YMMV / Firestarter

• Awesome Music: Much of the soundtrack, especially the opening and closing credits, was quite a few people's introduction to Tangerine Dream.
• Complete Monster: In Rekindled, John Rainbird is a death-obsessed psychopath and hitman for the Department of Scientific Intelligence, before he rose through the ranks; he gains young Charlie McGee's trust and friendship by posing as a friendly janitor, before later killing Charlie's father, with it being revealed he killed her mother too. Years after his seeming death, Rainbird continues the experiments on several boys, grooming them to be soldiers for his cause; he masterminds a conspiracy to track down and kill survivors of the original Lot-6 experiments. His obsession with Charlie becomes more twisted as he tortures her boyfriend Vincent, asking intimate questions while sniffing her discarded bra. Rainbird also has one of his hitmen killed for failing to catch Charlie. Rainbird reveals that his true plan to "test" the boys' powers is to have them incite a massacre on a small town in hopes of forcing Charlie into confronting them, committing mass murder and destruction; during the chaos, he kills his seeming superior, and when Charlie confronts them, Rainbird kills Vincent, fully expecting and hoping to get such an emotional response that Charlie would wipe out the town with her powers.
• Fridge Brilliance: As pointed out under No Control Group and Blatant Lies, there wasn't much point of using a placebo if the researchers were going to inform their test subjects what the experimental drug was supposed to do. However, given that they told the subjects it was a hallucinogen, the Shop's experts may have expected the drug to cause mild and temporary manifestations of psychic ability, which they wouldn't want the subjects reporting to anyone after the treatment wore off. So telling them about the placebo was just an excuse to warn them that many of them would be hallucinating shortly, thus predisposing the volunteers to disbelieve any potential weirdness they'd witness during the drug trial.
• Funny Moments:
  • Charlie has her Deadpan Snarker moments, first when she overhears the soldier in the airport ("She was only seven, but she knew a snowjob when she heard one") and then when the Shop finally sets up her test properly.
    Wood chips. They should have given me something hard.
  • When Charlie shows that she can correctly use her powers in front of The Shop, Hollister drops all traces of professionalism, running around excitedly shouting about how they have undeniable proof that they have someone with powers that can be replicated anytime they want for almost a minute. If his happiness wasn't based on doing horrible things to children you'd be happy for him too.
  • And then immediately after, when Rainbird interrupts the celebration to point out that they should probably go after Charlie - who just wandered off through the door that was left open.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A sexist murderer has the initials OJ and even insists on nicknaming himself "Juice," at a time when O. J. Simpson was still a highly popular football player and actor with his murder scandal still more than a decade away.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • David Keith running from The Shop in the movie is very amusing if you've seen the 2002 remake of Carrie - this time he's the one tracking a supernaturally empowered girl.
  • Andy watches Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Steven Spielberg would later feature an extended homage to the film adaptation of The Shining in Ready Player One, even pointing out that King hated it.
  • Charlie's choice of Rolling Stone as a fearless espouser of truth-telling in journalism hasn't aged well; the magazine fired an editor for writing an unflattering review of a Hootie & the Blowfish record so as to placate record executives.
• Moment of Awesome: When Charlie single-handedly sends the sadistic army of The Shop literally burning and screaming all the way to Hell where they belong. This, combined with a Tear Jerker, being Andy's last words after Rainbird shoots him in the head.
  It's a war. Make them know they've been in a war. [...] Make it so they can never do anything like this again. Burn it down, Charlie. Burn it all down.
• Narm: In the movie, there's Andy's incredibly silly gesture of putting his hands on his forehead whenever he uses his powers. In the book, he doesn't have to do anything, which is why he's able to sneakily use them on government officials when he's careful.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The bits from the perspective of those who are in the middle of severe echoes. Overuse of Andy's push on a person can cause echoes from their subconscious to emerge, centering on events that have psychological significance to them; eventually they start obsessing about it until their mind breaks.
  • From the movie, the LOT-6 experiment itself. While for Andy and Vicky, it's all cool, the others go into seizures, enter fugue states, or simply die. The crowner is the poor subject who, to try to make the visions stop, claws his own eyes out.
    • The novel isn't as traumatic with only one person going into cardiac arrest and one person clawing his eyes out but between Shop agents masquerading as grad assistants to test the participants, Andy and Vicky's telepathic conversations, the bloody hand reaching out, and the actual assistants gaslighting them into thinking it was All Just a Dream, it's a very unnerving experience. No wonder it haunts Andy and Vicky for the rest of their lives with the latter utterly terrified to the point where she refused to even talk about it if she could help it.
  • John Rainbird's obvious child molester tendencies towards Charlie (although in the book, his motives are much weirder; he wants to kill Charlie so he can figure out the mystery of death by watching Charlie die, and he gets offended when Cap assumes he wants to molest Charlie).
  • While it is awesome, Charlie's path of revenge at the end is a lot more frightening in the book, where, through her POV, she is enjoying the fact and would have kept on doing so, until she tells it "Back off!" multiple times. The frightening part comes into play when it is implied a lot of what was happening was caused from Andy's final push and amplified by Charlie's own powers as well, causing everyone to go into a blank state, killing themselves by accident via an electrical fence (if they were lucky enough to get out of the way of Charlie).
• Unintentional Period Piece: Andy makes a cab driver think a one dollar bill is actually $500. Bills larger than $100 were discontinued in 1969 but were never actually stricken as legal tender, and in 1980 there were still enough $500 bills floating around to make this plausible.
• The Woobie:
  • Charlie is just a 6-year-old who happens to have powerful pyrokenesis. She gets kidnapped along with her dad and basically made a slave by The Shop, even though she doesn't want to hurt anyone. Even worse, her dad dies right in-front of her at the end. While she ends up incinerating quite a few people, it was all in self-defense, and she really just wants to be left alone and allowed to live like a normal little girl.
  • A minor one in the form of Robert Everett, the mailman who picks up the post from Bradford, where Andy mailed the letters detailing his family's story. Robert believes in the sanctity and security of the U.S. Mail, and when the Shop agents casually rob him of Andy's letters on the road to Teller and then threaten his pension, he's deeply scared, outraged and strangely ashamed. The incident affects him for the rest of his life. Anyone who's ever been disillusioned by a system he or she believed in can understand how Robert feels.

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