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 | (Reviewed by DOMD) - Believe it or not LOTR freaks, director Peter Jackson
was in fact an energetic horror filmmaker before stepping up to epic
fantasy. His vocabulary spanning from splat-attack cartoon action to eery-feeling
drama, Jackson has now finally taken the world of film with his gorehound
force with those infamous LOTR flicks. Rewind a couple years before MTV knew
Jackson's name, we have this Michael J. Fox vehicle that wasn't too popular
with early Jackson fans because we saw a turn in direction in Jackson's
style that teaters away from the over-the-top gore fests of before.
First, I'll give you the rundown of the story of Peter Jackson's The
Frighteners. The story is about Frank Banister (Michael J. Fox), a former
architect now a paranormal psychic that can see and interact with ghosts,
but he uses that to con people. It's how he makes a living. He dups people
into believing that their home is being overrun by ghosts, they call him and
he "gets rid of them," when actually he's friends with three
ghosts and they help him out. One, known as The Judge (John Astin) during
the film appropriatly tells Frank "Death ain't no way to make a
living," showing Jackman's hints of clever dialouge writing. Trouble
brews when mysterious deaths are accurring in this New Englund town, and
Frank begins seeing numbers "burned" into the living's forheads...coincedently
before they die. He finds out that The Soul Collector is deliberatly going
around, giving people a number, and pulling the plugs on their hearts...only
the mystery is who is this "soul collector?" He's aided by
recently widowed Lucy (Trini Alverado) and has an....eccentric (for lack of
a better word) FBI Agent by the name of Milton Dammers (Jeffery Combs...yes
THE Jeffery Combs) on his tail, in belief that Frank is the one responsible
for this string of killings.
There's a few plot twists...some clever and exciting while some are more
"meh," but I don't want to give the rest of the plot away. Peter
Jackson's film style is very evident here, using as much zoom/wacky -angle
as he can to give his film a more quirky feel. The film's spinal cord is
horror driven, but caging around it is comedy...but effective comedy. There
is dialouge traded off between Frank and his buddy ghosts that are just
hilarious. Cyrus (Chi McBride, from TV's boston Public) is one of the ghosts
that died in the 70's....leaving him with poorly outdated disco duds with an
afro to boot. Stewart (Jim Fyfe) is Cyrus's right handman, more of a nerdy
white guy. The Judge, with overlooked makeup effects by Rick Baker, had died
sometime in the 1800's, and his own ectoplasm is rotting away, leaving him
mostly skeleton with some skin and clothes. His complaining about him being
"all dried up" are some of the highlight humorous moments in the
film.
Adding to more of the quirky comedy, there are some characters that come
along such as Lucy's recently deceased husband Ray (Peter Dobson) who has an
obsession with gnomes on his lawn and has a yelling problem, the sheriff
(Troy Evans) that is kind and warm spirited, but has this air of goofiness
about him. Jeffrey Combs' character is disturbing and awkward, in the
funniest way. His lips move randomly and he tweaks, twitches, and shakes. He
even gets easily startled when a woman raises her voice to him. And to top
it all off, R. Lee Ermy has a role, resembling his Full Metal Jacket Drill
Sergent character, as a ghost keeping watch on the town graveyard and has a
bone to pick with Frank. He takes what was funny about his FMJ character and
amplifies it to basically a self-parody, which is what it was meant to be.
Ermy is just "balls out" funny.
The screenplay feels a bit uneven though, in some spaces, in terms of
pacing. There is a particular scene in the town graveyard at night where the
film feels like it's about to climax...but it doesn't, it leads to a plot
twist, which is kinda neat, but seems to disrupt the feel of the rest of the
movie. It's not that the twists comes out of left field, there is some
backstory sprinkled throughout with one dreadfully frightened character
played by Dee Wallace, but the twist just seems to take the Soul Collecter
down a notch, at least to me. And while most of the dialouge reads as
clever, some of the dialouge seems to be more forced. Example? Take the
scene where Frank Banister is in a jail cell and Lucy comes to understand
him more, and Frank starts to tell her that basically he doesn't want to
hurt her. The dialouge in this scene feels, to me, underwritten. The makeup
in this film is great, though Baker (Rick) actually only does the job for
The Judge character. There is an entire different team working on the rest
of the movie as Rick works on John Astin, and the styles don't clash but
blend with each other. The Judge really looks like he's deteriorating. All
other ghosts may not be as elaborate, but with the darker rims around the
eyes and blown out pale faces, it doesn't make The Judge stick out like a
sore thumb.
The music is by the ever popular Danny Elfman, and unfortunatly I believe
this may be the film that marks the downfall of his talent. Now, the music
here is great, but this is the first time he seems to be repeating elements
that worked great in his past work, and he decides to mesh it together.
While this "mesh" is trite, gloomy, and works brilliantly with the
tone of the film...there's no signature theme lurking within.
There is an abundance of CGI work here, used for such effects as the
"tunnel of light" and goofy things that happen to the ghosts. The
"soul collector" is animated primarily with CGI, and it's design
itself looks like early art direction drafts used later for Jackson's LOTR
Ringwraiths. Of course that may not be the case, but it's hard to overlook
the spooky similarities between the Soul Collector and the Ringwraiths. I'm
not too bothered by the abundance of CGI in this film...until towards the
end, when The Soul Collector and his partner are up in the tunnel of light,
going after Frank, and the tunnel stops and turns into this hellish snake
that takes the Soul Collector and his partner into the fires of hell. Neat
design and concept, but it's very obviously CGI.
Michael J. Fox really is at his best in this film, in my opinion. His Marty
McFly character is still his best role, but I feel his acting abilities are
further stretched and done well in this part. He's believable as Frank and
he doesn't let the character down. Dee Wallace is squeemish here, and is
convincing. Trini Alverado sounds cheesy in several scenes. When she talks
to Frank, asking about her husband, she just comes off as amatuerish and she
doesn't sound like a grieving wife, even if she proclaims they never had a
good marraige. If your husband/spouse had died unexpectidly, even if you
were getting the feeling that they may not be the right one for you,
wouldn't you be a little more in dispair about it? Trini's sad, but to me
she doesn't seem sad enough. Troy Evans, the sheriff, is fun as a friend of
Frank, who knows that Frank may have done something, but feels that he is
the good guy in the predicament. But of all performances in the movie, the
most memorable would have to go to Jeffery Combs's Dammers character. The
way he plays this guy is like he took his Herbert West character from
Re-Animator, locked him away in solitude without any light and fed him
nightmares of women shrieking at him, then let him out. He's a hoot. Every
time he comes in frame, you are suppose to be distracted by him, you wonder,
"what is this nutball doing?"
For those fans of Jackson's earlier gorefests, this probably would be a
disapointment for you. Splatterblood from firehoses and zombie-fighting
priests are nowhere to be found here. This film is more coherently
nararrated with more believable characters. Jackson was obviously trying to
make more profesional pictures by this point (this direction starting with
the breathtaking and even better Heavenly Creatures). This film is fun,
sometimes jumpy, and cleverly told, even if it suffers from some spotty
acting by one crucial character and some pacing issues. Peter Jackson's The
Frighteners is a good spookfest with a bit of room for improvement. Grade: B
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