The second adaptation of the king of terror novel, published in 1980, takes advantage of advances in the field of special effects
Adapting Stephen King’s novels to the big screen, now multiple, is not daring, unlike other writers. The popular horror writer hardly gives an opinion about the new versions of his books, he prefers to praise ‘The paper house’ on Twitter and other proposals that make him fall in love. Unconditional fan of the Spanish series, his time as a hater facing Kubrick and his ineffable interpretation of ‘The Shining’ (the subsequent translation with the approval of the letter board did not exactly go down in history) is left behind. Some classics of the master of horror already have several jumps to real image, generally unsuccessful in their second round, as in the case of ‘Carrie’ -difficult to beat the work of Brian de Palma-. Now it’s the turn of ‘Ojos de fuego’, released in the mid-1980s directed by Mark L. Lester -substitute for John Carpenter-, who signed the cult film ‘Curso1984’, and later ‘Commando’, before definitively turning his filmography into “video store meat”.
Starring in his day by Drew Barrymore, who came from the success of ‘ET’ before falling into the hell of addictions as a child, he is replaced almost four decades later by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who was seen in the second part of the renewed ‘It’ and in run-down blockbusters like ‘Black Widow’. Zac Efron and Sydney Lemmon, who is worth seeing in the series ‘Helstrom’, accompany the little actress in this drama with supernatural overtones.
‘Ojos de fuego’ presents a girl barely 11 years old with pyrotechnic powers who is persecuted by a malicious organization that intends to take advantage of her extraordinary abilities. Her parents hide her as best they can from the clutches of the evil agency, but it is increasingly difficult to escape from the threat. The girl is capable of generating fire out of nowhere, thus becoming a powerful weapon of mass destruction, highly lethal if she falls into the wrong hands. The strange gift of hers is increasingly difficult to control. As anger takes hold of the little girl, she lights the spark and a symphony of sound and fury erupts. The flames devour everything in its path.
An image from ‘Eyes of Fire’.
Unlike its predecessor, this new version is supported by a display of visual effects according to current times, under the orders of Keith Thomas, a novelist with a rising career in the literary field who wrote and directed the vindicatable ‘The Vigil’, an atmospheric debut film where the protagonist lives a real nightmare in which he must face his faith after accepting the role of ‘nocturnal shomer’, a Jewish practice in which a person watches over the lifeless body of a recently deceased member of the community . It closed the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, the most important of its kind, and opened the doors for the filmmaker to accept a major commission, another adaptation of one of the novels by the indefatigable Stephen King, whose prose continues to be a source of inspiration for genre cinema.
The reboot, read relaunch, of ‘Fire Eyes’ imitates the design of the 1984 poster in its poster and visits the conventional exhibition circuit sponsored by Blumhouse, a production company specializing in horror films aimed at young audiences, with references such as the sagas ‘ Insidious’, ‘Paranormal Activity’ or ‘The Purge’. Presumably this new version is more concerned with the psychology of the characters, although its strength is the combustion unleashed in images.
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