But he can't avoid that: shaking hands with another person reveals that person's fate to Johnny. Sam Weizak, a helpful and compassionate figure played by Herbert Lom, he tries very hard not to use them. After Johnny is made aware of his psychic abilities by Dr. Walken, Johnny is a guileless and rather passive man, one who regrets his new circumstances but cannot really fight them. What makes the film strangely believable is Johnny's reluctance to exploit this new power. And Johnny has somehow developed the power of second sight. In the interim, Sarah has married another man, although she has never stopped loving her former fiance. He falls into a coma - and when he awakens, five years have gone by. A schoolteacher named Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is injured after a visit to his sweetheart, Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams) unlike many horror film victims, he isn't being punished for sexual promiscuity, since this has been a very chaste date. ''The Dead Zone,'' which opens today at Loew's State and other theaters, evolves out of an automobile accident.

King's books, which include ''Carrie'' and ''The Shining'' as well as the forthcoming ''Christine,'' have their own brand of validity and momentum, and that these qualities may be even more apparent on the screen than they are on the page. It's clear by now that film adaptations of Mr. This approach may not compete goosebump- for-goosebump with horror films of the chain-saw genre, but it works on its own terms. King's novels, the story has its roots in reality even when its most fanciful elements come into play. It's a sad, sympathetic and unsettling movie, quietly forceful but in no way geared to the cheap scream.Īs with ''Cujo,'' the last film to have been adapted from one of Mr.

THE combined talents of the novelist Stephen King, the director David Cronenberg (''Scanners'') and the producer Debra Hill (who has the second and third ''Halloween'' films to her credit) would seem to suggest something much scarier than ''The Dead Zone,'' a well-acted drama more eerie than terrifying, more rooted in the occult than in sheer horror.

Stephen kings the dead zone