Firestarter

Drew Barrymore had just done "E.T." when they planted her in front of a wind machine for "Firestarter," probably the most memorable visual of that 1984 ...

Horror never goes out of style, and thanks in part to the aforementioned "It," everything old with King's imprimatur is either new again or likely soon will be. But honestly, not much happens for a fairly long stretch of the film's modest 90-some-odd minutes, until the bad guys finally locate them again, leading to the inevitable showdown. Simultaneously hitting theaters and the streaming service Peacock feels about right, since this is the sort of movie that would have gone directly to cable TV a few decades ago.

Zac Efron stars as the father of a girl, Charlie, who is learning to control her powers.

Zac Efron pays Andy, Charlie’s father, and he’s got powers, too — with a twitch of the neck, he can cloud people’s minds. This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is. The first “ Firestarter” (1984) starred a not-yet-10-year-old Drew Barrymore as a girl who can start fires — with her mind, which makes all the difference.

The new adaptation of Stephen King's best-selling novel is all fizzle, no sizzle.

He kills Vicky and manages to finally nab Andy in a compressed version of events from the book, while Charlie ultimately comes for the Shop with vengeance on her mind. But this Firestarter doesn’t even try; Charlie simply arrives at the rather threadbare Shop HQ and torches a handful of extras before the baffling ending. In one especially horrific scene, Charlie accidentally fries a cat with her power; her dad comes along and teaches her to control the flames by using them on the still-living cat. So sure, put her in public school, where kids bully and tease anyone who seems shy or out of place, like Charlie does (Armstrong is okay, but doesn’t seem sure of how to play the role). Vicky is already dead when King opens his novel, murdered by Shop operatives, and Andy and Charlie stay on the road under assumed names with the Shop on their tails. The substances give Andy and Vicky limited psychic and telekinetic powers, but turn their daughter Charlie into a literal weapon, providing her with the ability to start fires with her mind.

Zac Efron tries his best in an otherwise regrettable retread of the horror author's tale of a girl with superpowers.

Scott Teems’s drearily perfunctory script is at least not as howlingly bad as his script for Halloween Kills, a small mercy, although both films bizarrely share John Carpenter in charge of the music, his throwback synth score working at odds with Thomas’s pedestrian aesthetic. While the original is far from indispensable (it’s also rather dull), at the very least it provided a showcase for a young Drew Barrymore, who gave a typically precocious and persuasive performance. It’s perhaps why the arrival of Firestarter is even more of a bore, retelling a story we know all too well and don’t need to hear yet again.

Charlie (who will be played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong in the new movie) is a young girl who has special abilities that put her at risk of harming herself and ...

Armstrong may be young, but so was Drew Barrymore when she made her debut as young Gertie in the 1982 movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. She plays the younger version of Forester’s daughter, Muri. When Dan travels to the future to help, he is fighting for his daughter’s future, but he’s caught off-guard when the Colonel that he reports to turns out to be his adult daughter, Muri Forester (Yvonne Strahovski). A Good Marriage (2014) - The most recent Stephen King adaptation to grace the Peacock streaming platform (for now), A Good Marriage is based on King’s 2010 novel of the same name. The third and final story is where the cat (who has made appearances in the other two stories) finally finds his way to the little girl. On the contrary, they are all tied together by a stray cat on a mission to save a little girl (Barrymore) pleading for his help. Stephen King also makes a cameo appearance in one of the short stories that he wrote, called “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” Another cameo appearance that might excite horror fans is that of practical special effects icon Tom Savini, who has worked extensively with Romero on other projects like Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). She adopts him and names him “General.” General learns that the girl is being terrorized by a small troll that enters her room at night. Needful Things (1993) - Based on the King novel of the same name, Needful Things is set in Castle Rock, Maine. A mysterious man named Leland Gaunt (Max Von Sydow) comes into town and opens up an antique store called Needful Things. His shop somehow manages to stock items that will fulfill the desires of his customers, but at a great cost. When he locates Charlie, he soon learns that there was never a lawsuit settlement and that he was inadvertently sent by John Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell) the assassin from the original 1984 film. Crime boss Cressner (Kenneth McMillan) kidnaps his wife’s affair partner, athlete, and gambler Johnny Norris (Robert Hays). He forces Norris to gamble with his life by making him scale the small ledge that runs the perimeter of his penthouse apartment. As of right now, Peacock is the only streaming platform that will have Firestarter available to stream on the day of release. However, Charlie’s father, Andy (Zac Efron) thinks it’s best for her to “shove it down and keep it hidden.” It’s almost as if he’s never seen the Disney movie Frozen. Even though Charlie controls fire instead of ice and snow, he’s still setting her up to become a ticking time bomb. With a runtime of 94 minutes, this Blumhouse Production is the perfect length to enjoy at your local theater.

Keith Thomas' adaptation of 'Firestarter' struggles to find relevance in a world heavily steeped in its source's influence.

Even if one had made the perfect adaptation of King’s novel, to the point that folks would shout hosannas from the rooftops at your favorite genre film festival provided that it premiered there, it would still have to prevail against the kind of deja vu-like indifference that emerges when someone watches a film that reminds them of other and more memorable films that came about in a perfect cultural storm and commanded the moment’s attention. It’s one thing to be skeptical and fearful of power this great in the hands of a child, but the one stroke of genius that Mark L. Lester had in casting Drew Barrymore in the original was that she was heavily emotive, even if she wasn’t given as much to do as she could have. There’s a sad soulfulness that Lester was able to draw from, and the film is cognizant of it: Just look at the differences between the posters for each Firestarter. One emphasizes the fundamental childishness of the character — a vacant gaze, familiar to most parents, that all children show when do not understand the cruelty they wreak upon the world — while the other has her practically grimacing at the camera and viewer as if to suggest that she, not the world she inhabits, is the thing to be feared. The third is the more intangible and out of Thomas’ control, and I don’t fault him for this at all, but Firestarter, unlike something like Carrie, is a narrative that has been wholly absorbed into the culture at large to the point that it feels generic. It’s just too smooth and dark to become atmospheric in a home environment, to say nothing of what it must be like in a theater. The first is the film’s look, which is digitally desaturated and bisexually-lit in the way that a lot of cheaper horror projects are nowadays: it looks fundamentally generic, especially in comparison to the original, which was still shot on film and retains a real texture.

Andy and Vicky McGee (Zac Efron and Sydney Lemmon) fell in love during an experimental drug trial for telepaths overseen by a shadowy government agency known as ...

That can’t be said about the disorientingly hazy shallow-focus photography, which reflects a sense of paranoia building up within the characters, if to a distracting extent. For one, it seemed as if it could only grow in cultural cachet, as the 1984 film version is considered even by King to be among the worst adaptations of one of his books. Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben), who’s been searching for Andy and Vicky since Charlie’s birth, is alerted to the family’s whereabouts after Charlie, a social outcast, unleashes her powers in terrifying fashion during a game of dodgeball.

A film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you're watching ...

It’s often hard to decipher what the hell is happening when things are supposed to be getting intense and director Keith Thomas does a miserable job with geography (largely because of the close-up, reverse shot structure that never puts two people in a frame in a room). “Firestarter” just looks cheap—in most ways, cheaper than the 1984 version—with no memorable craft elements or decisions outside of a cool, ‘80s score from John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies. The score deserved a movie that knew how to use it more effectively and with tighter visual language. The Stephen King novel on which the new version of “Firestarter” is based was published in 1980 during a phase of the horror master’s career in which the writer seemed fascinated by kids with inexplicable powers. When Charlie and dad get home, they discover how hot it really is for the now and go on the run. There is no better recent example of this than “Firestarter,” a film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you’re watching it on ablaze. Charlie, played by Drew Barrymore in the 1984 film and Ryan Kiera Armstrong in this one, is cut from similar cloth as Danny from “ The Shining” and the title character in “Carrie”—people who discover they’re not like normal kids.

Zac Efron and Black Widow's Ryan Kiera Armstrong star in the 2022 adaptation of Stephen King's novel about a psychic man and his pyrokinetic daughter, ...

Firestarter 2022 is a marginal improvement on the ’84 original, if only because it has a handful of redeeming qualities rather than virtually none at all. But sometimes in the world of remakes and Stephen King adaptations — and especially when the two overlap — “quality” can become awfully relative. As with the 1984 film version of Firestarter — widely acknowledged as one of the worst King adaptations — the cast and crew of the 2022 Firestarter features names that seem too high-profile for this particular project. Generally, the 2022 Firestarter is pretty okay when no one is talking. Firestarter predates the 2010s wave of “elevated” superhero movies — in fact, the S-word doesn’t appear in the ’84 version at all. King’s novel and the 1984 film both start in medias res, after DSI agents finally track down the McGee family and force Andy and Charlie to go on the run.