21 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002)

Sometimes you watch a movie that your gut immediately tells you is going to be bad.  From the promotional artwork, to the plot synopsis, to the cast list, to the fact that it's a sequel to a film that definitively should not have a sequel.  When I finally got a copy Firestarter it happened to come in a set with a tv miniseries sequel directed by Robert Iscove called Firestarter 2: Rekindled.  I knew from the start it was going to be pretty bad, but sometimes you just can't help yourself.

Set roughly 10 to 15 years after the events of the original film, Firestarter 2 finds Charlie McGee (Marguerite Moreau) under an assumed name going to a college in Colorado.  Many of the key moments of Stephen King's novel are retold in flashbacks juxtaposed to the current events in which she is being sought out by Vincent Sforza (Danny Nucci) a naive office worker who believes he is finding survivors from the original drug test that created Charlie's powers in the first place to compensate them for damages.  Of course it's all an elaborate trap that leads Charlie back against her original foe, (previously assumed dead) John Rainbird (Malcolm McDowell), and a new group of psychic powered children he is grooming.

I'm going to be short and sweet about this:  For a TV movie, it's okay, but otherwise it's pure dreck as I pretty much knew it would be from the start.  Marguerite Moreau is interesting as an actress and Malcolm McDowell is always fun to watch, but their characters are such boring cliche's that it's easy to be distracted.  It has a larger budget than most TV films had at the time but that doesn't save it from it's many glaring faults.  Flat lighting, annoyingly relentless score (seriously there is not one moment without cheap and utterly bad music), and a relatively boring script.

The real reason I watched it was for Dennis Hopper's cameo and I liked the idea of the concept.  Why wouldn't I want to revisit a character of one of my favorite sci-fi horror films?  The concept isn't all that uninteresting, but all the things worth exploring are pretty much ignored in favor of pulpy (i.e. boring) cliches.  So ultimately it's another case of another film that can only be made enjoyable with inebriation, which I suppose means it has it's moments, but they're too far in between to really make a difference or save the end result.