Brad Dourif in the lead, well after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, concurrent with the start of Chucky, but before Exorcist III and being Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings Tobe Hooper, after TCM and Poltergeist, Funhouse, Salem's Lot and Lifeforce; some consider this one of his last significant films; I say you may need to look earlier It starts with a nuke test in the desert where they built a shelter and his folks were given a wonder drug to make them immune from radioactivity. Well, you know no good would come from that. His folks torch up right off the blocks and we flash forward to Dourif being a young professor, which I really hadn't picked up on for a bit, because he seemed to be hanging out with the students is a kind of flirty way. One problem with the flick is all the female characters look very similar so it is tough some times to tell them apart. Well, at this school, they must have some neo-Nazi's in charge since everyone seems to have an armband either pro or anti the local nuclear power plant that is about to go online. Brad drives a Studebaker that was his father's but somehow knows nearly nothing about his father...despite driving this thing around for his adult life. We meet Brad's ex-wife which at first you think may be his mother because you think he is a student at the beginning. To say the establishing stuff in this movie is a mess is an understatement. Brad is also not good at acting normal, which he is supposed to be at the start. So we are taught that Spontaneous Human Combustion is so normalized people refer to it as SHC as if everyone just knows. When it happens the feet don't burn, nor does anything non-human...except plastic melts. They make a point of telling you this...but it never, ever pays off. This movie could be called "Don't Pay Off" and it would make sense. At some point we meet a radio psychic medium who is most important because his technician is John Landis and he goes up like a match or like Vic Morrow on his movie set. For a while, it looks like Brad may have a case of fire zits that pop open every so often. But he has a real fire in his belly for revenge. As the movie goes on, Brad's manic acting style fits more and more to the role. He morphs from the afflicted to the antagonist and morphs into Drew Barrymore in Firestarter. The weirdness is he never really seems to have much control, but they refer to this as his "gift." If you get a remote truck and it goes all over the place, what would think? Not a very good gift. Brad, in some of the final scenes, as he cracks and goes nuts shows why so many of us wanted him to play Joker in Burton's Batman, though Jack Nicholson was an inspired choice that made the movie a hit. Of course, we all know his laugh from Chucky but he would have made a good alternate reality Joker. His girlfriend's house was decorated by MTV with transparent plastics and neon that I thought was screaming for some combustion, but of course, didn't pay off. They kept trying to inject here with Dr. West's Reanimator glowing green fluid but she was a firecracker, and kept avoiding the stuff. Still unsure what that stuff actually was. Did it protect from the flames, immunity from radioactive, or resurrect the dead like the label said??? This flick is more like Lifeforce than Tobe's other "good" films. Manic and not very coherent, Brad complained in a Fangoria article that the producers eff'd it up. Having seen a number of Tobe Hooper movies, I know he can eff up flicks, though, as well. Overall it was unsatisfying as watching water burn.

That ending though... what the fuck. Dourif could read the phone book. I'd watch it. Unfortunately that'd probably be more entertaining than this is. Gotta get me that neon phone Lisa had. That thing was dope.

Rewatched after 5 years - i didnt remember anything from it, therefore im lowering rating from 6 to 5. + ria film < czech dubbed version has terrible translation / grim ripr :) - demented preaching about atomic energy - poor ending 23/08/27