THE FRIGHTENERS
A lot more fun than it is funny
I liked Heavenly Creatures as much as the next guy, but with that film, Peter Jackson looked like he was getting dangerously close to becoming respectable. The Frighteners came as a bit of a relief.
I first saw this one in its theatrical run with my brother; my expectations weren't too high (still don't care one way or another for Michael J. Fox) but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that my brother tends to have a weird kind of sixth sense for picking good movies in genres he really don't know anything about. (but when it comes to genres he's familiar with, beware - he might just pick Con-Air)
Fox stars as Frank Bannister, a ghost-busting psychic investigator in Fairwater, a town that seems awfully small to really be able to support somebody in such a line of work. He's sort of a half-hoaxter - yes, he does have connections with The Other Side, and he does get rid of the spooks once he "exorcises" them, but he's the one who sends them out in the first place. His life is kind of dreary but endurable, until a nasty, cloaked, Grim Reaper-like spirit swoops into town, crushing people's hearts from within and burning an ascending order of numbers into their foreheads, starting at 38. Who is this guy? Why's he doing what he's doing? Where were victims 1-37? And what does all this have to do with the woman in the asylum who's held captive by her mother and is continually abused by some fiendish ghost that pushes itself out of the walls and floors, Walkers-style?
For the first half of the film, we're presented things as if the movie were a comedy, with the occasional dark moment. As much as I love the film overall, most of this comedy just doesn't work. The three ghosts who keep hanging out with Bannister are all used as comic relief, and they're not very funny. Aside from them, there's a lot of dumb slapstick (like Bannister's lousy driving) and lame "ectoplasm" gags. Only Peter Dobson really brings a lot of laughs, as a recently deceased health nut who doesn't want to leave his earthly life. That is, until the arrival of Jeffrey Coombs.
Coombs plays a clearly insane FBI agent who's been doing a little bit too much undercover work in his twenty years in the Bureau. He's like a twisted cross between Jim Carrey, Fox Mulder and Mr. Burns, easily chewing enough scenery away from the other performers to render them unnoticeable when he's onscreen. While his scenes generate quite a number of laughs, his arrival triggers a dramatic change in the film's tone, which goes from shaky comedy to a very effective blend of scary horror and exciting, FX-based adventure.
The villain is an imposing, quite frightening figure who's a menace to humans and spirits alike. He's sometimes shown bounding from rooftop to rooftop like some sort of feline and heard growling like some kind of great cat, which all sounds a little silly but manages to make him even creepier. The film's denoument unfortunately undercuts the effectiveness of some of his appearances in retrospect, but still, after this movie was over, I was looking warily up at rooftops on the way home. Likewise, the climactic scene in the asylum (which effectively cuts back and forth from a chase in the modern day and the Columbine-like massacre that started this all decades earlier) is quite scary and violent. This movie was marketed as a comedy, and since that comedy doesn't work, this might explain its flopping at the box office.
The story, despite the protracted buildup, is quite involving and plays out well. Fox is good, as is Trini Alvarado as the widow of the health nut. Dee Wallace-Stone is appropriately mysterious the abused woman. (some sick twisted part of me found her kind of sexy in this movie, even though she's clearly insane, made up like a haggard and was 46 at the time of filming) (her relationship with this abusive spirit changes abruptly near the ending, and the notion of this being some kind of dysfunctional abuser/abused codependence seems insufficient to explain it) And of course, when you see Troy Evans' name in the credits, you just know who's gonna play the sheriff.
The Frighteners was filmed in New Zealand, from where Jackson hails. The FX houses down there managed to cram twice as many effects into this film as would have shown up had this been filmed in America, on an American budget. My favorite of these is near the end, when we're shown an inventive, disturbing glimpse of Hell (well, the trip to Hell). Unfortunately, this is followed up by a lame one-liner. (@%#$@%$ comic-relief ghosts)
This would have been a truly great movie if that first half had been substantially cleared up of comic clutter. As it is, it's quite exceptional, and very entertaining, but flawed enough to make one sigh with wishes for lost possibilities of what the film could have been. Still, I'd recommend it highly; I've rarely seen a horror movie so loaded with effects be so effective, when effects (particularly CGI effects) so often tend to distract from a horrific atmosphere.
Concludes with a cover of "Don't Fear The Reaper" by the Mutton Birds, which is as slavish, unimaginative and boring as the Gin Blossom's cover of "Christine Sixteen". I mean, if I wanted to hear the song done the original way, I'd listen to the original recording. Yeesh!