Product: The Dead Zone [VHS] (1983)
Rating: 5.0
Poignant, Melancholy , and Tragic
It's hard to convey the sheer atmosphere of this movie, helped enormously by the wintry photography and a haunting score. At its heart is a very atypical performance by Christopher Walken - not in terms of his talent, which is always considerable, but because here his performance is not so much creepy as tragic, and even romantically tragic, and complex enough that I still think it should have been rewarded with that year's Oscar. My test, often, is whether I can imagine another actor in the same role delivering the same mundane lines and making them unforgettable (case in point: "The ice is gonna break!") No, I cannot. The supporting cast is also uniformly excellent. Despite the gore (and there are some jolts that remind you that this is Stephen King), what I remember is not the horror but the slow-building tragedy of one man's story and the poignancy of his sacrifice.