With Dino De Laurentiis exec-producing, Canadian director David Croenenberg was finally able to move up from schlocky (in a good way) mind-blowing shockers to classy, B+ budgeted horror via this Stephen King adaptation.* Christopher Walken, forty but looking much younger, brings his peculiar, wary anxiety to a well-liked High School teacher who wakes from a five-year coma with inexplicable psychic abilities allowing him to visualize past & future events in subjective POV. Reluctant to use his new power, he’s convinced to try and solve a still active serial murder case and finds his ‘gift’ a two-edged sword. Running away from instant notoriety, Walken starts a new life as a beloved tutor in a new town, only to be confronted by his past when former fiancée Brooke Adams (now married with kid) comes thru town; and by his present and putative future thru Martin Sheen’s Kennedyesque Senate candidate (and future Fascist President?). Like a lot of Stephen King, the second half has trouble answering what gets raised in the first half, so Croenenberg holds tight to a blueprint slavishly lifted out of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE and hopes for the best. (That tight budget working hard against the big set pieces which come off as tinny.) But he does provide a real humdinger of a jolt in a final ‘future ‘visualization’ from Walken that audiences of the time must have shrieked at in outraged pleasure.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Note the all-star character actor list in parts large & small: Tom Skerritt, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Herbert Lom..
CONTEST: Either King or Croenenberg was really paying close attention to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE/’62 as a certain liquid beverage figures into both plots in unlikely ways. Name the beverage and how it shows up in each film to win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Naturally, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-manchurian-candidate-1962.html
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