FIRESTARTER is a Trash Fire | Explained

i don't know how to tie the background back into this this time um i'm at my parents place again uh this is 90s aesthetic though and we're talking about an 80s remake but we're gonna go with it so they remade fire starter and i had completely forgotten that they had already made a fire starter movie uh with a very young drew barrymore all the way back in 1984 and i actually hadn't even seen that one until uh after i watched this one i just wanted to let the um the natural talent of this one wash over me oh boy neither are good but this particular one does something more egregious than just being bad as i've mentioned before it's not just bad it's boring and i truly believe that boring is pretty much the worst thing a movie can be unless it hits a point where it annoys me and then it just enters a whole other level of bad but on average just something that is genuinely uninteresting especially when you have a premise like this is not a good sign it's hilarious in all the wrong ways early on and then it's just not interesting i was at least hoping for something that ventured into the realm of like so bad that it's not good but at least it's funny we're almost there but it just it just it leaves this movie also did something even more egregious to me personally uh it made zac efron a father of an eight-year-old like i was a little bit too old for high school musical when it came out even though zafron zephron is older than me uh but i still just see him has like the pretty boy himbo supreme he's not supposed to be the father of a small child even if he is 34. he doesn't need to play 34 year olds for a really long time it's like when they made aubry plaza the mom in that new child's play remake that i didn't watch but it feels unholy but sure himbo bro dad good for zephron uh the man has a name in this movie and i'm not i'm not gonna use it one time we're just we're going with variations i'm still young and you can't take my youth away from me reality's already doing that okay movie we're watching we're watching a movie so this was a little surprise because i didn't have time to catch it in theaters because i'm about to leave the country then i realized it's on peacock if you don't know what that is it's a very poorly titled streaming service but you're like amanda i don't live in america i don't have access to peacock well neither do i but with the power of today's sponsor surf shark i did it but i wouldn't even recommend doing that because i wouldn't recommend watching this i'd recommend watching a good stephen king adaptation like the shawshank redemption or the green mile but oh no they're also not available where you live well friends surf shark's here to save you again because all you need to do is connect to a canadian server location and bing bang boom right there great movies basically you pop on surf shark and it can make your internet think you're in a different location so you can then take advantage of those locations streaming services search also allows you to connect to unlimited devices from one account meaning that you don't have to like log in and log out of accounts on different devices depending on what you want to use it's super fast secure blocks unwanted ads and if you use code jedi you can save an astronomical 83 and then get an additional three months free every time i say it it blows my own mind so make sure to click the link in the description down below to try out surf shark for yourself all right let's dive on into the flames oh i'm sure there's better fire jokes out there but we're gonna go through a sampling so we start off with loving mother and father with their new baby they tuck it in head to bed but then flames literally the baby just lit up the entire room thankfully zeph dad sent something a little bit weird and wandered back in before the kid lit up the entire house so that's fun we got a baby just vibing setting [ __ ] on fire definitely isn't gonna cause any major issues but i guess we're not destined to live through uh the baby years until they can say hey little [ __ ] stop sending [ __ ] on fire this is basically just a nightmare flashback that zack daddy wakes up from uh once the baby sparks up like jack jack so he wanders out to the kitchen to find this kid playing with a lighter because obviously a kid does not need the zippo uh to to do the fire things uh the pyromaniac is not like pyro from x-men it's just why not have the fire kid playing with some fire and i can't i can't blame the kid zippo lighters are cool then the kid's trying to have like a nice little serious conversation with dad talking about how something feels weird inside her body and instead of high school himbo here being concerned that it's you know the whole pyrokinetic thing he's like i think we should go talk to your mom about this my dude she is eight it could be her period but i don't know the whole psychic fire ability really just seems more likely you should probably go that way but zippy isn't worried about working through whatever might be changing inside her body he just wants her to like stamp it down she's got a bunch of different techniques of things to focus on if she starts getting worked up it's pretty basic stuff just like focus on things around you to pull your attention usually a pretty good tactic but again uh we're working with someone who has psychic fire abilities it then cuts to the title card sequence which is just overlay to these like intake interviews for some kind of study where they're interviewing college age efron who looks older in college than he does 14 years later if the movie is set in 2022 uh because these tapes are dated 2008 but sure fine and both he and the mom were part of these experiments they start getting asked a series of questions that get more intense as they go both ephron and the future wife have no parents or strong family connections always a good sign with scientific experiments they both had some kind of experience in light that couldn't be explained through natural events like zach saw his parents die in a car crash a week before it happens so apparently this experiment is for a serum known as lot 6 that's supposed to be similar to lsd but they don't really explain what it does and what it does is unlock or enhance latent psychokinetic powers man they didn't do any cool [ __ ] like that when i was a kid and it seemed like a lot of people were dying in these experiments it was kind of hard to tell because the colors were all wonky but i'm seeing like eyes exploding out of skulls but like no major details because it's just the title sequence and that is really annoying to me because all of this stuff with the experiment seems way more interesting than the story we actually got but zack daddy who i guess is named andy i'm again well i don't think i'm sticking to that is now some kind of like hypno behavioral therapist life coach and with just three sessions he can make you quit smoking i think in the original he's supposed to be an english teacher so that is a major change but i think it's just so that we can like quickly understand what his powers are because it's something that's going to be called the push the push baby it's la push and that's just basically that he can like control other people with his mind and it does work in seconds but once this client leaves his eyes start to bleed so whatever he does takes an extreme toll on him or it's like just recently started and he's only charging 100 per session to get people to actually quit smoking which i feel is absolutely underselling yourself sir especially if you know for sure you can guarantee it works i feel like there's all sorts of people bsing the entire world charging more than that and then comes to charlie in school and for some reason she's dissecting a frog like why are they dissecting frogs at age eight that cannot be a thing in the united states this is an elementary school kids have probably just accepted what the concept of death is at that age what the [ __ ] but she messes it up and the teacher is like oh it's fine you can just look it up on the internet we don't even need to be doing this anymore so ma'am ma'am why are they doing it then it's in elementary school but in this unholy year of 2022 she doesn't have access to the internet uh and it results in her being the focus of this little shit's bullying is it true that amish families share the same bath water okay look i think bullying's just changed a lot since i was a kid anyway she doesn't like being called a weirdo so she starts heating up people are sweating up a storm in the class until she manages to ground herself cause that seems safe long term so obviously at this point she's starting to get a little bit scared of herself i guess this is something she's had a handle on for a while and it's now suddenly getting out of her control and like if all it takes is a kid calling her weird to start toasting up a classroom can't blame her for not wanting to go back to school i could never be scared of you yeah lady we'll see so it ends up leading to an argument between the parents like they obviously want her to be normal uh but the dad wants to be normal by shoving the powers down which traditionally works so well uh so that she can avoid detection but the mom wants her to be trained up so if people come to find them she can actually fight back but then also better control it in in classrooms clearly they just weren't supposed to be out here producing offspring all willy-nilly but now you gotta deal with it and the mom is rightfully concerned that if she's not trained she is a child with child emotions and she's just gonna explode so off to school she goes and it's dodge ball day that's gonna go great she actually manages to get someone out and she is so happy then this ginger haired [ __ ] point blank smacks her in the head whoa foul egregious that is like the number one rule of elementary school dodgeball you don't hit people in the head the follow-up acting here though real winner i'm not gonna make fun of the kid i'm gonna make fun of the director and the writer for not fixing it ultimately i have so many questions about this school though so this kid literally broke what i have to assume is like the main rule of dodgeball universally dodge duck dip dive and dodge nothing above the chest uh well the teacher is watching and follows it up with haha loser and the teacher does [ __ ] all just notices that charlie seems upset and yeah she's pissed but thankfully she runs off before she makes the rest of the kid match his hair then while the teacher is still there literally like less than six feet away from him he's like yeah run away you freak yeah run away you freak and no teacher does anything like no one even glances at this little [ __ ] i am so confused i know the teachers suck at catching bullying and go out of their way to ignore it sometime but this is just a little bit much so the teacher follows her into the bathroom she's like steaming and burning anything up until the stall door just starts wildly slamming before a fireball explodes out of it holy [ __ ] so the school obviously thinks she in her anger went in there and used something to cause an explosion even though there's like nothing please don't call it an explosion it makes her sound like a terrorist the bathroom stall exploded ma'am what would you like us to call it so they're a little worked up zaddy knows that the blast was gonna be like a siren call to the people hunting them down the mom points out again that if she could control it it wouldn't have happened which is when he points out that anytime he starts using his powers now his eyes start bleeding so he thinks that the more she uses it the more damage it's gonna cause her to and i guess he could theoretically push her not to use her powers but he says he'd never do that and they have to move i'm sure that's foreshadowing so charlie overhears all this and finally realizes that there are people out there trying to catch her and that's why they can't have internet or cell phones and why they always move i'm a monster i hate living like this tough luck charlie this is who you are she's 10 out of 10 parenting here big win it's definitely gonna calm the kid down so then she sets her mom on fire so obviously she freaks out and calls the cops until the dad's like no no not so fast bucko see she's fine it's just like fourth degree burns will manage but it is too late you end up seeing somebody looking at a screen of lewiston elementary and like sees the heat signature go off it's company called dsi and they have clearly realized that this is charlie it then cuts to this dude who has a bunch of like weird art like what looks like tarot cards he's not wearing a shirt and has like the hanged man tarot card tattooed on his back then you get this like semi-industrial style music like feeling very strong waves of the 80s and early 90s wafting in here i guess this dude's name is rain bird and he ends up getting a call from captain hollister who is the person watching the heath signature basically calling him back into the field i guess he's someone who used to hunt down all these missing experiments and they want him to bring in charlie alive now these baddies are never properly fleshed out or explained there's like way more going on in the book apparently and even in the first movie so it's really hard to feel much uh when these villains are just so nothing i'm also pretty sure this dude does not have any powers in the original story like his whole thing is that he thinks he'll get charlie's powers if he kills her but he definitely has powers in this either way the mom's hands are [ __ ] you'd figure they'd have to like track down some of those like tattoo and burn second skin things for this occasion i figured that might be something they'd track down because i really don't think the saran wrap is gonna do much she's obviously upset that he didn't use his push to calm charlie down and she's worried that she might kill one of them i could never be scared of you yeah see how quickly that flipped it's like one day one day so she basically says like can you take her out of the house for a little bit and then she starts to pack at first i thought she was like completely bailing on them and trying to get a head start uh but i think it's actually just that they need to move in general so she's just packing but who knows maybe she was gonna bail then she starts getting like a weird feeling but it's just a cop showing up because when you call the cops even if you hang up on them they're gonna like check up on you to make sure things are okay but it was totally just a bait and switch and yeah there there's rain bird and it never really explains uh what he can do he just mentions that he was like one of the early like lab rats for the experiment uh and it seems like he can read minds or like hear echoes of a past conversation from people's brains ice cream with the movies which again pretty sure not in the book but i could be wrong someone correct me but she isn't as trained up with her powers so he overpowers her pretty quickly and kills her when you see her you understand and so then the kid get home and she admits that she'd been trying to set him on fire not the mom that seemed pretty obvious to me but he seems kind of shocked and for the i don't know how many time she says she feels weird and he's like probably just a too much rocky road go get ready for bed maybe listen to your psychic kid but he finally notices the signs of struggle everywheres and walks in on rain bird holding a knife to her throat surrender surrender must be his thing i'm pretty sure the hanged man tarot card means something about surrender obviously not gonna happen kid freaks out gets super upset over where the mom is until she like pops out of the cupboard dead which obviously pisses her off and the kid just blasts him somehow it's not enough to seriously injure him but it gives her and zaddy enough time to get away i don't know how many times i'm gonna call him zaddy but yeah and yeah we get the indication that rain bird here does in fact regret going after the kid because they make sure to replay the audio of when the mom said that he was gonna regret going after the kid [Music] so they're on the run and she finds a nice little outdoor cat and i swear god if this kid kills the cat i'm showing none of this on screen but the cat bites her a little bit and she burns it but it doesn't die it's just making all these horrible [ __ ] noises before shockingly evil zaddy tells her she has to put it out of its misery and that it's her responsibility and it makes the most horrible noises when she has to then light it on fire even more look sir that was just a horrible experience for everyone even if it was a learning opportunity your kid is traumatized the cat clearly did not enjoy execution by fire i am upset i'm upset so the kids gotta die now those are the rules i feel like this is gonna be some foreshadowing that if someone's in pain because of something she did she's just gotta finish the job and then cuts back over to that hollister lady who hired rain bird and she goes to talk to the original daughter of the experiments onelist played by the i'm gonna stick my foot up your ass kirkwood smith himself how'd you like to own a little bit of my foot in your ass and she lets him know that he doesn't have to worry anymore because they track down the family and they're going to bring the kid in which actually terrifies them even more than them just being out there on their own she tries saying that they just want to help her and you know also do some scientific research to make up for the past so apparently whatever they have been doing since then failed and clearly that experiment failed and probably more so on top of people's eyes flying out but she wants him to come back to continue his research but he's taking the hard stance that i now agree with charlie needs to be killed because she has the potential to create a nuclear explosion look say no more duck i was on board the second she made that cat suffer like she's talking about wanting to train her and i gotta assume it's for military use but then she says they don't plan to clone her or make a little army they just want to understand her so there's a lot of conflicting information here so it cuts back to the little cat killer and like i guess they at least they give it a proper burial can we pray look i'm sorry but jesus doesn't want to hear from you today that he uh or she or they it's like a big cat party cannon you know what i take back everything i said this is cinema then they toss in a little prayer at the end for the mom in case you forgot she died so troy bolton finally realizes that the mom was probably right and that charlie does need to be trained up and that he thinks that she has a telekinesis like her mom that she'll probably also have the ability to use the push it's la push baby but if she uses it too much it could hurt her insides actually feels kind of good again i am just on board with the good doctor's child murder plan so they decided to ditch their car and hitchhike very responsible decision when your daughter literally blows things up at the slightest mood escalation so this kindly old man irv pulls up and he pushes him to drive them all the way to boston which that just seems mean except he then offers to take them back to his place for a meal and they agree to go even though they are literally being hunted down by people willing to kill and honestly all of this was was very boring to me apparently it's a highlight in the book according to some people so that's depressing and then when they get there she asks if she can go play with the chickens sir maybe keep your daughter away from the living creatures try not to cook any of them too soon to be joking about that she just torched a cat but before one can peck her and become roast chicken she starts hearing a woman's voice calling her from inside the house but in her head she ends up falling through the screen and it's clearly this man's wife on some kind of like ventilation life support and charlie can read her mind and herb says she's been like that for decades i assume that she was driving and got hit by another driver and it also killed their son so instead of taking them to boston he extends them an invite to spend the night and zack meister tells the story of when she was born so while they were in the hospital some kind of agents from the experiment stole her but when he woke up he could sense exactly where she was and when he found her he was so pissed that he ordered the dude to shoot his partner and then forget how to breathe which honestly badass way to kill somebody who nabbed your kid but then he says he ends up regretting it because you're not just hurting the person you're hurting everyone around them well maybe those people shouldn't have made it their business to be baby snatchers i'm just saying like i feel like this movie is trying to make some like big stand about morality and different things and ethics and it's just it's probably not the place so he wants her to promise to never use her powers that way even if it's on bad people doing bad thing because it'll affect other people and hurt too yeah i don't think that's gonna pan out super well but then they wake up the next day to the news station talking about how he is wanted by the police for killing his wife and kidnapping his daughter so irv is obviously freaking out no matter what zack says he doesn't believe him and he's very drunk you telling me i i can't trust the tv shocker oh my god then charlie comes in and starts laying down the facts about what actually happened in the wife's accident how he's the one who drove headfirst into another car that it's his fault the wife's like that and that their son is dead but offers some kind of peace that the wife says she forgives him and honestly if i was in her position just sitting in a dark room all day i don't think i would so irv's like oh [ __ ] i'm sorry i already called the cops and we probably could have got around it too he tries to convince them that you know he fell asleep with a tv on that he's been drinking he had like a dream that he saw them but before it can be resolved uh rain bird starts popping off cops gets a irv in the leg and even though zach and her just had lovely conversation about not killing people the second she realizes that it's the dude that killed her mom she's out there blasting flame bombs and scream splosions and it's also just kind of around here where things just makes a little bit sense like once she's out there she doesn't go at him at all even when he starts walking closer so zach tells her to run rain bird gets arrested because he wasn't supposed to kill cops and was not at all being discreet so they obviously have zack daddy in custody now too so she's off in the woods and hollister is super pissed that rain bird let the kid get away but he assures her that the daughter and the dad are connected so she will do everything in her power to find him with vengeance in her heart she is my sister my mother yeah i don't know what's going on here he seems to have grown a godlike reverence for her in their minor flame ball showdowns so she does obviously track him down after she has some real basic training montage of learning how to start a controlled fire she thinks she's good to go except potentially starting this forest fire but it's fine it's fine nothing it's fine so she starts wandering in that direction and of course there's a gang of bike hooligans there always just seems to be a gang of bike hooligans any time like girls are on a mission alone or mostly alone but she's also seemingly figured out how to do the push and makes them give her a bike food and jacket she doesn't even have to like say words out loud anymore apparently i think it's right around here that i realized exactly how boring this movie's been for about the last 30 minutes like pretty much once the mom dies this movie just tanks in any kind of interesting factor like i was really hoping that this was just gonna amp up into a fun or at least funny direction but no so she gets to the facility and nabs some dude to try to make him tell her where the dad is and like they've already set him up as someone with a family like he's talking on the phone with his pregnant wife and it feels like it's really to drive home that lesson that the dad taught her earlier when she inevitably massacres the dude because she was doing really good she wasn't gonna hurt him until he pulled a gun and i was just she has to torch him a little bit honestly fair he was being a big [ __ ] dummy i'm sorry your wife is not going to be a single mother but now because he's in pain she needs to put him out of his misery like the cat have to put him out of this misery honestly the longer this goes on it just strikes me as evil matilda but she does find her dad who really wants her to just take down this entire facility but hollister pops out and tries to say that she'll keep them both safe and that her dad's been experiencing a series of small brain hemorrhages every time he uses his powers and he probably only has one push left in him and she really tries to float the idea to charlie that like she's not a monster or dangerous she's basically a superhero my name's captain hollister you call me cap ma'am this is not the avengers we make people better we make them stronger people like you charlie's not buying it she says she can feel the bad things they do there and i'm kind of wondering if every other experiment was failed like what are they even doing here are they just like continuously running failed experiments on on people again other than being boring that is my biggest issue with this movie there's just too many unanswered questions and it's just too many things that seem interesting that they don't touch on at all and all too soon the dad gives up on his ideas of not hurting anyone probably because he knows that neither one of them is going to make it out alive and he's definitely not going to make it out so he uses his last push to tell her to light the whole building up starting with them i think it is a very traumatizing thing to force your daughter to set you on fire but what do i know and this dumb [ __ ] grabs the dad assuming it'll make her not torch him but she doesn't really have a choice in the matter if the dad's making her do it also uh when they use the power and the people's dialect uh the subtitles say pupils squelching i don't ever want my pupils to do that then we get this primo scene of them going up in flames oh [ __ ] she pulled up her hood you're in trouble now i swear to god everything they do to make it seem more badass makes it worse but maybe she is a fan of comic books and calling her a superhero was the right track because she decides to make these guys ghost rider like she's snapping necks getting people to shoot each other but don't worry just when you actually start thinking that she's a scary badass she delivers this beauty of a line liar liar pants on fire come on like apparently that was in the trailer and the public backlash was not enough for them to remove it man we can't even take a moment to appreciate the fact that she completely torched this woman's body out of existence because my eyes were too busy rolling into the back of my head at that line delivery so she's finally starting to run out of energy when she can't take down these dudes in like the anti-fire suits but that's fine cause rain bird just shoots them for her because i guess that's where his loyalties lie now and then he even presents himself to be killed in the original he is desperately trying to kill her because he thinks it let him like take her powers and she is going to kill him until she kind of notices her reflection and sees all the blood on her face and probably realizes like hey this isn't what my dad wanted uh and then decides to spare him because she never wanted to hurt anyone except that she just starts lighting everything on fire as she walks by and i'm pretty sure she blows up the building but also i'm sorry this dude hunted them down directly killed her mom and is the reason that her dad got caught and is therefore the reason why her dad is dead i think most people would murder the dude or at least name and then it ends with him carrying her away presumably to protect her going forward and uh leaving room for that sequel baby and it just feels very dumb in the original rain bird shoots her dad in the neck and then tries to shoot her so she like blows up the bullet and then makes it engulf him in a blaze of not glory uh then she blows up this facility hitchhikes back to the old dude's house and then plans to go to rolling stone magazine to tell the real story because they have been trying to spin it as a terrorist attack is that any better of an ending because i don't i don't think it is this movie was not great or good at all it's very boring and i was at least hoping again that it would get so bad that was funny which it starts to touch on that the early parts of the scene like when she's still in school we're there we're in the zone that i was expecting and this is always my frustration with stuff like this if you're gonna take a movie that wasn't that great to begin with and remake it you gotta actually make it better like you've been given the chance and you ruined it even that pet cemetery movie that came out a few years ago was more interesting than this one and it also was not very good this just is not interesting it's not thrilling it's not scary it's not ominous it's just really bland and too often that just seems to be the case with most of these stephen king adaptations especially if stephen king is like involved in the adaptation but yeah that is gonna do it for today's video let me know what you guys think of it down below if you haven't caught it i definitely do not recommend spending money on this movie i wouldn't even recommend watching this at home if you can watch it for free it is like that unnecessary let me know what you guys are thinking down below thanks so much for watching thanks as always to my patreon supporters subscribe the channel if you're new leave a like on the video if you're into that kind of thing hope you're all having a fantastic day i'm mostly okay and we'll catch you all later you

Channel: Amanda the Jedi

Views: 364,881

Keywords: Firestarter 2022, firestarter review, firestarter movie, firestarter explained, firestarter remake, firestarter peacock, zac efron, firestarter 2022 review, firestarter 2022 movie review, firestarter 2022 movie, horror, worst of horror 2022

Id: vhMsZJ88Gg4

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022