By CHAD TAYLOR
Stephen King's The Dead Zone is the story of a young man named Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) who awakes from a coma after six years.
While Johnny was unconscious his girlfriend married someone else, his mother died and his family's estate fell into the hands of the suspiciously
convivial Reverend Brady (David Ogden Stiers).
Johnny, meanwhile, acquired the power to visualise strangers' pasts and futures simply by touching them.
The premise is stock Stephen King, who enjoys events that literally transform everyday people.
Johnny's Midas touch forces him to avoid contact with others. Fear of intimacy is another of King's recurring themes.
The Dead Zone has already been made into a feature film by David Cronenberg, who gave it a pleasantly creepy flavour.
This new TV version is produced by Michael Piller, co-creator of the moody Star Trek spin-offs Voyager and DS9. It was no coincidence the first episode flicked through different realities like Johnny was channel-grazing on the Holodeck.
Better than that, the episode was well-scripted. Good acting and a good pace kept the story alive. If it keeps up, The Dead Zone will become a natural successor to The X-Files.
The premiere of Wolf Lake started with an original twist when Ruby Wilder (Mia Kirshner) was attacked at night and vanished, leaving only her attacker's severed hand.
A flash of Ruby's angry, yellowing eyes told viewers her secret straight away, but her boyfriend John Kanin (Lou Diamond Phillips) stayed in the dark, mounting a search that eventually led him to an eerie village north of Seattle called Wolf Lake.
Riding his Triumph into town, Kanin gave a lift to a virgin, stopped beside a carved wolf and chatted about bloodlines with an Indian spinning an egg.
David Lynch's Twin Peaks gave TV directors merry licence to play with this kind of imagery and Wolf Lake had good fun with it.
It also shares with the 1983 horror movie The Howling an isolated community with a secret werewolf cult.
There's something genuinely savage about the idea. It's redolent of sacrifice and initiation and implies a lot of intimacy, not all of it good.
Kanin is also native American (Phillips is eighth-Cherokee) and his search was telegraphed as a journey into his culture's myth and legend.
The wolves have heat-sensitive night vision and use digital effects to seamlessly transform.
Werewolves always seem to work on screen. It has something to do with people's fondness for dogs. If the wolves are done badly you want to scratch their ears, and if they're done well, they're scary on a visceral level.
Wolf Lake looks like one of the scary ones.
By CHAD TAYLOR
Stephen King's The Dead Zone is the story of a young man named Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) who awakes from a coma after six years.
While Johnny was unconscious his girlfriend married someone else, his mother died and his family's estate fell into the hands of the suspiciously
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