes into physical contact with. Johnny tries to adapt to his new life after the coma and comes to realise that he might actually have a purpose after all with this new psychic ability.

Is this a curse or a blessing?

Video

We get a 1.85:1 anamorphic video transfer for this classic movie. Unfortunately this isn`t very clean and there`s a lot of dirt on screen. Colours look somewhat flat, washed out and uninspiring too. As a result, the detail is low and it looks older than its 19 years. It`s quite watchable and I`m sure if this were a bigger budget film it would have been cleaned up.

Audio

This comes with a remixed DD5.1 soundtrack and this sounds quite good. Most of the sound in dramatic events is spread over the front speakers and has a wide range. The dialogue is concentrated well in the centre and Michael Kamen`s musical score sounds superb. It`s tense and underpins the events unfolding very well.

Kamen only had three weeks to write this score and orchestrated it at Abbey Road with the National Philharmonic Orchestra. It sounds good.

Features

There`s a really good 12 page full colour production booklet enclosed and this surprised me; it`s not something you usually expect. It has some international poster artwork for the film, some detail of the films production, scripts for deleted scenes and up-to-date bios on the cast and David Cronenberg himself up to his newest film, `Spider`. The booklet is a good addition.

The audio commentary track with Stephen Jones (film writer) and Kim Newman (film critic) was recorded recently and they talk back and forth about the film, the production, the story...pretty much anything they feel like talking about. It`s interesting and quite informative. The film trailer isn`t too good though. It`s 2 minutes long and gives away far too much. Better to watch the movie without the reminders of what`s in store. Lastly there are English, French and Spanish subtitles.

Sadly some of the information on the back of the box isn`t accurate. There`s no mention of the audio commentary or the 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer. It simply states this as 1.85:1 letterboxed. A missed sales opportunity.

Conclusion

The Dead Zone has been a favourite Stephen King book of mine for ages and has been well adapted for this film. Script writer Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) has retained the essence of the film without going into too much of the extraneous description of the book. I think this is certainly one of the better King film adaptations made and is a marked departure from the usual Cronenberg viceral stuff.

There is something which isn`t explained however such as from where Johnny (Christopher Walken) gets this psyhic gift. He has headaches throughout the film but it`s not clear if this occured as a result of the car accident, or was something that had lay dorment within him whereas in the book Johnny has an accountable brain tumour.

This film marks a fine performance from Christopher Walken who is engaging and electrifying in equal measure while Martin Sheen running for the U.S. Senate is eery (especially since he made it to being President in The West Wing). The rest of the cast are good and surprisingly cast against type too which keeps the film interesting.

I`ve always liked this film and it was certainly good to watch again after all this time. Despite the very average video transfer, there are bonuses with the production booklet and audio commentary. Christopher Walken and the story are engaging enough to help rise above the nitty gritty points I mentioned about the video transfer too. This R0 DVD is certainly the best release so far out of all the regions for the addition of the audio commentary. Definately worth a purchase.

As a side note The Dead Zone DVD is coded as region 0. I had a problem with my Arcam set to R2 where the picture stuttered along during playback. Setting it to R0 or auto fixed this problem and the video played back without problems.