Firestarter

An attempt at a Carpenter horror film, but the most Carpenter things about it are the music (which John Carpenter actually composed in part) and the list of carpenters in the end credits (which is kind of my attempt at a joke). The source material is one of those King books I read some twenty years ago and remember only the basic plot, but even so it is clear to me that the filmmakers misunderstood it and turned it into a bland, almost second-rate made-for-TV movie with uninteresting characters, which was not saved even by the cast led by the horribly miscast Zac Efron. The more seriously the film takes itself, the more ridiculous it gets. I'm sorry, but this is one of the worst King adaptations I've seen so far. (13/05/2022)

The only bright spot is the music, co-written by John Cerpenter, it’s a really good, proper horror soundtrack. Otherwise, the film is completely devoid of sparkle – pun not intended. The screenplay in particular feels like a lot is missing. (14/05/2022)

Here we all kind of expected it to be bad, and it really is bad. The source material is grasped by an inexperienced director and the result is a terribly uninteresting B-movie that is not even helped by Zac Efron, on the contrary, he doesn't fit here at all. The 90-minute running time is also a blemish, as it is so extremely abridged and edited down to the bare essentials that it makes all the dialogue feel terribly artificial, lacking coherence and leaving us to dream of any emotion or experience with the characters. There is no gore, there is little action, there is more talk than action, and the abilities are not only drastically underused, but often make little sense and go by the rules as it suits the creators. Thank goodness for the online webrip and the spared cinema visit, because I probably would have suffered through that one. And if someone complains at a "short" 90-minute flick, that probably says a lot about the film's entertainment value in itself... (13/05/2022)