*This 1996 film was released several years ago as a 4 disc DVD set in a shameless attempt to capitalize on Peter Jackson's success with The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. It is hardly deserving of a Director's Cut, Director's Commentary and the special features to fill so many bytes of digital space. If I have time this weekend, I will take a look at some of the special features and post a follow-up.
It’s a wonder that the same directing/writing husband/wife team of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh that gave us the incredible Heavenly Creatures next foisted The Frighteners upon us. One of the earliest films to heavily employ CGI for story-telling purposes (to decent effect for 1996, I must add), it rather unfortunately has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be. What could have been a compelling psychological thriller/mystery about a man who started seeing spirits after the tragic death of his wife turns into a bit of a farce employing gimmicks, schtick, caricature and really bad jokes in a very mildly scary ghost story.
Michael J. Fox plays Frank Bannister, a kind of sham ghostbuster who utilizes the help of two ghosts (a bookish white guy with glasses and an afro-adorned, bellbottoms wearing black guy who practically speaks jive like the two black passengers in Airplane) to haunt the homes of the recently bereaved in order to prey on their vulnerability, swoop in and clear the house of poltergeists, reaping a heavy cash reward in the process.
But it turns out that people in this small town of Fairwater have been dying mysteriously for several years. In fact, it’s been happening since the mysterious death of Frank’s wife, which occurred after he’d crashed the car during an argument after he’d been drinking. She’d had the number ‘13’ carved into her forehead with a utility knife that was never recovered.
Frank is able to see when a person is marked for death by a ghostly number imprinted on the victims’ foreheads. It seems death has racked up a toll of 36 before the film begins. Victim number 37 is Ray, husband to a local doctor, Lucy Lynskey (Trini Alvarado), and the latest victims of Frank’s little scam. After the funeral, Lucy and Frank pretty much immediately fall for one another in order to give Fox his character’s motivation to save the girl in the end.
There may also be a connection between the mysterious deaths and a hospital murder spree committed some 30 years earlier in which lunatic Johnny Bartlett (Jake Busey) and his teenage girlfriend, Patricia (played as an adult by Dee Wallace Stone), gunned down 12 people in a hospital. Bartlett wanted to hold the murder spree record. So maybe he’s come back from the dead to raise the count. And what is going on in Patricia’s home where she’s kept locked up by her seemingly unhinged mother (Julianna McCarthy)?
Jackson and Walsh’s screenplay starts taking us in an interesting direction as there is a suggestion, somewhat plausible, that Frank is the one committing the murders and his visions of spirits are a psychological means of dealing with his guilt. I would have liked to have seen that movie. Instead they drag us right back to the predictable land of action chase sequences and a climax that unnecessarily takes place in the abandoned derelict hospital where the original killings took place and to which the two main antagonists inexplicably track Frank and Lucy.
The most bizarre character in the film is an FBI agent named Milton Dammers (Jeffrey Combs) who, the sheriff explains, has spent most of his career working undercover in the occult world of various sects and cults and so is caricatured with a kind of spastic speech pattern, an obsessive need to demonize Frank and a penchant for vomiting at the sound of shouting women. This character exists for no reason other than to stand in Frank and Lucy’s way at various points in the story and stretch out the running time. Without Agent Dammers, the film would be over in about 75 minutes.
Fox seems out of place and miscast in the role of a tortured widower. I’m guessing he was coaxed into accepting the role by producer Robert Zemeckis, who directed Fox in his star-making role of Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Wallace Stone makes the most out of a character that goes from intriguingly flawed to cartoonishly evil at the drop of a hat and Jake Busey empties the well of his actor’s repertoire of its one facial expression in his first scene, then washes, rinses and repeats several times. Then he does it again a year later in the Robert Zemeckis directed Contact.
However, it’s the abrupt shifts in tone that sink the film more than anything else. What starts out as weirdly slapstick in the face of some heavy subject matter (tragic death of wife; murder spree; mysterious deaths in a small town) suddenly becomes much more sinister and chilling at about the halfway mark. It’s fairly obvious Jackson has drawn a great deal of inspiration from the directing style of Sam Raimi with his use of shaky cam and quick zooms into close-ups, but he ultimately fails at the kind of synchronicity Raimi adroitly achieves with his combination of slapstick humor and outlandish gore in the The Evil Dead trilogy.
If there’s one consolation to be taken out of this, it’s that directing this film led to Peter Jackson’s ability to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In his introduction on the DVD he says he had to buy a bunch of computers to do the CGI work, after which he needed a use for these expensive machines. From there he got the idea to do a big fantasy film and settled on the trilogy that established him as a major Hollywood director and gave us a truly incredible set of films.
*correction: My original post incorrectly identified the name of the fictional town as Fairweather instead of Fairwater. I have changed it in the review and removed a reference to the fictional town in the film "Pleasantville".
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