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FIRESTARTER (1984)
Among the worst of King cinema Stephen King's Firestarter, a gift from my big sister for my 13th birthday, was the first more-or-less adult book I ever owned. King's stylistic spooky tricks (italicized asides reflecting people's nagging doubts) took some getting used to, and I had to assail the book more than once to get through it, but it got me hooked and in the next two years I'd devoured everything by King I could find, and remained a loyal fan up until about Dreamcatcher, more or less burned out on horror novels. I'm trying to get back into it right now with Dan Simmons' Summer Of Night, but it's boring the living shit out of me. I've got Stephen Laws' Daemonic coming to me from England through ebay, and I hope it's got a little more life to it. Firestarter isn't one of King's more generally beloved books, but the movie is one of the most universally reviled King adaptations - one of those dutiful but trite marches through the source material with all the enthusiasm of a TV movie circa 1989 or so. Drew Barrymore, for whom cute childhood was a recent memory but the wild n' sexy teens were still years away, makes for a whiny heroine as Charlie McGee, a pyrokinetic girl who gets wind-tunnel hair every time she uses her power. Her dad, played by Keith David, is less fortunate - he can manipulate minds by making eye contact (even in a mirror) but gets a nosebleed every time, which he mops up with a nasty, crusty handkerchief for which laundry day never comes. They're on the run from The Shop, the secret government agency that experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and gave some test subjects psychic powers. It's not a very well-planned flight, what with all these stumbles into traffic and desperately robbing pay phones of dimes. But then, dad isn't very smart - if you had a pyrokinetic kid, would you let her practice in the house? His plan: to write some incriminating letters to the papers. But he hasn't written the letters yet, and exactly how he'd make them credible is left unmentioned. After a few failed attempts to capture them by men in suits, the Shop sends in a bad boy played by George C. Scott, who gives us the first "nose into the brain" facial whack I think I've seen in movies (though I understand this is just about impossible to actually do), and has one of those scenes where he secures his own safety from people even more dangerous than he is because "I've already made certain provisions that should I disappear..." It seems a little hard to believe, even now (maybe especially now) that a shady government agency would have to go through the trouble of strangling a mailman just to take his bag. He ultimately captures them with no more inventiveness than hiding in a tree and shooting them with tranquilizer darts - couldn't the guys in suits have thought of that one? The Shop knows so little about kids that they first try to win over Charlie by throwing toys at her, which just further cements how I don't understand how the Shop works at all. Why did they kill the mom? Why did they bother so half-assedly hiding the body? Why do bullets bounce off of Charlie when she's using her power? Who the hell is Joan? The inevitable climax where Charlie goes hog wild (eyes narrow, hair blows back) and hurls fireballs the size of prize pumpkins is fun to watch, but that's really all this movie's got. Dean Koontz stole and recycled this plot about a million times. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE F's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |