“The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah!”

David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone is a competent little horror film in its own right. Christopher Walken waking up from a five-year coma with clairvoyant abilities is a great hook, the leading man is surrounded by a solid supporting cast (Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Martin Sheen), and the director knows how to create an atmosphere through editing and sound design. It’s comfortable popcorn horror for the masses and in that arena, it excels, even if it feels a bit too melodramatic and episodic for its own good.

But while it stands as one of the better Stephen King adaptations (it was one of three released in 1983 alone), it doesn’t even come close to keeping stride with Videodrome—Cronenberg’s sci-fi body horror masterpiece that came out earlier in the year. In all respects, The Dead Zone is a safe project from a director whose modus operandi at the time typically involved making the viewer feel uncomfortable in their own skin, and by virtue of that fact, it tends to leave a bad taste in my mouth. A late career run of non-horror films from Cronenberg has prompted a few reassessments that suggest this King adaptation is on the same level as films like Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, a notion with which I’d have to disagree.