Stephen King Month: Firestarter

1 Star - Awful

To continue Stephen King Month it's on to the next of King's novels to be turned into a film, Firestarter. Which is without a doubt the worst film I've had to watch for this month so far.

The book tells the story of Charlie McGee, a young girl with Pyrokinesis, the ability to start fires with her mind. Her mother and father were given an experimental drug called Lot-6 which gave them telekenisis and when they passed the ability onto Charlie, only much more powerful and dangerous. Years later the mother has been killed by the government and Charlie and her father, Andy, are on the run. They go to a few locations before the government catches up with them and experiments on them until they try to escape, leading to Andy being dead, Charlie getting away and the facility they were in burnt to the ground.

The film is just awful, the acting is stilted, the effects are laughable and it is really boring. I genuinely disliked this film a lot, especially Drew Barrymore as Charlie, sure she was just a kid at the time, but that doesn't make her performance any less irritating. At least George C. Scott and Martin Sheen are almost entertaining.

As an adaptation it is good, they did everything from the book as I recall, but at the same time it fails as an adaptation, because it doesn't make a good film out of a fairly entertaining book.

Will She Have The Power... To Survive?

In short, don't watch this film, watch other, better films.