Powder (1995)

Directed by Victor Salva. Starring Sean Patrick Flanery, Lance Henriksen, Mary Steenburgen, Jeff Goldblum, Brandon Smith, Bradford Tatum, Melissa Lahlitah Crider, Susan Tyrell, Esteban Powell. [PG-13]

A small-town sheriff (Henriksen) and state psychologist (Steenburgen) discover a pasty albino boy nicknamed “Powder” (Flannery) all alone in a farmhouse basement, and after taking him to a boys’ home as a ward of the state, Steenburgen does what any sane person would do: enroll the kid in high school where his fellow students would never be cruel to someone so different from them. Even more astonishing are the supernatural gifts the young man possesses, notably an electromagnetic charge within his body that allows him to magnetize objects, practice telepathy, create psychic bonds between living creatures he touches, and whatever else the filmmakers can cook up. “He is electrolysis,” someone intones in a classroom, and if that doesn’t make you either roll your eyes or laugh out loud, maybe you won’t find it such a gimmick-bound, tonally-uncertain chore to sit through. Why, for example, do almost all of the big “dramatic” magical realism moments make it seem like Powder is on the verge of becoming a supervillain? (I kept thinking, “Does [composer] Jerry Goldsmith think Spider-Man is about to show up to fight Electro or something?”) Flanery’s makeup looks like, well, just makeup, and his character is a pawn for the film’s clunky (sometimes, even perverted) sense of empathy, purity, suffering and martyrdom—oh, yes, the Christ-like parallels are front and center. In a supporting role, a bemused Jeff Goldbum floats through the thing, but he does no favors for the film’s earnestness, which needs the mad conviction of a cultist to generate some facsimile of wonder. Even though none of the “teenage” actors look a day under twenty-five, knowing the child-rapist Jeepers Creepers director was responsible for this film makes a tender scene between Powder and a teacher more than a little uncomfortable.

18/100